On Alex O’Connor’s YouTube channel—a popular watering hole for the casually curious and militantly secular—he recently hosted biblical scholar Bart Ehrman to discuss Judas Iscariot and the motivations behind history’s most infamous act of treachery. O’Connor, a fashionable atheist who parades his doubt with a genial earnestness, interviews Ehrman, a former evangelical turned professional skeptic (that he holds advanced degrees from the notoriously liberal Princeton Theological Seminary should tell you all you need to know about his worldview), who has built a lucrative second career explaining to believers why their Scriptures can’t possibly mean what they say.
The conversation, titled “For What Reason Did Judas Betray Jesus?”, circles politely around the question, leaning heavily on Ehrman’s book The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed. Together, the two muse on the alleged ambiguity of the Gospel narratives—Mark’s reticence, Matthew’s financial motive, Luke’s devilish possession, and John’s theological damnation. It’s an intellectually comfortable stroll through a graveyard—long on speculation, short on confrontation with the text itself.
Curiously absent, however, is the most explicit explanation offered in any Gospel. In John 12:5–6, we are told not only that Judas specifically objected to Mary’s anointing of Jesus with expensive ointment (how was this overlooked), but also why:
“Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor? asked Judas.”
“He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it.”
Here, in crisp, unapologetic prose, the mask is ripped away. Judas did not merely drift into betrayal through divine manipulation or political disillusionment—he had been embezzling from Christ’s ministry all along. The poor, whose name he invokes like a modern-day bureaucrat justifying another grift, were merely a pretext. The real god of Judas Iscariot was not justice or revolution. It was money. And Jesus, who had the gall to allow such an extravagant gesture of love rather than economizing it for the ledger, was standing in the way.
And this is not a sin in the abstract—it is a rejection of Christ’s ministry in its most elemental form. Jesus’s entire message was oriented toward the poor, the weak, the overlooked—“whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.” In fact, Jesus’s first major public declaration of himself starts with him specifically saying “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.” (Luke 4:18)
In other words, Judas wasn’t just stealing; he was looting from the treasury of mercy. His theft was not merely dishonest—it was literally anti-Christ. So when Mr. O’Connor and Mr. Ehrman, or others like them, wonder aloud whether Judas might have been fulfilling a divine purpose or whether he might ultimately end up in heaven or hell, they miss the forest for the trees. The tragedy of Judas is not that he played a role in the crucifixion; it is that he stood in the very presence of divine compassion and rejected it, and exploited it for silver instead. That he only received a relatively paltry sum only further shows how little he valued Christ and how much he valued even a small amount of money.
This is not an incidental footnote. It reorients the entire discussion. The betrayal of Christ was not a spur-of-the-moment miscalculation or a tragic misunderstanding—it was the logical endpoint of a long corruption. Judas was not simply tempted. He was already compromised. His soul had already been leased out to the highest bidder. That Satan “entered into him” (Luke 22:3, John 13:27) does not imply possession in the cinematic sense; it implies surrender—an open door, willingly unlatched through theft, deceit, and moral rot.
Ehrman floats the suggestion that perhaps Judas was just disillusioned, maybe expecting Jesus to lead a militant Jewish uprising and becoming bitter when he didn’t. This is fashionable among scholars who can’t help remaking Christ in the image of Che Guevara. But this theory, like Judas himself, falls apart under scrutiny. If Judas truly thought Jesus was the Messiah in a military sense, why side with the Roman authorities?
The answer is painfully obvious and painfully human: Judas wanted the silver. He was an opportunist. Being a disciple gave him the opportunity to steal, and later, cash in on selling Jesus out. Maybe there was good in him at one point, and that explains why he threw the money back after the betrayal. But the damage was done. It is telling that Jesus does not refer to Judas with ambiguity. He says:
“Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.” (Mark 14:21)
So much for the idea that Judas was merely fulfilling God’s will like a cog in some preordained machinery. Divine foreknowledge does not cancel human responsibility. If anything, it heightens it. The fact that God can bring good out of evil does not sanitize the evil. Pilate played his part. Caiaphas played his. Judas’s name just happens to be the one that became a byword for betrayal.
O’Connor and Ehrman, to their credit, seem vaguely aware of the theological tension here, but they lack the framework—or perhaps the will—to resolve it. Instead, they lean into ambiguity, as if vagueness were a virtue. But Christianity does not tremble before moral complexity. It absorbs it, and then judges it. And on the question of Judas, the verdict is clear. He was not confused. He was not coerced. He allowed himself to be corrupted. And his betrayal was not a one-time act—it was a final crescendo in a symphony of self-service.
To recast Judas as a misunderstood idealist, as Jesus Christ Superstar and other modern interpretations attempt, is to baptize cowardice and canonize theft. It is an act of literary mercy that Christ Himself did not extend.
What happened to Judas’s soul? That is God’s judgment to render. But what Judas represents—a man so close to truth and yet so inwardly rotten—is a warning. Not just to theologians and skeptics, but to all of us who imagine that proximity to righteousness can substitute for obedience to it.
In the end, Judas didn’t just abruptly sell out Christ for silver. He sold Him out long before—when he decided that his own desires mattered more than the poor, more than the truth, more than the very Savior he followed.
That’s not mysterious. That’s just sin.
