In one of the most dramatic scenes in theater, Julius Caesar is attacked by those conspiring against him, including his beloved friend Brutus, and Caesar utters the words that have echoed down to us since the day that Shakespeare first wrote them, “et tu, Brute?” Then Caesar says words that are just as important, but not as well known, “then fall, Caesar.” That might be one of the most famous scenes of betrayal in history, except, of course, for the one we just heard between Jesus and Judas, but I have to be honest and say that I think that Judas might be one of the most tragic and misunderstood characters of history, maybe especially in Judas’ understanding of himself.
Often in the New Testament, people’s names will tell us something about who they are. While there are several Judases in the gospels, including another disciple, the Judas we are focusing on today is referred to as Judas Iscariot, or Judas of Iscariot, Judas the one called Iscariot, among several others, not only so we can tell him apart from the other Judases, but also to give us some information, but the problem is we don’t really know what that means. The answer you are most likely to find is that Iscariot may mean “man of Kerioth”, a town recorded in the book of Joshua as being in southern Israel, but there are some problems with this identification. The first is that there is no indication that the town of Kerioth still existed 1200 years after Joshua mentions it, as there is no record of it during the time of Jesus. The other problem is that all of the other disciples’ were from Galilee, where Jesus is from, so what would someone from southern Judea be doing up in Galilee? Does that mean it’s impossible, of course not, and if it that is true, it would mean that Judas was different and separate from the other disciples from the very beginning.
Some scholars have speculated that Iscariot may mean that Judas was a member of a group of zealots called the sicarrii. We know that at least one other disciple, Simon, but not Simon Peter, was called a zealot, but the sicarrii were a special group who assassinated other Jews whom they saw as collaborators with the Romans, including the high priest Jonathan, using hidden knives, from where they get their name. Another option is that Iscariot comes from an Aramaic word meaning “red color,” so maybe Judas was a red head, and we all know about red heads. In the end, where most scholars who have worked on this issue end up, is that while they may have their personal preference, the truth is that we simply don’t know what the term Iscariot means and it may even be that 40 plus years after the facts that even the writers of the gospels no longer knew what it meant either.
