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People of the Bible

Judas Iscariot

Apostles

Family

Father
Simon

In the story

A dot is a moment; a bar is something that lasted, drawn to its length.

  • Apostles Chosen · 28 AD
  • Judas Plans Betrayal · 30 AD
  • Prayer and Betrayal in Gethsemane · 30 AD
  • Judas' Suicide · 30 AD

Easton’s Bible Dictionary

Son of Simon (John 6:71; 13:2, 26), surnamed Iscariot, i.e., a man of Kerioth (Josh. 15:25). His name is uniformly the last in the list of the apostles, as given in the synoptic (i.e., the first three) Gospels. The evil of his nature probably gradually unfolded itself till “Satan entered into him” (John 13:27), and he betrayed our Lord (18:3). Afterwards he owned his sin with “an exceeding bitter cry,” and cast the money he had received as the wages of his iniquity down on the floor of the sanctuary, and “departed and went and hanged himself” (Matt. 27:5). He perished in his guilt, and “went unto his own place” (Acts 1:25). The statement in Acts 1:18 that he “fell headlong and burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out,” is in no way contrary to that in Matt. 27:5. The sucide first hanged himself, perhaps over the valley of Hinnom, “and the rope giving way, or the branch to which he hung breaking, he fell down headlong on his face, and was crushed and mangled on the rocky pavement below.”

Why such a man was chosen to be an apostle we know not, but it is written that “Jesus knew from the beginning who should betray him” (John 6:64). Nor can any answer be satisfactorily given to the question as to the motives that led Judas to betray his Master. “Of the motives that have been assigned we need not care to fix on any one as that which simply led him on. Crime is, for the most part, the result of a hundred motives rushing with bewildering fury through the mind of the criminal.”

From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.

Named in 23 verses

Matthew
10:4, 26:14, 26:25, 26:47, 27:3
Mark
3:19, 14:10, 14:43
Luke
6:16, 22:3, 22:47, 22:48
John
6:71, 12:4, 13:2, 13:26, 13:29, 14:22, 18:2, 18:3, 18:5
Acts
1:16, 1:25

The family, dates and events on this page come from Theographic, a knowledge graph of the Bible by Robert Rouse, used and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. It is a work in progress, and its dates follow one reconstruction of biblical chronology among several. The dictionary article above is separately in the public domain.