Bart Ehrman has strangely committed a lot of resources to defending the historicity of Judas. I say strange because most mainstream historians would be perplexed by this. Judas is obviously a fictional character. Christians need him to be real because they need the Gospel story to be true at least in outline, lest they admit the authors lied a lot (and if they lied about even that, what else can’t we trust them on?), and that’s too dangerous a slippery slope for a committed believer, much less a scholar contract-bound to never start down it (lest they get fired, exiled, divorced, or literally or figuratively excommunicated). But secular historians tend not to be so bound, and in my experience, are generally doubtful or agnostic about the reality of Judas. Hence while Wikipedia claims “secular historians” believe he existed, it lists only one example: Bart Ehrman; of the others, Oropeza, Stein and Meier are devout Christians, and Gubar is devoutly Jewish, and more agnostic about the historicity of Judas (Judas: A Biography, 27–28, 40).

A Jesus historicist does not need Judas to be real (it’s entirely explicable how a Judas story got invented to explain what happened to a real Jesus). But if you can defend the historicity of Judas, you might think you’ve thereby defended the historicity of Jesus (since the one can’t have been historical without the other). But the problem here is circular: to defend the historicity of Judas, you have to defend the historicity of Jesus first. So you can’t really use Judas to defend Jesus. If Jesus didn’t exist, then a mythical construction of Judas automatically becomes more likely, as all the mythical interpretations of him are then assured (unless Judas was real and allegorized somehow as an enemy of the church, but that’s obviously less likely). So we have to assume the historicity of Jesus. Because there is no other evidence for the historicity of Judas than myths of Jesus.

But if Judas appears only in myths, how can we know he was real? If there are even just plausible reasons for his invention, that pretty much nixes any chance of proving him historical. He is just as likely then not.

So, I don’t know why anyone would die on this hill. But it warrants response anyway.

The Prior Odds on a Real Judas

Here I will simply assume for the sake of argument that Jesus existed (in some minimal yet relevant sense). So my case against the historicity of Judas won’t depend on doubting that; though if one does doubt that, the historicity of Judas will become even less probable than I figure here. I will also assume Judas belongs to an ambiguous reference class, that is, it’s not inherently clear if he looks more like a typical fictional character that even historians sometimes invent to explain the course of real events, who tend not to exist, or if he looks more like a mundane historical person simply recorded in a report, who tend to exist. I point out the difference, and its relevance mathematically to the probability of someone existing on very little evidence, in my article on Hannibal (So What About Hannibal, Then?).

Unlike your typical mundane person, Judas never appears in any mundane history (much less any primary documents). He shows up only in patently mythical narratives. And I mean this in the same sense as Ehrman would himself agree with: the Gospels are mythographs. They are hagiographies, “mythic biographies,” a subgenre of mythology generally. That does not mean their protagonist did not exist (many hagiographies were written of real people; yet are mythical narratives of them nonetheless). So when I say here that the Gospels are myths, I do not mean they make everything up, but, rather, that they layer on top of whatever in them might be true so much mythology as to remove them from the genre of straightforward histories, biographies, or memoirs. This is the mainstream consensus now (see my discussion of the Burridge panel in Adventures at the Society of Biblical Literature and Bart Ehrman’s own article on The Gospels as Myths).

This means the prior odds on Judas existing are vague and thus indeterminate. The Principle of Indifference epistemically applies in such cases: we must use an uninformed prior. Which means the prior odds on Judas existing, which means prior to considering any specific evidence either way, are simply 50/50, or in proper parlance, 1/1. We just don’t know either way. So we need to interrogate the evidence and see if it points one way or the other.

The Case against Judas

I will start with the evidential case against Judas. Then I will evaluate whether any of Ehrman’s “evidential case” for Judas carries any weight (though, spoiler: his case is mostly not even logical, much less evidential). I devote several pages to this question in Proving History (151–55, with 317-19nn67–72), and prevent supporting evidence Historicity of Jesus (560–61; cf. 463); Dennis MacDonald adds to this evidence in Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (38-40). I will also only query the existence of the Judas narrated as the “betrayer” of Jesus. There were surely many men named Judas in the early movement, and one might even have been an apostle for all we know, but the only one we’re interested in is the one who “betrayed” Jesus in later first century mythology.

Silence

The first evidence against the historicity of this Judas is that no one had ever heard of him before Mark composed a tale of him—and all later Gospels simply embellish Mark’s account, thus confirming no other source for it. There is no evidence anything they embellish it with came from anything other than their own imaginations (or each other, since Luke merely redacts Matthew, and John, Luke, while Matthew is redacting Mark), while there is some pretty good evidence that’s exactly where Judas came from. We’ll get to that. But first, we must weigh the unexpected silences—and they are unexpected, and therefore do carry weight as evidence: these silences are to some degree improbable if Judas existed (but not at all improbable if he was made up later).

Judas does not exist where we should expect to find him in the authentic letters of Paul (or indeed any other New Testament book outside the Gospels and Acts—he’s not even revisited as among the damned in Revelation). Neither he nor Jesus’s prediction of him to his apostles is mentioned 1 Corinthians 11:23–27, but that could be because no one is; and, of course, such a prediction tale is likely a later myth even if Judas wasn’t. But, by contrast, Judas should be accounted for in the creed, 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, repeated by Paul, that after three days Jesus appeared “to Peter and then the twelve” and only after that to anyone else. Which means Judas was still a member in good standing, and thus can’t have been the betrayer portrayed by Mark (and certainly not by Matthew or Luke, who kill him off before that even happened).

Paul also has no knowledge that Jesus was betrayed at all. Christians actually mistranslate Paul when their bibles have him say “on the night he was betrayed” (in 1 Corinthians 11:23; Bart Ehrman agrees here: see Does Paul Know that Judas Betrayed Jesus?). Paul makes clear elsewhere that he means God or Jesus himself (not Judas) “handed Jesus over,” not “betrayed” him (Romans 4:24–25, Romans 8:32, Galatians 2:20, compare 1 Corinthians 5:5 and the LXX of Job 2:6: all the same word; and it almost certainly is from Isaiah 53:12, which in the LXX says “he was handed over for their sins,” same word). Most literal and half of Catholic bible translations correctly render Paul’s sense as “when he was handed over,” not “when he was betrayed.” The Greek word here rarely means “betrayed.” It typically means surrender, hand over, as in of something that’s yours (note all the lexical examples of it meaning “betray” mean this: surrender, not betrayal). A dozen words in Greek have the primary meaning of “betray,” and this is not one of them. The Gospels and later Christian authors simply twisted it to that meaning by adapting their creed to the myth. But in chronological order, the word did not mean that in Paul. That isn’t what the Christian creed originally meant.

1 Clement also has no knowledge of this Judas, which is even more improbable, because 1 Clement narrates an entire extensive section on internal betrayal among Christians and its leading to death, where they somehow didn’t think to use the Mother of All Examples, Judas betraying their own Lord. As I wrote in Historicity (312):

[Clement’s] list of ‘betrayals’ born of envy in chaps. 4 to 6 (beginning with Cain and Abel), in which Judas’s betrayal of Jesus would naturally belong (through envy of money: Mk 14.10-11; and as the vehicle for the envy of the Pharisees: Mk 15.10), the Judas example, the very best example he could have, is conspicuously not mentioned. Instead, when he says he will move from ‘ancient’ examples to those more recent ([1 Clement] 5.1), he skips immediately to the deaths of Peter and Paul.

This letter predates Mark (though if it didn’t this omission is even harder to explain) and is making exactly the argument that the Judas tale would powerfully teach, so it is very improbable it would not have been used—unless it didn’t exist yet. See Interpreting 1 Clement’s Supposed Descriptions of Fabulous Murders and How We Can Know 1 Clement Was Actually Written in the 60s AD for more on the overall point here. Compounding that, 1 Clement also attests the things Mark has Jesus says about Judas also came from somewhere else, so never before Mark were about Judas. Mark coopted the material found in 1 Clement to construct his Judas myth (Historicity, 311–12). Indeed, the Judas story itself could be Mark’s reification of Clement’s entire discourse on internecine betrayal.

All these silences are, especially combined, quite improbable if any disciple betrayed Jesus. I would honestly put this evidence, combined, at ten times less likely if that happened (than if it was invented later). But in no way can it be any less than three times less likely. That means, it’s not impossible, but it is improbable. If all these silences are 100% expected on myth, then they would be no more than 33% expected on historicity. So I am generously giving the Judas story a rather remarkable 1 in 3 chance of nevertheless still being true on this evidence. There is no credible argument that it should be higher.

Mythmaking

The second evidence against the historicity of Judas is that his entire story reeks of mythmaking. And that is less probable if it were historical than if it were mythical. Because if it were mythical, all of this is 100% expected. But not so if Judas nevertheless “just by coincidence” existed, as well as all the evident mythological basis for inventing him. Yes, it’s “possible” a real man got all this myth layered on him to coopt his story to some useful message; but that’s going to be less commonly the case for any mythical character, who are more usually made up to their purpose. This also refutes all arguments of the form “They would never have made that up,” which we will get to later. Such arguments almost always turn out to be false. There is usually a good reason to have made something in the Gospels up, and often the evidence is even more likely if it were made up. Which makes that a fallacy of Lack of Imagination (or rather, Failure to Check for Alternatives—biblical studies is rife with scholars failing to check things before asserting them).

As for the story’s merit as history, the whole thing makes no historical sense (Proving History, 153–54):

The authorities did not need Judas (much less have to pay him) to find or identify Jesus (Mark 14:10–11, 14:43–50). Given what Mark has Jesus say in 14:49 (and what Jesus had been doing in Jerusalem only days before), the authorities knew what he looked like, and they could have seized him any time he appeared in public. They were not on a timeline. The idea that Jesus had to be tried and crucified illegally in a rushed overnight trial exactly at Passover is a Christian theological concept that cannot have had any role in the decisions of the Sanhedrin (especially since they had jails to hold him over in).

See Crucifixion Quake for more on the mythic purpose of forcing this historically implausible timeline. But Mark even has the elite admit arresting (much less publicly killing!) him “during” the festival would cause riots; so what a real elite would have done was arrest him and lock him away until the festival was over and the crowds gone. And they’d have done this the instant they saw him (much less caught him committing felony assault in the temple square, or being welcomed into the city in a public parade, or anything else the story depicts). “Gosh, we don’t even know what he looks like” is simply not plausible. Nor is “Gosh, we do know that, but not where he is,” since that isn’t the story Mark tells, they don’t need an insider to tail him anyway, and a hiding Jesus is fine for them: he can’t make trouble if he’s not in public; and the moment he is, they can grab him and lock him up then. So what’s the point of Judas?

As for the story’s merit as mythology, we can start with the most obvious (and thus quite suspicious) coincidence: the fact that Jesus’ betrayer’s name essentially means “Jew” (Proving History, 154). His name is actually “Judah (Ioudas). The word for Jew (Ioudaios) is the adjective of Judah, meaning ‘People of Judah’ (hence ‘People of Judas’); likewise the word for the Holy Land, Judea (Ioudaia), means ‘Land of Judah’ (hence ‘Land of Judas’)” (Proving History, 317). Moreover, just the name itself (Ioudas or Iouda) can stand in for all of these things: Judah the land or Judah the tribe, and thus by synecdoche, any Jew.

Hence Judas fits right into the mythic narrative of the Jews betraying the true bearers of their own God’s plans. To Mark, this symbolized the Jews abandoning their birthright to the Gentiles; to Matthew, it symbolized the mainstream Jewish establishment abandoning their birthright to the “real Jews,” the faithful in the Lord Jesus. Either way, a story too apposite to be real. That “the Jew” betrays Jesus (and indeed, as Matthew embellishes, then admit their sin and kill themselves; or even as Luke and John embellish: because of siding with Satan) is entirely on-point for their mythic narrative. It would be a weird coincidence if a guy actually did this and was (ironically!) named Jew. That’s not impossible as history. But it is less probable as history. Appositely named agents fulfilling a literary point of the fiction they appear in tend not to exist.

Indeed, this is a common sign of mythmaking: showing up suddenly, performing a single ritual function, and then suddenly vanishing. When this happens in a mythic narrative, it is more probably a mythical person. Hence Judas doesn’t exist except to perform his literary-symbolic function. In Mark we get a fourth-wall mention of what Judas will do when he is enumerated with the twelve apostles, but we hear nothing of him before or after his deed (Mark does not even narrate his suicide). He just shows up suddenly as a character with a brief story arc in Mark 14 (from Jesus predicting what he will do and then his doing it, parallel to the same arc set up for Peter, literarily representing two different kinds of betrayal, which Luke expanded into four), and then suddenly disappears. That he is coincidentally named after what he represents just clinches what’s obviously going on here.

Mark’s brief use of the treacherous Jew was unsatisfying to Matthew, who took that skeletal tale and added a suicide (which Luke then borrowed and redacted into Acts; and Ehrman does not believe any account of his suicide is reliable) and fleshed out Mark’s overbrief bribery scheme (built to reify scripture, as we’ll see in a moment). But in this he is simply dressing up a more satisfying arc. We are really getting no other real information. Who was Judas, and why did he do this, especially after a psychic Jesus told him he’d be horribly damned for it, and since Mark’s (and especially Matthew’s) bribery tale is in every possible detail historically ridiculous (as we’ll also see in a moment)? Which was still so disappointing that, as the myth grew, Luke added a (purely mythical and eye-rolling) motive to “make sense of it all” (Judas was possessed by Satan!). John then borrowed that idea from Luke and tried to improve on it by redacting another story never originally about Judas into a story about Judas. This all looks like mythmaking. It doesn’t look like recollection.

And we know this can’t have been embarrassing, as “the subsequent trend was to make Judas’s character and betrayal even more despicable (and hence more mythically grandiose), rather than apologetically softening or eliding it or explaining it away (or even, in fact, making it any more historically intelligible, which confirms later redactors had no genuine sources)” (Proving History, 154). To the contrary, “it was something all these authors found rhetorically useful, and even amplified.” Modern anachronistic thinking imagines they’d never do this to a beloved character (one of “the twelve”) but internal betrayers are a common theme in religion (remember Cain and Abel?), and all the Gospels depict the twelve betraying Jesus in different ways (Peter flees and denies Jesus; James and John get haughty and betray Jesus’s gospel). So this was a mythic theme, not a verboten concept. (I show how Luke really runs with this theme in Can You Rebel Against Rome?)

This is why Mark invents these narratives so appositely: “the inclusion of Jesus’ foreknowledge of Judas’s betrayal (Mark 14:17–21), directly in parallel to his prediction of Peter’s betrayal (14:29–31), both framing the Eucharist and prediction of resurrection and apostolic abandonment, only highlights the mythic character of the entire plot element” (Proving History, 154). Indeed, having one of Jesus’s closest confidents betray him is gold for Mark’s sociopolitical messaging (Proving History, 154–55):

In both name and deed, Judas may be an intentional symbol of the very internecine betrayal that was destroying Jewish society and causing it to fail to realize God’s kingdom, even just recently having caused the destruction of Judea, Jerusalem, and God’s own Temple (if Mark wrote in the 70s CE, as most scholars now think). Judas was also a name famously associated with the path of violent rebellion (Judas Maccabeus and Judas the Galilean), which is all the more obvious an allusion if “Iscariot” is (as many scholars believe) an Aramaicism for the Latin “Sicarius,” the infamous “Killers” whom Josephus blames for provoking Rome to bring about the destruction of the Jews.

And Mark, we have good reason to believe, read and used the Wars of Josephus, so we expect him to pick up themes like this:

(which would further mean that Judas’s full name meant in Aramaic “The Jew Who Kills [Him],” which one might think would be too coincidental to be historical). The name Judas may also be intended to evoke the divided kingdoms Judah and Israel, a [biblical] symbol of Jews disunited and at war with each other, the more so if you agree that a number of indicators suggest Jesus is typecast in the Gospels as a symbol of Israel (as Thompson argues in convincing detail in The Messiah Myth), which alone could have inspired the creation of a Judah to oppose him. The text of Zechariah from which Matthew borrows many details of his expanded Judas story even contains this very juxtaposition, including the very name of Judas.

That’s right, Mark is getting this whole story from scripture (Proving History, 155):

In Zechariah, the one who is paid the thirty shekels is to “become shepherd of the flock doomed to slaughter” (an apt description of Judas in respect to Jesus) and then, by abandoning the task (and the sheep to their death) and casting the money aside, to “break the brotherhood between Judas and Israel” (the very point of the Judas story: you can take the money and die, or follow Jesus and live, thus either joining the New Israel or the grave).

Zechariah 11 has God saying he will reward greed and betrayal with invasion and destruction; for Mark, an obvious commentary on God allowing the Romans to destroy Judea because of Jewish greed and corruption. God “severs the old covenant” in that day. Matthew understood what Mark saw: he borrowed several more elements of this prophecy to build out Mark’s story, including making the issue of greed causing betrayal explicit, and the details of “thirty pieces of silver” and a “potter’s field.” This is also where Mark got the name (Ιουδα in the LXX, literally “Judas”). Mark got the Judas betrayal scene here and uses it to symbolize a theme of the gospel (the house divided, the old Judas vs. the new Israel); Matthew recognized this, and padded the story out with even more details from this same prophecy. (There is even more than this to the mythology of Matthew’s improved Judas narrative according to Andrew Simmonds.)

The land bought with “Judah’s” money was also for dead foreigners: the unsaved. Moreover, “the thirty shekels Judas is paid in Matthew’s version is exactly the [biblical] legal value of a slave (Exodus 21:32), in fact a dead slave (thus it is what God’s law declares you shall receive in place of a living servant)” (Proving History, 318). The mythmaking here is obvious. And it’s all built out of scripture, not “memory.” In first century Judea, “thirty pieces of silver” was not that great a payout. It resonates with scriptural symbolism, not historical believability: assuming “shekels” are meant, which were four times the value of a Roman silver denarius, which the Gospels attest was a day’s minimum wage, which comes to about $7200 American today—which is chump change. It’s barely four months severance for an entry-level counter boy.

Moreover:

The Zechariah tale has him giving the money “to the potter in God’s temple” (Zechariah 11:13), so Matthew has Judas cast the money into God’s temple (Matthew 27:5) and then the priests give it to the potter (for his field: 27:7); Acts 1:18 has Judas just buy a field (no details given). Matthew might also be alluding to Jeremiah 32 (see also Jeremiah 18–19), where Jeremiah is to buy a field and put the deed for it in a pot (Jeremiah 32:14, thus connecting a potter and a field), and that plot of land is saved while the sinners of the city are forsaken (Jeremiah 32:25); the Judas story reverses this: the buyers of the plot are to be forsaken (they are now foreigners who will inherit the grave—literally: Matthew 27:7), and the sinners of the city will be saved (in Jesus). That Matthew emphasizes how the Jewish elite in the end break their covenant with God (by their violation of the Sabbath) thus dovetails with his version of the Judas tale [see The Empty Tomb, 362].

In fact (Proving History, 318–19):

One can also see parallels in the betrayal of Joseph by his brother Judas [yes, Judas; and yes, also for money] in Genesis 37:18–36 (Joseph’s cloak is taken and he is cast into a grave, sold to his enemies, and declared dead; Jesus’ cloak is taken and he is cast into a grave, sold to his enemies, and declared dead; notably Joseph is betrayed by being sold into slavery, and in Matthew 27:9 Jesus is sold for the price of a slave); but also in the reversal of Israel’s device of betraying his way into God’s inheritance with a kiss (Genesis 27), while Judas betrays his way out of God’s inheritance with a kiss—indeed, in the OT the one kissed is Isaac, the sacrificed firstborn son for whom an animal is substituted (Genesis 22), while in the NT the one kissed is Jesus, the sacrificed firstborn son substituted for that same animal. We might not know if these allusions were intended, but they cannot simply be dismissed. They seem far too apposite to be mere coincidence.

The suicide of Judas is then a lift from 2 Samuel 17, where the equivalent betrayer, Ahithophel (“Brother’s Folly”), King David’s close confidant, joins an elite conspiracy against the king and leads an armed band to capture David (and no one else, just like Judas), and then hangs himself. This was the closest betrayal narrative in Jewish myth at the time, so it makes sense that Matthew would use it to construct his spin on the Judas tale.

But Dennis MacDonald also finds some literary parallels between the betrayer of Jesus and the betrayer of Odysseus (Homeric Epics, pp. 38–40; cf. pp. 33–43). As I described long ago:

Why do the chief priests need Judas to identify Jesus in order to arrest him? This makes absolutely no sense, since many of their number had debated him in person, and his face, after a triumphal entry and a violent tirade in the temple square, could hardly have been more public. But MacDonald’s theory that Judas is a type of Melanthius solves this puzzle: Melanthius is the servant who betrays Odysseus and even fetches arms for the suitors to fight Odysseus—just as Judas brings armed guards to arrest Jesus—and since none of the suitors knew Odysseus, it required Melanthius to finally identify him. MacDonald also develops several points of comparison between the suitors and the Jewish authorities. Thus, this theme of “recognition” stayed in the story even at the cost of self-contradiction. Of note is the fact that Homer names Melanthius with a literary point in mind: for his name means “The Black One,” whereas Mark seems to be maligning [old-school] Jews by associating Melanthius with Judas, whose name is simply “Judah,” i.e. the kingdom of the Jews, after which the Jews as a people, and the region of Judaea, were named.

Both Judas and Melanthius were in their master’s closest inner circle, both attended a dinner with their master where they were almost outed, both betrayed their master out of greed, and both meet gory deaths. Today we use the name “Judas” as a universally recognized designator of a greedy betrayer; before that, one would say Melanthius to mean that, as then he was the most famous literary betrayer. So any educated reader would see Mark is recreating a Melanthius character, to side with the “suiters” for the hand in marriage to the people of Israel, but the “real” groomsman is Jesus, just as in Homer it was Odysseus—also in disguise.

The mytho-literary basis of inventing Judas is already clear on this model alone. Mark simply built it out of Jewish flesh, using Homer’s betrayal narrative as the skeleton. Mark Judaizes it by using the name most resonant for a Jewish context, Judah, the historical abuser of Israel causing their rebellion and the name of recent rebel leaders, and having the bride being competed for be the people of Israel, “the saved,” and the “suiters” the Pharisees, elders, priests, and scribes who are competing for control over the people. Matthew Judaizes it further with lifts from Jewish scriptures (their own “Homer”).

Judas was also heavily mythologized in the Middle Ages as a Christian Oedipus (Historicity, 20n4); the Gospel of Judas was a late second century fiction; and before that ridiculous tales were already circulating (like that Judas swelled to the size of a wagon trail and exploded: Historicity, 324–25), demonstrating that people readily made things up about him. He is a thoroughly mythologized character. But already from his first appearance in the historical record he’s already heavily mythical, to the point that when you remove every mythosymbolic feature of him, nothing remains. So there probably wasn’t anything to remain.

The probability of any of this being “coincidentally” historical (the apposite name, and the ridiculous, scripturally-derived narrative of his betrayal) is low. While the probability of it all looking like this if invented is, basically, 100%. Again, I doubt we’d get this lucky even one in ten times, but certainly not one in three. That means, all this evidence of mythmaking is 100% expected if unreal, but only 33% expected if Judas existed and he just coincidentally had this apposite name and storytelling function (and the rest is just legendary framing and embellishment). Which is still respectable odds. A one in three chance a real man still exists under all these layers of patent mythmaking. But because every single detail of him (right down to the name) is predicted by the mythmaking thesis, it is at least three times more likely that there isn’t anything under these layers.

Conclusion

So we start with a prior odds of even steven, 1/1, and get two likelihood ratios favoring Judas being a myth by 3 to 1, so it’s 1/1 × 3/1 × 3/1 for 9/1 odds Judas is a myth. If we use my more credible estimates, it’s 1/1 × 10/1 × 10/1, or 100/1 odds he’s made up. That translates to a probability Judas existed between barely 1% to no more than 10%. And that’s with a historical Jesus. If Jesus didn’t exist, then the silence and mythmaking are far more likely if Judas was invented. His historicity would then plummet near 1% on either side of our error margin (at the very least, it gets knocked down by the probability Jesus existed, so if that’s 33%, then Judas is down to a third of a percent likely to exist or, at best, three percent).

The Case “for” Judas?

Now let’s look at what Ehrman argues (in Was Judas Iscariot Made Up?, The Quest for the Historical … Judas Iscariot, and Can We Know Anything About Judas Iscariot?).

Adding Evidence?

Ehrman’s first argument he admits is weak (see “Why Did He Do It”): that we can come up with plausible narratives for Judas to betray Jesus (in my own personal opinion, the best one is written into the humanist reconstruction of Jesus and his movement in Jesus Christ Superstar). But this is not an argument at all, because it is actually pointing out how improbable the evidence is, not the other way around. The only story that exists is historically implausible, and that means improbable. You can’t “fix the fiction” to get it to sound more historical and then use the thing you just made up as evidence for the thing you just made up. That’s circular reasoning. As it stands, the evidence is simply less probable on history than on myth. That we have to invent more credible narratives only illustrates this fact.

So, no evidence here, gets you no weight here. Moving on.

Ehrman’s second argument is a typical example of specious reasoning, an “Ehrmanism” one can now say (since he pulls this one a lot):

Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source but they also appear to have used independent sources of their own for what they tell us about Judas. The Gospel of John probably did not rely on the other three Gospels for its stories, so it is an independent account of Judas. That means that we have accounts of Judas in a number of early Gospel sources: Mark, M (source of Matthew), L (source of Luke), John. There is also a tradition about him independently Inherited by the author of Acts based on what we have in the New Testament. [Plus Papias,] another independent source.

This is all false. It has been proved and agreed by most leading experts on John now that John did rely on the Synoptics, especially Luke and Mark (but also appears to have known Matthew). John is not an independent source (for some of that evidence, and cited scholars concurring, see my discussion in §10.7 of Historicity). Everything Papias says about Judas is farcical and thus cannot be historical (this is the exploding Judas legend, complete with weird medical details about his penis). And there is no evidence (none whatsoever) that any Gospels got their embellishments from “sources.” They self-evidently just spun them out themselves.

Matthew did not get all the Zechariah add-ons to the tale from “sources.” He just used the same story in Zechariah that Mark did to “flesh out” the story, and borrowed a suicide story from Kings. Luke did not get “Satan did it” from “sources.” He just made that up. And the only source John got that from was Luke. There are no independent sources. There is only one source: Mark. Everything else is fan fiction, based on Mark or other embellishments of Mark. We simply do not “have a rather large number of independent sources that all speak about” Judas as Ehrman says. We have only one source, and its many dependent redactions. You cannot just “declare” independent sources exist. You need evidence that they exist. Since there is no evidence they exist, we cannot use them as evidence for the historicity of Judas.

So, no evidence, gets you no weight. Moving on.

Ehrman’s third argument is that:

The very heart of the traditions about Judas does not appear to advance the agendas of the sources that narrate them … . It seems unlikely that a Christian storyteller would concede that Jesus had no more charismatic authority than that, that he couldn’t even control those who were closest to him, that not even all those who knew him well actually believed him. That wouldn’t seem to serve the Christian agenda of promoting the incredible person of Jesus very well.

This is all false. As we just showed, it fit the agendas of these authors perfectly. Ehrman is applying anachronistic modern thinking to these ancient authors. These authors are writing a mythology, wherein such concerns about historical reality are irrelevant. We cannot argue that Romulus must really have existed because in his myth he murders his brother, and fratricide was considered by Romans the most execrable sin punished in the worst circle of hell. No. The Romulus myth was not originally written with history in mind. It was written to convey greater truths about society and reality. Ancient myths routinely transgressed public morals and social assumptions, specifically to comment on them and their consequences. Jacob’s betrayal of Esau is despicable and in any historical context would result in his being sued for estate fraud and losing his inheritance back to Esau. Yet in the Bible it is portrayed as heroic and the foundation of the entire right of Israel’s people to the Holy Land. We simply cannot apply our modern, historicizing mindset to these tales. That guarantees we will misunderstand them.

This is already illustrated by Mark’s depiction of Peter’s betrayal of Jesus. Even Matthew, a Petrine sectarian, kept that in. Because it happened? No. Because the story is useful. Just like every preacher’s suspect tale of having been an egregious sinner and mocker of God “before they saw the light,” as rhetoric to assure their flock they “must” be sincere and God “must” therefore be real. In the context of the myth, we see the trendline: Paul tells us God handed Jesus over to those who killed him; this gets “riff tracked” into “the killer Jew” handed Jesus over to those who killed him. It’s simply a reification of Paul’s theology into an earthly mythology. Why have a close confidant do it? Because that symbolized reality: be wary of greed, it will turn even a close confidant against you. And because scripture and creed required that Jesus be completely abandoned—as he is: all his disciples abandon him (even the people do), not just Judas, thus refuting Ehrman’s notion that no one wanted to admit Jesus’s charisma was fallible; to the contrary, that it would fail him is the entire story they are creedally and prophetically required to tell.

Judas is a morality story about internecine betrayal (a theme of 1 Clement, likely also another source Mark is reifying). That requires Judas to be a disciple (not some rando). Because Judah was not an outsider to Israel. They were (at least in legend) once a united kingdom. So their betrayal was brother against brother, just like Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel, Joseph and his brothers, and so on down the line. That Jews betray each other is what was then a very familiar and epic lesson, so it fits that it would be conveyed here. This wasn’t even antisemitic in essence, as it is admitted even by the Jews who wrote Matthew, who saw this betrayal in their rival power-elite, and the reason God withheld his protection of them. Their message is, “We need to stop doing this.” Hence (as I showed already) the “kiss” narrative reverses and “corrects” the original injustice of Jacob upon Esau: this time the villain, not the hero, is using a kiss to betray, and in consequence will not receive the inheritance. The same reversal occurs in the kingdom allegory: originally it was Israel who betrayed Judah (by engaging a physical rebellion); here it is Judah betraying Israel (by opposing a spiritual rebellion). Reversal of a theme to set right something that went wrong is a common marker of myth (e.g. Jesus’s success against temptation reverses the Israelites’ failure, Historicity, 468–69; etc.).

Mark knew Christians do betray each other. Matthew knew Jews do betray each other. So creating a myth that captures and establishes the internecine betrayer’s condemnation, by which to discourage or shame them, is entirely on agenda, not contrary to it. And doing so to reify the prophecy and creed that Jesus had to be surrendered (originally meaning in respect to God’s plan, not literal treason) is what the Gospels do throughout, so it is absolutely the sort of thing they would do here. Consequently, while Ehrman is using the correct Bayesian reasoning here—declaring something improbable unless (at its core) historical, thereby increasing the probability of it being historical—he is inputting the wrong measure: this is not improbable as myth, but entirely on-point as myth. Consequently there is no evidence here for historicity.

The data here is actually more likely as myth than history—because (as I showed earlier) the story makes no sense as history, while all its details come from mythological source materials. Even the name comes from Zechariah 11, as well as the concept being alluded to with the model example of Judah’s enmity with Israel; and the embellishments in Matthew confirm this by coming from exactly the same chapter of Zechariah. And to do this, to reify the concept of surrender of Jesus by God’s plan in Paul’s description of the creed, the then-most famous betrayal tale was coopted from Homer as an outline, and the slats in that outline filled with familiar scriptural and Jewish concepts, including the most famous Jewish betrayal myth. So even at best, this evidence is a wash, equally likely whether Judas existed or not; at worst, it’s evidence against that historicity. I already weighed it as the latter. Ehrman is trying to get around that by “declaring” the opposite, but the evidence refutes his declaration. So he has presented no evidence here. He has simply omitted all the determining evidence.

Once again, no evidence, gets you no weight. Moving on.

Removing Evidence?

That concludes all the positive evidence Ehrman claims to have. Which we just saw was no evidence at all. He also tries to get evidence against it “out of the box” as it were, by the apologetical device of “explaining it away” (which “feels” like it works but is actually illogical). For example, in his article on Paul’s knowledge, he argues that “maybe” Paul “didn’t know” there were only eleven disciples who saw Jesus when he says the twelve did (but since Paul is quoting a universally-agreed creed predating him, that obviously can’t explain this datum), or, failing that, maybe “the twelve” was an administrative label and not an actual number (which doesn’t make sense, since the whole point is that there must be exactly and only twelve heads to sit the twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes). So these are not even probable explanations, much less certain. And any uncertainty must translate to the conclusion. For example, if it is only 70% certain that “the twelve” is not a number of persons (and that’s still a much higher certainty than any evidence supports), then the evidence of Paul saying twelve becomes 70% likely on the historicity of Judas, but remains 100% likely on his later mythic invention, for a likelihood ratio of 70/100 or 7/10 against historicity, hence 10/7 for myth. I gave the highest odds at 3/1 by accounting for all the silences in Paul and Clement, not just this one datum. So that already accounts for possibilities like Ehrman speculates on here.

The mathematical folly here is the possibiliter fallacy: that just because something is possible, we get to assume it is 100% probable, and thus it is just as likely to be true as the alternative (that Paul said this because Judas was invented later). But that hasn’t been established. Mere possibility is not a probability. To get a probability, you need evidence. Without evidence either way we are at best 50/50. With evidence against us (as I just cited against Ehrman), it must necessarily be less likely—say, 40/60 or 30/70, in any case, a lot lower than “70%” and thus the datum counts as evidence against historicity no matter what excuses you can establish are possible. Indeed even a “70%” would be evidence against, since the competing probability is 100%, which is higher and thus more probable on myth than history. So that possibility is already included in my estimates. At my highest odds, it’s included in the 33% chance that that datum (and the others) are explained somehow, nevertheless, by a real Judas; and even at my lowest odds, it’s included in the 1% chance of that. So we cannot argue by just coming up with possibilities. We have to input the probability of those possibilities. I already did that. Ehrman does not. So he actually has nothing relevant to say here. His point has already been accounted for.

And that’s all Ehrman has by way of arguments. As noted, they don’t move the needle of probability at all. The probability that Judas existed remains less than one percent at worst, and no more than ten percent at best.

And What About?

There are some points Ehrman does not lean on but others have that warrant mention.

For example, some will claim that when Paul says “the twelve” saw Jesus this means the newly constituted twelve after-the fact. But as I’ve already noted (Proving History, 317):

Luke says Judas was replaced, though forty-seven days later (Acts 1:1–12: forty days plus a week = forty-seven days), which was also a full week after Luke says these appearances of Jesus had ended and Jesus had finally departed into the sky (Acts 1:15–26); this simply contradicts Paul’s assertion that the very first people Jesus appeared to were Peter “and then the twelve” just three days later, only then followed by several more appearances to all the other brethren and apostles (last of all Paul: see 1 Corinthians 15:5–8). Someone is lying. 

In other words, it cannot have been in the creed that “the twelve” saw Jesus three days after his death when only eleven were there. The vacancy was filled a month later. So the number eleven would have entered the creed. Hence Mark’s original text never says “the twelve” saw Jesus (as Paul does) and thus created no contradiction with his new version of events (likewise, John). And when Matthew numbers them at the appearance, he “is smart enough to emend the number to eleven” (Proving History, 153: Matthew 28:16; likewise Luke 24:9 and 33, and Pseudo-Mark 16:14). So every author is aware of this. Thus it should have shown up in the creed Paul quotes.

Because the mass appearances creedally happened afterward, and so no vacancy-filler can have been counted as these twelve (they would be counted as the later recipients). The vacancy tale itself is probably aetiological, i.e., it is a myth written to exemplify how to fill vacancies generally. And it was occasioned by the invention of a vacancy to fill. So there is no way to get any assurance this even happened. It’s another tale attested only in myth, to fulfill a mythical purpose. But even if it happened, it can’t explain the creedal declaration that twelve were there mere days after. And even if you think that’s somehow still remotely possible, we already accounted for that possibility above.

Another argument is that Jesus is made to promise that all twelve disciples will be honored with thrones in Matthew and Luke, which creates a contradiction that Judas is instead damned, so surely this means Jesus didn’t anticipate the defection and yet the saying was preserved anyway; and so somehow (?) this is evidence that it happened. As convoluted as this reasoning goes, it doesn’t work (Proving History, 151–52):

[Scholars will argue that] Jesus is made to say all twelve of his disciples would receive eternal honors [Luke 22:30; Matthew 19:28] … [but this] predicted rule of twelve may have originally been communicated in visions of the risen Jesus (and thus might not derive from [the] historical Jesus) or even been adopted from pre-Jesus messianic tradition, all before the Judas story was conceived. The fact that Jesus does not say “the twelve” will rule but that those who follow him will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes seems innately disconnected from the number of disciples (since the governing number is the Jewish tradition of twelve tribes, not the number of people who just happened to be following Jesus).

In other words, in Matthew’s (more original) construction of this saying (which Luke probably redacted), he does not say the disciples will sit on these thrones, only those there who follow him will. This saying is entirely compatible with a vacancy-filler (Paul seems to think any faithful Christian could end up there), and thus does not clearly contradict the Judas account. The Gospel of Judas fixes it the other way around by retconning Judas being secretly an ally of Jesus and his punishment temporary and his reward inevitable, rather like the way Lost in Austin retcons—spoiler!—the villain of Pride & Prejudice, Mr. Wickham, as, secretly, a sympathetic hero. As Ehrman himself points out, the Gospels don’t actually rule this out: nowhere do they say Judas will be punished “forever” and thus exclude him from the reward come the final End. So there really is no contradiction here to account for. And even if there were, it was created a lifetime later, by Mark’s mythic contrivance, and thus cannot be evidence for Judas. If anything it is evidence against Judas, as the saying is more likely to predate the story.

Conclusion

So in the end, we are left with no good arguments for Judas being historical, and several good arguments for Judas being a myth, the net effect of which makes him ten to hundreds of times less likely to have existed than to have been mythically invented, even if Jesus existed.