There’s actually quite a number of Judases in the New Testament: Judas the brother of Jesus (Matthew 13:55), Judas the son of James (Luke 6:16, Acts 1:13), Judas not Iscariot (John 14:22), Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37), the Judas who sheltered Paul (Acts 9:11), Judas called Barsabbas (mentioned three times in Acts 15), and the epistle-writer Judas whom we in English prefer to call Jude, most of whom are basically good guys, but you won’t find Christians naming their sons after any of them. When we say Judas we mean Judas Iscariot, the sneaky low-down traitor, so oily that he betrays the Son of Man with a kiss, so cheap that it’s Mary of Bethany’s extravagant anointing of Jesus with nard that drives him as thief and keeper of the moneybag to bargain with the chief priests for thirty pieces of silver in exchange for his teacher.

Sleazy Judas is also the object of a rehabilitation campaign in the last decades. The hoopla over the “gospel of Judas” demonstrated how titillating it was to many to imagine that the ultimate bad guy was really the innocent victim of a smear campaign. Apparently some third-century author thought the same. The film “The Last Temptation of Christ” (which I personally adore for entirely other reasons) makes the same implicit argument; Judas shoulders the hideous but heroic burden of turning Jesus over to the authorities precisely so the necessary death could take place. He even makes the most significant christological confession: "What's good for a man isn't good for God!"—protesting Jesus' fruitful marriages in place of the cross. In the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Judas is frustrated with Jesus’ failure to make the dream happen, insisting constantly that “these sordid kind of things are coming hard to me” and “I haven’t thought at all about my own reward, I really didn’t come here of my own accord” (with which the evangelists would agree: Satan entered Judas’s heart and drove him to it); but at the end, seeing Jesus so bitterly wounded, he ends up wailing to God, “I’ll never, ever know why You chose me for your crime, Your foul, bloody crime!”

It’s a hard heart indeed that can’t feel a shudder of pity for the friendless Judas, however corrupt. Two of the evangelists report what became of him. Though they differ in the details, in either case it’s an inglorious end. In Matthew, Judas realizes, too late of course, that he has betrayed innocent blood, and says as much to the chief priests and elders, trying to return the money in a sad little act of penance. In the face of their indifference, he throws the money down and goes out to hang himself. The priests, evidently feeling a little guilty about the money after all, use it to buy the “Field of Blood” for the burial of strangers. In Acts 1, Luke links Judas to the Field of Blood too, but in this case Judas had bought the field itself with his thirty-piece prize, but “falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out.” It’s on account of this gruesome detail that the field acquires its name.

Thief, liar, traitor, coward: Judas has committed the worst of sins, no doubt. Yet it has always been a matter of Christian conviction that the Lord Jesus died for sinners, and that sinners who come to Jesus have in their own spiritual if not historical way betrayed this same Lord. If we are eager to rehabilitate Judas, it’s probably a case of rehabilitating ourselves. If Judas can be saved, then none of us are beyond hope.

The differing reports on Judas’ final fate leave us in an all-too-familiar Bible-induced state of uncertainty. We are not permitted either to proclaim triumphantly the punishment of the wicked or assure ourselves in ill-disguised relief that no one really gets damned in the end. In Luke, Judas was, is, and remains rotten. He uses his reward to invest in real estate and then his guts explode, as if suggesting he had indulged in a gluttonous feast with the last few silver coins. There is no sign of remorse or love at all; no sign of hope for this impenitent. All believers can say about Judas is what Peter quoted from the Psalms about him: “May his camp become desolate, and let there be no one to dwell in it.” In Matthew, Judas actually repents of his betrayal. His final sin is not turning against God but despairing of his own standing before God. Can despair be forgiven? Was anyone even around to tell Judas that nothing, really nothing, can come between us and the love of God in the end? Apparently not, and suicide seemed like the best choice.

Which is the real Judas? This side of the Jordan we won’t know. But we’ll likely find that the search for the historical Judas ends up much like the search for the historical Jesus—we look into his face and are unsettled to discover that it’s a mirror reflecting our own faces back again.