I've never understood why people believe that Judas betrayed Christ, not even when I was a Christian. If it weren't for Judas there'd have been no crucifiction, no death, no ressurection, no forgiveness, no Christianity at all.
Am I missing something? Surely Judas did you all a favour?
Didn't Jesus ask Judas to do that? Only in the Gnostic gospels.
Someone had to get the ball rolling for the ressurection to happen.
Judas' betrayal played part yes. It was still betrayal though.
And only in the Gospel of Judas, a gnostic text, does Jesus have Judas do this. Of course that's not the central theme of the Gospel of Judas. Like most gnostic gospels, the theme of the Gospel of Judas is that there is a single disciple of Jesus who understands who Jesus really is, and the others are representative of the ignorant masses.
In fact, the Gospel of Judas is one of the most antagonistic of these, where all of Jesus' disciples are ignorant fools believing in the "false god" of the Jews, indeed Jesus openly mocks this and laughs. It is only then that Jesus takes Judas aside, who truly understands that Jesus is an ethereal agent of the spiritual realm that Jesus imparts to Judas some of the secrets and tasks Judas with being the agent to render whatever humanity Jesus has inert.
Judas is mildly Docetic, that is it presents Jesus as not-quite-human, for example it states that Jesus sometimes appeared as a child, rather than a man. In fact Jesus easily seems to transport himself between different periods of time or dimensions. This underscores the Gnostic cosmological/theological tone of the text.
The text seems to imply that only those with gnosis can depart the mortal realm (by escaping the body) to be received into the spiritual realm (this does not deviate much from the standard themes of gnostic literature); whereas the rest, the mortal world, is effectively screwed; though this part of the text has a lot of holes in it.
Indeed, Jesus having Judas hand him over is found only in one small line, "For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me", then at the end of the text it says some of the priests and scribes approach Judas with a deal, and Judas agrees to the exchange for some coin.
-CryptoLutheran