First Person: Why Did Judas Identify Jesus with a Kiss?

Home > Magazines > BAR > January/February 2014

I’ve been reading a new book titled Pseudo-Cyril of Jerusalem “On the Life and the Passion of Christ”: A Coptic Apocryphon by the Dutch scholar Roelof van den Broek.1 In case it has escaped your attention, it provides a new translation of an eighth-century Gnostic gospel in Coptic from Egypt that has been in the Morgan Library in New York since 1908, a gift of J.P. Morgan. This text explains why Judas Iscariot identified Jesus with a kiss so that the Roman soldiers could arrest him, as related in three canonical gospels (Matthew 26:48; Mark 14:44; Luke 22:47). According […]

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Footnotes

See Strata: In Their Own Words: “Stop the Presses: Report on ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’ Due Out Mid-Summer,” BAR 39:04.

Endnotes

Roelof van den Broek, Pseudo-Cyril of Jerusalem “On the Life and Passion of Christ”: A Coptic Apocryphon (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Its retail price is $140.