Was Jesus “betrayed” or “delivered” to be crucified?

Q. In Matthew 26:2, Jesus says, “Ye know that after two days is the feast of the Passover, and the Son of Man is betrayed to be crucified.” Does the word translated “betrayed” actually mean “betray,” or does it just mean “deliver”? Because to betray someone means a cunning malicious wicked action against someone who is ignorant of what is going on, while Jesus knew that He would be arrested with the help of Judas and He did not mind or resist that. What do you think?

I hear both a linguistic question and a theological question in what you are asking.

To take up the linguistic question first, the word that the King James Version translates as “betrayed” does mean simply “hand over” or “deliver.” It is the same word that Paul uses, for example, when he says about the Lord’s Supper tradition, “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you.” So the idea of malicious deception of an innocent, trusting individual is not implicit in the Greek verb. That would have to be inferred from the context. Because the notion of betrayal is not implicit in the verb, many modern translations do not use the word “betrayed” in the passage you are asking about. The NIV says, for example, “the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.” The ESV says “the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.”

But if we do translate the word with its basic meaning, is it still appropriate for us to make the further inference that in this context, Jesus is talking about an actual betrayal? That is the theological question. It has two parts, based on two things you assert in your inquiry: (1) Was Jesus ignorant of what was going on? (2) Did Jesus mind that Judas enabled the authorities to find him and arrest him and demand his execution? I believe that the premise behind your inquiry is that if the answer to both of these questions is no, then it would not be accurate to say that Judas betrayed Jesus. We shall have to investigate that premise as well.

(1) Certainly by the time Judas actually led the authorities to Jesus, Jesus knew that he was going to do that. Jesus said as much at the Last Supper. Now personally I do not believe that Jesus recruited Judas to be a disciple with the direct knowledge that Judas was going to betray him. I don’t think it would have been fair to Judas for Jesus to give him the impression that he sincerely wanted him to be his disciple when all along Jesus was just looking for someone to betray him. Rather, I think that Jesus knew generally that one of his disciples would eventually betray him, and that one turned out to be Judas. Jesus described in the Parable of the Sower how some people “receive the word” but are then “scandalized” when the experience of living according to the word turns out not to be what they expected. That was what happened to Judas, and this was not a surprise to Jesus.

(2) However, when that happened, Judas could simply have walked away from Jesus, as others did. Instead, Judas seems to have wanted to “cash in” on Jesus by selling him out to the authorities. If, given the realities of human nature and spiritual conflict, it was inevitable that some of Jesus’ followers would turn away from him, it was still not necessary for any of them to sell him out to his enemies. As Jesus said in another context, “It is necessary that scandals come, but woe to the person through whom they come.” So I don’t think it was all right with Jesus that Judas led the authorities him in exchange for money.

But let us assume, in order to address the premise behind your question, that Jesus ultimately realized it was necessary for someone to tell the authorities where he was in order for him to be arrested and executed, and so, all things considered, he accepted what Judas did. Since Jesus knew it was going to happen, and if he accepted it, would be accurate to call it a betrayal?

I would still say yes. Right up until the last moment, Judas pretended that he was Jesus’ friend. When he led the authorities to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, he didn’t point Jesus out from a distance and say, “That’s the man you want!” Instead, he walked over to him and kissed him on the cheek, which is how, in this culture, one man would greet another man who was his friend. At this, even though Jesus knew that Judas was going to lead the authorities to him, he said (I think with some incredulity), “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?” Here Jesus uses the same verb as in Matthew 26:2, but now the NIV (which I quote here) and the ESV, like the KJV, translate it as “betray.” And I think the context justifies that translation. Pretending to be a friend when you are really an enemy is a betrayal, no matter how much idea the person you are betraying has of what you might actually be up to. Indeed, this action of greeting Jesus with a kiss illustrates how Judas went about the entire process of handing Jesus over. He acted all along as if he were deceiving an innocent, trusting individual, because that was what he believed he was doing. And in that sense, from the perspective of Judas’s own moral responsibility, he certainly did betray Jesus.