<p>22:3 <i>And Satan entered into Judas who was called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve</i>- It was the Jewish &lsquo;satan&rsquo; that put the idea of betraying Jesus into Judas&rsquo; mind, so Lk. 22:2,3 implies: &ldquo;the chief priests and scribes sought how they might kill him...then entered Satan into Judas&rdquo;. See on :2. The Jewish ideas of an immediate Kingdom and the throwing off of the Roman yoke by a glamorous, heroic Messiah entered Judas, and caused him to become so bitter against Christ&rsquo;s Messiahship that he betrayed Him. The Jewish Satan, in the form of both the Jews and their ideology, was at work on the other disciples too: &ldquo;Satan has desired to have you&rdquo; (plural), Jesus warned them. Especially was the High Priest seeking Peter: &ldquo;I have prayed for you (Peter &ndash; singular), that your&nbsp;faith doesn't fail you&rdquo; (Lk. 22:31,32). Could Jesus foresee the Satan &ndash; High Priest later arresting Peter and his subsequent trial in prison? Throughout the first century, the Jewish and Roman Devil sought &ldquo;whom he may devour&rdquo; (1 Pet. 5:8).</p><p>Note how &ldquo;enter&rdquo; is used in a non-physical sense in Mt. 25:21: &ldquo;Enter into the joy of your Lord&rdquo;, entering in at the narrow gate (Mt. 7:13), entering into another&rsquo;s labours (Jn. 4:38). &lsquo;Satan&rsquo; enters a man&rsquo;s heart in the sense that &ldquo;the lusts of other things enter in&rdquo; (Mk. 4:19); in this sense we can &ldquo;enter into temptation&rdquo; (Lk. 22:46).</p><p>The link between Judas and the &lsquo;Devil&rsquo; is brought out by a consideration of Luke&rsquo;s comment that Judas &ldquo;sought an opportune time <i>eukairan</i> to betray Jesus&rdquo; (Lk. 22:6). But Luke earlier used this word in Lk. 4:13 to describe how the &ldquo;Devil&rdquo; in the wilderness departed from the Lord &ldquo;until an opportune time&rdquo; <i>achri kairou</i>. The Lord&rsquo;s victory in the wilderness prepared Him for the victory over the &lsquo;Devil&rsquo; which He achieved in His final passion. Just as the temptation to &lsquo;come down from the cross&rsquo; was a repetition of the temptation to throw Himself down from the temple. John&rsquo;s Gospel often repeats the history of the other Gospels, but in different language. In Mt. 26:46, the Lord comments upon the arrival of Judas: &ldquo;Rise, let us be going; my betrayer is coming&rdquo;. But Jn. 14:30,31 puts it like this: &ldquo;The prince of this world a phrase understood as meaning &lsquo;the evil one&rsquo;, the Devil is coming&hellip; Rise, let us be going&rdquo;. John is picking up the mythological language of the &lsquo;Satan&rsquo; figure, and applying it to a real person with real attitudes and sinful intentions &ndash; i.e. Judas, who is presented as a personification of the &lsquo;Satan&rsquo; / &lsquo;Devil&rsquo; / &lsquo;Prince of this world&rsquo; principle.</p><p>We can easily overlook the huge significance of Mk. 14:21 recording the Lord&rsquo;s words that Judas personally was guilty for betraying Him, and would suffer accordingly &ndash; even though Lk. 22:22 says that Judas did this because the Satan i.e. the Jews &lsquo;entered him&rsquo;. <i>Whatever</i> that means, it doesn&rsquo;t mean that Judas nor anyone is thereby not personally responsible for their actions.</p><p>The translation of the Greek text in Jn. 13:2 has been problematic. &ldquo;The Devil having put into the heart of Judas&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t quite do justice to what the Greek is really saying. The respected expositor and Greek student C.K. Barratt insists that strictly, the Greek means &lsquo;the Devil had put into his own i.e. the Devil&rsquo;s heart, that Judas should betray Jesus&rsquo; (C.K. Barratt, <i>The Gospel According to St. John</i> (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978) p. 365. Barratt&rsquo;s view of the Greek is confirmed in D.A. Carson, <i>Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility</i> (London: Marshall, Morgan &amp; Scott, 1981) p. 131). This translation is almost impossible to make any sense of given the orthodox understanding of the &lsquo;Devil&rsquo;. And so most popular translations ignore the obvious difficulty by glossing over the strict meaning of the Greek. Understanding the &lsquo;Devil&rsquo; as the innate source of temptation within the human heart, the picture becomes clearer. The idea is surely that the thought of betraying Jesus began within the Devil&ndash;mind of Judas; he &lsquo;put the thought in his own mind&rsquo;, as if to stress how Judas conceived this thought totally of himself and within his own mind, just as later Ananias and Sapphira in an analogous incident &lsquo;conceived this thing within their heart&rsquo;. So properly translated, Jn. 13:2 actually supports our general thesis about the Devil &ndash; it is stressing that the heart of Judas was itself responsible, that heart put the idea of betraying Jesus into itself &ndash; and nobody else was responsible. Note how the Lord addresses Judas as if Judas had full responsibility for his actions and control over them &ndash; e.g. &ldquo;What you are going to do, do quickly&rdquo; (Jn. 13:27), and Mk. 14:21 &ldquo;Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed Good were it for that man if he had never been born&rdquo;. Those two passages alone surely make it clear that Judas was no robot, no puppet on a satanic string. He had full responsibility and choice over his actions, hence these words of the Lord to him. Summing up, we are left with the question: Did <i>Judas</i> betray Jesus, or did <i>Satan</i>, working through Judas, betray Jesus? The answer, surely, is that it was Judas, and he must bear full responsibility for that.</p>