Do Roman Catholics KNOW

King James Bible And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
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So, according to Jesus own words, Judas shall sit upon one of the twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel
Judas Iscariot (Hebrew: , Yehuda, Yhh -qrayy) was, according to the New Testament, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ. Most Christians consider Judas a traitor. Some have embraced the alternative notion that Judas was merely the negotiator in a prearranged prisoner exchange (following the moneychanger riot in the Temple) that gave Jesus to the Roman authorities by mutual agreement, and that Judas's later portrayal as "traitor" was a historical distortion. In his book The Passover Plot the British theologian Hugh J. Schonfield argues that the crucifixion of Christ was a conscious re-enactment of Biblical prophecy and Judas acted with Jesus' full knowledge and consent in "betraying" his master to the authorities. Theologian Aaron Saari contends in his work The Many Deaths of Judas Iscariot that Judas Iscariot was the literary invention of the Markan community. As Judas does not appear in the Epistles of Paul, nor in the Q Gospel, Saari argues that the language indicates a split between Pauline Christians, who saw no reason for the establishment of an organized Church, and the followers of Peter. Saari contends that the denigration of Judas in Matthew and Luke-Acts has a direct correlation to the elevation of Peter. Further evidence of the absence of the Judas story in the earliest Christian documents is drawn on the basis of Matthew 19:28 and Luke 22:2830. Here Jesus tells his disciples that they will sit on the twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. No exception is made for Judas even though Jesus was aware of his impending act of betrayal. The answer may lie in the fact that the source of these verses could be the hypothetical Q document (QS 62). Q is thought to predate the gospels and would be one of the earliest Christian documents. Given that possibility, the betrayal story could have been invented by the writer of Mark. The book The Sins of the Scripture, by John Shelby Spong, investigates the possibility that early Christians compiled the Judas story from three Old Testament Jewish betrayal stories. He writes, "...the act of betrayal by a member of the twelve disciples is not found in the earliest Christian writings. Judas is first placed into the Christian story by the Gospel of Mark (3:19), who wrote in the early
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years of the eighth decade of the Common Era." He points out that some of the Gospels, after the Crucifixion, refer to the number of Disciples as "Twelve", as if Judas were still among them. He compares the three conflicting descriptions of Judas's death hanging, leaping into a pit, and disemboweling with three Old Testament betrayals followed by similar suicides. Spong's conclusion is that early Bible authors, after the First Jewish-Roman War, sought to distance themselves from Rome's enemies. They augmented the Gospels with a story of a disciple, personified in Judas as the Jewish state, who either betrayed or handed over Jesus to his Roman crucifiers. Spong identifies this augmentation with the origin of modern Anti-Semitism. Jewish scholar Hyam Maccoby, suggests that in the New Testament, the name "Judas" was constructed as an attack on the Judaeans or on the Judaean religious establishment held responsible for executing Christ. The English word "Jew" is derived from the Latin Iudaeus, which, like the Greek (Ioudaios), could also mean "Judaean".

Role in apocrypha
Judas has been a figure of great interest to esoteric groups, such as many Gnostic sects. Irenaeus records the beliefs of one Gnostic sect, the Cainites, who believed that Judas was an instrument of the Sophia, Divine Wisdom, thus earning the hatred of the Demiurge. In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Zechariah, the one who casts thirty pieces of silver, as Judas does in the Gospels, is a servant of God. His betrayal of Jesus thus was a victory over the materialist world. The Cainites later split into two groups, disagreeing over the ultimate significance of Jesus in their cosmology.

Gospel of Judas
During the 1970s, a Coptic papyrus codex (book) was discovered near Beni Masah, Egypt which appeared to be a 3rd- or 4th-century-AD copy of a 2nd-century original, describing the story of Jesus's death from the viewpoint of Judas. At its conclusion, the text identifies itself as "the Gospel of Judas" (Euangelion Ioudas).

The discovery was given dramatic international exposure in April 2006 when the US National Geographic magazine (for its May edition) published a feature article entitled The Gospel of Judas with images of the fragile codex and analytical commentary by relevant experts and interested observers (but not a comprehensive translation). The article's introduction stated: "An ancient text lost for 1,700 years says Christ's betrayer was his truest disciple". The article points to some evidence that the original document was extant in the 2nd century: "Around A.D. 180, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon in what was then Roman Gaul, wrote a massive treatise called Against Heresies [in which he attacked] a 'fictitious history,' which 'they style the Gospel of Judas.'" In contrast to the canonical gospels which paint Judas as a betrayer of Christ who delivered him up to the authorities for crucifixion, the Gospel of Judas portrays Judas's actions as done in obedience to instructions given by Christ. The document also suggests that Christ planned the course of events which led to his death. This portrayal seems to conform to a notion current in some forms of Gnosticism, that the human form is a spiritual prison, that Judas thus served Christ by helping to release Christ's soul from its physical constraints, and that two kinds of human beings exist: the men furnished with the immortal soul which is "from the eternal realms" and "will abide there always" ("the strong and holy generation...with no ruler over it", to whom Judas belongs), and the other ones, the majority of mankind, who are mortal and therefore unable to reach the salvation. The Gospel of Judas does not claim that the other disciples knew about Jesus's true teachings. On the contrary, it asserts that they had not learned the true Gospel, which Jesus taught only to Judas Iscariot, the sole follower belonging to the "holy generation" among the disciples.

Gospel of Barnabas
According to medieval copies (the earliest copies from the 15th century) of the Gospel of Barnabas it was Judas, not Jesus, who was crucified on the cross. This work states that Judas's appearance was transformed to that of Jesus', when the former, out of betrayal, led the Roman soldiers to arrest Jesus who by then was ascended to the heavens. This transformation of appearance was so identical that the masses, followers of Christ, and even the Mother of Jesus,
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Mary, initially thought that the one arrested and crucified was Jesus himself. The gospel then mentions that after three days since burial, Judas's body was stolen from his grave, and then the rumors spread of Jesus being risen from the dead. When Jesus was informed in the third heaven about what happened, he prayed to God to be sent back to the earth, and descended and gathered his mother, disciples, and followers, and told them the truth of what happened. He then ascended back to the heavens, and will come back at the end of times as a just king.

Death
There are a few descriptions of the death of Judas, two of which are included in the modern Biblical canon:

Matthew 27:310 says that Judas returned the money to the priests and committed suicide by hanging himself. They used it to buy the potter's field. The Gospel account presents this as a fulfillment of prophecy. The Acts of the Apostles says that Judas used the money to buy a field, but fell headfirst, and burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. This field is called Akeldama or Field of Blood. The non-canonical Gospel of Judas says Judas had a vision of the disciples stoning and persecuting him. Another account was preserved by the early Christian leader, Papias: "Judas walked about in this world a sad example of impiety; for his body having swollen to such an extent that he could not pass where a chariot could pass easily, he was crushed by the chariot, so that his bowels gushed out." The existence of conflicting accounts of the death of Judas caused problems for scholars

who saw them as threatening the reliability of Scripture. This problem was one of the points causing C. S. Lewis, for example, to reject the view "that every statement in Scripture must be historical truth". Various attempts at harmonization have been suggested, such as that of Augustine that Judas hanged himself in the field, and the rope eventually snapped and the fall burst his body open, or that the accounts of Acts and Matthew refer to two different transactions. Matthew's reference to the death as fulfilment of a prophecy "spoken through Jeremiah the prophet" caused controversy, since it paraphrases a story from the Book of Zechariah which refers to the return of a payment of thirty pieces of silver. Some writers, such as Jerome and John
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Calvin concluded that this was an obvious error. Some modern writers suggest that the Gospel writer may have had a passage from Jeremiah in mind, such as chapters 18:14 and 19:113 which refers to a potter's jar and a burial place, and chapter 32:615 which refers to a burial place and an earthenware jar.
References: http://www.armchairinterviews.com/reviews/the_secrets_of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Judas http://thestoryofjesus.com/part7_130.html

New American Standard Bible (1995) And Jesus said to them, "Truly I say to you, that you who have followed Me, in the regeneration when the Son of Man will sit on His glorious throne, you also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

New American Standard Bible Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif. All rights reserved.