I am quite high so take all of this with a grain of salt, along with that, I am also not a Christian. I am speaking wholly from my own perspective, irrespective to the Christian tradition, I am not interested in debating. With that said, Judas was clearly a good guy. My reasons for saying such are multi-pointed, but the first being how Jesus works into my own religious belief. Within my tradition, Jesus is one of multiple Prophets (We call them Doomsayers).
He is not the literal 'Son of God' or 'Literally God', so off the bat for many of you I want to be clear I am not a Christian as many people define 'Christian' as those who subscribe to the doctrine of Trinitarianism or Unitarianism, and obviously many do not even consider the latter to be 'True Christians' (See Mormons, Arians, Universalists etc).
However what a Doomsayer is to me is best described with a poetic metaphor. If we imagine as all humans as belonging to one massive tree1, we can call this the tree of life. Perhaps we think of one specific tiny little branch of that tree is humanity, and on that branch are leaves, counting for every single person in the world. Among those leaves sometimes there are flowers, and then sometimes even more, there is fruit that comes from those very flowers. There are more leaves than flowers and more flowers than fruit. The leaves are us, the flowers are what some may call 'Saints', 'Heros' or 'Bodhisattvas'. The fruit however, they are the Doomsayers, the Prophets, or my personal favorite 'Dharma Age Wheel Turners2', or less clunkily translated; Epochmakers (or something like this, fuck you, maybe just Wheel-turners.)
Some ages have no fruit, others have many, but when there is fruit it is a fundamental shift in the progression of our history as a species. We must understand that karma is the act of causality, cause and effect, but this is not simple cause and effect, but rather the 'causal origin' of all things. Everything comes from something and will return to something, the planets have their orbits, the earth has its seasons, the galaxy spins around a single axis (Sagitarius A, our friend Yaldaboath3).
Humanity always trends on a certain path, sure some great men come here and there to push it a little this way or that way, but in reality they are quite insignificant, not even 'Saint'-level in their ability to effect and change the trajectory of human civilization.
Jesus represents one of these fruit4, a human being so powerful that it was like he was God, his actions changed the trajectory of mankind so unbelievably much, permanently. He along with figures like Buddha or Laotzu were real 'Wheelturners' they were 'Doomsayers' but in truth perhaps the word 'Doomsayer' is almost erroneous, perhaps they are better seen as 'Doom-makers' for they are in the business of making man's doom (if you are illiterate PLEASE be aware 'doom' is the english word for fate5, if you are feeling high cortisol from this thread but did not know that please understand, you are NOT supposed to be reading this.)
Jesus made Man's doom, but in the same respect, so did everyone around him. Every single actor around Jesus was part of this collective spell, the same can be said for Gotama (our lovely Cowherd) as well! You see, when a fruit appears the whole fruit can be said to be the Prophet, but his followers are the sweet meat of the fruit, and his disciples are the very seeds within in. They all act as an almost singular body, in such a way, that the God's cannot stop them, not even Doom himself, that mighty force of entropy, can stop them. In those moments Man's path is indeterminate, in question, there is possibility, there is hope.
So we turn to Judas. It must be stated again, I am not a Christian, within the context of 'Jesus' the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Judas both have a similar narrative authenticity, and I consider them both equally valuable in understanding both Jesus and Judas.
In the Gospel of Judas we are told6 that Jesus actually has a secret relationship with Judas, one unbeknownst to the other disciples. We are told Judas (and by extension Mary) are aware of Jesus's true nature, not as 'Yaldaboath' (whom it is stated that the disciples believe he is) but an avatar or manifestation of the true God.
Within my tradition's framework I see it like this; Jesus's disciples thought he was 'Doom' who both7 many of the Jewish & Gentiles saw as the 'Highest God', where as Judas and Mary both understood that Jesus was not the Demiurge but rather a manifestation of the underlying unifying principle of creation, God, the All, Pan, the Dao. Whatever you wanna call it. This is essentially exactly what 'Buddhas' are in the context of Buddhism. A Buddha is considered the perfect expression of both Man & Brahma, thus we can think of Jesus as the perfect expression of Man & God. Or perhaps, the Son of Man and the Son of God (hmm that's clever maybe those will catch on?)
Now now now before you get your panties all in a twist and start yapping about 'Gnostics' or whatever, the interesting thing about the Gospel of Mary8 and the Gospel of Judas is they do not actually say much of what we think of as 'classically Gnostic'. They quite well stand alone, and they surely were considered important by Gnostics, and kept among their collections (which is why we know of them in the first place) but both of them come from a time before this concept of 'Gnostic' was even crystalized, before there was even a formalized 'Universal' (Catholic) canon that was widely accepted throughout Christendom, so these texts can be considered contemporary and part of the greater narrative on Jesus of the time period, it can be understood that most Christians would be somewhat familiar with these texts.
If we exclude these texts we are left with a glaring problem, how could Jesus get fooled like that? And if he got fooled, what are we meant to learn from it? I know Christians have all sorts of answers to this, but the answers are funnily 'Christian'; "Its about the suffering and the injustice" is the most common one I hear. Well forgive me, but I am a Pagan9, and that makes no fucking sense.
We must understand Wyrd, and we must understand that Prophets do not really 'make mistakes' or 'get tricked & betrayed' in such a way because of what I was talking about previously, how once a Prophet is actively a 'fruit' then the collective is a being itself, and everything acts through that being.
Clearly the best thing for Christianity was for Judas to 'betray' Jesus, if that did not happen it cannot be said (as a non-Christian) that anyone would have ever given a fuck about Jesus. He was able to rise from the dead because he was crucified, the crucifixion happened on (seemingly) a total solar eclipse, it became the central memetic core of Christianity and continues to be to this day, it is the central binding trauma, that was the wheel being turned at that moment and when he rose from the dead. This was the act of the whole not the one.
Even if we admit that Jesus was actually hoodwinked (unlikely) then we still have Judas unwittingly turning the wheel of dharma, and thus is still karmically in the right to a point! This may be very very hard for Christians to understand, but I was raised Buddhist, and in my childhood faith even Mara and the dastardly10 Devadatta11 played a role in the awakening of the Buddha, and they too eventually become Bodhisattvas themselves, it is said Mara is the last being that will gain Enlightenment, and it is said that Devadatta eventually becomes a Prophet in a future age. I believe in redemption, I believe not in fate but not in absolute free-will, I believe in wyrd12. Something fundamentally different than both fate and free will but also containing within it the seeds of both. You cannot have free will without fate because fate is just the trajectory of things. Likewise you cannot have fate without free will because without the ultimate act of free will (creation itself) there would be no trajectory to begin with.
Thus that is to say, to me, I take the Gospels of Mary & Judas as relevant and real to the story of Jesus, they add a distinctive character and lesson that is lacking from the synoptic Gospels & John without them. I believe the idea that Jesus and Judas were working together. It simply makes sense, and it takes nothing away from me to believe. A Prophet as great as Jesus can not be so easily tricked, because when that flower turns to fruit he is no longer truly 'himself' he is a scion of God, and everything around him bows in his wake, to his end, and to the benefit of all humanity.
Judas was simply the Paschal Lamb's13 paschal lamb, and so let us say 'Thank you Judas'.