The "villain" of the Passion narratives, Judas Iscariot, who for a few coins betrayed Christ with a kiss, is the subject of a poignant liturgical motet by Tomas Luis de Victoria. The two opening chords decry his name in a stark, almost accusatory manner, and the piece proceeds to describe the betrayal. The text of this piece (though it quotes from the Bible the judgment upon Judas that it "had been better for him if he had never been born" [Matthew 26:24, Mark 14:21]) remains anonymous, as is the case with textual elements of many of the so-called Tenebrae Responsories. These pieces, part of the special liturgies to commemorate Holy Week in the Catholic Church, provided inspiration for Victoria to compose and publish a complete collection of Holy Week music—Psalms, hymns, two Passions, Lamentations, and the Responsories—in Rome in 1585. Judas mercator belongs to the liturgy for Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter, and would have followed a chanted Psalm and a lesson similarly appropriate to this section of the Passion narrative.

The piece follows the proper liturgical form for a Responsory, with an opening, a refrain, a short versicle, and a repeat of the refrain; the versicle is marked by a shift to a three-voiced texture. Whereas all eighteen of Victoria's Tenebrae Responsories adopt the same mode (or key), Judas mercator brings two of the four sections to cadences on different pitches, lending a "Classical" balance to the piece on its own merits. At the same time, Victoria's characteristically charged harmonic language yields a passionate emotional quality: in the first four measures alone, the chords involve a concise battery of conflicting inflections from F sharp to E flat, B natural, E flat and F sharp again. Furthermore, the composer never neglects an opportunity for text-painting, such as the wandering imitative motive on the text "sought our Lord with a kiss," or the rapid running melisma in the bass voice to evoke the path of the "innocent lamb."



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