The song’s first verse conflates a couple of Biblical events. She says she’ll “wash his feet with [her] hair,” alluding to a figure traditionally contrasted with Judas, the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair (Luke 7:44). She goes on to say she will “forgive him […] even after three times he betrays [her],” which is not a reference to Judas, as it would seem Gaga intended, but rather to another disciple, Peter. On the one hand, she compares herself to a woman forgiven by Jesus for her hospitality, and on the other, to Jesus as betrayed three times by Peter. These comparisons make sense as a sort of imagistic self-portrait of someone with a Jesus-complex, which is born out by the chorus.

“I’m just a holy fool, / Oh baby it’s so cruel, / But I’m still in love with Judas” could again describe Christ-like thinking. After all, in order to redeem humankind, Jesus had to be sacrificed, and Judas was the efficient cause of his sacrifice. The two need each other. Taken this way, “Judas” would be an extremely controversial song. It would describe an illicit love between Jesus and Judas, with Lady Gaga taking on the role of Jesus. It would speak to the paradoxes of Christian faith, wherein Judas is damneded for a predestined act wholly out of his control (he was born that way), and it would even carry an extremely sacrilegious undercurrent of homosexual love. That seems like a hell of a song, but based on the rest of it, it’s not the one Lady Gaga wrote.

The second verse loses its Biblical focus, instead invoking vague imagery: Forgiving prophets, crooked ways, sinking bodies. Jesus was crucified, and Judas died of hanging or being split open.

The half-spoken bridge is perhaps the most direct part of the song in that it relates Lady Gaga herself. Calling herself a “fame hooker” who “vomits her mind” refers directly to the themes of her previous records, The Fame and The Fame Monster. And Gaga touched on the mind vomiting part in “Gagavision 43,” when she said, “The creative process is approximately fifteen minutes of vomiting my creative ideas in the forms of melodies and some sort of a theme.” The rest of the bridge speaks to Gaga’s self-image (if not command of grammar), saying she “speak[s] in future tense,” commanding Judas to kiss her or wear an “ear condom,” which is probably an allusion to the Annunciation, the archangel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin Mary that she would bear Jesus, which has nothing to do with Judas.

In all, “Judas” is a glorious wreck of a song. It’s hard to see the text of the song support Gaga’s assertion that its narrator is Mary Magdalene. With the twin assertion that god sent the song to her, it would seem she’s more like the Virgin Mary—somehow a more blasphemous account.