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WHAT SHOULD JUDAS HAVE DONE? AND WHAT SHOULD JESUS?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2018

Ardon Lyon
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Abstract

The gospels tell us that Judas betrayed Jesus, and that this was an incredibly wicked act. Lots of people believe that at least many of the events portrayed in the New Testament did not actually happen. I argue here that if we suppose on the contrary that they did, then Judas did not in fact act wickedly, and that the only person who acted immorally in this situation was Jesus. I refer in this article first to the wonderful story ‘Three Versions of Judas’ by Borges, who draws a somewhat different conclusion from mine, and later to Amos Oz's novel Judas.

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 17 , Issue 49 , Summer 2018 , pp. 57 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2018 

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References

Notes

1 See Borges, Jorge Luis, Collected Fictions, trans. Hurley, Andrew (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid. 164.

3 The translation I am relying on is that of The Gideon Bible, 1986 edition, first copyright 1973. The Preface states that it is ‘a completely new translation made by over a hundred scholars working directly from the best Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts’. The quotation above is from verse 21.

4 Ibid., verses 22–6.

5 See Holland, Tom, In the Shadow of the Sword (London: Abacus paperback, 2013), 42Google Scholar, and for the following two assertions pp. 38 and 45 respectively. Originally published in Great Britain by Little, Brown, 2012.

6 Lyon, Ardon, ‘The Immorality of Prayer’, Think 14/40(2015), 57–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 But see also Cahn, Stephen M., ‘Why Worship God?’, Think 16.46 (2017), 9–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which he points out that from the fact that one should be grateful to someone for providing wonderful things it doesn't follow that one should worship the provider.

8 Oz, Amos, Judas (London: Vintage/Penguin paperback 1917)Google Scholar, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange in 2016; first published 2014, Keter Publishing House, Israel.