1. Ours is an age of toleration, and one of its favourite occupations is the rehabilitation of evil reputations. Men and women who have stood for centuries in the pillory of history are being taken down; their cases are retried; and they are set up on pedestals of admiration. Sometimes this is done with justice, but in other cases it has been carried to absurdity. Nobody, it would appear, has ever been very bad; the criminals and scoundrels have been men whose motives have been misunderstood. Among those on whose behalf the attempt has thus been made to reverse the verdict of history is Judas Iscariot. Eighteen centuries had agreed to regard him as the meanest of mankind, but in our century he has been transmuted into a kind of hero. The theory is of German origin; but it was presented to the English public by De Quincey.
Archbishop Whately put forward a theory similar to that of De Quincey. Judas was one who, believing in our Lord's power, sought to put Him in a position in which He would be compelled to exercise it in some startling, unique, and triumphant way. It never, according to this view, occurred to Judas that our Lord would submit to arrest or death; in putting Him, by an act of betrayal, into danger, he gave Him the opportunity (which he never doubted would be used) of confounding His enemies. Such an opportunity was wanting; nay, Judas may even have believed that our Lord desired such an opportunity; the disciple read his Master's wishes and created the opportunity which he believed his Master would welcome and use.
But no theory of the kind can be maintained. The facts are against it. If, knowing the supernatural powers of Jesus, he had no fears that He could suffer evil from the hands of His enemies, and delivered Him into the power of the Jewish authorities in order that He might be forced to assert His Messianic claims, why should he bargain with them for thirty pieces of silver? He could in many ways have accomplished this end, without taking the attitude of a traitor. The statements of the Evangelists about his covenant with the chief priests, his conduct at the arrest, his return of the money, the words of Peter respecting him, and especially the words of the Lord, “Good were it for that man if he had not been born,” conclusively show that he sinned, not through a mere error of judgment, while at heart hoping to advance the interests of his Master, but with deliberate perfidy, designing to compass His ruin.
The deed of Judas has been attributed to far-reaching views, and the wish to hasten his Master's declaration of Himself as the Messiah. Perhaps-I will not maintain the contrary-Judas represented his wishes in this way, and felt justified in his traitorous kiss; but my belief that he deserved, metaphorically speaking, to be where Dante saw him, at the bottom of the Malebolge, would not be the less strong because he was not convinced that his action was detestable. I refuse to accept a man who has the stomach for such treachery as a hero impatient for the redemption of mankind and for the beginning of a reign when the kisses shall be those of peace and righteousness.1 [Note: George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such.]
2. Nor can it be pleaded that Judas acted merely as a disappointed enthusiast. All the disciples were disappointed enthusiasts, but only he sought revenge on Christ by betraying Him. It is sometimes said that the sin of Peter in denying his Lord was scarcely less than that of Judas in betraying Him; but the sins were totally different in quality and nature. Any man, under the extreme pressure of danger or temptation, may deny the convictions that are really dear to him; but there is a gulf as wide as the world between such denial and deliberate betrayal. The most heroic of men in some hour of utter darkness may sign his retraction of a truth as Cranmer did, and afterwards may nobly expiate his crime as Cranmer did, by thrusting his unworthy hand into the martyr flame; that is weakness of the will; it is failure of courage, but it is not deliberate betrayal. But in all the closing acts of Judas it is the deliberation of his wickedness that is so dreadful. Every step is studied; every move is calculated. He works out his plot with a steadfast eye, an unflinching hand. He will not stir till he is sure of his compact; he studies with astute intelligence the hour and place of his crime; all is as planned and orderly as the strategy of some great battle. Had he broken utterly from Christ in the moment when he went over to the side of the priests, we might at least have pitied him, and, in part, respected him. We might have numbered him with those misguided patriots who, from motives which are tortuously honest, burn the idols they had once adored. But Judas does not take this course. It is an essential part of his hideous compact with the priests that he must play the part of the loyal friend of Jesus to the last. He moves upon his road toward tragic infamy without compunction, without one backward thought, without a single pang of pity or of old affection. The most vivid touch in the appalling picture is the smile with which he asks his Master, who has just declared His knowledge that He will be betrayed-“Lord, is it I?” Judas knows in that moment that Christ is perfectly aware of his conspiracy, and yet he says, “Is it I?” He is so sure of success, so confident that it is no longer in the power of the heavy-hearted Galilæan to thwart his scheme, that he can mock Him with the insult, “Is it I?” Morally cold, intellectually astute, and now filled with the deliberate madness of revenge, it is little wonder that the world has discerned in this hard, impenetrable wickedness of Judas a sin beyond forgiveness, in which no germ of renovating good can be discerned.
Cæsar defended himself till the dagger of a friend pierced him; then in indignant grief he covered his head with his mantle and accepted his fate. You can forgive the open blow of a declared enemy against whom you are on your guard; but the man that lives with you on terms of the greatest intimacy for years, so that he learns your ways and habits, the state of your affairs and your past history-the man whom you so confide in and like that you communicate to him freely much that you keep hidden from others, and who, while still professing friendship, uses the information he has gained to blacken your character and ruin your peace, to injure your family or damage your business,-this man, you know, has much to repent of.1 [Note: M. Dods, The Gospel of St. John, ii. 97.]
