New Testament Note 335

Welch library ms illumination — This anonymous manuscript illumination from 1503-1504 shows the betrayal of Christ. Peter, standing (from the viewer’s perspective) to the left of Jesus and clad in brownish red, raises his right arm with a sword. On the left margin of the illustration, Judas, shown in yellow against a green background, has hanged himself.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)

According to the gospel of John, Judas hanged himself out of remorse after his betrayal of Jesus. (The “field of blood” mentioned is still visible — its traditional site, anyway — from the grounds of the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu, outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City.)

Nevertheless, Judas is generally viewed by Latter-day Saints — and not without good reason (see, for example, John 17:12) — as the very model of an unredeemable “son of perdition.”

I’m inclined to universalism, though, and always hold out hope for the salvation of everybody. I’ve long liked the response given by Pope St. John Paul II to a question about whether Christians must believe in Hell. “Yes,” he replied. “But we may hope that it will be empty.”

So I’ve wondered about Judas.

He’s not portrayed very positively in the gospels. John 12:6, for example, describes him as a thief. Could that, though, possibly be the retrospective bitterness of a former apostolic colleague at his betrayal of both Jesus and their fellowship? It’s a wan hope, I grant, but it seems to me a theoretical possibility.

One suggestion that has been made is that Judas remained a believer in Jesus as Messiah, but that he was one of the Zealots or the sicarii (which might explain his somewhat puzzling title, Iscariot) and that he was frustrated by Jesus’s failure to use his great, divine, messianic power to drive the Romans from the land of Israel. His betrayal of Christ, on this hypothesis, was an attempt to put Jesus into such peril that the Savior would be forced to defend himself. And then, when Judas saw that Jesus had no intention of saving his own life, the apostle, realizing with despairing horror what he had done, killed himself.

If this suggestion is true, Judas would probably not be a “son of perdition” in the strict sense, and there might even still be hope for him. His act would have been grievously mistaken, but not done with evil intent and certainly not meant as a gesture of overt rebellion against God.

It’s an attractive thought. But I have no idea whether it’s true.

Posted from Herzliya, Israel