Dinner with Judas...
Why he betrayed Christ and why Christians should forgive him. Christ did.
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).
IF YOU COULD invite one of the twelve apostles to dinner, whom would you choose?
I would choose Judas Iscariot, because his motives for betraying Jesus Christ remain a mystery.
Maligned as the ‘Christ killer’, Judas was believed to have divulged Jesus’ secret location in the Garden of Gethsemane to the Jewish high priests in return for thirty pieces of silver. His actions set in motion Jesus’ arrest, crucifixion and resurrection.
For his betrayal, Judas has envenomed centuries of antisemitic hatred, depicting him as the archetype of the treacherous, money-hungry Jew. Nor would Judas receive a particle of Christian compassion, as these samples (in a long tradition) reveal:
‘[Judas] was a dr…