Which makes the name a bit of a misnomer - Judas knew what he was doing.
But the whole narrative was written after the fact to justify Christian claims of being the legitimate heirs to God's covenant and condemn the Jews as a people for "betraying Jesus" so expecting any degree of nuance beyond "Satan made him do it because Jews are greedy" is likely expecting too much.
And the entire message of the New Testament is to offer the Jews salvation and explain how their old ways were wrong. The New Testament explicitly condemns absolutely nobody, instead offers salvation to absolutely everybody, which the only condition being that they ask for it. This is in stark contrast to the old testament, in which only the Jews would be saved and all else are condemned.
Not to mention the New Testament explicitly states there is no Jew or Gentile in the body of Christ. The distinction is entirely abolished. And Jesus calls Judas a friend, and says he could avoid this all if he wanted to but he must do it to fulfill the scriptures.
All in all it seems like you are reaching for a reason to say the New Testament is anti-Jew, when it is truly not against anyone (except perhaps those unwilling to love God and their neighbor).
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_the_New_Testa...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity#C...
People will use anything to find a reason to dislike other people. You can be a part of perpetuating those malcontentments, or you can look at the entire rest of the New Testament which at every turn denounces condemnation and emphasizes love above all else.
Judas's story is a big point in supporting my atheism , like you had a dude following a God for years, witnessing extreme miracles and still the guy had doubts that the person was a God and at the same time this Gods would want me to believe based only on that old,censored book that contradicts itself with reality and morality 100 times. I would have censored this story too if I was there.
After all we have doubters and people who betray for money today in all walks of life.
What's even more noteworthy about miracles is the report that some of those who had the miracle applied to, who were healed even some of them didn't believe or even say thanks! The point of the miracle maybe was not really to make people believe... it's a mystery to me.
> One might say that the existence of a doubter or rejector lends the story authenticity.
The story? Certainly!
Evidence of that specific god? Not at all (it's actually the opposite).
Let me put it this way:
You get told a story about how someone, $LEADER, had millions of people following his proposal to get rich, hanging on his every word, believing his every utterance, because he claimed to have the people's interest at heart.
Believable? Maybe.
Then you get told that one guy from $LEADER's inner circle, who saw every thing that $LEADER did, and heard everything that $LEADER said, stopped believing that $LEADER was, in actual fact, capable of doing what he said he could do.
Believable? Sure, much more than before.
But .. that still doesn't provide any evidence that $LEADER was, in fact, who he claimed to be, nor that what he claimed was true, nor that he believed what he claimed to be true.
In fact, it's just the opposite - we now have more reason to believe the story, but disbelieve the claims of $LEADER.
Replace $LEADER with SBF and the context with cryptocurrencies.
Not for me, if someone that was in the inner circle and witness so much did not believe then expecting me to believe this stories is too much. Anyway other issue I have are the contradictions with the reality and that the God morality is incompatible with my morality so even if he existed 100% I would not worship him.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/feb/01/stephen-fry-...
>In his imaginary conversation with God, Fry says he would tell him: “How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It’s not right.
>“It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”
>Pressed by Byrne over how he would react if he was locked outside the pearly gates, Fry says: “I would say: ‘bone cancer in children? What’s that about?’
>“Because the God who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac, utter maniac. Totally selfish. We have to spend our life on our knees thanking him?! What kind of god would do that?”
So Judas was setup by God? Give him a test that he will fail?
I also hate the story where God allows Satan to kill some extremly good person children to test him and later to reward him the "good" God gives the man other children( f that God, he kills your children, you pass the test and he is so heartless or impotent to restore your children - an average human would not be such cruel)
My "favorite" part of this is the section of the Old Testament/Torah about "sexual immorality" - if a man violates an unbetrothed woman, the punishment is a fee to the father and marriage to the poor girl. If betrothed, both man and woman is stoned to death (unless it was outside the city), as the woman being guilty for not screaming loud enough to get others to stop the act. Oh, and the reason you shouldn't take your fathers wife is to not "uncover your fathers nakedness" - nothing to do with the woman itself. (Deutoronomy)
The thing reads like a bad joke.
Yes. My theology is rusty, but that is supposed to be what sin is. Nobody is free from it, everybody is tempted and fails.
Judas' great crime wasn't selling Jesus for forty silver, Peter is supposed to have committed the same crime by thrice denying Jesus (that never made sense to me, but it's what I was told). Peter realized what he had done, repented, and returned to Jesus while Judas realized what he had done and let his guilt drive him to suicide. He "betrayed" Jesus' forgiveness.
Isn't one of the main points in Christianity that people have free will and so Satan wouldn't be entering and controlling Judas, but would more likely be telling him falsehoods and persuading him to sell Jesus out? i.e. a normal man can always overcome Satan by choosing God, even if it's just right at the end of their life.
I'm actually of the opinion that Christianity held back humanity's development for at least a thousand years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
Alternatively, if he truly believed in Jesus as a god, then he might think "how could they kill a god?" and would want the silver as he'd expect it to be funny when the Romans couldn't kill him.
What chances are to convince me that those miracles were real if someone that was there and seen them with his eyes had doubts?
I can imagine Judas hearing someone recounting a miracle and he'd be shaking his head and thinking "I was there, that's not what happened at all".
I honestly don't care if 1% or 5% of the text is real anyway.
I have heard a story that Judas didn't actually betray Jesus willingly. It had to happen this way and Judas just played his role. Makes the story more tragic and less black and white.
There's too many alternative explanations to say that either the miracles were false xor the Judas story was false - I don't see that they're necessarily connected.
The assumption here is that people will unconditionally believe and follow a person who performs miracles. But human beliefs and actions are more complex than that. People regularly refuse the evidence of their own senses, or that of knowledgeable authorities, if it contradicts their prior world view. They also regularly act contrary to better knowledge if they think it's in their interest.
So I think it's perfectly plausible that Judas experienced all of Jesus' miracles, but out of a mix of personal disappointment (Jesus not living up to Judas' expectations) and greed decided to betray him nevertheless.
I don't think that does justice to the historical weight of the New Testament accounts. We have multiple eye witness accounts of the events surrounding Jesus' life, recorded within a few decades of the events themselves and emerging from an oral tradition that placed a premium on verifiable accuracy. The early Church writings we have (for example Eusebius) make it clear how concerned the first Christians were to ensure the historical reliability of their teaching, and how strongly they opposed the spreading of stories that were of doubtful veracity. In fact, the New Testament itself repeatedly tells its original readers to verify its accounts by asking other eye witnesses (e.g. Luke 1, 1 Corinthians 15).
e.g. Did Jesus exorcise demons?
As far as I am aware there are no contradictions on the Bible. People often point to the sorts of cases claiming a contradiction, when really it is two authors describing different aspects of a thing that are all simultaneously true.
More apropos would be the accounting of Judas's death: Matthew describes him as hanging himself, whereas Acts says he burst open in a field. However this isn't a contradiction either: it may simply be the case that he hung himself in a field, then over time grew bloated and burst open.
I would consider those miracles to have the most plausible explanations. There's any number of medical conditions that can make a person appear to be dead for days and that's the reason that coffins were sometimes fitted with a bell that could be operated by the "dead body" in case they'd been buried alive after being mistaken for dead.
Blindness can be caused by neurological conditions and presumably be cured by a person encountering someone that they believe to be a representation of their god. The problem is that medical knowledge at that time was limited to say the least, so even assuming that the reports are 100% accurate, there's still a lot of uncertainty as to the conditions that were cured and indeed if they were permanent cures.
Personally, I don't think it likely that we have accurate representations of the miracles described in the bible, so it's somewhat meaningless to dissect the stories that were transmitted orally for centuries before being written down (biblical scholars may be able to show that modern bible descriptions have been changed from the original source documents during translation etc. as well).
The COVID years have inoculated me against that line of thinking (pun intended). If people would deny that the bodies piling up in hospitals are conclusive evidence of something more than "just a flu" then I can totally imagine an individual seeing a miracle and arguing "dunno, maybe he was just a little dead". And I've definitely seen people take money to argue in favor of policies they know to be false, harmful, or both.
(In fact, the Bible's willingness to talk about the weaknesses of its protagonists makes it all the more believable to me. If the early church leaders had "censored" the story to fit their own interests, why did they leave in all that embarrassing stuff about themselves?)