Was Judas Really That Bad?

[Purple Knight]

Question for debate: Was Judas Iscariot really that bad?

I don't hate Judas. Nothing about his (admittedly not fleshed-out) character bothers me. I could have been his friend even after the betrayal. That doesn't mean I agree with anyone betraying anyone, and perhaps this is me being messed-up, but nothing Judas did really bothers me to the point I'd cut ties if I knew him.

First I ask myself why he was stealing from Jesus's group. There are basically two unforgivably horrible things you can do in that time where you'd need large sums of money: Drinking, and gambling. I don't think Judas probably did either. Signs point to him being a bit of a fatty so maybe he overindulged in food, but coming from my perspective (I see welfare recipients whip out an EBT card for grocery carts full of what I consider indulgences like $10 tiny little bottles of pomegranate juice and snobby cheeses) that's not really that bad. Reverse two thousand years and maybe the guy just wanted to have meat every day. Maybe the disciples ate mostly grass or often went hungry. Morally right? No. Understandable? To me, definitely. I can't condemn someone for stealing if it's for food.

And what did he do with the blood money he got? He bought a field. He didn't drink or gamble away that money (those would be dealbreakers for me). He bought something that he could invest in that would be useful later. Add some seeds and a couple servants or slaves to a field and you've got a farm. A farm is not a bad thing to want. That's the kind of greed I don't have a problem with. Yes, it was paid for by a life, but lives were routinely bought and sold in those times to pay for whatever you wanted; there was legalised slavery.

No matter how I look at this, I can't really get my mind round to a perspective that paints Judas as a terrible person. And not that this excuses it, but let's be honest, if Jesus was really a wanted man but went about to populated areas to teach, he was going to be caught eventually anyway. From the perspective of Judas, he's probably thinking, it'll happen sooner or later so I might as well have the silver. He might have even been uncomfortable with being a disciple at that point, and wanting it to be over. Or he might have been legitimately scared to be following around a wanted criminal all day, and acting primarily from that. Perhaps he was unsure. If we're unsure, we do tend to default to the law.

[brunumb]

For me this is about what is truth. I don’t like when people claim something is false or wrong, without solid proof for it. If Bible is book with errors, it should be obvious, without making silly word plays.

That works both ways. Some of the silliest word plays involve rationalising what you deny as being contradictions, such as the Judas accounts discussed here.

[Purple Knight]

It would be if it were possible to produce the law that it is claimed he broke and demonstrate from scripture how it was broken. For example a law that says "Thou shalt not scatter animals", "It is hereby illegal to overturn a table"

It's not illegal to eat cheese. If I eat somebody else's cheese, that's theft.

Similarly there's no law that it's illegal to scatter cats. If you open my door and scatter my cats that's probably theft. You can't seriously be saying that since there's no law against one specific action, the action can't be taken in such a way that it would be illegal.

But if you're going to bump the burden of proof up to that level, that's fine. But what's right and proper if people think somebody probably broke a law is for him to be arrested and then have a trial. But this obviously shouldn't happen when the fellow won't get a fair one. Again, this puts law-abiding people in a terrible position. That's all I'm claiming.

For me this is about what is truth. I don’t like when people claim something is false or wrong, without solid proof for it. If Bible is book with errors, it should be obvious, without making silly word plays.

That works both ways. Some of the silliest word plays involve rationalising what you deny as being contradictions, such as the Judas accounts discussed here.

Correct. And it's a value-judgment either way as to whether the reconciliation is believable enough.

[JehovahsWitness]

It would be if it were possible to produce the law that it is claimed he broke and demonstrate from scripture how it was broken. For example a law that says "Thou shalt not scatter animals", "It is hereby illegal to overturn a table"

It's not illegal to eat cheese. If I eat somebody else's cheese, that's theft.

Are you suggesting Jesus ate the tables? Its not complicated, you say Jesus broke a law, which law did he break?

You can't seriously be saying that since there's no law against one specific action, the action can't be taken in such a way that it would be illegal.

That is what the word illegal means (Not to be confused wifh upsetting)

ILLEGAL

If something is illegal, the law says that it is not allowed.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dicti ... sh/illegal

JW

[Purple Knight]

It's not illegal to eat cheese. If I eat somebody else's cheese, that's theft.

Are you suggesting Jesus ate the tables? Its not complicated, you say Jesus broke a law, which law did he break?

I don't think there's ever been a society where you could grab somebody else's stuff and throw it about when they didn't want you to. And if he scattered animals that weren't his, he deprived people of their property. That's theft regardless of whether there is a specific law against scattering animals.

I'm not suggesting Jesus did something wrong. I'm suggesting that normal, law-abiding people are put in an untenable moral position when revolutionaries arrive and hold themselves above the society and its order. This is assuming they are above society and its order. Normal, law-abiding people are still caught between a rock and a hard place here. They accept that society knows better than them and they shouldn't challenge. 99.99% of the time, this is true, and there's a perfectly good reason why some person's gut reaction to a law can't be policy.

Being a law-abiding person while giving revolutionaries a pass literally requires cognitive dissonance and doublethink.

You can't seriously be saying that since there's no law against one specific action, the action can't be taken in such a way that it would be illegal.

That is what the word illegal means (Not to be confused with upsetting)

ILLEGAL

If something is illegal, the law says that it is not allowed.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dicti ... sh/illegal

This is easily disproven by the cheese example. Just because eating cheese is not illegal does not mean every possible instance of eating cheese is allowed. It's not allowed if it breaks a different law, which it can. If you eat somebody else's cheese, that's not allowed. Yes, the dictionary is wrong if you take it that literally, which to be fair you're supposed to be able to.

But unless you think that eating cheese is legal means that eating somebody else's cheese is legal, the dictionary is just wrong. Or, to be more precise, the definition fails to be both necessary and sufficient when contrapositioned into, "If something is legal, that means it is allowed."

[JehovahsWitness]

I don't think there's ever been a society where you could grab somebody else's stuff and throw it about when they didn't want you to. And if he scattered animals that weren't his, he deprived people of their property. That's theft regardless of whether there is a specific law against scattering animals.

illegal means there must be a specific law violated .

Scattering animals is not theft, theft is when you take possession of something that is not legally yours not when you touch it. The animals were in an "enclosed" area and would have been easy enough to recuperate them by the owners, so no, Jesus did not " deprive people of their property". Jesus stopped business he didn't take possession of anything so he could not justifiably be accused of theft.

My point is about legalities, I am entirely uninterested in your moral assessment of his or anyones actions,


JW

[Difflugia]

Apropos to this discussion, it turns out that Roman law is extremely well-documented. It seems that the modern concept of law with its specific statutes and lawyers to argue them derives directly from the system used by the Romans. Furthermore, since such a system requires knowing the exact wording of the enacted laws, the Romans recorded laws as they were enacted and, most importantly, maintained copies of those records from hundreds of years before Jesus until the final dissolution of the last vestiges of the Holy Roman Empire during the early modern era. Whatever other records were lost, we can know exactly what the laws were at any given moment in the history of the Roman government back to the days of the Republic.

I didn't realize this before yesterday, but since modern legal theory and practice are based on the Roman system, modern law schools study and teach Roman law. There are therefore scads of books about various aspects of Roman law at all levels of detail, including hundreds of public domain titles available at Google Books. One that I thought gave a good overview of things is the 1897 textbook Introduction to Roman Law by William Alexander Hunter. There are many others, but that was the first one I hit with a satisfying amount of detail.

In short, there's just about no way that Jesus didn't break some Roman law in the course of his cleansing of the temple and indeed almost certainly broke several and was legally liable for his conduct in multiple different ways.

If Jesus caused any damage at all that can be measured financially to property, then it's broadly covered by the lex Aquilia de damno. By the first century CE, the concept of rumpere ("rupture" or damage) had expanded enough that the difficulty lay not in proving that damage had, in fact, occurred, but in demonstrating either intent or negligence as opposed to accident. If any of the tables were scratched, a single coin were lost (they were the tables of the money changers, remember), or even if someone's lunch were spilled, then Jesus broke the law.

Any damage to a person was called injuria (whence, obviously, we get the word injure). This applied not only to physical harm, but harm to one's dignity. From the aforementioned Introduction to Roman Law, p. 136:

Injuria is when a person, either intentionally or by negligence, violates any right that a free man has in respect of his own person . It thus includes a multifarious variety of wrongs, as striking or whipping a man; kidnapping or falsely imprisoning him; reviling a man in public (convicium facere); defaming a man either by words or writing, or even by acts. Thus it was defamation to take possession of a man's goods, as if he were insolvent, when he owed nothing. Again, it was an injuria to enter a man's house against his will, even to serve a summons.

At first blush, it would appear that being driven from a public place with a whip, whether physically struck or not, would constitute an injuria. Mark 11:16 ("He would not allow anyone to carry a container through the temple.") would constitute an injuria.

Rather than being a question of whether Jesus broke any law at all, the questions are how many different laws he broke and how many different ways he broke them.

Scattering animals is not theft, theft is when you take possession of something that is not legally yours not when you touch it.

Interestingly (and very amusingly), that's not true by Roman lights. In Roman law, theft involved the handling of an item without permission regardless of possession. Taking a cup of wine from a cask without permission entailed theft of the whole cask because it necessarily required handling it in a way not prescribed by the owner. Similarly, using an item merely given to one for safekeeping was also theft. Even if the perpetrator had legal possession of the item, he or she didn't have permission to use it.

Since Jesus wasn't using the animals, it probably wasn't theft, but he would have been guilty of an injuria (depriving, even temporarily, the owners of the animals of their use) and, if he did even minimal harm to any of the animals, injuria damno (harm to property).

The animals were in an "enclosed" area and would have been easy enough to recuperate them by the owners, so no, Jesus did not "deprive people of their property".

He certainly deprived them of the use of their property, albeit temporarily, which is what was important to Roman law.

Jesus stopped business he didn't take possession of anything so he could not justifiably be accused of theft.

He didn't use the livestock himself, so it wasn't theft. He did temporarily deprive their owners of them, though, so it was injuria.

My point is about legalities, I am entirely uninterested in your moral assessment of his or anyones actions.

"If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell."—Carl Sandburg

I'm very much looking forward to the ensuing pounding and yelling.

[JehovahsWitness]

Did people really not know who the twelve disciples were?

I shouldnt think many outside of the "Christian community" would have. Jesus himself wasnt recognised by some he is reported to have cured, so outside of friends and close aquaintences I doubt if many would have recognised them.



JW

[1213]

Till this day I have not seen actual contradictory in the Bible, all that people have managed to show is misunderstandings or misinterpretations.

What you really mean is that people have shown understanding and interpretation different from yours. The gross assumption here is that yours are the correct ones.

I don’t think I have really made own interpretation. I think it is generally not good to make own interpretations. Bible should be understood as it itself explains what it means.

But, even if we think I have done own interpretation and we have an interpretation that makes the Bible look non-contradictory and interpretation that makes it look contradictory, why should we choose the contradictory interpretation? Should I also begin to interpret your sayings so that they look contradictory and bad for you?

[1213]

And you're some kind of expert on the Bible and the scholarship behind it? I think not...

So, does the meanings of the words change, if I have scholarship? I think not… …which is why it is totally irrelevant to mislead the debate to personal matters.

Fine. So which of the following is true:

Has anyone ever seen god?

NO
No one has ever seen God (1 John 4:12).
No man has seen or can see [God] (1 Timothy 6:16).

OR

YES
The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day (Genesis 18:1).
The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend (Exodus 33:11).

Speaking face-to-face can mean to speak directly. It does not necessary mean one sees another person’s face. In this case it continues with “as a man speaks to his friend”, which seems to clarify this. Also, if you continue reading, it says:

He said, "You cannot see my face, for man may not see me and live."
Exodus 33:20

That is why I think it is clear that Moses didn’t see the face of God in Exodus 33.

Second difference in those scriptures can be, what is really meant with God, or Lord in the scriptures. There are many options. And for example, the Genesis 18 continues with:

He lifted up his eyes and looked, and saw that three men stood opposite him. When he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself to the earth, and said, "My lord, if now I have found favor in your sight, please don't go away from your servant.
Gen. 18:2-3

There the word “Lord” can mean also someone else than the one and only true God, especially when it says they there was 3 men. I think that is not really speaking of the one and only true God. But, this leads to interesting question, Bible tells Jesus is the image of God, if you have seen Jesus (the image of God), have you seen God?

And who bought the field after Jesus's betrayal, the priests or Judas?

THE PRIESTS
5 So Judas threw the money into the Temple. Then he went off and hanged himself. 6 The leading priests picked up the silver coins in the Temple. They said, “Our law does not allow us to keep this money with the Temple money. This money has paid for a man’s death.” 7 So they decided to use the coins to buy a field called Potter’s Field. This field would be a place to bury strangers who died while visiting Jerusalem. ( Matthew 27:5-7)

OR

JUDAS
Judas bought a field with the money he got for his evil act. But Judas fell to his death, his body burst open, and all his intestines poured out. (Acts 1:18)

Please read the post #10. It was priests who bought, Judas obtained it by that way.

THEN WE HAVE:

1SA 17:50 David killed Goliath with a slingshot.
1SA 17:51 David killed Goliath with a sword.

2SA 6:23 Michal was childless.
2SA 21:8 She had five sons.

2KI 8:25-26 Ahaziah was 22 years old when he began his reign.
2CH 22:2 He was 42 when he began his reign.

Gen 2:17 Adam died the day he ate the apple.
Gen 5:5 He died 930 years later.

So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine, and killed him; but there was no sword in the hand of David.
1SA 17:50
Then David ran, and stood over the Philistine, and took his sword, and drew it out of the sheath of it, and killed him, and cut off his head therewith. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled.
1SA 17:51

Those don’t say David killed him with the stone and sling. Stone was not the cause of death. Apparently, the philistine fell because of the stone and then David finished the job with a sword.

Michal is an interesting question, It seems to me that there were two persons that now are called Michal. I recommend to read this: http://bib.irr.org/did-michal-have-chil ... 23-and-218. Interesting thing is that for example Wikipedia knows Merab (the second Michal), but many translations don’t seem to recognize her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... %93Z#Merab

And the age question. It is interesting that for example Young’s literal translation has:
A son of twenty and two years is Ahaziah in his reigning, and one year he hath reigned in Jerusalem, and the name of his mother is Athaliah daughter of Omri;
2CH 22:2

It appears to me that there is mistranslation in some versions.

And about Adam, it depends of several things. First is, what is meant with a day. By what the Bible tells, for God one ay can be thousand years, which is why it can be said he died at that day.

And this one thing let not be unobserved by you, beloved, that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day;
2 Pet. 3:8

Second issue is, what was actually said. Young’s literal translation says:
and of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou dost not eat of it, for in the day of thine eating of it--dying thou dost die.'
Gen. 2:17

So, he lost his life with God and was expelled to this first death to die. Death was relatively slow process, but it begun that day. Because of these two reasons, I don’t think there is really contradiction, unless you make suitable interpretation for to believe it is contradictory.

[Purple Knight]

My point is about legalities, I am entirely uninterested in your moral assessment of his or anyones actions,

Fair enough. Since my only claim is that revolutionaries who are morally correct put law-abiding people in a difficult (and in fact untenable) position, we're not really arguing.