Do you think Christianity would exist today without Judas being a part of it?

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Do you think Christianity would exist today without Judas being a part of it?

I have given this a lot of thought lately and I’m leaning towards no. I don’t think that the whole Jesus phenomenon would have generated the same impact if Jesus were not indeed killed, thus making the whole thing die with time.

Anyway the question generates a thought about the balance between good and evil and just how necessary it is...

 

All great things in history is due to happenstance and chance. Empires rise and fall due to small happenings at crucial points, same with religion. If Muhammed had been executed instead of exiled I dont think we would have had a religion called islam today and if emperor Constantine hadnt embraced the christian faith I dont think christianity would have been any bigger or more important than any other jewish sect. History and our world is ruled by chance and the whims of people with power.

 

If you assume that the substance of Christianity is Christ's moral teaching, then so what if it existed with or without Judas? Judas was just the tragic, precipitous ending to what could have been a noble career in moral education. But we can learn great moral teaching from others - Socrates, Gandhi, Confucious, Singer, etc.

But if you assume that the substance of Christianity is Christ HIMSELF - His life, death, and resurrection - then yeah, Judas plays a part in that. Given that the New Testament interprets the entire Old Testament as pointing toward's Christ's death, a Christianity without Christ's death wouldn't have much point, would it?

The real question to ask is, not if Christianity would've survived without Judas leading to Christ dead, but if Christianity would've survived if Christ had stayed dead?

Incidentally, Constantine didn't embrace Christianity 'til 312 AD. So the li'l Jewish sect managed to survive and thrive for almost three centuries before gaining official recognition. It was already the biggest competitor to organized paganism, even in the face of decades of inconsistent persecution and state neglect.

 

Well, it's quite comforting to know that God has absolute power. If Judas wasn't part of the history, then God would have someone else betraying Jesus. That may sound simple, but it actually IS that simple.

We might also wonder what would have happened if Laban didn't deceive Jacob. And what would have happened if Noah drowned with all the others? Or if Rachab didn't protect the spies?
If, if, if...

We don't have to worry about 'if'. God has a plan and He's using His power to realize it.

The balance between evil and good, death and live has been greatly disturbed for about 2000 years. Evil and death have lost, but since they are bad losers they try to take lots of people with them.

 

I think it's hard to know if Judas was critical to Jesus being killed. Who's to say that if Judas didn't narc, someone else wouldn't have two days later?

Of course, if someone didn't "betray" Jesus, some angry mob may have ripped them all to bits, apostles and all. If THAT happened, there wouldn't be too many people to write the story down, which would undoubtedly have altered the progression of Christianity in some way. Jesus hadn't annoyed the authorities so much as upset the people, who put pressure on the authorities to do something with him. Funny that Judas is condemned to hell (or at least infamy) for giving directions, but the people who were petitioning to have him nailed to a tree aren't vilified.

 

As mentioned above, small incidents can change the history of the world. If Judas had not happened, christianity would have taken a very different direction. After all, Jesus sacrificing himself to atone the sins of his fellow men is often what christianity is about. Therefore, I think christianity would not have evolved into the "forgiving" religion it is today. (Yes I know, we are discussing the most agressive and warmongering religion ever!)

However, lets get a few things strait. Jesus did live a few thousand years ago. Historical texts from the time does mention him, and by this I do not mean the common religeous babble, but official documents and so on. But sorry to be rude, but claiming that some god had a hand in anything, that is just naive. Come on, this is the 21st century. Religion was invented some thousand years ago to explain all the silly questions of mankind, like why does the sun rise and how did life develop. Today we know the answers to these questions, so why still keep to the old superstitions?

I respect other peoples religions, but religion is for me some sort of morality codex on how we are to behave as human beings. Most laws are based upon old religious doctrines after all. But to believe that some greater being is behind everything and pulling the strings? Plain silly.

By the way, sorry if I went a little off-topic in this. This is not meant as a flame, but just my humble oppinion. Oh wait, I'm not humble....

 

If Jesus did not die and rise from the dead, then Christianity is a bankrupt religion.
Someone here recently mentioned CS Lewis's "Lord, Liar or Lunatic" argument. Jesus predicted his death and resurrection, claimed to be the Son of God and to forgive sins ... he was either crazy, lying or indeed the Son of God.
So Jesus' death is crucial to the Christian religion.
On Judas ... that is a good question. The way Jesus was going there were plenty of people who wanted him dead. I'll have to think about that piece more

 

Judas exercised his free will in his betrayal of Jesus. Just because God knew from the beginning of creation that it would be so, does not mean it was not an act of Judas' free will. It is a mistake to assume that Cristianity was dependent upon the arbitrary sin of one man, it is only an unfolding of events that God knew of all along. It is also a mistake to assume that Judas is the victim of some sort of diabolical predestination. He made his choice fully away from the control of God. Christ was God, and as such new from the beginning of Creation that men would sin and that it would be necessary for his blood to be shed to return us to a point where we could truly be sons and daughters of God again.

In my opinion, if Judas is condemned to hell it would not be due to his betrayal of Christ, it would be for his subsequent suicide. St. Peter committed as grevious offense in his denial of Christ, but he stayed alive, gained courage, started ministry and eventually was martyred in Rome. Two similar starts but different uses of free-will. (I'm not even saying Judas is condemned, to say so would be judgemental and presumptuous)

Those are only the simplest questions that religion answered. It was really was to answer to "How did I get here" (and I don't mean sperm and egg stuff), "Why am I here" and "Where will I go when I am done". These are answers that science can never provide, only offer the hypothesis of the day.

So, in answer to the original posted question, yes Christianity would undoubtedly exist without Judas, just as surely as morning would still exist without your alarm clock.

Hey, have I killed another thread?

 

I wouldnt say that you have killed a thread just because it may be hard to argue with someone whose main argument is "it is so because god says it is so". No argument can breach an impregnable wall of faith. That is why it is called faith.

 

Hmmm, seems like this topic can take two directions. It can either develop into a theological discussion, which I fear will leave some of us out, as I have no intention of arguing with "god is right and mighty" and all that. I don't object to people having this point of view, I just think you are horribly mistaken. As for the other direction, this can also be about the historical persons and take a more, what shall we say, scientific direction?

As I've said before, I see religion as a set of ethics. While I don't believe in any gods, I still believe in christianity as an ethical codex for a society. This is the impact christianity has had on the modern world. Hell, uphere in scandinavia, you might still see some remnants of the old nordic mythology in our belief and traditions. But remember, religion is also influenced by the culture of the place.

As for the questions in life, well, life's only purpose is life in it self. That is the single, hard and cruel reality. There are no other reasons, except those you then decide to make yourself. Which kind of brings this back to why religion was invented in the first case.

 

joacqin, mon ami, as was discussed in the earlier post "Reality, beyond logic and faith", faith and arguments go hand in hand. You need to have faith in your premises, but you follow those premises logically and abandon them if they fail to survive logical scrutiny. So faith should serve as a spur to further debate. Your own statement that "all great things in history are due to happenstance and chance" requires a huge leap of faith, because proving it would require that you identify every great thing in history, and then conclusively demonstrate that the historically-accepted "leading factors" of each specific occurrence were in fact not leading factors but entirely coincidental. That's not to say that your statement is necessarily false, just that holding it requires a massive faith investment.

Similarly with these arguments about "what might have been" if such-and-such had or hadn't happened. What takes more faith - to trust what actually IS, or to speculate with our postmodern biases about what really WOULD have happened?

Judas, you have the politics flipped. The Gospels claim that the people supported Jesus but the authorities were out to get him. Check out verses like Mark 14:1-2, where the leaders plot to kidnap Jesus to keep from sparking a riot.

Grovflab, Mathetais has it right. If religion is just a "morality codex", why even bother with the religious trappings? There are plenty of secular morality codexes (codices?) that are kinder and gentler than Christianity - in fact, one of the arguments against Christianity is that it's too darn harsh with the harsh damnation. Check out I Corinthians 15, especially verse 19, where Paul points out that if Christianity is just a nice moral codex, then "we are to be pitied more than all men".

 

Sorry, if I was a little bit unclear above. All the religious trappings were included at a time, where people didn't know what was going on. Ofcourse at that time it was a perfectly sane thing to do, trying to describe the seemingly divine aspects of life. Besides, religion was invented many years before christianity. I'm not considering people who lived back then to be naive or stupid, just ignorant. The naive part is for those who still believe today.

As for the moral codex part, I'm not talking about what christianity used to be, but what it has developed into! I'm perfectly aware about all the wars of religion undertaken by zealous christians. And lets not forget the inquisition and all that.

 

Christianity if there was no Judas would not be what it is this day. I don't speak personally i speak as from what factors the majority of the population is affected. But as MoN so precisely said God would have placed another Judas in place of Judas if need be. Allthough i am pretty sure that God would not have to do anything. Men are capable of killing people they make them feel uneasy in any given situation (Son of God or not).
But Kiranos I wanted to point out another theory\conspiracy theory, myth, you name it. Jesus Christ after he died he resurrected, as we all know and believe. But some say that after he resurrected he got married with Maria Magdalene and went to Marseille to live. There he created a family, which family later became the famous Medici (spelling?) dynasty, which literally governed and set the course of Europe for nearly a century. Furthermore all the members of this dynasty never managed to die naturally and always they were betrayed.
Interesting story heh

 

The purpose of this thread was to answer whether or not Christianity would exist without Judas Iscariot. I have given the answer from the Christian perspective, and not hidden behind a so-called veil of faith. I just got done with a rather lengthy post in the "evil" thread trying to expound what I believe and why, and it's pointless to duplicate it here.

I stand by the answer that I have given, and have no further need to try to defend it in this thread. It's gotten too hard to try to jump back and forth between two threads trying to explain something to people who don't really want to know your answer anyway. I appreciate all the different opinions, and it's fun to share different ideas. I have posted as a Libertarian on political threads, a Liberal on health care threads, and a Conservative on religion threads...Sometimes I even make myself sleep on the couch .

Just wanted one final word in, that if I don't post here in defense of my beliefs, it doesn't mean I no longer stand behind them...I just don't have the time.

EDIT: posted this as judas was posting his response. Yes, I am aware of the type of argument made in the link you have provided, and it has been indeed made in much more eloquent ways. The problem with this argument, and all like it, is that they are based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of God. When seen from that view, the "clever" arguement falls into it's own pile of crap. Use it to re-affirm the tenets of yourself or your agnostic friends.

[ November 11, 2003, 03:18: Message edited by: Hacken Slash ]

 

@Grey Magistrate
No, my politics are the right way around. I'm just reading from a different part of the bible. Check out Matthew 27, for example. The people specifically asked for his death. They even told Pilate how to bring it about. This brings me back to Judas. According to Matthew 27, Judas promptly goes off and hangs himself at this point. I think another book has him throw himself off a cliff, and another doesn't have him die at all. I can't say that one book is right and another wrong (I treat the whole bible as a work of fiction anyway, so, technically, there is no right and wrong), so I can't really make arguments based on them. I concede that some versions have the authorities out to get him. In these cases, it's more or less the same: Jesus was condemned to death by other people... not Judas. He was simply an informant.

@Hacken Slash
Ahh... you're treading on shaky ground, now. You said:

There are known problems with the coexistence of omniscience, omnipotence, and free will. Check out http://world.std.com/~apl/Philosophy/chess.html for a nicely worded rundown. Either Yahweh’s “plan” was a guess, or Judas didn’t have free will.

@Groflab
I agree with you - I think religion is heavily founded on attempts to explain what is not understood. It’s the type of baseless waffle you wind up with when you don’t apply the scientific method (or at least sound logic) to, for lack of a better term, reasoning. I find it strange that we’re willing to entrust our lives to devices built through application of scientific reasoning, but still hold beliefs that can only be classified as baseless under the same model.

 

You are looking at it from the wrong direction brother.

Remember, it is in God's plan whether you like vanilla or rocky road ice cream. The creation and formation of your taste buds is in His soverign hand. Your family, the kid that bumped you at the mall, the old lady next door that smelled of perfume and made you hate to wear cologn ... all part of his soverign workings in our world.

So when I sit down at the chess board across from God, not only is his omnicient and omnipotent, he has also soverignly ordained my life towards that moment and beyond.

I freely choose to move my rook based on the books I've read and the strategies I've studied.

God ordained that I move my rook and lead me to certain teachers and books.

The two are not mutally exclusive.

 

@Mathetais
If I do have a problem understanding this, I cannot see how it is based on perspective. I must have made a mistake in my reasoning somewhere.

What you’ve said just now makes no sense to me. Free will involves choice. Choice involves alternatives. If Yahweh has set everything up so you will “choose” a particular path, there is, in reality, no alternative for you. If he has truly guaranteed your actions with his setup, you are powerless to choose, even though it may appear otherwise to you.

Omniscience and omnipotence are mutually exclusive. You can’t be all-powerful and all-knowing at the same time. Being omniscient means knowing everything that has happened, everything that is happening, and everything that will happen. This includes knowledge of everything you will do, too. If you know what you will do, you can’t make choices. That’s impotence, not omnipotence.

Omnipotence has problems of its own, anyway. Ask yourself this: can God create a rock that is so heavy he cannot lift it? Whether he can or cannot, he has failed in some way. He lacks the power to do one or the other.

Consider:

Free: Not controlled by obligation or the will of another
Ordained: To order by virtue of superior authority; decree or enact.

I strongly disagree. The two ARE mutually exclusive.

 

I guess that it would since Judas had very little to do with the spread and preaching or practice of what we understand to be Christianity, but then neither did Jesus (God bless him) himself. It was Paul of Tarsus who was responsible for giving us Christianity as it is today as even a rather poor reading of the New Testament reveals.

So to answer the question. Yes it would exist and probably without much difference.

 

But would Jesus really be as interesting of a subject if the ending of his tale wouldn't have been so perfect, Mankind in general loves martyrs, death and people not showing fear when dying. Judas added a lot of that to Christianity, he is the perfect villain. Even seeing him hanging under that tree and why he does it makes a great impact.

I have a distinct feeling that if Jesus would have lived to grow old. Then he would not have been interesting enough for mankind, thus he would have been forgotten with time. Deep down we all work the same whether we like it or not.

 

@JUDAS

I disagree, though we are off-topic here.

God freely chooses to do only that which is in keeping with his nature. He has choices, and chooses freely to honor his holiness, goodness, justice and mercy.

Maybe we need to define terms a little more specifically. For example the word "free" has some problems with it. Note the following from former SP-ers at www.thirdmill.org

We could go on here, but this is fodder for a different thread (that and I'm *supposed* to be working)