And yet the principle that the innocent can pay for the guilty, that the death of one man can be salvation for all, was not foreign to the consciousness of ancient peoples. The heroic myths of the pagans recognize and celebrate voluntary sacrifices of the innocent. They record the example of Pilades, who offered himself to be punished in place of the guilty Orestes; Macaria of the blood of Heracles, who saved her brother’s life with her own; Alcestis, who died that she might avert from her Admetus the vengeance of Artemis; the daughters of Erechtheus, who sacrificed themselves that their father might escape Neptune’s blows. The old King Codrus, who threw himself into the Ilissus, in order that his Athenians might be victorious; and Decius Mus and his sons, who consecrated themselves to the Manes that the Romans might triumph over the Samnites; and Curtius, who, fully armed, cast himself into the gulf for the salvation of his country; and Iphigenia, who offered her throat to the knife that Agamemnon’s fleet might sail safely towards Troy. At Athens during the Thargelian feast two men were killed to save the city from divine wrath; Epimenides the Wise, to purify Athens, profaned by the assassination of the followers of Cylon, had recourse to human sacrifice over the tombs; at Curium, in Cyprus, at Terracina, at Marseilles, every year a man threw himself into the sea as payment for the crimes of the community, a man regarded as the Saviour of the people.
But these sacrifices, when they were spontaneous, were for the salvation of one being alone, or of a restricted group of men; when they were enforced they added a new crime to those they were intended to expiate; they were examples of individual affection or of superstitious crimes.
No man had yet appeared who would take upon his head all the sins of men, a God who would imprison Himself in the abject wretchedness of flesh to save all the human race and to give it the power to ascend from bestiality to sanctity, from earthly humiliation to the Kingdom of Heaven. The perfect man, who takes upon himself all imperfections, the pure man who burdens himself with all infamies, the righteous man who shoulders the unrighteousness of all men, had appeared under the aspect of a poor fugitive from justice in the day of Caiaphas. He who was to die for all, the Galilean working-man who was disquieting the rich and the priests of Jerusalem, was there on the Mount of Olives only a short distance from the Sanhedrin. The Seventy, who knew not what they did, who did not know that they were obeying the will of the very man they were persecuting, decided to have Him captured before the Passover; but because they were cowardly, like all men of possessions, one thing restrained them, the fear of the people who loved Jesus. They consulted that they might take Jesus by subtlety and kill Him. But they said, “Not on the feast day lest there be an uproar among the people.” To solve their difficulty, by good fortune, there came to them the day after one of the Twelve, he who held the purse, Judas Iscariot.
THE MYSTERY OF JUDAS
Only two creatures in the world knew the secret of Judas: Christ and the traitor.
Sixty generations of Christians have racked their brains over it, but the man of Iscariot, although he has drawn after him crowds of disciples, remains stubbornly incomprehensible. His is the only human mystery that we encounter in the Gospels. We can understand without difficulty the depravity of Herod, the rancor of the Pharisees, the revengeful anger of Annas and Caiaphas, the cowardly laxity of Pilate. But we have no evidence to enable us to understand the abomination of Judas. The Four Gospels tell us too little of him and of the reasons which induced him to sell his King.
“Then entered Satan into Judas.” But these words are only the definition of his crime. Evil took possession of his heart, therefore it came suddenly. Before that day, perhaps during the dinner at Bethany, Judas was not in the power of the Adversary. But why suddenly did he throw himself into that power? Why did Satan enter into him and not into one of the others?
Thirty pieces of silver are a very small sum, especially for an avaricious man. In modern coinage it would amount to about twenty dollars, and, granting that its effective value or as the economists say its buying power were in those days ten times greater, two hundred dollars seem hardly a sufficient price to induce a man whom his companions describe as grasping to commit the basest perfidy recorded by history. It has been said the thirty pieces of silver was the price of a slave. But the text of Exodus states on the contrary that thirty shekels was the compensation to be paid by the owner of an ox which had injured a slave. The cases are too far apart for the doctors of the Sanhedrin to have had this early precedent in mind.
The most significant indication is the office which Judas held among the Twelve. Among them was Matthew, a former tax-collector, and it would have seemed almost his right to handle the small amount of money necessary for the expenses of the brotherhood. In place of Matthew, we see the man of Iscariot as the depository of the offerings. Money is insidious and saturated with danger. The mere handling of money, even if it belongs to others, is poisonous. It is not surprising that John said of Judas the thief, that he, “having the bag, took away what was put therein.” And yet it is not probable that a man greedy for money would have stayed a long time with a group of such poor men. If he had wished to steal, he would have sought out a more promising position. And if he had needed those miserable thirty pieces of silver, could he not have procured them in another way, by running away with the purse, without needing to propose the betrayal of Jesus to the High Priests?
These common-sense reflections about a crime so extraordinary have induced many to seek other motives for the infamous transaction. A sect of heretics, the Cainites, had a legend that Judas sorrowfully accepted eternal infamy, knowing that Jesus through His will and the will of the Father was to be betrayed to His death, that no suffering might be lacking in the great expiation. A necessary and voluntary instrument of the Redemption, Judas was according to them a hero and a martyr to be revered and not reviled.