Judas First to Fall and Rise

In the last post I offered the notion that Eve (or perhaps Adam) would have committed The Sin sooner or later.  We might say that is mere conjecture, but an honest appraisal of human behavior would make it a pretty good conjecture.

It is, of course, little use to pontificate about other people's misdeeds.  The capacity for misdeeds is one of the chief things that unites us as a species.  The issue does, however, occasionally give us pause in how we view the accounts that unify and consolidate our belief systems.  A perfect example of this is the blame that is laid upon Judas.

Judas betrayed Jesus.  It might be said that Judas' act of treachery was overt and unnecessary.  What cannot be said, however, is that Judas' act was all that special.  All of the Twelve betrayed Jesus.  All of the Twelve were responsible to speak in defense of Jesus, and all failed.

Or did they all?  Did not Judas in his remorse--while Jesus yet lived--go to the Jewish officials, deny Jesus' guilt, and risk sharing Jesus' fate?  Are we supposed to assume that Judas was sure that the officials would display the honor of thieves and send him away as they did?  Judas could well have ended up hanging on one of the three crosses.  When he hanged himself swiftly he was still liable to have been nailed and hanged on a cross for days.

And what of Peter?  At the moment when he first experienced remorse at having denied--betrayed--Jesus, is there any law of man or God that would have prevented Peter from throwing himself against the doors of the meeting place, shouting Jesus' innocence?  Might not a remorseful Peter have carried on so as to--futilely yet earnestly--goad the guards into killing him, a sort of first-century suicide by cop?  What, in that case--a case of Peter behaving more admirably than the text relates--would have been the essential moral difference between a penitent and dead Peter and a penitent and dead Judas?

And yet Judas carries the stigma of suicide, though in his belief system the punishment for falsely accusing a person of a capital crime was to suffer capital punishment.  Judas had it coming.

It is this business of attempting to evaluate others' misdeeds that leads to such curious results.  One might be reminded of Paul, of how we employs the rhetoric of having been a great criminal.  Perhaps more to the point is the extent to which he, in his lamentable unconverted zeal, wrought such havoc in what were, in the final analysis, gentile jurisdictions.  How often might he have disturbed the public order in his infamous forays to enforce the ever-questionable dicta of a religious court?

Disturbing the public order was, as the New Testament relates, of particular concern to the gentile authorities, and moreover Paul speaks explicitly of the duty to heed those authorities.  After his conversion, Paul spends some time in a murky episode in Arabia.  Would it not have been more laudable for Paul to turn himself in, and suffer a stint in the mines of the governor of Damascus?