Sir, Geza Vermes (Register, April 8) rightly identifies Judas Iscariot’s role as “the linchpin without which the Passion story would fall apart”, and the Gnostic Gospel of Judas as affording little or no insight into the events of the last days of Jesus’ earthly life. He is perhaps also right to be sceptical of attempts to conjure with the verb paradidomi (to hand over), as in some way less pejorative in its context than the English translation “to betray” would suggest.

Then, however, he says of two (related) arguments in favour of Judas that they “cut no ice with the historically minded”, namely: that if Jesus’s death is either (a) part of a divine plan, or (b) already foreseen and consented to by Jesus himself, then Judas cannot be blamed for acting as he did.

The paradox of human complicity in a divine plan is a theological, not a historical, problem. St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and others would see here an example of the paradox of divine omnipotence versus human freedom — namely that such freedom as we have is somehow an expression of divine providence, rather than exercised in opposition to it.

Aquinas, for example, would have viewed Judas as an “instrument” of divine providence in just the way that human beings always are: as a human agent capable of choice — not in the way that a pen, for example, is an inanimate instrument for writing with. Our post-Enlightenment outlook tends to picture causation in mechanistic terms, whereas Aquinas sees it as ranging across an indefinite variety of kinds of agency, and that although divine agency is inscrutable (conditioning without prejudice everything that is and everything that happens), he thinks we can nevertheless say that divine love “causes” human beings to be the beings that they are: free agents enabled to be so by divine fiat.

Whether or not one accepts this account — and Aquinas’s immensely supple arguments continue to be subject to contending interpretations — historical assessments of Judas’s role are in this case (pace Vermes) neither here nor there.

FR STEPHEN WILSON
Faversham, Kent

Sir, Geza Vermes’s article was a welcome change to the attention now being given to the apocryphal work, the Gospel of Judas.

The verb paradidomi is used in Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he writes: “He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all . . . ” (Rom viii,32).

Such an amazing and daring statement takes us to the heart of the meaning of Holy Week, if we accept it as a comment on the extent of divine love for the human race.

RAYMOND BROMHAM
Swansea

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