if) 'A devil.' — In Jn 6™ there is a contrast between the hopes of Jesus when He chose (^|eX-
♦ Our Lord's words to Pilate, ' He that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin' (Jn 19' i), are sometimes applied to Judas ; but the reference is almost certainly to Caiaphas.
e^aix-qp) the Twelve, and His present grief over the moral deterioration of one whose nature is now devilish (5id/3oX6s ^ittiv). Our Lord's spiritual dis- course to the multitude brought all wlio heard it to the parting of the ways ; it shattered the hopes of those who were eager to share in the glories of an earthly kingdom. On the inner circle of the Apostles that teaching also cast its searching light ; to Jesus, though not to Peter (v.*'), it was plain that Judas was at heart a deserter, — in sympathy with those who ' went back and walked no more with him.' What Jesus detected in Judas was 'a sudden crystallization of evil, diabolic purpose, which made him a very adversary of the one whom he called friend' (Wright, op. cit. in loc.). But an adversary is not an irreconcilable foe ; the assertion taken in its full strength of meaning is a message of conciliation as well as of warning. It involved no lowerinj among the Twelve, for 1 and it assuredly involved no relaxing of our Lord's efforts to scatter with the light of love the gloom which was creeping into the heart of one whom He had chosen ' to be with him.' A strained inter- pretation of the saying underlies the statement that it ' appears to be inconsistent with the equal confidence in all the disciples shown by Jesus according to the Synoptic tradition ' (Ency. Bibl. ii. 2624). 'No man,' says Pressense, 'could be more akin to a devil than a perverted apostle' [Jesus Christ, p. 324).
(g) 'Son of perdition.' — The Gr. word rendered ' perdition ' in this phrase (Jn 17'°) is ctTriiXeia, which signifies the state of being lost. It is the substantive derived from the same root as the main verb of the sentence (dTriiXero). The con- nexion of thought is not easy to reproduce in English. Ainger (op. cit. p. 227) brings out the sense of the passage in a paraphrase : ' None of them is lost, but he whose very nature it was to be lost — he (that is to say) whose insensibility to the Divine touch, whose irresponsiveness to the heavenly discipline, made it a certainty that he should fall away.' 'The apostasy of Judas is traced to the ' natural gravitation ' of his character. By a well-known Hebraism Judas is described as the '.son of thrt which stamps his nature; he is of such a character that his pi-oper state is one of loss (cf. 2 Th 2^). The same word (dirciXfto) is rendered ' waste ' in the Synoptic accounts, of Mary's anoint- ing (Mt 26", Mk 14^). 'To what purpose is this waste?' was the expression of indignation of 'some' (Mk.) of the disciples; perhaps it was originally the question of Judas, though St. John does not say so. It may well be, however, that he whose audible murmur, ' Why this loss or waste ? ' was echoed by the other disciples is himself described by Jesus as ' the son of loss ' — ' the waster.'
This verse (Jn 1712) is often appealed to by rival champions of Calvinism and Arininianism. In Bishop Sanderson's Works (v. 324 f.) there is a letter to him from H. Hammond, who affirms that ' here it is expressly said that Judas, though Ijy his apostasy now become the son of perdition, was by God given to Christ.' But the true reading is, ' I kept them in thy name which thou hast given me ' (RY), and the thought (cf. v.9 ' those whom thou hast given me ') is rather that ' they in whom the Father's object is attained ' are those ' given ' to the Son ; Judas, therefore, was not so given. 'To suppose that Judas is now brought before us as one originally doomed to perdition, and that his character was but the evolving of his doom, would con- tradict not only the meaning of the Hebraic expression "son of" (which always takes for granted moral choice), but the whole teaching of this Gospel. In no book of the NT is the idea of will, of choice on the part of man, brought forward bo re- peatedly and with so great an emphasis' (W. F. Moulton, op. cit. in loc).
iii. Other NT Kefekences 'to Judas.— (a) Before the Bftrayal. — The obscurity which rests upon the early history of Judas accounts to a large extent for the difficulty of estimating his character. But for occasional allusions in the Fourth Gospel,
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all that is related of him before the Betrayal is that he was one of the chosen Twelve, and that he turned traitor. There is, however, a statement peculiar to St. Luke among the Synoptists, which is obviously intended to furnish an explanation of the act of Betrayal — ' Satan entered into Judas ' (22'). It finds a fitting place in the introduction to the narrative of the Betrayal in the psycholo- gical Gospel which so often gives internal reasons ; ' the Gospel of the physician is also the Gospel of the psychologist' (Alexander, Leading Ideas of the Gospels, p. 107). The same phrase, ' Satan entered into him (eiariKdev (h iaetvov 6 SoTaKos), is also found in Jn 13", and it is preceded by the statement (13-) that the devil had ' already put into the heart (fiSri j3e/3Xi)K6Tos ei's ttji' KapSlav) of Judas ' the thought of betrayal. It is true, as Cheyne says (Ency. Bibl. ii. 2625), that in Jn. we have 'a modification of the Synoptic tradition,' but that is not equivalent to ' quite a different account.' So far from assert- ing that ' it was at the Last Supjier that the hate- ful idea occurred to Judas,' St. Jolin prefaces his description of the proceedings at the Supper {Shtt^'ov yivoijAvov) by the emphatic assertion that ' already ' (^5i)), i.e. at some time other than the Supper, the suggestion of the devil had been entertained by Judas. In St. Luke's brief account it is said, once for all, that ' Satan entered into Judas.' In the Fourth Gospel the genesis of the foul purpose is distinguished from its consummation ; the Satanic influences were not irresistible ; the devil had not full possession of the heart of Judas until, ' after the sop,' he acted on the suggestion which had then become his own resolve.