Eighteen centuries had agreed to regard him as the meanest of mankind, but in our century he has been transmuted into a kind of hero. Among those on whose behalf the attempt has thus been made to reverse the verdict of history is Judas Iscariot. Nobody, it would appear, has ever been very bad the criminals and scoundrels have been men whose motives have been misunderstood. Sometimes this is done with justice, but is other cases it has been carried to absurdity. Men and women who have stood for centuries in the pillory of history are being taken down their cases are retried and they are set up on pedestals of admiration.
Ours is an age of toleration, and one of its favourite occupations is the rehabilitation of evil reputations.
But in modern times opinion has swung round to the opposite extreme. Such was the mediaeval view of this man and his crime. He is in the mouth of Satan, being champed and torn by his teeth as in a ponderous engine. And the next most conspicuous figure is Judas Iscariot. In the midst of them stands out, vast and hideous, "the emperor who sways the realm of woe" - Satan himself for this was the crime which lost him Paradise. It is a lake not of fire but of ice, beneath whose transparent surface are visible, fixed in painful postures, the figures of those who have betrayed their benefactors because this, in Dante's estimation, is the worst of sins. In the Vision of Hell the poet Dante, after traversing the circles of the universe of woe, in which each separate kind of wickedness receives its peculiar punishment, arrives at last, in the company of his guide, at the nethermost circle of all, in the very bottom of the pit, where the worst of all sinners and the basest of all sins are undergoing retribution. Judas is one of the darkest riddles of human history. Only in the latter case we are not able with the same accuracy to fix the circumstances of time and place. Christ's great confession in the palace of the high priest was accompanied by the great denial of Peter outside and the proceedings in the court of Pontius Pilate were accompanied by the final act of the treachery of Judas. The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - James StalkerTo the civil trial of our Lord there is a sad appendix, as we have already had one to the ecclesiastical trial.