Was Judas part of God's plan?

[Uncle Joe]

If Jesus was destined to be sacrificed long before he was born, then it goes to follow that Judas was a tool of God, does it not?

Furthermore if Judas was destined to betray Jesus, do we truly have free will?

[rug]

1. See this.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/

[Angry Dragon]

5. ............

[Scuba]

2. The god I learned about as a child was a real prick.

[oldandhappy]

7. the people you learned from were the pricks

Most of the man made stuff is so off of the real stuff. Sorry you got landed on.

[Scuba]

8. They were just reading from the Bible.

[edhopper]

11. Real stuff?

[Kalidurga]

3. Nope

There is no plan.

[Iggo]

4. Ain't everything?

If God's God, then Judas gets a pass, right?

[oldandhappy]

6. God knew

what would happen. Big difference.

[Phillip McCleod]

9. nope just a character in a work of historical fiction.

[dimbear]

10. The story of Judas is worth a lot of thought. Ask yourself what you would take to betray someone

that you had seen with your own eyes raise the dead. Got your answer? Is it any amount of money in the whole world? No? Then you have a clue that the whole thing is merest fiction. As if you needed some help to identify as fiction a story in which a person kills himself in two entirely different ways. Or that it's predicted in the Hebrew scriptures that there would be misuses of 30 pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12). Or that a public speaker known to thousands of folk would need to be pointed out with a kiss. It's purpose? To set the citizens of the Empire against the Jews. Note what Judas's special responsibility was--keeping the money.

[deutsey]

12. I always liked the portrait of Judas in that mini-series from the '70s

The one co-written by Anthony Burgess, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and had an all-star cast (Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Ernest Borgnine, etc.).

In the movie, Judas is a well-intentioned, idealistic political/religious reformer who thinks that if he can just get Jesus together with the religious authorities, something positive and transformative would happen (like rebelling against the Romans). He ends up being used by the Sandhedrin to arrest and try Jesus, though, and winds up killing himself when he realizes what he has done.

There's no scriptural basis for that interpretation that I know of (I haven't studied the NT in years, though) and it was definitely a product of its post-radical times, but I remember liking how it humanized Judas.