Questions of Perspective

I have received so many responses to my question of Judas--here, on Facebook, and privately. Thank you for your thoughtful answers, subsequent questions, your exchanges with one another... and, on several occasions, sympathetic head-scratching. I've loved the thought that you put into a historically (religiously?) pat answer.

Because you know how I am about pat answers.

So I'm still away, just returned from a horseback ride, and about to bury my nose in research again. The melancholy I expected the first day has arrived now on the third. Contemplation, silence, and time on my hands has a way of doing that. But that's not all bad.

I'm spending a lot of time today considering how one's modern orientation to the New Testament dictates perspective on scriptures--the Old Testament histories, the prophecies... the New Testament itself, even. A very exaggerated example of this is the Adam/Eve account in Genesis. A New Testament/Christian perspective of that story as the origin of sin (where Satan is present in the serpent) is very different from the Jewish rendering of the same story--one of free will and knowledge entering the world (where Ha-Satan is not a player).

You might remember my saying that despite all the questions I had going into the writing of Havah,* I left with more than I began with. And I find the same true again; research has a way of drilling holes in some of the certainty I once enjoyed--in my own understanding, if nothing else.

So I am struck, very much, by that thought today. That thought has such varied nuances to me--as a person of faith, as a writer seeking first to explain something to myself.

**

So here is something interesting about Judas: he is portrayed most generously in the earliest-written gospel--that is Mark--and with increasing darkness and villification through the subsequent gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. What do you make of this?


* I am frequently re-asked for this list, which you can read here.