“Judas Iscariot. Without attempting to gaze into the mysterious abyss of the Satanic element in his apostasy, we may trace his course in its psychological development. We must not regard Judas as a monster, but as one with passions like ourselves. True, there was one terrible master-passion in his soul, covetousness; but that was only the downward, lower aspect of what seems, and to many really is, that which leads to the higher and better, ambition. It had been thoughts of Israel's King which had first set his imagination on fire, and brought him to follow the Messiah. Gradually, increasingly, came the disenchantment. It was quite another Kingdom, that of Christ; quite another Kingship than what had set Judas aglow. This feeling was deepened as events proceeded.”
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Alfred Edersheim was an evangelical Anglican biblical scholar and expert on the Greek Old Testament.
A Jewish Christian, he was perhaps the foremost authority of his time on Judaism in the time of the New Testament. He was critical of scholars' tendency to reject Moses' authorship of the Pentateuch, and described liberal trends in biblical scholarship as fraud that shook "the whole basis of our religion.