It’s Easter Monday. Thought you should know that in case you overdid the chocolate, even the alcohol, in recent days and now are uncertain who you are, where you are, what day it is. [This “gentle reminder” is just another low-key, if essential Irish Times service. We don’t boast about such things].
So Christianity’s greatest feast is “done” for another year. Such drama too. Trial, execution, resurrection and a gross miscarriage of justice, aided and abetted by a weak justice system succumbing to the mob. Very contemporary, apart from the resurrection bit.
Yet, Easter after Easter, the man without whom none of this could have happened is ignored, if not further vilified. Poor oul Judas.
How easily people forget that without him there would be no Christianity; that Jesus would be presented, if remembered at all, over the past 2,026 years as just another well-meaning preacher in a long line of well-meaning preachers, albeit with a nifty line in miracles.
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I mean, water into wine (yes, please), walking on water (don’t try it at home), making the blind see and the deaf hear (our motto at The Irish Times)! Hats off.
Judas was probably the second-greatest informer in history and what did he get? Thirty pieces of silver, a rope, and ignominy for all time. Hardly fair, considering the most popular religion on Earth would not exist without him.
At least in Ireland we have continued his trade “in every generation [when] the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty ”, as it is put in the 1916 Proclamation.
In every generation our informers have been every bit as dedicated as Judas and have suffered similar ignominy, with one exception – the greatest of them all. I refer to be the late Freddie Scappaticci, otherwise known as “Stakeknife”.
Lauded by republicans as a senior member of the IRA during the Troubles, he was also the British security forces most prized informer then too.
Simultaneously, he was head of the IRA’s “nutting squad”, which investigated and killed alleged informers, in which role he was linked to at least 14 murders and 15 abductions. The chief informer, rooting out informers. Genius.
Poor oul Judas isn’t even at the races in that company.
Informer, from Middle English enfourmen, for “one who gives information against another”.
