what If, like God chose Mary before birth that she would conceive of his Son; what if before birth God also chose Judas to fulfill his plan of atoning humanity’s sin once and for all by being the cause that ultimately leads to the atonement.
It’s an interesting idea (and it’s been proposed before, by various groups throughout the past two millennia), but it doesn’t really hold up to reason. God
did ask Mary (through the angel Gabriel) “will you bear Jesus?”… but there’s no evidence that God asked Judas “will you betray Jesus?”.
Now… God did
allow Judas to betray Jesus (just as He allows humans to make any free will choice to sin). That doesn’t mean that God
willed it, or
condoned it, or
requested it (or even that He
bears responsibility for it!)…
who is to say in the opposite way, the people we view as the villains in the Bible were also chosen before they were conceived to carry out God’s ultimate plan.
God
foreknows everything that everyone will ever do. That doesn’t mean that God
wills all of humanity’s actions… just that He
allows them.
So it’s saying Caiphas had already known beforehand.
No, that’s not the implication. Let’s look at the quote in the RSV-CE, since it’s closer to the original Greek text:
“He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation.”
To get a good sense of what’s being said here, we need to understand Greek verbs a bit. In the Greek of the Bible (“Koine Greek”), verb tenses worked a bit differently than they do in English. In English, tenses tend only to reflect the time of the action, but in Greek, that’s only part of what they do. Now, the verb “prophesied” in the sentence you refer is in the “aorist” tense. It generally speaks of something that happened in the past, and is a simple (not continuous) act.
So, here, it doesn’t mean “since he was the high priest, he prophesied on a regular basis, and here was one of his prophecies.” (Neither does it imply that he had any special or previous knowledge.) It merely means that, on this one occasion, through divine inspiration, he said something that was to come true in the near future.
In other words, it doesn’t mean that God acted through him in order to make Jesus’ death happen, or that God gave him a choice (“Umm… as high priest, would you please murder my son?”). Rather, he happened to say one thing that, later on, Christians would look back at and say, “dang! he was right and didn’t even know it!”
But, over and above all that, the prophetic part was something he hadn’t even intended or was aware that he had said. Caiaphas only meant to say, “how about if we kill one guy so that the Jews are saved from the Romans?” … but it was God’s intent that his statement be true on a far more intense level: “how about if we kill one guy so that all people are saved from sin?”
Last I checked being a high priest doesn’t make you a prophet?
You’re right – it doesn’t. However, God used him to make one statement that was not only true in the sense that he intended it, but also true in a wider, more far-reaching salvific sense.
