Letter: Judas Iscariot and the roots of Christian anti-Semitism

Sir: It is not altogether entirely surprising and certainly not necessarily anti-Semitic that many people consider Judas to be the only one of the twelve apostles who was Jewish. The problem stems from the term.

Jewish is both an ethnic term and a religious term. All the apostles and Jesus himself were, of course, ethnically Jewish. However, from a religious point of view, most apostles, though Jewish to begin with, come to recognise Jesus as the Christ and so become de facto Christians. Judas betrays Jesus, as he does not believe him to be the Christ. Religiously therefore, Judas remains a Jew.

Yours sincerely,

TIM EVERSON

London, SW20

7 April