Others have cast doubt on Dante’s lurid depiction of Judas in the Inferno, frozen for all eternity in Satan’s maw, along with his fellow traitors Brutus and Cassius. In fact, Hell may be empty, for even Judas — who did repent — is not beyond redemption.

There is something about the Judas story, leaving aside issues of historical accuracy, that raises doubts about his role as the embodiment of evil. Jesus’s prophecy at the Last Supper about his betrayer (“better for that man if he had never been born”) sits oddly alongside his identification of Judas by handing him bread dipped in oil, and contrasts sharply with his remark later in the meal, quoted by John, which suggests complicity (“What you are going to do, do quickly”) and his response, reported by Matthew, to the notorious “Judas kiss”: “My friend, do what you are here for.”

If Jesus knew what Judas was doing, was his disciple really a traitor? If God needed Judas to do what he did, even if (as John tells us) “the Devil entered into him”, how much responsibility does he deserve to bear? And how, if He allows Judas to be damned as collateral damage, so enabling the rest of humanity to be redeemed by the risen Christ, do we justify the ways of God to men?

These are intractable questions. But Judas, like the Jewish people with whom his name has so often been identified, deserves a better answer — a theodicy, indeed — than he has hitherto received. Dante damned Judas and Brutus equally as traitors, but only Judas can plead that he had no choice. Thomas à Kempis’s adage “man proposes, but God disposes” applies to no one more poignantly than Judas.