ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the tension between providential and tragic readings of Judas Iscariot, as exemplified in the writings of Karl Barth and Donald MacKinnon. Certainly both MacKinnon and Barth are alert to the fact that the role and fate of Judas in the New Testament is related to the experience of the Jewish people in subsequent centuries, although they understand this relation in different ways. For MacKinnon, attention to Judas does not so much reveal the providence of God, as indicate the presence of the tragic at the heart of the New Testament. MacKinnon's 1963 broadcast talk called 'Order and Evil in the Gospel', hovers on the edge of a discussion of tragedy. The purpose of the Gospel is to give the one without a future, the rejected, and a future in covenant with God. This applies to Israel, the Jewish people, but in the New Testament to Judas.
