There are two questions that I rather wish I had asked Reverend Rodgers during our confirmation classes. As I’ve written previously, I really liked Reverend Rodgers and I didn’t want to put him on the spot, and I had discovered that when I asked him some skeptical type questions he didn’t really answer them.

Still, there are two that I think are reasonable questions that would have been worth asking.

One of them, in fact, I nearly did ask. It was about Judas.

It’s well known, of course, that Judas famously betrayed Jesus, and for this he is universally reviled among Christians with even his name being synonymous with betrayal and living on in phrases such as Judas goat, but at the same time, his betrayal supposedly turned out to be part of God’s grand plan for getting Jesus crucified. So shouldn’t Judas be be praised for setting in motion God’s plan? It seems strange to condemn him for doing something that God really wanted him to do.

That’s a question that I thought about at the time, and I very nearly did ask it.

Of course, I didn’t know then that there actually was a Gospel of Judas, one of many gospels that didn’t make it into the Bible, that portrayed Judas as simply following the instructions of Jesus.

The other question that I wish I had asked is one that I hadn’t fully formed at the time, although I think it it was partially floating around in my head.

It might be asked something like this. We accept the fact of evolution, right? The earth is billions of years old. We humans have evolved from other species over millions of years. OK, then. So humans in our current genetic form have existed for tens of thousands of years, but we only have recorded records since writing was invented about five thousand years ago. So why did God wait so long to make himself known to humans? And why did he only make himself known to the Hebrew people for the first few thousand years? Sounds fishy to me.

Of course, I wouldn’t have added that last comment.

But I think those are reasonable questions and I’m curious as to how Reverend Rodgers may have fielded them.