Chapter 23

Better Not to Have Been Born

Matthew 26:24 (with Mark 14:21)

A. The Case for Judas’s Irreversible Ruin

A seminary student asks his professor a question that has nagged him for months. “What about Judas? Is he in hell?” The professor pauses. Then he opens to Matthew 26. “Jesus said it would have been better for that man if he had never been born. That settles it. If there were any hope at all for Judas, nonexistence would not have been better.” The room goes quiet. The verse sounds final. And for many Christians, it is.

The traditional reading treats these words as proof that Judas is lost forever. If Judas would one day be saved, how could Jesus say that never existing was better? The argument runs like this: even brief suffering followed by salvation is better than never being born. So the saying can only make sense if Judas faces something worse than not existing at all. That means eternal conscious torment, with no end and no hope.¹

Millard Erickson reflects this line of thinking. He argues that such words would be empty if Judas were eventually restored. If someone ends up saved and blessed, being born was worth it, no matter how hard the road.² Wayne Grudem reads the verse the same way. The saying assumes a fate so terrible that nonexistence is the better option, which Grudem identifies with unending punishment.³ John MacArthur calls Judas the clearest biblical example of someone beyond redemption, doomed by his own choice and sealed by Jesus’s own pronouncement.⁴

I understand why this reading carries such force. Jesus spoke these words at the Last Supper, hours before the cross. They land with the gravity of a final verdict. And the logic seems airtight: better never to have been born can only be true if the person’s end is worse than total nonexistence. But is that really what the words require? Stay with me. The answer depends on what kind of saying this is.

B. The Full Text in Context

The scene is the upper room in Jerusalem. Jesus and the Twelve share the Passover meal. The mood is solemn. Jesus has washed their feet. And now he drops a bomb.

“When it was evening, he reclined at table with the twelve. And as they were eating, he said, ‘Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’ And they were very sorrowful and began to say to him one after another, ‘Is it I, Lord?’ He answered, ‘He who has dipped his hand in the dish with me will betray me. The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.’ Judas, who would betray him, answered, ‘Is it I, Rabbi?’ He said to him, ‘You have said so.’” (Matthew 26:20–25, ESV)

Mark records the same event with almost the same words: “For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (Mark 14:21, ESV).⁵

Look at the structure of the saying. It has two parts. The first is a woe (Greek ouai, a cry of grief or lament). The second is a comparison: it would have been good or better (Greek kalon ēn autō) if he had not been born (Greek ei ouk egennēthē).⁶ Both parts belong to a form that was common in the ancient Jewish world: the woe-saying. And woe-sayings carry a distinct flavor. They express grief, horror, or warning. They are not calm doctrinal statements.

This form shows up across the Old Testament. Job cursed the day of his birth: “Let the day perish on which I was born” (Job 3:3). He wished the womb had been his grave. Jeremiah did the same: “Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, ‘A son is born to you’” (Jeremiah 20:15). The writer of Ecclesiastes said a stillborn child is better off than a man who lives many years without good (Ecclesiastes 6:3).⁷

None of these speakers meant it as a precise claim about eternal destiny. Job was not saying he deserved annihilation. Jeremiah was not saying he faced endless torment. They were drowning in grief, and the language of “better never to have existed” is how grief talks. The woe-form uses extremity to match the weight of the moment. That is what it does. That is how the idiom works.

Luke’s version of the betrayal announcement is worth noting. It says simply, “For the Son of Man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed!” (Luke 22:22, ESV). The “better not to have been born” line does not appear in Luke at all.⁸ That silence suggests the saying is not a doctrinal decree about Judas’s eternal fate. It is a grief-soaked woe over his act.

C. The Heart of the Defense

1. The Woe-Form Is Hyperbole, Not a Doctrinal Formula

The most important thing to see about this verse is what kind of saying it is. It is a woe-saying in the Semitic tradition of extreme language. And extreme language, in the mouth of Jesus, is not unusual. It is normal. It is how the prophets talk.

We miss this because we come to the text from a modern Western context. We expect precision. We expect doctrinal statements to work like legal codes: every word exact, every implication intended. But the woe-form does not work that way. It is emotional, urgent, and deliberately overdrawn. Its purpose is to make the listener feel the full weight of the moment, not to provide a systematic account of the afterlife.

Jesus told people to pluck out their eyes if those eyes caused them to sin (Matthew 5:29). He said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24). He told his followers they must hate their father and mother to be his disciples (Luke 14:26). Nobody reads these as calm, literal instructions. They are hyperbole. They use extreme language to drive a point home with force that a measured statement could never match.⁹

Thomas Talbott makes this point well. He observes that Jesus “steadfastly refused to address in a systematic way abstract theological questions, especially those concerning the age to come.” His entire manner of speaking, Talbott writes, including “the incessant use of hyperbole and riddle, of parable and colorful stories, was intended to awaken the spiritual imagination of his disciples and to leave room for reinterpretation as they matured in the faith.”¹⁰ A woe over the betrayer fits that pattern perfectly. It is vivid, emotional, and devastating. It is not a metaphysical timetable for the afterlife.

2. “Better Not to Have Been Born” Expresses Temporal Horror Elsewhere

I showed above that Job and Jeremiah used the same kind of language. But I want to press the point further. In every Old Testament case where someone wishes they had never been born, the suffering in view is this-worldly. Job was covered in sores, had lost his children, and sat in ashes. Jeremiah was mocked and persecuted. The Ecclesiastes passage describes a man who lives a long, joyless life. None of these speakers were making claims about eternal torment or final annihilation.¹¹

Andrew Hronich puts it plainly. Cursing the day of one’s birth, he writes, “was a common Jewish proverbial expression of overwhelming grief.” In every biblical case where the idiom appears, “the day of one’s birth is cursed but not because one faces eternal conscious torment or annihilation. It is simply an exaggerative Hebraic idiom meant to stress a point.”¹²

So when Jesus uses the same idiom about Judas, we have no grammatical or contextual reason to read it differently. It means: the horror of what Judas has done is beyond words. It means: betraying the Son of Man is as bad as anything a person could do. It does not mean: I am now issuing a binding verdict about this man’s eternal state.

3. The Saying Does Not Specify Which Fate

Here is something the traditional reading overlooks. Even if we take the comparison at face value, the saying does not tell us what fate Judas faces. The traditional interpreter fills in the blank with eternal conscious torment. But that is not in the text. The text says only that not being born would have been better.

Think about this from the standpoint of conditional immortality. On that view, the final fate of those who refuse Christ is destruction: they cease to exist. If Judas were to be destroyed, nonexistence would be his fate. And “better not to have been born” is a natural way to describe a life that ends in nothing. You lived, you suffered, and then you were gone. That is a tragedy worth a woe. In fact, conditional immortality fits the saying more naturally than eternal torment does. If someone suffers forever, they at least exist. It is destruction, the end of all being, that makes the comparison with never having been born so tight.¹³

So the verse does not demand eternal conscious torment. It does not even point toward it specifically. It is compatible with several views of final judgment. And it is most naturally read as a woe-form hyperbole that grieves over the betrayal itself.

4. The Verse Says Nothing About Grace After Death

This is the point the chapter hangs on. Whatever the saying means about the severity of Judas’s act, it says nothing about whether God’s grace can reach Judas, or anyone, after death. Read the verse again. It does not say, “There is no hope for Judas beyond the grave.” It does not say, “The offer of salvation ends at death.” It does not say, “Judas cannot repent.” It says: woe. It says: better never to have been born. And it stops.

The opponents who use this verse against saving grace after death are drawing a conclusion the words do not support. They are filling the silence with a doctrine the text never states. The verse laments the horror of betraying Christ. That is all it does. Whether God pursues the betrayer in Hades, whether the saving offer continues past the grave, whether even Judas might face Christ in the intermediate state and be given the chance to respond: the verse says nothing about any of that. The question is simply left open.¹⁴

Think of it this way. A judge might say to a convicted man, “What you did was so terrible that it would have been better if you had never lived.” That says something about the gravity of the crime. It says nothing about whether the governor might later issue a pardon. The woe speaks to the weight of the act. It does not speak to the limits of mercy. And in the case of this Judge, we know something about his character. He is the same one who told a parable about a father who ran to welcome home a son who had wasted everything (Luke 15:20). He is the same one who promised to draw all people to himself (John 12:32). A woe from this Judge does not carry the meaning the traditional reading needs it to carry.

5. An Alternative Translation Worth Noting

There is one more piece of the puzzle. Hronich points out that the Greek grammar allows a different reading of the sentence. The phrase could be rendered: “Woe to that man through whom the Son of Man is delivered up! It would be good for him”—that is, for the Son of Man, for Jesus—“if that man had not been born.”¹⁵ On this reading, Jesus is not describing Judas’s fate at all. He is describing his own grief over the suffering that the betrayal will bring on him.

This reading was supported by the early Bible translator Frederick Farrar, and it appears in early English versions including the Wycliffe Translation, Young’s Literal Translation, the Douay-Rheims Version, and the American Standard Version of 1901.¹⁶ I am not certain this is the best translation. The majority reading is probably right: the “him” refers to Judas, not Jesus. But the fact that the grammar can bear this alternative reading tells us something. The sentence is not as airtight as the traditional case requires. It is a grief-filled cry, and like most grief, it resists the neat categories that doctrinal formulas demand.

D. What the Scholars Say

The major Matthew commentators read this verse within its narrative setting, not as an independent doctrinal claim about Judas’s eternal state. Donald Hagner, in his Word Biblical Commentary, treats the saying as part of the woe-form tradition, stressing its connection to prophetic lament. He notes the Old Testament parallels in Job and Jeremiah and reads the comparison as an expression of the enormity of the betrayal, not a pronouncement about Judas’s everlasting fate.¹⁷

R. T. France sees the phrase as a common Semitic expression of horror. He situates it within the larger passion narrative, where the focus is on what is about to happen to Jesus, not on the detailed eschatology of the betrayer.¹⁸ Ulrich Luz, in his Hermeneia commentary, likewise treats the saying as hyperbolic grief language. He highlights the woe-saying tradition and resists drawing a firm dogmatic conclusion about Judas’s postmortem destiny from a lament.¹⁹ On the Markan side, Joel Marcus reads the parallel in Mark 14:21 as a prophetic warning shaped by the conventions of the Old Testament woe oracle, where hyperbole is the native register.²⁰

The scholarly debate over Judas’s final destiny has never been settled. The question has divided Christians for two thousand years. Some early Christians believed Judas repented before his death. Others saw him as the archetype of the damned. The tradition is not as uniform as the popular version suggests.

Karl Barth, for one, took Judas’s later actions seriously. When Judas saw that Jesus was condemned, he “changed his mind” (Greek metamelētheis), brought back the silver, and confessed, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” (Matthew 27:3–4). Barth commented: “There is no reason not to take seriously this repentance, this confession, this attempt of Judas to make restitution.”²¹ Barth does not pronounce Judas saved. But he refuses to pronounce him damned, either.

Allison and Davies, in their magisterial three-volume commentary on Matthew, argue that metamelētheis (“having changed his mind”) may well indicate genuine repentance. The same word carries a positive sense elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel (21:29, 32).²² They also point out that Matthew’s imprecise use of “then” (Greek tote) makes it hard to pin down exactly when the events of Matthew 27:3–5 took place. Judas may have repented after the crucifixion, not before. But even if he acted before the cross, Jesus was in Roman custody and out of reach.³³

I am not building my case on whether Judas truly repented. The point is more modest: if serious scholars across two thousand years have disagreed about Judas’s destiny, the verse cannot be as decisive as the traditional reading claims.

Hronich goes further. He points to Matthew 19:28, where Jesus promises the Twelve—Judas included, since the promise was spoken to the group as a whole—that they will “sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” If Judas’s exaltation could be conditional, Hronich asks, why can’t his condemnation be conditional as well?²³ It is a fair question. And it presses the reader to hold the woe-saying open rather than slamming it shut.

E. Counter-Objections

Objection 1: “It must mean eternal ruin. Otherwise the words are empty.”

This is the strongest pushback. If there is any hope at all for Judas, how can Jesus say it would have been better for him never to have been born? Doesn’t even a moment of eventual salvation outweigh the alternative of never having existed?

The answer is twofold. First, woe-form hyperbole is heavy without being a precise metaphysical calculation. When Job said “let the day perish on which I was born,” no one thinks he ran the numbers. He was drowning. The words carried the full weight of his anguish without making a philosophical claim about the comparative value of existence. Jesus’s woe carries the same weight. It says: what you have done is so terrible that the strongest language in the prophetic tradition barely covers it.²⁴

Second, conditional immortality satisfies the saying even on a literal reading. If Judas’s final fate is destruction—ceasing to exist after the judgment—then “better never to have been born” is literally true. He lived, he suffered, and he ends in nothing. The comparison holds without requiring eternal torment.²⁵

Objection 2: “Jesus would not use empty exaggeration about something this serious.”

He would, and he did. Jesus used hyperbole about the most serious topics in his ministry. He told people to cut off their hands and pluck out their eyes to avoid sin (Matthew 5:29–30). He said a camel could pass through a needle’s eye more easily than a rich man could enter the kingdom (Matthew 19:24). He said you must hate your own family to follow him (Luke 14:26).²⁶

Nobody calls these statements empty. They are powerful precisely because they are extreme. The woe-form is not a failure of precision. It is a choice of force. Jesus chose the strongest language available to mark the horror of what Judas was about to do. That is the opposite of empty. It is the fullest thing the prophetic tradition has to offer.

Objection 3: “Even if the words are hyperbolic, they prove some are finally lost.”

This objection shifts the ground from Judas to a general principle. It says: the very existence of a woe this severe proves that some destinies are sealed. But it proves no such thing. The woe marks the gravity of the act. It does not seal the actor. Jeremiah was not “finally lost” when he cursed his birth. Job was not beyond rescue. The idiom expresses extremity, not finality.²⁷

I want to be honest here. I believe the Bible teaches that some may finally refuse God’s love, even at the judgment. I hold conditional immortality as my working view. I am open to the hope that all will eventually say yes. But whichever of those positions a reader holds, this verse does not settle the question. It was never designed to. It is a woe, not a creed.

F. The Weight of Sin Without the Despair of Foreclosure

What have we seen? Jesus pronounced a woe over Judas at the Last Supper. The words were fierce, final-sounding, and devastating. They were meant to be. The betrayal of the Son of Man is a horror beyond ordinary language, and Jesus reached for the strongest idiom available: the prophetic woe-form, the “better never to have been born” that Job and Jeremiah used before him.

But a woe over an act is not a sealed verdict on a soul. The saying uses the language of extremity, not the language of eschatology. It does not tell us what happens to Judas after death. It does not say grace stops at the grave. It does not mention the intermediate state, the judgment, or the duration of punishment. And it does not close the door on the God who descends to the dead (see Appendix A) and who holds the keys of Death and Hades (Revelation 1:18).²⁸

The word usually translated “eternal” (Greek aiōnios) does not appear in this verse at all. But opponents sometimes tie this text to the “eternal punishment” of Matthew 25:46. That connection, too, does not bear the weight placed on it. The word aiōnios means “pertaining to an age,” and its duration depends on context, as Appendix B demonstrates in full.²⁹ And the fate described in Chapter 12, destruction from the presence of the Lord, fits the “better not to have been born” comparison more naturally than endless suffering does. If the end is ceasing to exist, the comparison with never having existed is exact.³⁰

As for Judas’s own case, this book has argued throughout that the unsaved dead are held in Hades, a waiting place, until the final judgment (see Chapter 16). If Judas is among the dead in Hades, he is in the very place where Christ descended to preach. I will not claim that Judas will certainly be saved. I do not know. But I will not claim he is certainly damned, either. The verse that is supposed to settle the question does not even address it.³¹

And that brings me to you, the reader. Maybe you are not thinking about Judas at all. Maybe you are thinking about someone closer to home. Someone who did something terrible. Someone who hurt others badly, who lived a life that seemed beyond repair. Maybe you have whispered under your breath, or thought in your darkest hour: it would have been better if that person had never been born.

The voice of grief speaks that way. It always has. But grief is not the final word. The God who met Job in his ashes and restored him is the same God who holds the keys of death. The God who watched Judas leave the table that night is the same God who, on a cross the next morning, prayed, “Father, forgive them.”³²

The woe stands. I do not want to soften it. Sin is terrible. Betrayal is terrible. The weight of what Judas did falls on him with the full force of the prophetic tradition. But a woe is not a locked door. And the God who spoke it is the one who walks through locked doors to find the lost (John 20:19, 26). The question this book asks is simple: Does this text foreclose saving grace at the moment of death or beyond it? The answer, here as in every chapter we have examined, is no. The woe grieves over the act. It does not seal the actor. And the deepest hope of this book remains: that the God who wept over Judas’s betrayal is the same God who pursues even the betrayer, through the dying moment, into the waiting place, and all the way to the throne.