Redbud Row

Just after cockcrow on the Friday of the Crucifixion, the betrayer of Jesus Christ learned that the Sanhedrin had condemned the Messiah, that he had been taken before Pontius Pilate. Unhappy Judas rushed to the priests, cried: "I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood." When they shrugged and said, "What is that to us?," Judas threw down his 30 pieces of silver "and departed, and went and hanged himself." So later wrote St. Matthew, whose Gospel contains a few more details than the others concerning the man of Kerioth in Judah. Still later, after everyone who might have known about the events had died, sects such as the Cainites came to believe that Judas acted as he did to hasten the redemption of mankind, and the scholar Origen maintained that the betrayer hanged himself to seek Christ's forgiveness as soon as possible in the next world. And somehow there crept into Judas-lore a famed, odd detail: that Judas hanged himself upon a flowering tree whose blossoms turned red in shame. The Judas or redbud tree flourishes in the South of the U. S., and last week it made news in Oklahoma.

At the behest of Oklahoma clubwomen, the State Legislature passed a bill declaring the redbud the State's official tree. One clubwoman, however, believed that the tree on which Judas hanged himself was no tree for Oklahoma. She, Mrs. Roberta Lawson of Tulsa, first vice president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, so telegraphed last week to Governor Ernest Whitworth Marland, who had not signed the bill.

To the defense of the redbud rushed two equally determined Oklahoma clubwomen. Mrs. Virgil Browne, president of the Interclub Forum, declared that the redbud and Judas tree "aren't technically the same," cited an Oklahoma City clergyman as authority for the simple fact that Holy Writ does not specify where Judas hanged himself. More deductively to Mrs. Lawson wrote Mrs. S. I. Flournoy, State chairman of the Daughters of the American Revolution: "I've heard of people hanging themselves from a lot of things, including chandeliers, but I should think if anybody wanted to kill himself he'd pick out something sturdier than our pretty little redbud." An Oklahoma City-ite named John Ishian said he had never heard of Judas trees growing in his native Jerusalem.

Governor Marland. perplexed, fearful that there were political pitfalls in the redbud bill, said he was giving it his "mature judgment."

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