Matthew 26:24 The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born. (parallel Mark 14:21)

I recently heard from someone -- one of those sorts who has already made up his mind and was actually trying to convince someone else -- asking about this verse with relation to the question of whether it was cruel of God to create people who He knew would be condemned. I pointed them to the usual answers (Miller's series here; see especially this part, and our article here) and they of course ignored them and repeated the same questions or dodged the answers by asking new questions. However, one issue that was worth notice revolved around this verse, which the "someone" took literally.

Of course, as we might expect, it wasn't meant to be literal, as though there were some objective weighing of Judas' life proving things would have been better had he not been born. Keener's Matthew commentary [626] notes that cursing one's own birth, or that of others, was a common metaphorical lament used for or by someone experiencing great distress or woe, both in Jewish and pagan literature (see for example Job 3:3-26). There is even a rabbinic saying that anyone whose first words upon waking are not from the Torah is better off not having been born. Obviously this concept had the status of a metaphor to indicate the experience of something tragic or awful, or else to pronounce judgment. Even to this day we use the same metaphor; Napoleon reportedly said, for example, "Better not to have been born than to live without glory."

Those who take this as a literal evaluation which proves that God was being cruel when he created certain persons need to take a basic reading or course in ancient language. As for my inquirer, he seemed to think Adam Clarke, who wrote in the 1700s, was the final word on the issue; and people with that sort of priority have already made up their minds.