DID JUDAS HANG HIMSELF OR DID HIS GUTS EXPLODE?

Back there in Sunday School, we were taught the “New Testament” as if it were a chronological story. But the account of Jesus's life in the Four Gospels is anything but. The version you get in church is cobbled together from writings attributed to Matthew, Mark Luke and John, many of which are either inconsistent with the three other books or downright contradictory. In the latter category is the sad, cautionary account of how the traitor Judas ended his days. You remember that Judas betrayed his master with a kiss (even though it’s hard to imagine the temple authorities could not pick him out unassisted with the halo over his head).

Matthew says Judas hanged himself. Acts says he fell down in a field and his guts spilled out. Further, Matthew tells us that he first discarded the silver in the temple, a clear sign of regret and self-hatred over his duplicity. 

But in the Acts version, he is less remorseful. He buys himself some land, whereupon he takes a most unfortunate fall. Then, in the particularly truncated chronology of the Bible, his insides more or less explode, a probable sign of divine displeasure. In this telling, it seems as if he no sooner makes the purchase than, boom, his intestines blow up.

In one case, he takes his own life and in the other, he dies either by the hand of YHWH or by a most unlikely accident. In one case he rejects the money and in the other he spends it.. These are fundamentally different accounts that can’t be reconciled. 

They are not both true.

This doesn’t particularly matter in the telling of the extended Easter story, but it does absolutely matter if you are committed to Bible inerrancy, a sketchy but pervasive world view that insists every word of the Bible is literally true.

Here is the text.

Matthew 27:5
“Then Judas, His betrayer, upon seeing that He had been condemned, repented and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the head priests and elders,  saying, “I sinned, by surrendering innocent blood. Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself.”

Acts 1:18
“Now this man purchased a field with the wages of iniquity; and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his entrails gushed out.”

The inerrancy scholars are not unaware of these contradictions, so they have developed tortured explanations for how the Bible doesn’t really say what it indeed does say. Pretzel Logic, as Steely Dan says. 

On the Answers In Genesis website - brought to you by the folks who run the tax payer subsidized Ark Experience in Kentucky - the reasoning is the very definition of a faulty syllogism: the two tales can’t be contradictory because the Bible is inerrant. Thereafter follows an utterly delusional and yet somehow condescending explanation of how these two accounts are both true: After he hanged himself, he fell down and then his intestines burst. Or something. 

But they never get to the other part of the story: what happened to the money? If Judas returned the money to the priests, how did he use it to buy the land? Especially after he committed suicide.

So when you hear the inspiring snippets read from the pulpit on the big money holy days, you are getting only a small segment of what’s really in there. And that is not an accident.

If an inerrant document contains two accounts of the same event that clearly and unambiguously contradict each other, then the document is not inerrant.