DID JUDAS HANG HIMSELF OR DID HIS GUTS EXPLODE?

WARNING: SUICIDE, GROSSNESS

CONTEXT: ~ 30 - 200 AD The betrayer Judas may have hanged himself, or he may have stumbled and caused his guts to explode, but he didn’t do both. 

Back there in Sunday School we were taught the “New Testament” saga as if it were a chronological narrative of Jesus’s life. But that’s not what’s in the Bible. The accounts in the Four Gospels are not a linear description of events. 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 other three books or downright contradictory.* In the latter category is the sad, cautionary account of how the turncoat Judas Iscariot ended his days. Which is to say: there are two distinct sad, cautionary accounts, which are not even close to similar to each other.

You remember that Judas receives a bribe from the Temple authorities and betrays his master with a kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane.** Following ben Joseph’s arrest and execution, the New Testament presents us with two conflicting stories as to how Judas meets his end and also how he spends the blood money. One of these stories is told in church, the other is generally ignored. 

CONTRADICTORY ACCOUNTS

The Gospel of Matthew tells us that Judas hanged himself. The Book of 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. In the peculiarly truncated chronology of the Bible, his insides more or less explode, a probable sign of divine displeasure. In this telling, the apparent timing is that 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.

AN ERROR IN INERRANCY 

The discrepancy doesn’t particularly matter in the retelling and retelling and retelling 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.

Compare the text from both accounts.
 

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.” 

Inerrancy theologians 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. Other apologists claim that the traditional site of Judas’s death is a high windblown ridge. This caused Judas to slip the hanging noose and fall down the ridge, which blew open his stomach. There actually is no such location in the scripture, so this is simply made up.

As lame as that and similar efforts are, none of them deal with the other component 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. If he used the silver to purchase land, as noted in Acts, it suggests a much lower level of remorse.

So when you hear the inspiring snippets read from the pulpit on 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. 

__________________________________ NOTES_________________________________

* The “four apostles” (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) are not historical personages and certainly not disciples of the individual named Joshua ben Joseph. These writings were not contemporaneous with the events depicted and were heavily edited and redacted over the years by multiple authors. Manuscripts with “According to” in the titles do not start appearing until around 200 CE.

** Considering the high profile Jesus was enjoying in Jerusalem not to mention the halo over his head, it’s hard to imagine the Temple authorities couldn’t locate him without a peck on the cheek from Judas.

*** That is: every word of the Bible is literally true, no matter how unlikely, impossible, contradictory or ridiculous.