Which narration of the death of Judas in the Bible is correct Matthew 27 v5 or Acts 1 v18?

Answer 1

Both are correct, and here's what happened. Matthew says that Judas went out and hanged himself and that the Greek word for "hanged" means "until he was dead." So he is out in a field that he had purchased and the next day is the Sabbath. He is cursed because he hanged himself (see Deut. 21:23). So no one is going to cut him down. He hangs and bloats (decomposes). Then we turn to Acts, which was written by Luke, not Peter. After some time of decomposition, the rope breaks and he falls on his face (not head first, but "headlong" which is old English for "face-down or prostrate," and the Greek bears this out). Having decomposed, he explodes and his "bowels gush out." Why do we have to choose? Note also that this was known in "all Jerusalem" so if they saw any contradiction, why haven't we heard about it? If there truly was a contradiction, then the enemies of God, The Bible, and Christianity would have made a great deal of this issue. But they all heard that it happened exactly as the Bible recorded and it's only because we misunderstand (probably deliberately) that we see a contradiction. They didn't, and it was their language, culture, time, and story.

Answer 2

For Christians, a problem with the Bible is that it contains too many contradictions for a rational person to consider it reliable and true. So it is with the stories of the death of Judas, neither of which is likely to be historically true. Contradictions can only be dealt with by creative ways of appearing to harmonise the accounts but, for careful readers of the Bible, this fails in the case of Judas Iscariot.

Matthew 27:3-5 says that Judas repented of what he had done and took the thirty pieces of silver back to the Temple and cast them down at the priests. He then went away and hanged himself. Dennis R. MacDonald (Two Shipwrecked Gospels) points out that his repentance was made necessary by a traditional saying that was included in Matthew 19:28, in which Jesus clearly promises all twelve apostles who were with him, including Judas, thrones to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. That would be incongruous unless Judas repented and was forgiven.

The other account, in Acts of the Apostles, shows Judas to be unrepentant. No doubt pleased to be suddenly rich, he purchased a field with the money he had received (Acts 1:19). Unfortunately for him, he fell down and died, his bowels gushing out in the field he bought.

John Shelby Spong (Jesus for the NonReligious) says Judas Iscariot is probably a literary creation, based on a number of passages in the Old Testament. The common element is Mark's Gospel, in which Christians first learnt of Judas as a traitor.