How did Judas die?

Matthew: the silver and the rope

Matthew tells it on the morning Jesus is handed over to Pilate. Judas sees that his teacher has been condemned and is seized with remorse. He brings the thirty pieces of silver back to the chief priests and elders: “I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent blood.” They shrug: “What is that to us? You see to it.”

He threw down the pieces of silver in the sanctuary and departed. Then he went away and hanged himself.

The priests will not put blood money in the Temple treasury, so they buy “the potter’s field” as a burial ground for foreigners, and that is why it is called the Field of Blood (Matthew 27:6–8). English took the phrase potter’s field from here, for a grave site for the poor and the unknown. Matthew says this fulfilled “Jeremiah the prophet,” but the thirty pieces thrown to the potter in the house of the Lord come from Zechariah 11:12–13. Jeremiah supplies the rest: a potter’s jar smashed in the Valley of Hinnom, where Jerusalem will bury its dead (Jeremiah 19:1–11), and a field bought for silver (Jeremiah 32:9).

Acts: the field and the fall

Acts gives the story to Peter, in a speech to about a hundred and twenty believers before they choose someone to take Judas’s place.

Now this man obtained a field with the reward for his wickedness; and falling headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines gushed out.

Here Judas buys the field himself, and the name Field of Blood seems to come from his own blood, spilled there. Everyone in Jerusalem knew it, Peter says, by its Aramaic name, Akeldama (Acts 1:19). Then he quotes the Psalms, “Let another take his office” (Acts 1:20), and the lot falls on Matthias.

Side by side

• Who bought the field? Matthew: the chief priests, with the returned silver. Acts: Judas, with “the reward for his wickedness.”
• How did he die? Matthew: he hanged himself. Acts: he fell headlong and burst open.
• Why the name Field of Blood? Matthew: it was bought with the price of blood. Acts: apparently his own blood, spilled there.
• What both agree on. Judas died soon after the betrayal, his money ended up in a field near Jerusalem, and the field became known as the Field of Blood.

How readers handle the difference

Many readers have long harmonized the two: Judas hanged himself, the rope or the branch gave way, and the body fell and burst; the priests bought the field with his silver, so it could be called his. Most scholars instead see two early traditions about a notorious death, each told through Scripture. Matthew’s hanging recalls Ahithophel, the counselor who betrayed King David and then hanged himself (2 Samuel 17:23), the only other such death in the Bible. Acts reads Judas’s end as the fulfillment of two Psalms (Psalms 69:25; 109:8).

A third version shows how fast the story grew. Papias, a bishop writing about AD 120, said that Judas swelled so huge he could not pass where a wagon could, and died on his own land, which stayed deserted and reeked into Papias’s own day. The passage survives in a quotation by Apollinaris of Laodicea.

The field today

Tradition places Akeldama in the Hinnom Valley, just south of the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, the same valley where Jeremiah smashed his jar. The Greek Orthodox Monastery of St Onuphrius stands there today among ancient rock-cut tombs.