Commenting on the two conflicting accounts of Judas’ death in Matthew 27 and Acts 1, Arie W. Zwiep commented:
The Death Accounts of Judas
In the NT we have two different accounts of the death of Judas. According to Matthew 27:3-10, Judas committed suicide by hanging himself when he had come to realize that an innocent man had been condemned by his foolish act. According to the version of Acts 1:16-20, he died (accidentally?) by “falling headlong” on the field that he had bought with his treacherous money, “so that he burst open in the middle and all his entrails gushed out”, apparently with no sign of remorse. Both accounts relate the cruel death of Judas to a particular field in the vicinity of Jerusalem, the so-called Field of Blood (Matthew: ἀγρὸς αἵματος, Acts: χωρίον αἵματος), which in Luke’s version is called by its Aramaic name, Akeldama (חקל דמא).
From early days on attempts have been undertaken to harmonize these two accounts, for example by advancing the thesis that Judas hanged himself on a tree (= Matthew), but that either the branch or the rope broke, so that he fell forward on the ground and his entrails gushed out (= Acts). Or that his attempted suicide failed and that he continued to live on his own property until he died by an unfortunate fall or in otherwise unknown circumstances. However, from a modern perspective these harmonizations, creative and ingenious as they may be, are unconvincing and superficial on several grounds. First, the integrity of both stories as complete narratives in themselves is seriously disrespected when the two stories are being conflated into a third, harmonized version. Neither story was ever meant to be read in the light of the other. Second, in addition to the two canonical stories, there was a third, allegedly independent account of Judas’ death in early Christian sources. Apollinaris of Laodicea, who died around 390 attributes to Papias, who was active in the first decade of the second century (!), the story that after the betrayal Judas continued to live, but that at a given time his body swelled to such immense proportions “that where a wagon could go through easily he could not go through” and when he finally came to die “after many trials and sufferings, he died in his own place, which because of the stench has remained deserted and uninhabitable to the present day. Until today, no one can pass by that place without holding his nose.” Significantly, such conflicting traditions on the death of Judas were passed on in Christian circles, even in conscious competition with the existing canonical stories, as, for example, the various fragments from Apollinaris make clear. (Arie W. Zwiep, Judas and the Choice of Matthias: A Study on Context and Concern of Acts 1:15-26 [WUNT 51; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004], 16-17)
