In the
Gospel of Matthew and the Acts of the Apostle, we have two accounts of the
death of Judas:
And he cast down the pieces of silver in the
temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. (Matt 27:5)
Now this man purchased a field with the
reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and
his bowels gushed out. (Acts 1:18 [the JST reads the same as the KJV])
The JST of
KJV Matt 27:5 (JST 27:6) is an attempted harmonisation of these two accounts:
And he cast down the pieces of silver in the
temple, and departed, and went, and hanged himself on a tree. And straightway
he fell down, and his bowels gushed out, and he died.
Commenting
on this, Kevin L. Barney wrote:
Luke preserves a conflicting tradition of the
death of Judas in Acts 1:18: "Now this man purchased a field with the
reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and
all his bowels gushed out." Some scribes tried to harmonize these contradictory
accounts by making both events part of the narrative. However, these ancient
variants are usually associated with Acts 1:18 rather than with Matthew 27:5:
(1) and falling headlong, he burst asunder in
the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.
(2) and being swollen, he burst asunder in
the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.
(3) and being hanged, he burst asunder in the
midst, and all his bowels gushed out.
Reading 1 has overwhelming textual support
and is widely considered to be the original. Reading 3 is found only in Latin
texts. The Vulgate follows Reading 3. Nevertheless, Jerome probably did not
invent this reading, for the text of Acts which Augustine read in his dispute
with Felix the Manichean contained a similar harmonization: "Therefore, he
[Judas] took possession of a field he had acquired with the reward of his
iniquity, and he bound himself around the neck [et collum sibi alligavit], and
when he had fallen on his face he burst asunder in the midst, and all his
bowels gushed out." A number of ancient authors and commentators made
similar harmonizing efforts.
The JST parallels Reading 3 and the
harmonizing tradition it represents. There are a limited number of ways of
dealing with these two accounts. One would be to say that Matthew is correct
and Luke is not; the other would be to say that Luke is correct and Matthew is
not. But neither of these options is palatable to the harmonist, since they
both suggest an error. The logical alternative is to say that both are right
and put them in a temporal sequence: Judas hanged himself and then (somehow)
fell. The JST parallels this ancient harmonizing tradition, not the original
text.
Luther, following the Vulgate, inserted the
phrase und sich erhangt ("and he hanged himself") into his rendering
of Acts 1:18. Joseph Smith, who was studying German and reading Luther's German
translation of the New Testament in the spring of 1844, stated on 7 April:
"I have been readg. the Germ: I find it to be the most correct that I
found & it corresponds the nearest to the revns. [revelations] that I have
given the last 16 years." Luther was not a source for the JST. Joseph's
German studies came too late, and he would have emended Acts rather than
Matthew had he been relying on Luther. But it is very possible that the JST of
Matthew 27:5 is one of the revelations Joseph had in mind.
Scholarly attempts to harmonize the Judas
accounts were abandoned as early as 1879; today scholars generally regard both
traditions as irreconcilable and nonhistorical. Matthew's account was probably
fashioned on the hanging suicide of Achitophel, which represents the classic
example of a traitor in Jewish tradition (2 Sam. 17:23). Jesus himself had
evidently applied Psalms 41:9 to Judas (Jn. 18:18), which had long been
regarded by the rabbis as a reference to Achitophel.17 If either account were
authentic, it would be Luke's account in Acts not Matthew's, yet even this
tradition appears to represent the typical death of the sinner, such as that
described in Wisdom 4:18-19, where sinners are described as dying prostrate
(preneis). (Kevin L. Barney, "The Joseph Smith Translation and Ancient
Texts of the Bible" in Dan Vogel, ed. The
Word of God: Essays on Mormon Scripture [Salt Lake City: Signature Books,
1990], 143-60, here, pp. 152-53)
What
reminded me of the above was reading the following from a Seventh Day Adventist
paraphrase of the Bible, The Clear Word
Bible. In Acts 1:18, the text attempts to harmonise the two accounts of
Judas’ death in this verse in a way similar to what Joseph Smith tried to do in
the Matthean text:
The priests bought a field with the money
Judas had received from selling Jesus. That’s where they buried him after he
hanged himself from a tree just outside the city walls. The rope had broken and
his swollen body fell and burst open, and the dogs came and ate his intestines.
It was a horrible sight.
Personally,
I believe attempts to harmonise the two accounts are problematic, and it is
easier to admit that we have two different (and conflicting) traditions.
· Judas committed suicide by hanging; therefore, his head and upper torso would have been closest to the tree limb that he was hanging from and his feet nearest to the ground. Consequently, from a hanging position, Judas would be falling feet first. Yet Acts reports that Judas fell head first without any mention of a hanging. It would seem that Judas would need to be hanging from a substantial height from his body to have adequate time to rotate or tumble into a head first position. The physics of such a scenario is open to speculation.
· Even if Judas were assumed to be falling head first, he would have presumably split open his head, not his guts.
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)
A first major contradiction lies in the closing of the covenant occurring in the temple before the temple has been purified. To this is added that throughout 2 Kgs 23:4-20 nothing is said of the law book. This shows that 23:1-3, 21-23 and 23:4-20 did not originally belong together. That Hilkiah and the guards appear (only!) in v. 4aα which forges a link with 2 Kgs 22 (and 23:24 for Hilkiah) is no objection to our hypothesis since Hilkiah and the guards play no further role in 23:4-20. They serve merely as transition figures.
This is a connection to a second broad contradiction long known to exegesis: it is impossible that all these cult reforms took place at the start of the 18th year of the king’s rule (cf. 2 Kgs 22:3) and that the Passover feast also took place in that same 18th year (cf. 2 Kgs 23:23) for this leaves an interval of but two weeks between New Year (1 Abib) and the Passover feast (15 Abib). N. Lohfink offered a good interpretation of this: 2 Kgs 22:3 and 23:23 are the starting and finishing borders of the ‘Auffindungsgeschichte’. Both verses contain the name Josiah with his title (מלך יאשׁיהו) and the date. The author of 2 Kgs 22-23:3, 21-23 uses these verses as inclusion to delimit his passage. This does not remove the tension, but indicates a redactional laying in the text which can only be explained via redaction criticism. (Erik Eynikel, The Reform of King Josiah and the Composition of the Deuteronomistic History [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996], 320-21)
Such issues show that Latter-day Saints, rejecting inerrancy and biblical sufficiency, are on solid ground.