Joan of Bark

According to many Bible-thumpers, there are no contradictions, only seeming contradictions. I've read so many convoluted interpretations used to reconcile two seemingly contrary passages that I've given up thinking there is any example that will get an inerrantist to admit defeat.

The real questions are:

1) Why would God give us his Word in such a way as to create so much confusion? Surely he would want -- and, as an omnipotent being, could make -- his Word straightforward. Yet there are over a thousand Christian denominations in the world, all of whom claim to follow the Bible yet no two of which can agree on exactly what it says. Hell, Christians can't agree on whether it is permissible to kill another human being under certain circumstances. You would think God would have been pretty clear on this point!

2) Because of the problems of communicating with humans using imperfect language, why wouldn't God simply beam all this stuff directly to our brains upon birth, thereby saving the need for scribes, printing presses, translators, missionaries, and the destruction of entire forests. God is no environmentalist!

Helpmabob

No mention of his actual death in Acts 1:18. Can't someone who has been hanged until they died and the body has deteriorated, later fall to the ground?

Joan of Bark

According to the NIV:

This hardly sounds like someone being hung and then falling to the ground ...

mike.davis

Helpmabob gives a typical apologetic response to the two versions of Judas's death when he says, "Can't someone who has been hanged until they died and the body has deteriorated, later fall to the ground?" The problem with this type of "refutation" is that you have to assume (i.e., invent) wildly implausible additional facts that are not reported anywhere in the Bible. These additional facts are so improbable, that any reasonable author would have mentioned them if they had really happened. The fact that they did not mention them, indicates that neither author had such a context in mind. This is why looking only for formal logical contradictions in the Bible misses the point. Under Helpmabob's scenario, both accounts could, might, maybe, possibly have happened without entailing a logical contradiction. But if they did, the authors surely would have included this amazing coincidence in their accounts. And why would the author of Acts even bother to tell us that Judas fell to the ground and spilled his guts out if he was already dead from hanging? Why would he leave out the main point (how Judas died) and then tell us the trivial detail of how his dead body fell into a field? Focusing only on strict logical contradictions makes it easy on the Christians and gives them a free pass on these highly improbable scenarios they invent when trying to refute the inconsistencies.

Doug Shaver

Why not?

Net2004

matthew doesn't say judas hung himself in a field.christian have to assume he hung himself in a field.

Helpmabob

I totally agree that it is easy to read the accounts and arrive at your conclusion. It may be the correct conclusion to reach.

According to these two accounts, Judas died unceremoniously. In that much they are in full agreement.

I don’t know exactly how Judas died. A pure technical reading appears to show a contradiction, which is why someone picked these particular two verses out. I’m not in a position to argue otherwise, but it is possible to see how the details of the two accounts could also be in agreement.Sorry to be unbearably glib, but why not? How can you be sure what part of the gospel is important for all people of all times to know or not know?

I don’t know. Perhaps because we have already been told in Matthew.

Let’s be honest at a few sentences long each, there is a lot that both accounts do not say about his death.

Doug Shaver

Oh, yeah, *we* have. But what about Luke's contemporary readers? He had no reason to assume that they were familiar with Matthew's gospel, or that they had even heard about it. For that matter, most New Testament scholars today are pretty sure that Luke himself didn't know about Matthew's gospel, or at least that he'd never read it.

Toto

The scholars who believe in Q think that Luke did not know Matthew's gospel. But there is no particular reason to assume that.

Ben C Smith

It is more than just the mode of death. Let me start with that and add the other pertinent issues:

1. Matthew 27.5 says that Judas hanged himself; Acts 1.18 says that he fell and burst open. Yes, it is possible for a dead body to fall and burst open; the stretch on the imagination is that Luke would mention the falling corpse without mentioning how Judas died at all. Furthermore,Apollinarius of Laodicea did not read the Acts account as a hanging: Judas did not die by hanging, but lived on, having been cut down before choking. And this the Acts of the Apostles makes clear, that falling headlong his middle burst and his bowels poured forth. His is a different harmonization altogether: Judas hanged himself, survived, and later fell and died. And Papias gives an account that resembles the Acts story, with nary a hint of a hanging. The Acts account is simply not the kind of thing one relates when one is trying to say that someone died by hanging.
2. Matthew 27.7 says that the priests bought the field; Acts 1.18 says that Judas acquired a field. Yes, it is possible to play with the words used and conclude that his acquisition of the field was indirect, with the priests buying it in his name, so to speak, after his death; again, this is not the most natural way to read it, since it looks like Acts is saying, simply, that Judas acquired the field.
3. Matthew 27.8 says that the field was named the Field of Blood after the blood money (the blood being that of the Lord) used to purchase it; Acts 1.19 says that the field was named the Field of Blood after the blood (being that of Judas) that was spilled upon it. Did the field really get the same name twice, for two different reasons?

One can harmonize each of these points, if one wishes to do so; the question is: Should one harmonize these points?

Ben.