Vinnie

Since this subject comes up so much here:

http://www.after-hourz.net/ri/biblecontradictions.html

Vinnie

Amaleq13

A refreshingly reasonable approach, IMHO.

Theophage

Excellent essay, Vinnie!

If I may poke the stick a little further into the carcass, though, there are much more contradictory problems with the account of the death of Judas than merely "how did he die?"

If you read the (rather brief) account of Judas' death in the book of Acts chapter 1, you will note that the attitude of Judas is a non-repentant one. Judas takes the money, buys the field, and then gets whacked, presumably by God, for being such a twit.

This is paralleled in another story in Acts 5, that of Ananias and his wife. They were to sell their property and give the money to the body of believers. But they were also twits and kept some of the money for themselves. As in the story of Judas above, for doing so they also get whacked, presumably also by God (though again it doesn't explicity say so).

Thus there seems to be a strong subtext in Acts: Disobey and you get whacked.

Now, if we examine the story of Juda's death in the Book of Matthew, you see an altogether different story. Here, Judas is remorseful to the point of suicide. He throws the piecies of silver back at the priests, because he doesn't want any reward for what he knows he has done wrong. The priests don't want the money either (bad, tainted money which they tainted) so they use it to buy the field. Judas, not being able to stand the thought of his betrayal any more, decides to hang himself and put an end to it all.

Note all these inconsistancies:

Judas was remorseful / Judas was not remorseful
Judas didn't keep the money / Judas kept the money
The priests bought the field/ Judas bought the field
Judas hung himself / Judas fell and split open

It is clear (at least to the sane) that these are two very different, conflicting stories. It is also clear that an ad hoc harmonization about the rope breaking and Judas falling after being hung doesn't even begin to harmonize the differences in both accounts. In short, the "rope breaking" hypothesis is only a red herring.

Daniel "Theophage" Clark

Vinnie

You may. But that kind of defies the point of the article. See this harmonization of the two accounts:

http://www.tektonics.org/judasdeath.html

I do not agree with that. It looks very tendentious! The point is that answers for every error--even the most obviously clear ones will be given. I agree with you that there is a plain error there. But I purposefully kept it to one "surface error" for illustrative purposes because this is the whole issue I tried to circumvent and think that I did so successfully

Vinnie