A biblical difficulty challenging the doctrine of inerrancy are the two biblical descriptions of the death of Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus into the hands of the authorities, which, when Matthew 27:5 and Acts 1:18 are viewed together, are described inconsistently.

Did Judas Iscariot die by hanging (Matthew 27:5) or did he die by falling and bursting open (Acts 1:18)? Attempts have been made to reconcile these descriptions.

Matthew’s author says Judas died by hanging:

So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. The chief priests picked up the coins and said, ‘It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money.’ So they decided to use the money to buy the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners. That is why it has been called the Field of Blood to this day (27:5-8).

The author of the Acts of the Apostles says that Judas fell headlong in a field and that his body burst open:

With the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. Everyone in Jerusalem heard about this, so they called that field in their language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood (1:18–19).

Are these two descriptions reconcilable?

A defense is to claim that Judas hanged himself in the potter’s field (Matthew’s version) and that after his body began to decay and bloat, the rope or branch of the tree broke, causing his body to fall and burst open on the land of the potter’s field (Acts’ version). His corpse was supposedly susceptible to bursting open because gas filled his insides as a result of the process of bacterial metabolism enhanced by the heat.

As such, these are putatively two accurate descriptions of the same event from different views and moments, and therefore both writers describe the same historical event without any inconsistency between them.

The counter to this defense is to stress the small detail that Judas died because he “fell headlong,” which conflicts with Matthew’s version of him dying by hanging himself. It is unlikely, and at the very least very unusual, for a person to fall headlong after hanging and killing himself. The only way to do that would be to hang oneself by the ankles and for the rope or branch to break.

Another defense is that Judas, after the rope or branch broke, fell and rolled down a hill, decline, or slope, therefore causing him to burst open and reconciling the detail of him falling “headlong,” despite first hanging himself. But this defense comes across as desperate and, at the very least speculative, to the point of inventing a scenario not indicated in any of the source materials in order to defend a particular point of view of how the defender believes the Bible should be, rather than letting it be for what it is.

New Testament scholar Arie W. Zwiep is also critical of defenses attempting to harmonize these two conflicting accounts of the death of Judas:

From a modern perspective these harmonisations, 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 separate 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 [e.g., the alternative version attributed to Papias of Hierapolis who was active in the early second century CE]… In light of the wild and early expansion of these traditions the conclusion that the early Christians were divided on the exact details of how and when Judas died is unavoidable. The process of legendary embellishment of the Judas tradition has started at a very early age, already, so it seems, in NT times (2004, 17).

Does the irreconcilability of these accounts suggest that they have no historical value? No, it does not. 

Although the means by which Judas committed suicide cannot be known historically, the fact that there are two independent traditions attesting to it in the New Testament sources, as well as other later versions (e.g., Papias, apocryphal gospels, etc.), underscores the importance this event had within early Christianity and the consciousness of the Christians, which would suggest that Judas did, in fact, betray Jesus to the authorities and subsequently kill himself as a result of his guilt and shame. This most general outline of what happened is not in dispute and the sources clearly agree on it.

Of course, contradictions in some details are not unique to the biblical sources. One should no more dismiss the biblical sources because of them as a reader should dismiss the likes of Tacitus, Suetonius, Paterculus, or Dio, some of the historian’s most important sources for ancient Roman history because they sometimes contradict on details (e.g., the crimes committed by emperor Tiberius, the relationship between Tiberius and his mother, Livia, the overly positive account of Paterculus, etc.).

References

Zwiep, Arie W. 2004. Judas and the Choice of Matthias: A Study on Context and Concern of Acts 1:15-26. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck.