Tool Beta
Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
Judas hanged himself, full stop
Matthew says hanged; Acts describes a fall and a burst body: a real harmonization question, not a myth.
Matthew 27:5, in every translation this tool compares.
Matthew 27:5 has Judas throw the silver into the temple, then go out and hang himself (apēnxato). Acts 1:18, inside a speech Peter gives to the early church, describes Judas acquiring a field with the money and "falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out," a strikingly different physical description, with no mention of hanging at all.
The two oldest harmonizations (that the rope or branch broke and he fell after already hanging, or that the body was left hanging long enough to decompose and rupture on its own) go back to the early church (Papias reportedly offered a version of this) and remain the standard reading in most study Bibles. They're old and plausible, but they are bridges built between two distinct narrated descriptions, not a detail either Gospel writer states directly, which is exactly why serious commentaries flag this passage rather than smooth over it silently.
