Series: The Twelve Apostles · Part 13 of 13
Scripture describes Judas’s death twice and the two accounts do not obviously fit together.
That is not a problem to be hidden. It is a place where reading honestly matters more than reading smoothly.
Who Was Judas Iscariot?
One of the Twelve, appointed with the rest, sent out with the rest, and trusted with the money.
John 12:6 says plainly that he was a thief, and that as keeper of the money bag he helped himself to what was put into it. That detail changes the shape of the story. The betrayal was not a sudden break. It was the end of a long slope, and the others apparently did not see it coming, because at the last supper they ask which of them it will be rather than looking at him.
He appears last in every list, and every list marks him. The naming is fixed and so is the verdict attached to it.
What the Gospels do not do is make him obviously villainous in advance. Wright points out that when Jesus says one of them will betray him, the others look at each other rather than at Judas. When he leaves the supper, they assume he has gone to buy something for the festival or to give to the poor. Nobody suspected him, which means that for three years he was indistinguishable from the rest.
Why Did Judas Betray Jesus?
The texts give a price and a spiritual cause, and neither is a full motive.
Matt 26:15 records the negotiation: thirty pieces of silver, which is the compensation for a slave in Exodus. Luke 22:3 says Satan entered into him before he went to the chief priests. John says something similar.
What none of them supply is the reasoning. The common explanations, that he was a disillusioned nationalist trying to force a confrontation, or that he was simply greedy, are inferences filling a silence. The greed reading has John 12:6 behind it and is the better supported of the two. The nationalist reading is largely modern and largely sympathetic, and the texts give it nothing.
The remorse is recorded and it is real. Matt 27:4 has him saying he has sinned by betraying innocent blood, and throwing the money into the temple. Remorse without return.
How Did Judas Iscariot Die?
Matt 27:5 says he went away and hanged himself.
Acts 1:18 says he acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his intestines spilled out.
Both accounts agree on a field bought with the blood money, called Akeldama, the field of blood. They differ on the manner of death and on who did the purchasing, since Matthew has the priests buying the field because the money could not go into the treasury.
Do Matthew and Acts Contradict Each Other on Judas?
They give two accounts that are not identical, and the responsible thing is to say so before offering a reconciliation.
The standard harmonization is sequential: he hanged himself, the body was not recovered promptly, and the fall came afterward when the rope or the branch gave way. That is possible and it is not strained. It is also not what either text says. It is a third account constructed to hold the two.
The purchase difference is handled the same way, with Acts treating the priests’ purchase as effectively made with Judas’s money and therefore attributable to him. That is a normal way of speaking and it does not require much stretching.
So the situation is this. There are two descriptions from two authors with different purposes, they can be fitted together plausibly, and the fitting is an interpretation rather than a reading. Present it that way. A reader who has been told the accounts are seamless and then reads them will not trust the next thing they are told.
Matthew adds a fulfillment note in 27:9 citing thirty pieces of silver and the potter’s field, and attributes it to Jeremiah although the wording comes from Zech 11. That is a genuine interpretive question in its own right and it has been discussed for a very long time.
Who Was Matthias and How Was He Chosen?
The replacement, chosen by lot before Pentecost, and never mentioned again.
Acts 1:21-22 gives the qualification, and it is the clearest statement of what an apostle was. The candidate had to have been with the group the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among them, from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up, in order to become a witness of the resurrection.
Not the most capable man available. The one who was there for all of it. The office is built on eyewitness testimony, which is why it could not be renewed indefinitely.
Two candidates met the standard. They prayed and cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias. It is the last casting of lots in Scripture. After Acts 2 the guidance comes from the Spirit and the practice stops.
Matthias then vanishes. Later traditions send him to Ethiopia, or to the Black Sea region, or back to Judea, and the death accounts include stoning, beheading, and natural causes. They do not agree, which puts him with the majority of the Twelve.
Part of a series working through the Twelve one at a time. See the overview of the Twelve as a group and the Twelve Apostles timeline.
Continues from Part 12: Who Was Simon the Zealot? · Start at Part 1: Who Were the Twelve Apostles of Jesus?
All 13 parts in this series
- Part 1Who Were the Twelve Apostles of Jesus?
- Part 2Who Was the Apostle Peter? Life and Death
- Part 3Who Was the Apostle Andrew?
- Part 4How Did James the Apostle Die? Acts 12
- Part 5Who Was the Apostle John? Patmos and Ephesus
- Part 6Who Was the Apostle Philip? Two Philips
- Part 7Was Bartholomew the Same as Nathanael?
- Part 8Did Thomas the Apostle Go to India?
- Part 9Who Was Matthew the Tax Collector?
- Part 10Who Was James the Less? The Three Jameses
- Part 11Who Was Thaddaeus? Jude, Not Iscariot
- Part 12Who Was Simon the Zealot?
- Part 13How Did Judas Iscariot Die? And MatthiasYou are here
New field notes when they are ready, along with the research underneath them. No drip sequence, no course, nothing to buy.
Footnotes2
- The Jeremiah attribution in Matthew 27:9 has attracted a long list of proposed explanations, including a lost Jeremiah text, a scribal slip, the practice of citing a section of the prophets under a leading name, and a deliberate allusion to Jeremiah's potter and field material alongside the Zechariah wording. It is a real question and none of the answers has swept the field.
- That the qualification in Acts 1:21-22 is stated at all is worth noticing. The group is defining its own membership criteria in public, before the Spirit arrives, and the criterion is not spiritual attainment. It is presence at the events.
Sources
Matt 27:3-10 and Acts 1:15-26. The two accounts of Judas's death and the selection of Matthias. The only narrative sources for either.
Zech 11:12-13. The source of the thirty pieces of silver and the potter's field wording that Matt 27:9 attributes to Jeremiah.
Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.39, quoting Papias. Preserves a third and much more lurid account of Judas's death, independent of both Matthew and Acts. Cited here as evidence that the tradition continued to develop rather than as a witness to events. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 11-21 (SPCK, 2002). Supports the point that none of the disciples suspected Judas, either when the betrayal was announced or when he left the supper. Supplied in full.
Where the sourcing stops: this post rests almost entirely on the biblical text, which is unusual for the series and reflects that Judas is one of the few apostles whose end Scripture actually narrates. The sequential harmonization of the two death accounts is the standard proposal rather than my own, and I have described it as a proposal rather than endorsing it. The judgment that the nationalist explanation for the betrayal has no textual support is mine.