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Originally Posted by thaskalos
1.) HOW DID JUDAS DIE?
"And he cast down the pieces of silver into the temple and departed, and went out and hanged himself." (MAT 27:5)
"And falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all of his bowels gushed out." (ACT 1:18)
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Okay...let's tackle the first one you gave, Mr. Thaskalos, which is also very convenient because this is the simplest one of them all. So, we'll get the light stuff immediately behind us. And I will make every effort to keep these posts as brief as possible, lest I incur another gratuitous criticism from PA, such as the one that he hurled at me on the "Interesting Find" thread when I soundly refuted Al's interpretation of a Job passage. But I love the Law of Parsimony, and certainly for this simple problem I shoud have no difficulty adhereing to it.
First, neither passage explicitly tells us that the
cause of Judas' death is actually the one stated therein. However, the
assumption by skeptics is that both passages are doing that very thing! This is a very typical error of interepretation by those who employ the hermeneutical method of
eisegesis. However, I employ the exact opposite method of interpretation -- that of
exegesis.
Secondly, an awful lot of details are missing about Judas' death. When did he die? Specifically, how did he die? And where did he die? In fact, when we interepret any passage of scriputre, the first hermeneutical order of business for all
honest truth-seeking interpreters is to ask the usual questions:
Who, Whom, What, When, Where, Why and How? I call these the "Suspect" Questions. We can learn an awful lot just by asking these questions, and depending upon the answers it came make the job of interepretation appreciably easier.
Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, the passages are very short and succinct accounts of something that Judas did, written not only by two different people but from two very different perspectives. Matthew was a Jew and his gospel account is loaded with OT references, prophecies and even typology. Matthew seemed to have a vast knowledge of the OT. But Luke quotes Peter's words in Acts, and Peter's focus is different from Matthew's.
So, since so many details are omitted about the last hours of Judas, I am at liberty to construct a feasible theory on how Judas died. After all, the Skeptic is at liberty (apparanetly) to read his presuppositions into these passages and come away thiking that both texts are teaching two different causes of death. However, my exegetical method of interepretation says that only one of the passages is actually stating the cause of death. The other passage is describing something that happened after death.
We do know from Mat 27:3 that on the very day that Jesus was condemened to die by Pilate, he suffered from an acute case of "Seller's Remorse". This lover of money sold his innocent Lord out for 30 pieces of silver. He was obviously overcome by guilt and grief afterward because he didn't even want to keep his blood money. He knew he did wrong and he also knew there was nothing he could do to undo it. When people are overcome by grief, guilt and remorse, they ususally want to be themselves. I suspect that Judas had some knowledge of the spots Jesus used to often go and pray in the mountains. After all, Judas was one of the 12. And Jesus would have chosen lonely, isolated spots to pray.
I submit to you that Judas chose such a spot high up on some mountain. He was alone and isolated -- away from people. He hanged himself from a tree, but his body wasn't discovered until days later. We don't know how long his body swung from that tree. But the longer he was up there, the heavier it became because his body was filling out with gas and liquids, and each passing day his body became more swollen from the besetting decay. At some point either the rope or the limb gave way. Scripture says he "fell headlong". Don't know how anyone knew that unless they were an eyewitness. Or it could have been that on the way down he struck another big branch or perhaps even some protuberance from the mountain side and turned him upside down where his head stuck hard on either the ground or some other obstruction on the mountain; but in either case, he eventually hit the ground so hard (possibly on rocks, to boot) that his swollen, gaseous body "exploded". Finally, someone discovered this wretch's body with his bloody guts splattered all over the place and that's how the entire community came to know.
Matthew's focus is entirely on the cause of Juda's death -- hanging. This makes sense because Matthew might have been drawing an analogy in his mind between accursed Judas' hanging and with what happened to Ahitophel in 2Sam 17:23 and/or Moses' words in Deut 21:23 -- this text also loosely quoted by Paul in Gal 3:13 and applied to Christ, since He, too, died on a tree.
Peter's focus in Acts, however, is very different. His focus was mainly on different scriptures that Judas fulfilled, mamely Ps 69:25; 109:8. The Jews at that time called the place where Judas' body was found -- the "field of blood", aptly named,considering the circumstances under which Judas was found.
In concluding, therefore, there is no contradiction between the two passages. We have no idea of the exact location of where Judas hanged himself. Or neither do we know when his body was found. Just how long was Judas dead before he was discovered? We don't know these things. The assumption among skeptics seems to be that Judas killed himself (one way or the other) and then his body was discovered very shortly thereafter. But I think it's logical to infer from these passages that Judas committed suicide by hanging himself in a lonely, isolated spot on a mountain and then after a few days or so, his decaying, swollen body fell from the tree and "exploded" when it hit the hard ground. This seems to me to be the simplest and most straightforward theory and would accord nicely with Occam's Razor.
Boxcar
