How Did Judas Die? The Two Accounts in the Bible, Side by Side

Cold open

Two books of the New Testament tell us how Judas Iscariot died.

In one, he throws thirty pieces of silver into the Temple, walks away, and hangs himself. In the other, he acquires a field, falls headlong, and his body bursts open.

Same man. Same city. In both, a field called the Field of Blood. And two very different stories.

Readers have argued about that for centuries. Today we'll lay both texts out, word for word, and look at how people have read them.

And because this is Judas, we'll go carefully. Bible, tradition, legend, guesswork: I'll tell you which is which.

Let's begin.

A name no one can translate

Scripture

Judas appears in every list of the Twelve in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and in every one of them he comes last, with a note attached. Matthew and Mark: "who also betrayed him." Luke: "who also became a traitor." When Acts lists the apostles again, after the resurrection, his name is simply gone.

Judas, the Greek form of Judah, was one of the most common names of the day. There was even a second Judas among the Twelve. So he needs a second name: Iscariot.

Scholarship

What does it mean? Honestly, nobody knows.

The most popular idea is Hebrew: ish Kerioth, "man of Kerioth." There was a town called Kerioth-hezron in southern Judah, and a Kerioth in Moab. And some ancient manuscripts of John's Gospel call him Judas "from Kerioth."

A second idea links it to the sicarii, the "dagger-men" described by the historian Josephus. The trouble is that Josephus places their rise in the 50s AD, some twenty years after Jesus's death.

Others have suggested a word meaning "the false one," from the Hebrew sheqer, falsehood. Others, a root meaning "red."

Scripture

But one detail complicates all of them. In the Greek text most modern Bibles follow, John twice calls Judas "the son of Simon Iscariot." The King James Version, translated from a different Greek text, reads it differently.

Scholarship

If the modern text is right, the name seems to have belonged to the family, not just to Judas. That fits a place name better than an insult. But it's evidence, not proof, and the honest verdict is: the meaning is lost.

Four Gospels, four portraits

So why did he do it? Each Gospel says something different, and it's tempting to blend them. Let's take them one at a time.

Scripture

Mark, usually thought to be the earliest Gospel, gives no reason at all. Judas goes to the chief priests "that he might deliver him to them." They are glad, and promise to give him money. That's it.

Matthew adds a question. Judas goes to the chief priests and asks, "What are you willing to give me if I deliver him to you?" And they weigh out for him... thirty pieces of silver. Matthew is the only Gospel that names the sum.

Luke gives a different kind of answer. "Satan entered into Judas." Then he goes and talks with the chief priests, and they agree to give him money.

And John says the most. Jesus says, "Didn't I choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?" And John adds that he meant Judas. Later, when Judas asks why expensive ointment wasn't sold for the poor, John comments that he said it "not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief," and that he stole from the money box. And at the Last Supper, John says the devil had already put it into Judas's heart to betray him, and that after Jesus gave him a piece of bread, "Satan entered into him."

So: Mark gives no reason. Matthew has Judas ask what they'll pay. Luke says Satan entered him. And John calls him a thief, and says the devil prompted him. Anything beyond that, that he was disappointed, or political, or trying to force Jesus's hand, isn't in any of the texts. Those are modern guesses, and we'll leave them there.

A kiss in the dark

Scripture

Then comes the night of the arrest, on the Mount of Olives.

In Mark and Matthew, Judas has arranged a signal. In Matthew's words: "Whoever I kiss, he is the one. Seize him." He walks up, greets Jesus as Rabbi, and kisses him. In Matthew, Jesus replies, "Friend, why are you here?"

In Luke, Judas comes near to kiss him, and Jesus says, "Judas, do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?" Luke doesn't actually say the kiss lands.

And in John? There's no kiss at all. Judas brings a detachment of soldiers and officers "with lanterns, torches, and weapons." Jesus steps forward and identifies himself. And John adds one quiet line: "Judas also, who betrayed him, was standing with them."

The kiss is so famous that it's easy to forget one Gospel doesn't have it.

Two accounts of his death

Now, the two accounts of his death, in their own words.

Scripture

Matthew, chapter 27. "Then Judas, who betrayed him, when he saw that Jesus was condemned, felt remorse, and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, 'I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent blood.' But they said, 'What is that to us? You see to it.' He threw down the pieces of silver in the sanctuary and departed. Then he went away and hanged himself."

The priests won't put the money into the treasury, because it's "the price of blood." So they buy "the potter's field" with it, as a place to bury strangers. "Therefore that field has been called 'The Field of Blood' to this day."

Acts, chapter 1. Peter is addressing about a hundred and twenty believers, and in lines many translations print as the author's own aside, we read: "Now this man obtained a field with the reward for his wickedness; and falling headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines gushed out. It became known to everyone who lived in Jerusalem that in their language that field was called 'Akeldama,' that is, 'The field of blood.'"

In Matthew, the priests buy the field. In Acts, Judas obtains it.

In Matthew, he hangs himself. In Acts, he falls headlong and bursts open.

In Matthew, Judas feels remorse and gives the money back. Acts mentions neither.

In Matthew, the field is called the Field of Blood because it was bought with blood money. Acts gives no such reason; it seems to tie the name to his death, which "became known to everyone who lived in Jerusalem."

But notice what they share. In both, Judas is dead within weeks of the betrayal. There's a field connected with the money, known in Jerusalem. And it's called the Field of Blood.

One story, or two?

There are two main ways to read that, with careful people on both sides.

Tradition

The first is harmonisation: fitting the accounts together. It's very old. In the 300s, Apollinaris of Laodicea offered one version: Judas "did not die by hanging," he says, but was cut down before he choked, and lived on.

By about 400, some Latin Bibles had merged the two: the text of Acts that Augustine quotes, in 404, has Judas bind himself by the neck, fall on his face, and burst open in the middle.

Scholarship

The same blend reached the Latin Vulgate, the Bible of the medieval West. Its Acts 1:18 says suspensus crepuit medius: "being hanged, burst asunder in the midst." That's not what the Greek says. But for centuries, readers of the Latin Bible met the two accounts already joined.

Later harmonisers put it simply: Matthew tells the first part, Acts the second. And the field? Many argue that because the priests bought it with Judas's money, in a sense Judas obtained it. Plenty of readers still find that a reasonable reading.

The second answer is that these are two independent traditions. Many modern scholars think that Matthew and the author of Acts each received a different story about how Judas died. Even the notes in the New American Bible, a Catholic translation, say the two traditions "agree only" on the purchase of a field and its name.

On this view, each writer told the story with Scripture in mind: Matthew with the prophets, Acts with the Psalms: "Let his habitation be made desolate."

Which is right? This channel doesn't take sides. The texts are in front of you, and so are the readings. And the early church left us a third story too.

Tradition

Papias was a bishop of Hierapolis, in what's now Turkey, writing probably in the early second century. His books are lost, but Apollinaris quotes him.

Papias's account mentions neither a hanging nor a fall. Judas's body swelled so much that he couldn't pass where a wagon could easily pass. In one version, a wagon crushes him. A longer version adds details I won't read out, and ends with the place where he died left deserted, people holding their noses as they pass.

It's early, within a century or so of the events, but historians almost universally treat it as legend.

Jeremiah... or Zechariah?

There's one more puzzle in Matthew's account.

Scripture

Matthew says the purchase of the field fulfilled "that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet": "They took the thirty pieces of silver... and they gave them for the potter's field."

But the words that match best come from the prophet Zechariah. In Zechariah 11, the prophet's wages are weighed out: "thirty pieces of silver." Then Yahweh tells him to throw it to the potter, and he throws the silver to the potter "in Yahweh's house."

Tradition

So why "Jeremiah"?

Augustine thought the name may have been allowed to stand, by the Holy Spirit's guidance, so that readers would compare the two prophets: Jeremiah also visits a potter's house, and buys a field, though for seventeen shekels, not thirty.

Jerome, his contemporary, said he'd once been shown an apocryphal book of Jeremiah with the words word for word. But he still thought Matthew was quoting Zechariah, giving the sense rather than the exact words.

Scholarship

Many modern scholars call it a composite quotation: Zechariah's words blended with Jeremiah's potters and fields, under the better-known prophet's name.

Some ancient copies leave the name out altogether; Augustine already knew of them. And some readers, then and now, simply say Matthew made a slip of memory.

It's a genuine puzzle, and it's fair to leave it as one.

Tradition

And the field itself? By the 300s, Eusebius's gazetteer of Bible places lists Akeldama as a site still pointed out, though sources disagree on exactly where. The traditional site today is on the southern slope of the Hinnom Valley, where a Greek Orthodox monastery of Saint Onuphrius stands among ancient burial caves. Is it the actual field? We can't know.

The Gospel of Judas

Scholarship

In April 2006, the National Geographic Society announced a lost Gospel of Judas.

It was real. A papyrus book found in Egypt in the 1970s, now called the Codex Tchacos, had spent about sixteen years in a bank safe-deposit box on Long Island, New York, and crumbled into around a thousand fragments before it was restored. Radiocarbon tests dated it to roughly AD 220 to 340. It's written in Coptic, translated from a Greek original.

Tradition

And we knew such a book had existed. Around the year 180, Irenaeus of Lyon wrote that a group who honoured Cain claimed Judas alone knew the truth, and that "they produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas." Whether that's the same text we now have, scholars can't be certain, but many think it probably is.

Scholarship

It's a series of conversations in the days before Passover. Jesus laughs at the disciples' prayer of thanksgiving, reveals a hidden cosmic myth, and singles out Judas for secret teaching. In the National Geographic translation, Jesus tells him: "You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." The book ends with Judas taking money and handing Jesus over.

The headlines said: Judas the hero. Then the arguments began.

April DeConick, of Rice University, argued that the translation had got key points wrong. Where Jesus calls Judas the "thirteenth spirit," the Coptic word is daimon, which, she argued, in texts like this means "demon." And a line saying Judas would ascend, she argued, actually has a negative: he will not. Others raised similar objections; the editors defended their work, and revised some points in later editions.

So today, scholars genuinely disagree: is Judas the hero of this text, a tragic figure, or a demon? Most scholars date the original to the second century, a hundred years or more after Judas. So it tells us what one group of Christians came to believe, not about the man himself.

Close

So. Let's go back to that Field of Blood.

What do the sources agree on? That Judas was one of the Twelve. That he handed Jesus over. In Mark, Matthew and Luke, that money was involved. And that he died soon after, in a way the New Testament records twice, differently. As for why, we've let each Gospel speak for itself.

Scholarship

One more thing needs saying. For centuries, many Christian writers and artists used Judas, whose name is simply the Greek form of Judah, as a symbol for the Jewish people as a whole. Medieval artists often gave him caricatured features and, especially in late-medieval German art, red hair, turning him into an anti-Jewish stereotype. That use of his image fed real hatred, with real consequences. But nothing in the Gospels makes Judas stand for anyone but himself. He was Jewish, yes. So were Peter, John, Thomas... and Jesus.

The Twelve began as twelve. By Easter morning, Luke calls them simply "the eleven."

Next time: the empty seat, and what became of the Twelve. Matthias.