Strengthen your faith in God's word

Matthew says that Judas “cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself,” and that the chief priests “took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field” (Matthew 27:5, 7). Peter says that Judas “purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out” (Acts 1:18). Did he hang himself or fall? Did the priests buy the field, or Judas?

Neither account denies the other. Matthew tells how Judas took his own life; Acts tells what became of his body. He hanged himself, and when the rope or the branch gave way, or when his body was cut down, it fell headlong and burst. Haley quotes a traveler who measured the cliffs over the valley of Hinnom, the traditional place, at twenty-five to forty feet, with trees at their edge and rock below.

The field was bought with Judas’s money, the thirty pieces he had thrown back, by the priests, who wouldn’t put “the price of blood” in the treasury (Matthew 27:6). So it was his purchase, made with his “reward of iniquity”, though their hands paid it; Scripture speaks this way of what is done with a man’s means (as Pilate “scourged” Jesus, John 19:1, by his soldiers). Both books say the field was then called the field of blood (Matthew 27:8; Acts 1:19).