| 130. The Death of the Betrayer. | ||||
ON Hearing That Jesus Was Condemned to death, Judas, according to the first gospel (xxvii.3ff.) was smitten with remorse, and hastened to the chief priests and elders to return to them the thirty pieces of silver, with the declaration that he had betrayed an innocent person. When however the latter scornfully retorted that on him alone rested all responsibility for that deed, Judas, after casting down the money in the temple, impelled by despair, went away and hanged himself. Hereupon the S;nhedrists, holding it unlawful to put the money returned by Judas into the treasury, since it was the price of blood, bought with it a potter's field as a burying place for strangers. To this particular the evangelist appends two remarks: first, that from this mode of purchase, the piece of ground was called the field of blood up to his time; and secondly, that by this course of things an ancient prophecy was fulfilled. The rest of the evangelists are silent concerning the end of Judas; but on the other had we find in the Acts of the Apostles (i.16ff.) some information on this subject which in several points diverges from that of Matthew. Peter, when about to propose the completion of the apostolic number by the choice of a new colleague, thinks proper, by way of preliminary to remind his hearers of the manner in which the vacancy in the apostolic circle had arisen, i.e. of the treachery and the end of Judas; and in relation to the latter he says, that the betrayer purchased himself a field with the reward of his crime, but fell headlong, and burst asunder in the midst, so that all his bowels gushed out, which being known in all Jerusalem, the piece of ground was called aKekdapa, i.e. the field of blood. In addition to this, the narrator makes Peter observe that these occurrences were a fulfilment of two passages in the Psalms. | ||||
Between these two accounts there exists a double divergency: the one pertaining to the manner of the death of Judas, the other to the statement when and by whom the piece of ground was bought. As regards the former, Matthew declares that Judas laid violent hands on himself out of remorse and despair: whereas in the Acts nothing is said of remorse on the part of the traitor, and his death has not the appearance of suicide, but of an accident, or more accurately, of a calamity decreed by heaven as a punishment; further, in Matthew he inflicts death on himself by the cord: according to the representation of Peter, it is a fall which puts an end to his life by causing a horrible rupture of the body. | ||||
How active the harmonists of all times have been in reconciling these divergencies, may be seen in Kuin l: here we need only briefly adduce the principal expedients for this purpose. As the divergency lay chiefly in the words d-nriyaro, he hanged himself, in Matthew, and falling headlong, in Luke, the most obvious resource was to see whether one of these expressions could not be drawn to the side of the other. This has been tried with dnriyaro in various ways; this word being interpreted at one time as signifying only the torments of a guilty conscience, at another, a disease consequent on these, at another, any death chosen out of melancholy and despair;and to this it has been thought that the statement in the Acts added the more precise information, that the kind of death to which Judas was driven by an evil conscience and despair was precipitation from a steep eminence. Others on the contrary have sought to accommodate the meaning of prhnhj genomenoj to aphgcato, understanding it merely to express as a circumstance what aphgcato expresses as an act: and accordingly maintaining that if the latter should be rendered se suspendit, the former should be translated by suspensus. | ||||
From repugnance to the obvious violence of this attempt, others, sparing the natural meaning of the expressions on both sides, have reconciled the divergent accounts by the supposition that Matthew narrates an earlier, the author of the Acts a later, stage of the events which marked the end of Judas. Some of the ancient commentators indeed separated these two stages so widely as to see in Matthew's statement (aTnjyfaro) only an unsuccessful attempt at self-destruction, which from the bough whereon he suspended himself having broken, or from some other cause, Judas outlived, until the judgment of heaven overtook him in falling headlong. But since Matthew evidently intends in his expression aphgcato to {P.754} narrate the last moments of the traitor: the two epochs, the account of which is supposed to be respectively given by Matthew and the Acts, have in later times been placed in closer proximity, and it has been held that Judas attempted to hang himself to a tree on an eminence, but as the rope gave way or the branch broke, he was precipitated into the valley over steep cliffs and sharp bushes, which lacerated his body. The author of a treatise on the fate of Judas in Schmidt's Bibliothek has already remarked as a surprising circumstance, how faithfully according to this opinion the two narrators have shared the information between them: for it is not the case that one gives the less precise statement, the other the more precise; but that one of them narrates precisely the first part of the incident, without touching on the second, the other, the second without intruding on the first; and Hase justly maintains that each narrator knew only the state of the fact which he has presented, since otherwise he cold not have omitted the other half. | ||||
After thus witnessing the total failure of the attempts at reconciliation in relation to the first difference; we have now to inquire whether the other, relative to the acquisition of the piece of ground can be more easily adjusted. It consists in this: according to Matthew, it is the members of the Sanhedrin who, after the suicide of Judas, purchase a field with the money which he had left behind (from a potter moreover-a particular which is wanting in the Acts); whereas, according to the Acts, Judas himself purchases the piece of ground, and on this very spot is overtaken by sudden death; and from this difference there results another, namely, that according to the latter account, it was the blood of the betrayer shed on the piece of ground, according to the former, the blood of Jesus cleaving to the purchase money, which caused the ground to be named the field of Blood. Now here Matthew's manner of expressing himself is so precise, that it cannot well be twisted so as to favor the other narrative: but the word ekthsato (purchased or acquired) in the Acts presents inviting facilities for its adaptation to Matthew. By the reward of treachery, Judas acquired a field such, it is said, is the meaning in the Acts not immediately, but mediately; since by returning the money he gave occasion for the purchase of a piece of ground; not for himself, but for the Sanhedrin or the public good. But however numerous the passages adduce! in which ktasqai has the signification: to acquire for another, still in such instances it is necessary that the other party for whom one acquires should be specified or intimated, and when this is not the case, as in the passage in the Acts, it retains the {P.755} original meaning: to acquire for one's self. This Paulus felt, and hence gave the facts the following tarn: the terrible fall of Judas into a lime pit was the cause of this piece of ground being purchased by the Sanhedrin, and thus Peter might very well say of Judas ironically, that in death by the fall of his corpse he had appropriated to himself a fine property. But in the first place this interpretation is in itself strained; and in the second, the passage cited by Peter from the Psalms: "let his habitation be desolate," shows that he thought of the piece of ground as the real property of Judas, and as being judicially doomed to desolation as the scene of his death. | ||||
According to this, neither the one difference nor the other admits of a favourable reconciliation; indeed the existence of a real divergency was admitted even by Salmasius, and Hase thinks that he can explain this discrepancy, without endangering the apostolic origin of the two statements, from the violent excitement of those days, in consequence of which only the general fact that Judas committed suicide was positively known, and concerning the more particular circumstances of the event, various reports were believed. But in the Acts nothing is said of suicide, and that two apostles, Matthew and Peter, (if the first gospel be supposed to proceed from the former, the discourse in the Acts from the latter,) should have remained so entirely in the dark concerning the death of their late colleague, a death which took place in their immediate vicinity, that one of them represented him as dying by accident, the other voluntarily, is difficult to believe. That therefore only one of the two accounts can be maintaind as apostolic, has been correctly perceived by the author of the above-mentioned treatise in Schmidt's Biblio-thek. And in choosing between the two he has proceeded on the principle that the narrative the least tending to glorification is the more authentic; from which he gives the preference to the account in the Acts before that in the first gospel, because the former has not the glorifying circumstances of the remorse of Judas, and his confession of the innocence of Jesus. But, it is ever the case with two contradictory narratives, not ordy that if one stands it excludes the other, but also that if one falls it shakes the other: hence, if the representation of the facts which is attested by the authority of the apostle Matthew be renounced, there is no longer any warrant for the other, which professedly rests on the testimony of the apostle Peter. | ||||
If then we are to treat the two narratives on the same footing, namely as legends, with respect to which it is first to be discovered how far their historical nucleus extends, and how far they consist of traditional deposits: we must, in order to be clear on the subject, consider the data which form the roots of the two narratives. Here we find one which is common to both, with two others of which {P.756} each has one peculiarly to itself. The datum common to both narratives is, that there was in Jerusalem a piece of ground which was called the field of blood, or in the original tongue, according to the statement of the Acts, akeldama As this information is concurrently given by two narratives in other respects totally divergent, and as, besides, the author of the first gospel appeals to the actual practice of his day in proof that the field was called by this name: we cannot well doubt the existence of a piece of ground so named. That it really had a relation to the betrayer of Jesus is less certain, since our two narratives give different accounts of this relation: the one stating that Judas himself bought the property, the other that it was not purchased until after his death, with the thirty pieces of silver. We can therefore draw no further conclusion than that the primitive Christian legend must have early attributed to that field of blood a relation to the betrayer But the reason wherefore this relation took various forms is to be sought in the other datum from which our narratives proceed, namely, in the Old Testament passages, which the authors cite (from different sources, however,) as being fulfilled by the fate of Judas. In the passage of the Acts, Ps. Ixix. 25, and Ps. cix. 8. are quoted in this manner. The latter is a psalm which the first Christians from among the Jews could not avoid referring to the relation of Judas to Jesus. For not only does the author, alleged to be David, but doubtless a much later individual, dilate from the opening of the psalm on such as speak falsely and insidiously against him, and return him hatred for his love, but from v. 6, where the curses commence, he directs himself against a particular person, so that the Jewish expositors thought of Doeg, David's calumniator with Saul, and the Christians just as naturally of Judas. From this psalm is gathered the verse which, treating of the transfer of one office to another, appearedperfectly to suit the case of Judas. The other Psalm, it is true, speaks more vaguely of such as hate and persecute the author without cause, yet this also is ascribed to David, and is so similar to the other in purport and style, that it might be regarded as its parallel, and if curses might be applied to the betrayer out of the former, they might be so out of the latter, Now if Judas had actually bought with the wages of his treachery a piece of land, which from being the scene of his horrible end, subsequently remained waste: it was a matter of course to refer to him precisely those passages in this psalm which denounce on the enemies the desolation of their habitation s-navn;. As, however, from the divergency of Matthew, the fact, that Judas himself bought that piece of ground and came to his end upon it, is doubtful: while it can scarcely be supposed that the piece of land on which the betrayer of Jesus met his end would be so abhorrent to the Jews {P.757} that they would let it he waste as a land of blood; it is more probable that this name had another origin no longer to be discovered, and was interpreted by the Christians in accordance with their own ideas; so that we must not derive the application of the passage in the Psalms, and the naming of that waste piece of land, from an actual possession of it by Judas, but on the contrary, we must refer to those two causes the existence of the legend, which ascribes such a possession to Judas. For if the two psalms in question were once applied to the betrayer, and if in one of them the desolation of his epaulij (LXX.) was denounced, he must have previously been in possession of such an epaulij, and this, it was thought, he would probably have purchased with the reward of his treason. Or rather, that out of the above Psalms the desolation of the e)paulij was a particular specially chosen, appears to have been founded on the natural presupposition, that the curse would be chiefly manifested in relation to someting which he had acquired by the wages of his iniquity; added to the circumstance that among the objects anathematized in the psalm, the one most capable of being bought was the e)paulij. This conception of the facts was met in the most felicitous manner by the field lying near Jerusalem, which, the less was known of the origin of its name and of the horror attached to it, might the more easily be applied by the primitive Christian legend to its own purposes, and regarded as the desolate habitation, e)paulij e(rhmwmenh, of the betrayer. | ||||
Instead of these passages from the Psalms, the first gospel cites as being fulfilled by the last acts of Judas, a passage which it attributes to Jeremiah, but to which nothing corresponding is to be found except in Zech. xi. 12f., from which it is now pretty generally admitted that the evangelist substituted one name for the other by mistake. How Matthew might be led by the fundamental idea of this passage an unreasonably small price for the speaker in the prophecy to an application of it to the treachery of Judas, who for a paltry sum had as it were sold his master, has been already shown. | ||||
Now the prophetic passage contains a command from the Lord to the author of the prophecy, to cast the miserable sum with which he had been paid, into the house of the Lord, and which, it is added, was also done. The person who casts down the money is in the prophecy the same with the speaker, and consequently with him who is rated at the low price, because the sum here is not purchase money but hire, and hence is received by the person so meanly estimated who alone can cast it away again: in the application of the evangelist, on the contrary, the sum being considered as purchase money, another than the one so meanly estimated was to be thought of as receiving and casting away the sum. If the one sold for so paltry a price was Jesus: he who received the money and finally rejected it could be no other than his betrayer. Hence it is said of the latter, that he cast down the pieces of silver {P.758} in the temple (e)n tw naw) corresponding to the phrase beth yhwh wa'ashlik 'otho' in the prophetic passage, although these very words happen to be absent from the extremely mutilated citation of Matthew. But in apposition to the beth yhwh, wherein the money was cast, there stood besides el hayoser. The LXX. translates: ei)j ton xwneuthrion, into the melting furnace; now, it is with reason conjectured that the pointing should be altered thus: el hayyoser, and the word rendered: into the treasury; the author of our gospel adhered to the literal translation by kerameuj, potter. But what the potter had to do here, why the money should be given to him, must at first have been as incomprehensible to him as it is to us when we adhere to the common reading. | ||||
Here however there occurred to his recollection the field of blood, to which, as we gather from the Acts, the Christian legend gave a relation to Judas and hence resulted the welcome combination, that it was probably that iield for which the thirty pieces ofsilver were to be given to the potter. As, however, it was impossible to conceive the potter as being in the temple when receiving the money, and yet according to the prophetic passage the pieces of silver were cast into the temple: a separation was made between the casting into the temple and the payment to the potter. If the former must be ascribed to Judas, if he had thus once cast away the money, he himself could no longer purchase the piece of ground from the potter, but this must be done by another party, with the money which Judas had cast away. Who this party is must be followed of course: if Judas gave up the money, he would give it up to those from whom he had received it; if he cast it into the temple, it would fall into the hands of the fulers of the temple: thus in both ways it would revert to the Sanhedrin. | ||||
The object of the latter in purchasing the ground was perhaps drawn from the use to which that waste place was actually appropriated. Lastly, if Judas cast away again the reard of his treachery, this, it must be inferred, could only be out of remorse. To make Judas manifest remorse, and thus win from the traitor himself a testimony to the innocence of Jesus, was as natural to the conception of the primitive Christian community, as to convert Pilate, and to make Tiberius himself propose in the Roman senate the deification of Christ. But how would the remorse of Judas further manifest itself? A return to the right on his part, was not only unattested by any facts, but was besides far too good a lot for the traitor: hence repentance must have become in him despair, and he must have chosen the end of the well-known traitor in the story of Da- {P.759} vid, Ahithophel, of whom it is said, 2 Sam. xvii. 23: anesth kai aphlqen - kai aphgcato, he arose, and went and hanged himself, as of Judas here: he departed, and went and hanged himself. | ||||
A tradition referred to Papias appears to be allied to the narrative in the Acts rather than to that of Matthew. Oecumenius, quoting the above collector of traditions, says, that Judas, as an awful example of impiety, had his body distended to such a degree, that a space where a chariot could pass was no longer sufficiently wide for him, and that at last being crushed by a chariot, he burst asunder and all his bowels were pressed out. The latter statement doubtless arose from a misconstruction of the ancient legend; for the chariot was not originally brought into immediate contact with the body of Judas, but was merely used as a measure of his size, and this was afterwards erroneously understood as if a chariot in passing had crushed the swollen body of Judas. Hence, not only in Theophylact and in an ancient Scholium, without any distinct reference to Papias, but also in a Catena with an express citation of his eceghseij, we actually find the fact narrated without that addition. The monstrous swelling ofJudas, spoken of in this passage, might, it is supposed, originally be only an explanation of the displacing and protrusion of the viscera, and in like manner the dropsy into which Theophylaet represents him as falling, might be regarded as an explanation of this swelling: when, however, in Ps. cix., applied in the Acts to Judas, amongst other maledictions, we read: "so let it (cursing) come into his bowels like water" (v. 18): it appears possible that the dropsical disease, nosoj uderikh, may have been also taken from this passage; as also one of the features in the monstrous description which Papias gives of the condition of Judas, namely, that from the enormous swelling of his eyelids he could no longer see the light of day, might remind us of the other Psalm applied to Judas, where, among the curses this is enumerated: Let their eyes be darkened that they see not, a hindrance to sight which when once the swollen body of Judas was presupposed, must necessarily assume the form of a swelling up of the eyelids. If then the tradition which is allied to the account in Acts i. developed its idea of the end of Judas chiefly in correspondence Avith the ideas presented in these two Psalms; and if in that passage of the Acts itself the account of the connection of Judas with the piece of ground is derived from the same source: it is no farfetched conjecture that what is said in the Acts concerning the end of the betrayer may have had a similar origin. That he died an early death may be historical; but even if not so, in Psalm cix. in the very same verse (v. 8) which contains the transfer of the office to another, an early death is predicted for the betrayer in the words: "Let his days be few," and it might almost be believed that the death by falling headlong also was gathered from Ps. Ixix. 22. where it is said: Let their table become a snare before them. | ||||
Thus we scarcely know with certainty concerning Judas even so much as that he came to a violent and untimely death, for if, as was natural, after his departure from the community of Jesus, he retired so far as the knowledge of its members was concerned, into an obscurity in which all historical information as to his further fate was extinguished: the primitive Christian legend might without hindrance represent as being fulfilled in him all that the prophecies and types of the Old Testament threatened to the false friend of the Son of David, and might even associate the memory of his crime with a well-known desecrated place in the vicinity of Jerusalem. | ||||