The Bible Stories As I Read Them Were Never Actually In The Bible

Clipart image of Sherlock Holmes looking for clues. Image source.

[content note: discussion of a suicide in the bible]

Here's an interesting article from Libby Anne: How Did Judas Die? Why Evangelicals Seek to Explain Away Contradictions. She talks about a post on Answers in Genesis which "resolves" the supposed "contradiction" between Matthew's and Luke's (in the book of Acts) accounts of how Judas died.

I remember reading the "answer" to this contradiction a long time ago, in an apologetics book. Basically the issue is that Matthew 27:5 says:

So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.

And Acts 1:18 says:

With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out.

So like... uh what exactly happened to Judas?

The "answer" from Christian apologetics is that Judas hanged himself, and then his dead body hung there for a while and eventually fell down and burst open.

I've known this answer for a long time. And so, every time I read Acts 1:18, I read it as "Judas bought a field, there he hanged himself, and then after a while his dead body fell headlong and burst open and all his intestines spilled out." As it happens, I had this verse memorized back when I did bible quizzing- so I knew that the literal words written in Acts did not say "hanged himself", but that was still the meaning I got when I read it.

It's only right now, in 2019, reading Libby Anne's blog post, that I am realizing that's not what the Acts passage says.

It's only RIGHT NOW, that I'm realizing, if we just read Acts and not Luke, we would get the impression that Judas took the money he got from betraying Jesus, and happily went off and bought a field, feeling like he'd gotten away with it. But then he ended up accidentally falling off some tall thing that was in the field, and died from the fall. Perhaps this is God's justice- he didn't "get away with it" after all.

Or, well, I'm embellishing- we can't say for sure if he "happily" bought the field, we can't say for sure if this is a little morality story to show you can't actually "get away with it" ... I kind of added those. But reading it as "Judas was remorseful so he went and hanged himself" is also embellishing. The remorse is in Matthew's telling of the story; that's not the way it's told in the book of Acts.

Luke (the writer of Acts) is telling a different story.

And of course, the idea that Acts tells a different story than Matthew is completely unintelligible for Christians who believe the bible is inerrant. Everything in the bible happened in the same universe, which is also the universe we live in. Therefore if one passage says Judas did this and another passage says Judas did that, the correct account of Judas's life would include both. Indeed, if you read the bible this way, you would see it as quite helpful that Matthew tells us Judas was remorseful even though Luke doesn't- if we only had Luke's account, we might misunderstand and get the impression that Judas's death wasn't a suicide. Isn't it nice that Matthew gives us more information, to help us understand what Luke wrote?

Or rather, isn't it nice how we're not actually reading the story that Luke wrote, we're changing it by bringing in details from a different story...

Yes, if you believe in inerrancy, then this is definitely how you have to read the bible. But I don't believe in inerrancy any more. I won't get into all the reasons why; it's kind of too much to put into this blog post (but if you're interested, maybe read my review of Peter Enns's book "The Bible Tells Me So"). The bible has errors, it has stuff that wasn't true at all but was added for political reasons, it has embellishments that the authors made up to help communicate whatever point they were trying to make- and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because ancient readers wouldn't have expected they were reading a 100% true factual historical account. 

And all this stuff about "resolving contradictions" completely misses the point. It makes us unable to actually read the words that are right in front of us and understand the story that each individual author is telling.

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Note: In this post I said Luke was the writer of Acts, but hey maybe that's not true either.

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Related:
The Bible Lied About Lot's Daughters
This Star Wars Fan Theory Is EXACTLY How Apologetics Works
"The Author of Leviticus Would Have Been Cool With It"