How did Judas die?

The two accounts describe different moments of one death. Matthew tells how Judas died: he “went and hanged himself” (the Greek apēgxato means he strangled himself by hanging). Luke, writing Acts, tells what became of the body: falling headlong, it burst open. A body left hanging over a slope, perhaps because no one would handle a corpse during the Passover feast, would in time fall and split when the rope or branch gave way. John Gill thought this the most likely way the two fit: Judas hanged himself and then fell, ‘either the rope breaking, or the tree falling’. J. W. Haley (1874) gave the same explanation.

The field is explained the same way. The priests would not put Judas’s money back in the treasury, so they bought the potter’s field with it (Matthew 27:6–7). The money was Judas’s, so Acts can say pointedly that Judas “purchased a field with the reward of iniquity”: his betrayal paid for it. Both writers agree that the place was then called “the field of blood”. Matthew links the name to the blood money and Acts to Judas’s own death there, and both were true of it.

‘Swelling up’

Some scholars suggest that the rare Greek word prēnēs in Acts 1:18 here means ‘swollen’ rather than ‘headlong’. On that reading the body swelled after death and burst, which also fits a hanging. Matthew Henry gives a similar picture: Judas was strangled, and ‘partly with the swelling of his own breast, and partly with the violence of the fall’ he burst. An early tradition from Papias, preserved by Apollinaris of Laodicea, says Judas’s body became grossly swollen.

Where exactly the field lay is not certain; tradition places Aceldama on the slope south of Jerusalem where the Hinnom valley meets the Kidron.