This was previously posted at my old blog. I had mentioned that I would post it again earlier and am finally getting around to it. This is part 2 of a 2 part series.

In the last post on Luke and Matthew’s account of the death of Judas, I looked at the differing accounts to see if there was a contradiction. I showed that there was not a contradiction for several reasons: The first reason is that Luke’s account of Judas falling presupposes that Judas was at some height in order to fall. This is confirmed by Matthew’s account of Judas hanging himself. Because one account does not exclude the possibility of the other, there is no contradiction. The second reason is that while we can (and, I believe should) take both as historically correct, we can also see possible typological allusions to the Old Testament in Matthew. While I definitely think Matthew uses some typology, I think we should take both accounts as historically accurate because 1)both authors include other details, which seem to point to a historical reality, and 2) both books are written in genres with a historical bent.

In this post, I want to look at some other details that both authors include that also appear at first glance to be contradictory: Who actually bought the field, and who prophesied the events. Here are the two accounts:

³Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was full of remorse and returned the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders. ⁴ “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood,” he said.
“What’s that to us?” they said. “See to it yourself!”
⁵ So he threw the silver into the sanctuary and departed. Then he went and hanged himself.
⁶ The chief priests took the silver and said, “It’s not lawful to put it into the temple treasury, since it is blood money.” ⁷ So they conferred together and bought the potter’s field with it as a burial place for foreigners. ⁸ Therefore that field has been called “Blood Field” to this day. ⁹Then what was spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
They took the 30 pieces of silver, the price of Him whose price was set by the sons of Israel, ¹⁰and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord directed me”
-Matthew 27:3-10

“Now this man acquired a field with his unrighteous wages; and falling headfirst, he burst open in the middle, and all his insides spilled out.”
-Acts 1:18

Because I will be dealing with two different issues, I will try and remain brief. Let me start out by reminding everyone what a contradiction entails. We can represent a contradiction with this definition:
Something cannot be both A and not A at the same time, and in the same way.
In order for something to be a contradiction, one proposition (A) must exclude the possibility of the other proposition (not A). If there is even a chance of possibility, there is no contradiction. Let us first look at the problem of who bought the field.

Matthew’s account of the events has Judas throwing the money into the temple, and then the chief priests using that money to buy a field. Luke’s account says that Judas himself bought the field. At first glance, this is an obvious contradiction right? Not quite. An explicit contradiction would be if one account said that Judas bought the field, and another said that Judas did not buy the field. But isn’t that what they are saying? In order to understand why this is actually not a contradiction, and that the possibility of both is available to us, we must understand the Jewish legal system of the day.

In Matthew’s account there is a key phrase that will help us out: “It’s not lawful to put it into the temple treasury, since it is blood money.” Because the money was given to Judas as a reward for betrayal, it was unlawful for the priests to use in anyway. They were not, as Matthew records, allowed to put it back into the temple treasury for this very reason. Unable to do anything with the money, they decided to buy a field with it. The field was to be used for the burial of foreigners. In other words, it was going to be an unclean field bought with unclean money.

At this point, we must realize that because it was unclean money, the chief priests could not buy the field in their own names. D.A. Carson explains:
“[T]hus, after refusing the money the priests bough the field in Judas’ name and on his behalf” (emphasis mine). In regards to legality, it was as if Judas himself bought the field. This is not really as much of a stretch of the imagination as it might seem. There have been plenty of times when I have given someone money to buy a particular thing. Though someone else purchased the thing, it was I who bought it with my own money. Even if we do not grasp the legal issues at the time, we can see from instances in our own life where this makes sense. Luke’s account picks up on this by saying that Judas bought the field, since it was his money, and was done “in his name and on his behalf.” Because we are able to show even the possibility of the truth behind both accounts, there is no contradiction here.

The second issue is found in Matthew’s account only. Matthew attributes the quote to the prophet Jeremiah, yet the beginning of the quote appears in Zechariah. Was Matthew flat-out wrong with his attribution of the prophesy to Jeremiah? I am indebted to R. T. France for the explanation here, although the same explanation can be found in any discussion on this passage (I just happened to look to his commentary first), so I will just quote what he says:

“The theme of blood money picks up the idea of guilt for the blood of the prophets in 23:29-36, which reaches its climax in 27.24-25. Judas, unable to offload his guilt by returning the money, hanged himself; but the chief priests, by using that same blood money to buy the potter’s field, were also implicated. The Field of Blood (Akeldama) is traditionally located in the valley of Hinnom (from which potter’s clay was dug). These and other hints in Matthew’s wording suggest that he understood the whole story in light of Jer 19:1-13, where the valley of Hinnom is linked with burials and ‘innocent blood’ and with a potter. Other passages in Jeremiah may also be in mind (the potter’s house in Jer 18; buying the field in Jer 32).
So it is approat that the story reaches its climax (9-10) in a formula-quotation, allegedly from Jeremiah, about using blood money to buy a potter’s field. The words quoted are in fact most closely based on Zc 11:12-13, with its mention of “thirty silver coins’ … which are mysteriously thrown down in the house of the Lord ‘to the potter’. … This is not, however, a simple quotation of a single passage but a subtle weaving together of themes from Jeremiah and Zechariah in the light of the events just recorded. The ‘fulfillment’ Matthew here traces is something much richer than the simple occurrence of a predicted event.” (emphasis mine)

I apologize for the rather lengthy quote, but I think France puts it very nicely, so I wanted to give you the majority of his quote. The idea here is Matthew weaves together quotes and allusions from several authors, but then attributes the quote to a specific author. Generally, the attribution goes to the most well-known of the authors quoted. Because Jeremiah was very well-known (not to the exclusion of Zechariah mind you) and his book circulated often by his name (as opposed to Zechariah, which circulated together with the other 11 ‘minor’ prophets), he is the most likely candidate for what is called “major attribution.” This is when a collection of quotes are put together as one, and then attributed to one of ‘major’ prophet authors. We see this same issue in Mark 1:2-3, where Mark attributes a quote to Isaiah where Isaiah and Malachi are both quoted. This was a common practice at the time, and thinking that Matthew simply didn’t catch such a simple mistake reflects our removal from what was culturally accepted at the time.

As we saw in the first post, neither the issue of who bought the field, nor the issue of who prophesied the events can be found to be considered a contradiction. In the case of who bought the field, we can see that there is a plausible explanation that shows the possibility of both accounts being historically correct. Because there is even a possibility, we cannot say that there is a contradiction, because that implies that there is no possibility at all. In the case of the quotation, it seems apparent that it is not just simply an error on the part of Matthew, but the utilization of a common practice at the time of attribution. Matthew, after weaving quotes and themes of both Zechariah and Jeremiah together, attributes the whole to Jeremiah who was, and is, considered a ‘major’ prophet.* Though both of these issues, and the one explored in an earlier post, all seem to be contradictions at first glance, the accusations all seem to fall (and burst in the middle?) under close scrutiny. In terms of the inerrancy of Scripture, opponents of the doctrine cannot find their evidence on the two accounts of the death of Judas.

*”Major” and “minor” in reference to the length of the book attributed to each prophet, not of importance.