Matthew 27:1-10 When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death:… Objectors have represented the statement in this text as inconsistent with that in Acts 1:18, where he is said to have " purchased a field with the reward of iniquity, and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out." But these passages do not necessarily contradict each other. Matthew does not say that Judas, after having hanged himself, did not fall to the ground; nor, on the contrary, does Luke say that Judas did not hang himself before he fell to the ground; and unless the writers affirm the reality of the events which they respectively mention in such a way as to assert or imply that if the one event be true the other must be false, it is obvious that they do not contradict each other. Of the precise relation of the two events in question to each other we have no information, and can affirm nothing with certainty. Some intermediate circumstance connected the one with the other as parts of the same transaction, but that circumstance has not been recorded. It is conjectured that Judas may have hung himself on the edge of a precipice near the valley of Hinnom, and that the rope breaking by which he was suspended, he fell to the earth and was .dashed to pieces. As I stood in this valley, and looked up to the rocky heights which span over it on the south side of Jerusalem, I felt that the proposed explanation was a perfectly natural one; I was more than ever satisfied with it. I measured the precipitous, almost perpendicular walls, in different places, and found the height to be variously forty, thirty-six, thirty-three, thirty, and twenty-five feet. At the bottom of these precipices are rocky ledges, on which a person would fall from above, and in that case not only would life be destroyed, but the body almost inevitably bruised and mangled. (H. B. Hackett, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death: |
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