“I would like to know a single case in history where somebody was hanged and he died by going headfirst and his guts opened up”, Prof. Ehrman said in a 2019 debate with Peter Williams called ** you do not have permission to see this link ** at 48:45.
The discussion was about the contradiction of Judas’ death. Matthew 27:5 says that he hanged himself, but Acts 1:18 says that he fell headlong bursting in the middle with his bowels gushing out. But did he? Does the Greek text say he fell headlong, or fell face down? I argue the latter.
Why is this important? The two accounts can be explained by this story: Judas first hanged himself. Days later, after his body decomposed, fell face down, and decomposed as it was, there were some of his insides visible. Matthew records the hanging; Luke records the falling and bursting. But Prof. Ehrman’s argument hinges on the impossibility of a hanged person falling head first after the rope snap. But that’s not what the Greek says, i’m arguing. I’m arguing the Greek says that Judas fell face down, or prone.
The Greek word is πρηνής. The phrase is πρηνής γενόμενος, i.e., becoming πρηνής. Πρηνής means both ‘with the face downwards’ and ‘head-foremost’: or “leaning forward, with the face towards down, prone” and “inclined downward, towards down”.
For the first translation above i’m using ** you do not have permission to see this link ** page 824. Liddel & Scott say “with the face downward, head-foremost, Lat. prunus, opp. to ὕπτιος.” Stamatakos says “Lat. pronus. 1) One leaning forward (with the face down, prone). 2) inclined downward, towards down” (my translation).
** you do not have permission to see this link **. It translates πρηνής as ‘headlong’. It also gives some translations:
GRK: ἀδικίας καὶ πρηνὴς γενόμενος ἐλάκησεν
NAS: and falling headlong, he burst open
KJV: falling headlong, he burst asunder
INT: of unrighteousness and headlong having fallen burst
All of them headlong. But Liddel & Scott have headlong as their second meaning. Stamatakos doesn’t have it at all (as it is the case with modern Greek speakers, πρηνής is still a word in use to day and it never means headfirst, always laying face down, prone). Then why all English Bible translations, following in the footsteps of KJV, use ‘headlong’?
Here i will also give the translation from Ancient to Modern Greek of two very well respected Greek scholars. Trembelas translates πρηνής as “with the face towards the eartη”; ** you do not have permission to see this link ** as “with the face on the earth”.
It is very probable that Judas hanged himself and some days later decomposed and fell face down. But if you change this story to falling ** you do not have permission to see this link ** after hanging himself, it becomes highly improbable—how can one fall headfirst from a hanging position? Prof. Ehrman’s contradiction is not a contradiction if you translate πρηνής right.
In that case Acts is not actually relating the death of Judas. It describes his buying the field, then it skips to describe his decomposition, but skips the part where he does himself in. People don’t usually write that way.
If the suggested reading is what happened, it wouldn’t make sense for Acts to describe him falling and splitting open without mentioning hanging. He only fell and split open because he had already hanged himself and decomposed. It is sort of like when a kid says his little sister tripped on a stool and fell but fails to mention that she tripped and fell because he pushed her into the stool. People only narrate stories that way when they are trying not to communicate but to deceive.
I think an important question to ask is, would anyone read the account in Acts–in context, but without attempting to reconcile it to what other works say–and take it to describe a series of events that is consistent with what is being suggested here? If you just put Acts into someone’s hands and asked how it says Judas died, what would they say: He hanged himself? He threw himself off a cliff? The text doesn’t tell us anything about how he died?
Hi apolgies I know this isn’t probably the correct forum to ask this I just saw this was the most recently used forum so thought I was most likely to get an answer on this one (as could not find any others related to my question.) But was wondering if anyone knew if Bart’s view on whether Jesus claimed to be God is a popular scholarly view or is he like with the empty tomb (unless I’m wrong on that) in a scholarly minority when he says Jesus never claimed to be God?
The reason I ask is I’m doing an EPQ on “To what extent can the ressurection of Jesus be shown to be Historical fact” and for part of it I have to do a research review and one of the criteria is whether the three pieces of literature I am discussing in this review challenge or add to established knowledge although I’m not sure anything in New Testament scholarship is particularly “established” considering the plethora of views there are!
Robert said:
LS gives pronus as the Latin equivalent, not prunus.
Indeed, it’s a typo. Same root as for the English prone.
Robert said:
I don’t disagree with you about the meaning of πρηνής, and I suspect Bart would not either
But this was the crux of his argument. How can a person hang himself and then fall headfirst. That’s why i’m saying that Bart’s argument doesn’t hold with the right translation of πρηνής. So i don’t know if he would agree with the new translation option, but as it stands now, the old translation is what he uses to show how implausible this is.
Robert said:
The larger issue is that Luke simply does not mention Judas hanging himself or the priests buying the field with blood money as an aetiological etymology for the name of the field. Instead Luke has Judas buying the field and gives a completely different aetiological etymology for the name of the field. If you want to reconcile Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts start with those glaring differences, rather than just assume that Luke is also thinking of a hanging without mentioning it and only describing the disposition of the body following Judas hanging himself.
I’m not sure it’s a larger issue, but it’s a different issue, for sure. Here i was examining if a contradiction is not a contradiction anymore if one translates correctly.
However, why can not both of the accounts involving money be true? Why can they not be different accounts? Thanks!
Porphyry said:
In that case Acts is not actually relating the death of Judas. It describes his buying the field, then it skips to describe his decomposition, but skips the part where he does himself in. People don’t usually write that way.If the suggested reading is what happened, it wouldn’t make sense for Acts to describe him falling and splitting open without mentioning hanging. He only fell and split open because he had already hanged himself and decomposed. It is sort of like when a kid says his little sister tripped on a stool and fell but fails to mention that she tripped and fell because he pushed her into the stool. People only narrate stories that way when they are trying not to communicate but to deceive.
I think an important question to ask is, would anyone read the account in Acts–in context, but without attempting to reconcile it to what other works say–and take it to describe a series of events that is consistent with what is being suggested here? If you just put Acts into someone’s hands and asked how it says Judas died, what would they say: He hanged himself? He threw himself off a cliff? The text doesn’t tell us anything about how he died?
I’m not sure i follow. Are you suggesting there is no contradiction between Mt and Ac? Prof. Ehrman seems to think so.
What i’m wondering is if a contradiction ceases to exist with the right translation. Not sure how to fit the above into this question. Any help appreciated.
I doubt the story of Judas is historical. It’s too “neat” for one thing. It’s the sort of comeuppance one only gets in stories.
Historical or no, note that it does serve to provide cover for the rest of the disciples who abandoned Jesus to the authorities. And it plays right into Mark’s theme of the unreliable disciples.
What I mean to say is that you are, effectively, replacing the actual context of the statement (that is, the book of Acts, esp, 1:15-26) with context drawn from entirely different works (in this case Matthew), and, based on that new context, you are interpreting the statement to say something no one would understand it to say read on its own in its original context (i.e., within the work that the statement appeared in).
What you are doing in this case is very similar to what defenders of inerrancy do when they mash the several different accounts together: they take each statement that each book makes as a discrete utterance, and then put them all together and try to interpret them all together in that new context so that none contradicts the others. What they generally end up with–in trying thus to harmonize them–is a sequence of events that none of the original books could plausibly have meant to describe.
So in this case, you want to take the ‘prenes geneomenos’ to describe a hanged corpse falling out of a noose after it has rotted (on the basis not of anything in Luke but of Matthew’s statement that Judas hanged himself), but no one reading Acts on its own would think this passages is describing a hanged corpse falling out of a tree–nothing in the text suggests that. If that is what Luke meant to describe here, he chose a very strange (even downright misleading) way to describe it.
Individual utterances in natural language usually have a tremendous amount of ambiguity; those ambiguities are usually resolved by context and a sense of style (e.g., “just looking at the rule of grammar and the dictionary definitions, the sentence could mean x, but still no competent author would have written this sentence in this context if that is what he was trying to say”). This is how advocates of inerrancy often try to escape contradictions: before two sentences can contradict one another, we need first to interpret them to know what precisely each actually asserted; but if an inerrantist is willing to entertain sufficiently implausible interpretations, he will never have to acknowledge an actual contradiction. The irony of this approach is that while it may save the two texts from contradicting one another, you have to say that the authors were so bad at expressing themselves that you can’t understand even the plain narrative sense of what each of them wrote if you just read his account alone. If you are willing to say the books don’t mean what they seem to mean you can avoid all contradictions. But then you are left with inerrant books that don’t mean what they seem to mean.
Porphyry said:
What I mean to say is that you are, effectively, replacing the actual context of the statement (that is, the book of Acts, esp, 1:15-26) with context drawn from entirely different works (in this case Matthew), and, based on that new context, you are interpreting the statement to say something no one would understand it to say read on its own in its original context (i.e., within the work that the statement appeared in).
Let’s remember why we are discussing this: Prof. Ehrman used this as an example of a contradiction. I claim (maybe erroneously, this is what i’m hoping to hear arguments for or against) that it is not a contradiction if we translate with what i claim to be a better translation.
For a contradiction to exist, it means that there are two accounts that cannot be reconciled. There must also be an event that the two accounts refer to. So, I don’t think that i’m replacing one context for another, i’m using both contexts at the same time, hoping that they both fit the event. So, one needs to reconstruct the event so the event explains both accounts. Now, if there is no event that can fit both accounts within it, then we can conclude that the two accounts are indeed contradictory and there is no story to reconcile them.
As an example, consider this event: A man hangs himself. Days later, he decomposes, the flesh that holds his neck gives, and the corpse falls down (happens to fall face down). Forty-five years later, source A says that a man hanged himself. Around the same time, source B, also relying on oral traditions of this event, says that the man fell face down.
If this is the case, i have no problem whatsoever putting together sources A and B. I’m not replacing one for the other. I’m using all the information i can get my hands on to reconstruct the original event.
Not only am i not concerned that a person reading source A would not understand it in the context of source B (of course they wouldn’t, how could they know what another source says unless they know it!), i feel that using both sources gets me closer to the real event. It is a desirable thing to use all data available to you to construct a model that fits reality.
Now, if we’ve been using a mistranslation of what happened, and we require that the story fits an original event that wants a person falling to go headfirst (instead of just falling face down), then the mistranslation is impeding us from reconstructing the original event.
If read as greco-Roman literature, artfully reusing the Hebrew Bible, the two deaths different deaths fall into your lap. There is no need to reconcile. These are two different authors embellishing a mythological account, each to his own end. If you are curious as to this way of interpretation, read on, otherwise this will be no help to solving the Greek roots of exactly what happened to Judas’s body.
In the Bible I could find only one other false kiss, when Joab feigns a greeting kiss for Amasa, the former commander of the army of the Son of David (Absalom).
2 Samuel 20:9-12 Joab said to Amasa, “Is it well with you, my brother?” And Joab took Amasa by the beard with his right hand to kiss him. But Amasa did not notice the sword in Joab’s hand; Joab struck him in the belly so that his entrails poured out on the ground, and he died. He did not strike a second blow. And one of Joab’s men took his stand by Amasa and said, “Whoever favors Joab, and whoever is for David, let him follow Joab.” Amasa lay wallowing in his blood on the highway, and the man saw that all the people were stopping. Since he saw that all who came by him were stopping, he carried Amasa from the highway into a field and threw a garment over him.
There are dozens of what I think are strong similarities between the uprising of the Son of David (Absalom) and the gospels stories of Jesus Christ, showing that the gospel writers were mining the Absalom story for the Jesus Christ narrative. Here we will focus only on a few that are important to the theme of Judas. Mark is what is being built upon here. He has the false kiss that Judas betrays (exposes?) Jesus. Other factors include the offer of money to the one who betrays the Son of David (and Jesus). The offer in both cases comes after the exposure or agreement to betray.
Mark 14:10 Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. 11 When they heard it, they were greatly pleased and promised to give him money. So he began to look for an opportunity to betray him.
2 Samuel 18:10 And a certain man saw it and told Joab, “Behold, I saw Absalom hanging in an oak.” 11 Joab said to the man who told him, “What, you saw him! Why then did you not strike him there to the ground? I would have been glad to give you ten pieces of silver and a belt.”
You may object that the characters Amasa and Judas are not nearly the same, and this is true (though you could say both were traitors to Israel as a whole, I guess). What the gospel writers are doing is taking recognizable aspects of the Absalom rebellion and reusing them for their own story. Luke, with his portrayal of Judas bursting open in the field, is not comparing Amasa and Judas precisely, but using aspects of both stories to create a new story. And the Son of David (Absalom) is only one story that is being used from the Hebrew Bible to concoct the Jesus of Nazareth storyline, the field seems to combine Jeremiah (also a strong basis for Jesus of Nazareth) and Zechariah 11:12-13.
So far we have Mark hinting at the Absalom story, and Luke using one element of that story to describe how Judas died. Notice that there are no other stories where someone is gutted in the bible, just these two.
Likewise there are only two examples of someone hanging themselves: Judas and Ahithophel. (Though a relative of Tobit thinks about doing it but changes her mind.)
2 Samuel 17:23 When Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his donkey and went off home to his own city. He set his house in order and hanged himself, and he died and was buried in the tomb of his father.
Who is Ahithophel? He is Absalom’s chief counselor. His advice is to pursue David fiercely, cutting off the leader and thus saving the massive war and many casualties that would occur. The theme of weighing one death for the good of many runs strong throughout this storyline in the OT. Ahithophel here encourages a strategy to spare needless deaths. Joab killed Amasa in pursuit of a rebel Sheba who is holed up in a walled town. The leader of the town, appropriately a woman as the town is Abel-Beth Maacah, throws the head of Sheba the rebel over the town wall to spare the town’s destruction. Likewise David is rebuked for grieving the death of Absalom as if it were more important than the deaths of thousands. This is an apt storyline for the basis of Jesus of NAzareth, if his death is at all a sacrifice of one for many.
At any rate Ahithophel and Amasa, two traitors who worked for the Son of David, each died in a way that was used by gospel authors to describe the death of Judas. These types of death, hanging and gutting, are described only once each and are found in the story of Absalom, which is heavily mined for elements of the story of Jesus of Nazareth. This explanation of why the two writers could contradict each other (that they were writing useful fiction) fits the data much better than the idea that each one was working hard to write down the details of a historical Jesus.
Porphyry said:
Do you think that the author Luke-Acts believed that Judas died of hanging?
Personally, i don’t think he knew, no. But that’s irrelevant to my initial post and also irrelevant to if we should pay attention to what he says.
Let me put this another way. A detective is tying to solve a crime. Of course, the detective himself was not there when the crime was taking place. But he was lucky enough to get two sources of the crime event. None of them was an eyewitness, they both related information based on what they heard from people who heard. The accounts are not contradictory. The detective has several options now: dismiss both; choose A, and declare B false; choose B, and declare A false; use both. I’m using both, since they do not contradict each other (for this specific element of the story i’m talking about here, and not the purchase of the lot or other elements).
But wait! If you mistranslate them, they do contradict. This is the purpose of this post. All English translations say that Judas fell headlong. I disagree. What is your opinion based on the evidence i cited on the first post?
I’m imagining someone advising the detecting not to use both witnesses because he is ‘replacing one context for the other story’s context’. However, two independent data points are better than a single datum.
You also made a comment about those who believe in Biblical inerrancy. I’m not one of those, nor do i label people i don’t know. Here i made very specific claims about Prof. Ehrman’s question to Williams and pointed out a possible mistranslation. This is the purpose of this post. I like to delineate complex issues and discussing a piece at a time, otherwise it gets too complicated.
Would you acknowledge that the narrative purpose of the parenthetical in v. 18 is to explain that Judas is dead thus providing the occasion for Peter’s suggesting that they replace him?
Sure, i acknowledge that. But what does that have to do with if πρηνής means falling headlong instead of face down?
Thanks for your reply!
If you mistranslate them, they do contradict. This is the purpose of this post. All English translations say that Judas fell headlong. I disagree. What is your opinion based on the evidence i cited on the first post?
But what does that have to do with if πρηνής means falling headlong instead of face down?
I don’t see how it makes any significant difference to the issue of whether they contradict each other.
Case one: Envision someone falling out of a noose because his neck has rotted. For one thing, I’m not sure whether head-first or face-down means much, since presumably he is now decapitated, so the orientation of his head and face have little to do with the orientation of the rest of him, and in either event the detail seems simply bizarre and irrelevant in that scenario: “his neck rotted, his head popped off, and he fell prone/headfirst and split open”. I’m not sure what the detail means in this scenario (is it describing the orientation of the head or the body, or perhaps the relative position of the separated head to the headless corpse as they fell) and including the detail is just strange (who cares which way the rotted parts of his dismembered body were facing in the moment that they fell before splitting open? And unless someone was there to watch it fall apart, who would even know?).
Case two: he threw himself to his death. In this case, whether he fell head pointed down (and was oriented vertically and upside down) or simply face oriented down (so that he was prone and laid out horizontally) doesn’t really change the sense of the passage. A person deliberately jumping and trying to preserve his life will jump so that he lands feet first. So if you take the passage to say that he jumped deliberately, the detail that he jumped either head down or face down means that he dove off (either a shallow dive or a deep dive), and so in either case, the detail emphasizes that he was trying to harm himself: this was an act of extreme desperation because there is a really strong instinct, which he must have overcome, to jump from a high place feet first. That is exactly the sense that the English “headlong” captures: he threw himself off with outright scorn for his well-being.
So the precise issue of what “prenes” means–head first or face down–doesn’t seem to me to change anything significant. I don’t see how it changes the plausibility of either interpretation. To me the more obvious issue is why would anyone think that Luke is describing how he decomposed rather than describing how he died?
Insofar as you are trying to determine whether the passages are contradictory, I think prenes is a side issue. The real issue is whether both mean to describe how Judas died; that is the crux of your resolution. And I think the interpretation that says he was already long dead when he fell prenes is unnatural.
Robert said:
How do you imagine both stories being true? First the high priests bought the field, then Judas bought it from the high priests, and only then hung himself? Or did Judas buy the field first and then the high priests bought the field from Judas, and Judas took the money from the sale of the land to the high priests and only then gave it back to the high priests? And which explanation for the origin of the name of the field is true? Perhaps both were alternative aetiological etymologies made up by different people? Then neither is authoritative. Better to simply try and understand each account on it’s own terms rather than assume they are both true in all of their conflicting details and try and combine conflicting stories.
Why is it impossible that the money Judas used to buy this plot was from the money he was stealing as a treasurer? That will make both stories true: One story is that he threw the money back onto the temple’s floor; the other story is that he used the money he stole in another occasion.
The story he was a thief is reported in John 12:6. Remember, Acts 1:18 says that Judas bought the field with the price of his wickedness. The Greek uses ἐκ μισθοῦ τῆς ἀδικίας, lit. meaning ‘from the wages of the injustice’, that is, money taken unjustly, stealing.
However, this deserves its own post separately. We are mixing many elements here, which are indeed interconnected naturally, but talking about them all at the same time makes for a very complex discussion.
Let me be sure I’m understanding your proposed harmonization:
1) Judas repents and gives the money back to the chief priest (Mt 27:3-5)
2) Judas takes other ill-gotten money (from theft?) and buys a plot of land (Acts 1:18)
3) Judas hangs himself (Mt 27:5) in the field (see 4)
4) Judas’s corpse rots and falls face down out of the noose and breaks open (Acts 1:18), giving the field its name.
5) The chief priest, not being able to put the blood money into the treasury, takes the money he had returned and bought the field he killed himself on and made it into a graveyard for the indigent (mt. 27:6-8)–reinforcing the name.
BDEhrman
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Robert