In my experience, most people don’t realize that there are two different accounts of Judas’s death in the New Testament, let alone that these two are very difficult indeed to reconcile with one another.  Virtually impossible, I would say.  But even more people don’t know that there are accounts of Judas’s death from *outside* the New Testament in other sources.  One of these two almost *nobody* knows about, except for a few specialist scholars.

The first account comes to us from Papias, a proto-orthodox church author who wrote a five- volume book called An Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord in about 120-130 CE (it is hard to know exactly when) This must have been a very large book indeed (five volumes!) and to our very great regret, it has been lost.  We don’t have it.  All we have are snippets of quotations from it by later church fathers, starting with Irenaeus (around 180 CE) and especially the church historian Eusebius (early fourth century).

We aren’t sure why exactly the book was not copied for posterity.  My guess is that most readers didn’t much like it.  The later church fathers didn’t think highly of Papias, in part, it appears, because he held to a literal understanding of what would happen at the end of time, that there would be literally a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth.  This is a view called Chiliasm, and it was rejected by later church fathers who realized that in fact the end was not coming “soon” with a literal return of Jesus from heaven to set up a kingdom here on earth.   Anyone who thought so was a theological simpleton.

But Papias whole-heartedly advanced this view, and this may be why later writers (and scribes) thought his work was unsophisticated and possibly naïve.  Eusebius at one point says that Papias was a “man of very little intelligence.”  Not exactly an endorsement.

In any event, among the few quotations we have of Papias in later authors is one that deals with the death of Judas.  It doesn’t coincide  ….

If you can’t read the rest of this post, you’re missing out on all the interesting stuff.  So why not join the blog?  You get at least five posts a week for a grand weekly total of less than fifty cents.  Fantastic value.  And every one of those cents goes to charity!