He hanged himself.
Cited passages
Then Judas, who betrayed him, when he saw that Jesus was condemned, felt remorse, and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, “I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent blood.” But they said, “What is that to us? You see to it.” He threw down the pieces of silver in the sanctuary, and departed. He went away and hanged himself. The chief priests took the pieces of silver, and said, “It’s not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is the price of blood.” They took counsel, and bought the potter’s field with them, to bury strangers in. Therefore that field was called “The Field of Blood” to this day. Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled, saying, “They took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him upon whom a price had been set, whom some of the children of Israel priced, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.”
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The two New Testament notices of Judas's death describe incompatible mechanisms. Matthew 27:5 reports that Judas, seized with remorse, returned the silver, flung it into the temple, departed, and 'hanged himself' (apēnxato, the same verb used in the Septuagint of Ahithophel's suicide in 2 Samuel 17:23). Acts 1:18 reports that 'falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out' (prēnēs genomenos elakēsen mesos kai exechythē panta ta splanchna autou). Matthew gives a hanging and no fall; Acts gives a fall and rupture with no rope.
The classic harmonization, defended by Gleason Archer and by Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe in When Critics Ask, combines the two: Judas hanged himself, the rope or branch later gave way, and the bloated corpse fell and split open on the rocks below. The medical plausibility is real — a body left hanging in a warm climate undergoes putrefaction and gas accumulation within days, and a fall onto rough ground could rupture the distended abdominal wall. The steel-man here is that the two reports are partial, each preserving a phase of a single event. The objection is textual rather than physiological: neither author writes the composite. Matthew narrates a completed suicide and moves on to the priests; nothing in his text anticipates a later fall. Acts narrates a fall and rupture as the death itself and gives no hint of a prior hanging. To run the harmonization one must import the rope into Acts and the fall into Matthew, supplying from each text precisely the element the other omits. The Greek prēnēs genomenos ('falling headlong / face-forward,' or on a minority lexical reading 'swelling up') reads as the cause of death, not as the post-mortem sequel to a hanging.
The accounts also diverge on the agent of the field's purchase and on why it is called the field of blood — a related contradiction treated separately — which signals that these are not two halves of one report but two independent traditions, each an etiology for the Jerusalem place name Hakeldama. Raymond Brown's Death of the Messiah sets the traditions side by side and concludes they developed independently to explain a known field and to satisfy the theological expectation that the betrayer meet a fitting end. The two obituaries are theologically shaped in different directions. Matthew models Judas on the archetypal traitor Ahithophel, David's counselor who betrayed him and then hanged himself (2 Sam 17:23), reinforcing the typology of treachery within the inner circle. Acts deploys the genre of the gruesome divine-judgment death, whose closest scriptural and intertestamental analogues are the bowel-bursting ends of Antiochus IV in 2 Maccabees 9:7-12 and of Herod Agrippa I in Acts 12:23 (eaten of worms) — the wicked persecutor undone from within. A third early tradition, preserved by Papias (in Apollinaris's quotation), has Judas swell to monstrous size and die crushed in his own bulk, neither cleanly hanged nor cleanly fallen, confirming that the early church carried multiple incompatible accounts.
The fork is therefore stark. The harmonizer must graft details across two texts that each present a self-sufficient and different mode of death, against the grain of the Greek of Acts 1:18; or one accepts that primitive Christianity had no single settled account of how Judas died, only the shared conviction that he died badly and that a Jerusalem field bore the name 'of blood.'
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction reflecting two independent etiological traditions.
Sources for this reading