Acts 1:18

18. Purchased a field He did not purchase the field in his own person, nor intentionally. He did it through the priests, by setting agoing the causes by which it became purchased. He hoped to enrich himself; he only bought a burial-ground for refugees like himself. So often our human thought attributes an effect back to an earlier cause or agent. So Joseph “laid the body of Christ” in the tomb through others’ hands. Matthew 27:60.

(See note on John 4:2.)

Burst asunder Matthew says that Judas went and hanged himself. Luke here adds that he also fell, burst asunder, and his bowels gushed out. It is impossible for objectors to make out any contradiction here, for all the circumstances may be true of the same person as successive items in the same event. Judas may have hung himself on some dizzy precipice, and the rope breaking may have let him fall, breaking himself asunder on some projecting point of rock and crushing him at bottom by the force of his fall. No one can say this was the method; but this hypothesis, at least, shows that there is no impossibility for both accounts to be true. (See notes on Matthew 27:5-8.) But, it is asked, Why does each omit what the other states, precisely as if he knew nothing of it? Matthew, we answer, like a rapid historian, intends only to mark his death by suicide; Luke, whose account evidently intends to be incomplete, presupposing an abundance of circumstances he does not narrate, is painting those opprobrious points in the traitor’s death which indicate the Divine abhorrence of his wickedness.