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Four Accounts That Do Not Agree

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Four Accounts That Do Not Agree

The betrayal is in all four Gospels and in Paul's account of the last supper, and almost every detail beyond the bare fact varies.

Mark, the earliest, gives no motive at all: Judas goes to the chief priests, they are glad and promise him money, no sum is named. Matthew has him ask what they will give and names thirty pieces of silver, a figure taken from Zechariah 11:12-13, where it is the contemptuous price of a shepherd. Luke and John both say Satan entered him, which is a theological explanation rather than a human one, and John adds separately that he was a thief who helped himself to the common purse. That last charge appears nowhere else and reads as later hostility.

The deaths are irreconcilable. Matthew has him throw the money into the temple, go out and hang himself, with the priests buying a potter's field with the returned silver. Acts has him buy a field with the money himself and fall headlong in it so that he burst open. These are not two angles on one event; they are two stories that share only a field and a bad end. A third, preserved by the second-century writer Papias and quoted later, has him swell to monstrous size and die of it.

Even the betrayal's content is unclear. What did Judas actually supply that the authorities lacked? Jesus taught publicly in the temple and was widely recognised. The usual answers, a place to arrest him away from crowds, or an identification in the dark, are inferences, not statements in the text.

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