Day 23
CHALLENGE
“Matthew and Luke contradict each other. Matthew says that the Jewish priests bought the field of blood (Matt. 27:7–8), whereas Luke says that Judas Iscariot did (Acts 1:18–19).”
DEFENSE
Matthew and Luke are in fundamental agreement, and there are many ways the different attributions can be explained. Both authors agree that Judas Iscariot’s betrayal led to a field in the area of Jerusalem becoming known as the field of blood. Both also say that this field was paid for with the money that the chief priests had given Judas to betray Jesus. Both are thus agreed about the basic facts. How, then, can we account for the different way the two authors describe the purchase of the field? One proposal is that the reference in Acts (“Now this man bought a field with the reward of his wickedness”) is meant to be ironic rather than literal. It occurs in a speech that Peter is making, and it has been suggested that Peter merely meant that Judas got his just deserts. The money he originally meant to spend on himself ended up paying for a graveyard. This is possible, but as we observe elsewhere (see Day 124), the biblical authors sometimes omit the agents who perform an action in order to bring out the significance of the principal figures with respect to whom the action is performed. Thus we read that Moses built the tabernacle (2 Chron. 1:3) and Solomon built the temple (1 Kings 6:1–38), though in reality both were built by workmen acting on the leaders’ behalf (Exod. 38:22–23; 1 Kings 7:13–45). Sometimes the agents get mentioned and sometimes they don’t. It is therefore possible that Matthew chose to mention the role of the priests: They were the agents who actually bought the field. By contrast, Luke wants to bring out the significance of the fact that it was Judas’s money, without going into the mechanics of how the transaction was made. He thus omitted reference to the priests and only mentioned Judas. Or this choice may have been made by someone earlier in the chain of tradition than Luke, who simply reported the tradition as he had it. Either way, it would be in keeping with the known practice of omitting agents to bring out the significance of the principals.