Death comes to all humans, irrespective of who you are, whether righteous or sinful, a believer or an unbeliever, etc. But some die with honor and some, with dishonor. One dishonorable death we can mention in the Bible is the death of Judas Iscariot, the one-time disciple who betrayed Jesus Christ for thirty silver pieces. This is what the Bible says about his death:
- According to Matthew: And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself (Mt 27:5).
- According to Luke: Now this man (Judas Iscariot) purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out (Acts 1:18).
Two people, Matthew and Luke, were involved in producing an account of Judas Iscariot’s death and their accounts differ from each other. Matthew’s account tells us that Judas Iscariot hanged himself, making his death a suicide. Whereas Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, said Judas Iscariot fell headlong and all his bowels gushed out to his death. Hence, Luke described Judas Iscariot’s death in a way that makes it look like it happened by accident. The same Judas Iscariot cannot die twice at the same time. Any Bible reader would be wondering, “Which of the two accounts is true, Matthew’s or Luke’s?”
Since the Bible is inspired by God and is trustworthy, we can be sure that none of these inspired men was wrong. Both accounts were true about Judas Iscariot; it happened that he hanged himself and also fell headlong. The problem is how to connect these two accounts, Matthew’s and Luke’s.
After Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus and saw that Jesus had been condemned to death and nothing could be done about it, he was seized with guilt, regret, self-judgment, and self-condemnation, he went to tie a rope to a tree, then tied the rope into a noose, then put his head in the noose, and hanged himself with it. And his dead body remained hanging by the rope, swinging left and right in the hot Mideast sun.
Research shows that the human body begins to decompose four minutes after death. So not long after Judas Iscariot died, as it happens to all corpses, his dead body began to rot. First of all, his internal organs began to decompose by the doings of enzymes and bacteria in the body. In the process of decomposition, the enzymes and bacteria produced gases that accumulated in his dead body and caused his dead body, especially his abdomen, to bloat significantly, probably, doubling in size.
While hanging and swinging, his weight caused the rope to give way, then his body fell headlong to the ground, then his bloated abdomen burst, and then all his bowels gushed out as was described in Acts. While Matthew’s account described Judas Iscariot’s death as suicide by hanging, Luke focused on what happened to his corpse after he had committed suicide.