NEW TESTAMENT CONTEXTUAL COMMENTARY

by Dr. Robert R. Seyda

GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Part III

One can only imagine the horror and grief felt by Judas once he realized he had betrayed the Son of God. As we can see, it proved too much for him to handle. Instead of running to Jesus and asking forgiveness, or weeping in repentance as Peter did, he repeated what another betrayer of our Lord’s royal ancestor, king David. After trying, but failing, to turn the people against him so that his son Absalom could take over, we read: “When Ahithophel saw that the Israelites did not do what he suggested, he saddled his donkey and went back to his hometown. He made plans for his family and then hanged himself.”¹

Jewish scholars have a particular take on those who slander or do something to betray another, and how it affects them. In one document, the Rabbis’ ask: “Why does this affliction commence in the bowels and end up in the throat?”² And on another occasion, some Rabbis were discussing what happened to thousands of disciples of Rabbi Akiba who did not treat each other with respect. Rabbi Hiyya ben Abin told them, “All of them died a cruel death.” So they asked what kind of death? Rabbi Nahman told them that they all choked to death.³ In other words, they were hanged. I can only imagine that the hardest part of being strangled by a rope comes when one is no longer able to breathe and call for help.

So in their minds, Judas Iscariot died the worst kind of death because he strangled himself by hanging. But before he did this, he tried to compensate for his sinful betrayal by throwing the bribe money back at the leading priests. Were they then convicted of what they had done? There is no evidence that they felt any shame. After all, their intent was to ruin one man’s life, now they saw that they had ruined two. But it doesn’t seem to have bothered them. In fact, they told Judas that it was now his problem, not theirs.

Verse 6: The leading priests picked up the silver coins off the Temple floor. They said, “Our law does not allow us to keep this money with the Temple money because this money has paid for a man’s death.”

Obviously, the leading priests were quoting a verbal tradition that forbid them from accepting bribe money as an offering, even though it was their money, to begin with. But their claim was based on not mixing this tainted money with the money in the holy treasury which was called the Korban.⁴ As a matter of fact, Flavius Josephus tells us that when Pilate used money from this sacred treasury to build aqueducts to bring water into the city from some 400 furlongs⁵ away, the people were so upset that they rioted and ended up with many of them beaten and trampled to death.

So by refusing to take the money that Judas returned, we see the unbelievable hypocrisy of these leading priests. The very money paid by them to initiate this hideous act was now seven times more repulsive than putting blood money into the temple treasury. Yet, while they greedily and unashamedly plotted the death of the Son of God, they piously and sanctimoniously refused to violate the Temple or its traditional laws. But they had an, even more, sinister motive in refusing this refund. Should their act of bringing Jesus to trial backfire and the people rise up in His support, they wanted to be able to declare their innocence of any involvement in His arrest and torture. So instead, they invested the bribe money in real estate.

Chrysostom had something to say about their actions. He writes: “If they had put the blood money into the treasury, their deed might have remained relatively more hidden. But the religious leaders make clear their guilt to all subsequent generations by buying the piece of land for burial. They thereby unconsciously declare their guilt. So do not imagine that someone might do a good work through murder and use the reward for some supposed good purpose. Such alms are satanic. Such reasoning is twisted. Do not be naive about this. There are still many who imagine that they are permitted to violently take countless things that belong to others. Then they make an excuse for their violence if they give some ten or a hundred gold pieces to charity. Of these the prophet has said, ‘You have covered my altar with tears.’⁶ Christ is not willing to be fed by covetousness. He does not accept these gifts. Why do you insult your Lord by offering these unclean things? It is better to leave people to pine with hunger than to feed them from these polluted sources.”⁷

And Origen offers his insights: “Because the quality of resting places for the dead varies (for many are buried in their ancestral tombs which were secured by a pledge, but those who suffer misfortune are often buried in the graves of the homeless), those who received payment in exchange for the blood of Jesus used it to acquire a potter’s field for the purpose of having a place in which to bury those foreigners who could not supply a pledge to secure a proper tomb. If it is suitable to interpret these foreigners typologically, we can consider those persons to be foreigners who remained strangers to God until the end and alien to His covenants. Vagabonds such as these meet their end buried in a potter’s field acquired with blood money. The righteous are able to say, ‘We are buried with Christ in a new tomb cut from the rock in which no dead body had yet been laid,’ but those foreigners who remain finally estranged from Christ and alien to God will have to say, ‘We are buried with strangers in the field which is called the “Field of Blood.’”⁸

Verses 7-8: So they decided to use the money to buy a field called Potter’s Field. This field would be a place to bury people who died while visiting in Jerusalem. That is why that field is still called the Field of Blood.

Matthew says that this piece of land became known as Potter’s Field, known in Aramaic as “Aceldama or Hakeldama,” meaning “Field of blood.” In fact, one early Church scholar reported that while living in Bethlehem in 386 AD, such a field was pointed out as existing on the south side of Mount Zion in the infamous Hinnom Valley that became a symbol of hell.⁹ We also see that Matthew links the purchase of this field with 30 pieces of silver to a saying by the prophet Jeremiah.

Verses 9-10: This showed the full meaning of what Jeremiah the prophet said: “They took 30 silver coins. That was how much the people of Israel decided to pay for his life. They used those 30 silver coins to buy the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.”

While there is certainly a mention of the LORD saying: “Jeremiah, go and buy a clay jar from a potter,”¹⁰ and also a plea for Jeremiah to buy the field of his uncle, Hanamel ben Shallum,¹¹ there is no mention of 30 pieces of silver. However, there is a remark about 30 pieces of silver being thrown into the Temple treasury, but it does not involve buying a field.¹²

Some scholars try to explain it this way: “The words here quoted are not found in Jeremiah, but in Zechariah; and a variety of conjectures have been formed, in order to reconcile this discrepancy. The most probable opinion seems to be, that the name of the prophet was originally omitted by the Evangelist, and that the name of Jeremiah was added by some subsequent copyist. It is omitted in two MSS. of the twelfth century, in the Syriac, later Aramaic, two of the Italian, and in some other Latin copies.”

By removing the name, it then allows for this quote by Matthew to be ascribed to Zechariah. On the other hand, St. Jerome reports that when reading an apocryphal work, contributed to the prophet Jeremiah, which was shown to him by a Nazarene sect, he did read about Jeremiah buying a potter’s field for 30 pieces of silver. Another argument is that in the early coalition of the Old Testament documents, they were not identified in the same way then as now. For instance, 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings were once one book. In fact, Jewish Rabbis taught: “The order of the Prophets is, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the Twelve Minor Prophets.”¹³ But, because of Judas Iscariot’s chosen end, this becomes only an asterisk in the real story of what happens next.