HistoricalChristian.Faith

Matthew’s priests and Acts’ Judas: one purchase, one name

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: plausible — Acts does not say Judas bought the field, and it does not say why the field is called the field of blood. Ektēsato means “acquired, got,” not “purchased”; and where Matthew gives a cause for the name (“wherefore that field was called…”), Acts gives only a result — the affair became known, so that the field was called Akeldama — leaving the reason unstated. Read that way the two notices describe one plot, one transaction, and one name, with Matthew supplying the explanation Acts withholds. It falls short of settled because Acts on its own never links blood to that ground except through Judas’s death, because the earliest commentators on Acts read it exactly so, and because most critical scholarship takes the two verses as independent popular etymologies of a genuine Jerusalem place-name.

Related arguments: the two accounts of Judas’s end — see also Matthew’s hanging and Acts’ bursting: one death, told twice · Matthew’s repentant Judas and Acts’s silence; and, on the site rather than the text, Aceldama on the ground

The claim

[Matthew:] And they [the chief priests] took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day… [Acts:] Now this man [Judas] purchased a field with the reward of iniquity… and it was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem; insomuch as that field is called in their proper tongue, Aceldama, that is to say, The field of blood.

— Matthew 27:7–8 and Acts 1:18–19. The reading weighed here is that these are two notices about one plot of ground — one purchase, made with Judas’s betrayal-money and so reckoned his, and one name, whose reason Matthew states and Acts leaves unsaid — and not two rival stories about who bought what and why it was called what it was.¹

What can be said for it

Acts does not say Judas bought anything. The verb is ektēsato, aorist of ktaomai, and the standard lexicon of classical Greek never glosses it “buy.” Its senses are “procure for oneself, get, acquire,” and, in a branch that matters here, “bring upon oneself, incur” — one may ktaomai a death, a calamity, a reputation for impiety. Luke uses it four other times and not once of a cash purchase: the disciples are to ktaomai their souls (Luke 21:19), the Pharisee tithes all he ktaomai’s, meaning his income (Luke 18:12), and Claudius Lysias “with a great sum obtained” Roman citizenship through intermediaries (Acts 22:28). The price in Acts 1:18 is carried by the prepositional phrase — ek misthou tēs adikias, out of the wages of unrighteousness — not by the verb. Ellicott puts it flatly: “Better, acquired, got possession of, a field, the Greek not necessarily including the idea of buying.” So the two texts are not, on their face, saying different things about who handed over money; Matthew says who transacted, and Acts says whose the acquisition was.²

Acts gives no reason for the name. This is the load-bearing point, and it is grammatical. Matthew explains the name with a causal connective: dio, “for this reason that field has been called the field of blood to this day” — and the reason he has just given is that the silver was “the price of blood.” Acts uses hōste, which introduces a result, and its main clause has no expressed subject at all: kai gnōston egeneto pasi tois katoikousin Ierousalēm, hōste klēthēnai to chōrion ekeino… — “and [it] became known to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, with the result that that field was called Akeldama.” What became known, Luke does not say; that the field came to bear the name is the consequence, not the explanation. Bengel refers the unexpressed subject to the opening of the previous verse — the acquisition out of the wages of iniquity, which is precisely Matthew’s ground; Meyer refers it to the whole verse; Gill to the whole affair, betrayal, price, field and death together. On none of these readings does Acts assert a second etymology. It is the reader who supplies one. And once that is seen, the older exegetes’ question is not a dodge but the obvious one — Knowling: “It is true that the two accounts in St. Matthew and St. Luke give two reasons for the name Field of Blood. But why should there not be two reasons?”; Hackett: “the ill-omened name could be used with a double emphasis.”³

The reading is the ancient one, and it is continuous. Reconciling the buyer is not a modern expedient. Chrysostom, preaching on Acts about 400, states it as a matter of ordinary equity: “And the field may well be called his. For he who cast down the price, although others were the buyers, has a right to be himself reckoned owner of a great desolation.” Gregory the Great, about 590, makes it a point of scriptural idiom, listing it beside Job’s “mine own clothes shall abhor me”:

For Judas never could have purchased the potter’s field, which was bought with the price of blood, in that restoring the thirty pieces of silver, he straightway punished the guilt of the betrayal by a death with greater guilt inflicted on himself, but ‘he purchased’ is rendered, he ‘was the cause of purchasing.’

Bede carries Gregory’s solution into his commentary on Acts, Job-parallel and all — “according to the manner of sacred speech, it is said he possessed what he caused to be possessed.” Oecumenius, in the Greek commentary tradition, poses the difficulty in so many words and answers it: “For he himself did not buy the field, but the priests, from the silver thrown down by him in the temple. Since, then, these things are the wage of Judas’ betrayal, the acquisition is also reckoned to him.” Theophylact repeats it as a rule of ownership: “the owner in fairness should be considered the one who put up the money, even if others made the purchase.” Five writers across seven centuries, Greek and Latin, and no one in the patristic record proposes that the two notices cannot be reconciled.⁴

Both writers are reporting a name already in use. Matthew’s “unto this day” and Acts’ “in their proper tongue” are the marks of a toponym in circulation, not of a coinage. The critical side concedes as much and more. Barrett, who denies that the accounts can be harmonized, judges that they share “knowledge of the existence in Jerusalem of a field called Blood Field, which had at some earlier stage come to be associated with Judas (for it is most unlikely that Matthew and Luke should both, independently, have made the association).” Bart Ehrman takes the name to be pre-Christian, attaching to a red-clay potters’ ground in Jerusalem. If a Judas-and-field tradition already stood behind both writers, the presumption shifts: two authors are drawing on one memory, and the burden lies on showing that they contradict rather than that they differ. The site itself is attested early — Eusebius points to Akeldama in the fourth century and Jerome places it on the southern slope below Mount Zion, where a strip of the Hinnom valley served as a burial ground for foreigners.⁵

What weighs against it

Acts, read alone, does not get to “blood” except through Judas. This is the serious objection, and August Klostermann framed it sharply in 1883: in Acts the middle term is missing — there is no blood-money, no blood-sale, no blood-betrayal in the verse. Luke says Judas acquired the field out of the wages of unrighteousness; if the name followed from the acquisition, the field should be the field of unrighteousness. What Acts does put on that ground is a ruptured body. So while Luke states no etymology, the only blood his own narrative supplies is Judas’s, and readers have taken it that way from the first. Chrysostom, the earliest surviving commentator on the verse, is explicit: “Now the Jews gave it this name, not on this account, but because of Judas.” Theophylact repeats him — the Jews named the village “on account of what happened with Judas.” The two-reasons reading is not, then, a case of a modern critic importing a distinction the ancients never felt; the ancients felt it, and the greatest of the Greek commentators resolved it by separating the two reasons and assigning them to different speakers, not by holding both.⁶

The name may not have meant “blood” at all. The best-attested Greek form of the Aramaic in Acts is Hakeldamach, with a final chi — so the earliest papyrus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and Vaticanus. Taken as it stands, that final consonant yields “field of thy blood,” which is impossible in a place-name. The usual answer is that the chi is an artefact of transliteration, on the analogy of Ben Sira appearing in Greek as Sirach. Klostermann proposed instead that it is radical: Aramaic dmk, “to sleep,” used of rest in the grave, would make Akeldama the “field of sleep” — a cemetery, exactly what Matthew says the plot was bought to be. On that reading both evangelists are explaining a name that never referred to blood at all, and the harmonization is reconciling two folk etymologies rather than recovering one true reason. The proposal is a minority one and the standard reference works reject it, but it is not fanciful, and it shows how thin the ground under any etymology here is.⁷

Three props usually offered for the harmony do not bear weight. (i) The “fiction of law.” It is often said that Jewish law required unlawfully gained money refused by the Temple to be restored to the donor, so that the field legally remained Judas’s purchase. This traces to Alfred Edersheim in 1883, who asserted it with no rabbinic citation; Vincent and the Pulpit Commentary copied it, Knowling and A. T. Robertson repeated it only as a possibility, and John Nolland reports that the rabbinic sources show no such interpretation. The nearest genuine texts — the ruling that a robber’s unclaimable gains go to public works, and the ruling that leftover burial funds go to the dead man’s heirs — are later and say something else. Nothing establishes that title accrued to Judas’s estate. (ii) The causative form. Several popular treatments claim the Greek of Acts 1:18 is grammatically causative, “caused to be purchased.” It is not: ektesato is the ordinary aorist middle, and ktaomai has no causative morphology. Whatever mediated force the word carries comes from idiom and context, which is enough, and the grammatical claim should be dropped. (iii) Two different fields. The proposal that Matthew’s agros and Acts’ chōrion are separate plots bought with different money is unnecessary and unsupported; Ellicott dismissed it in a line.⁸

And the weight of critical commentary is against it. Barrett, Zwiep, Lindars and Nellessen all read Matthew’s and Acts’ notices as independent developments around a shared place-name, with each author’s explanation shaped by the scriptural point he is making — Matthew toward the potter and the thirty pieces, Peter toward the desolate habitation of Psalm 69. Zwiep states the divergence in its usual form: in Matthew the name refers to the blood of Jesus, in Acts to the blood of Judas. Papias, within a generation or two, supplies a third account of why the ground was shunned — the stench of the swollen traitor left it uninhabited — which is what one expects of a notorious site that accumulates stories.⁶

Assessment

Plausible. Two questions, again, have to be kept apart. The popular apologetic case rests partly on props that fail: there is no documented Jewish law making the field Judas’s in title, there is no causative in the Greek, and there were not two fields. The interpretation those props were meant to serve does not need them. On the buyer the case is strong enough to be near settled: ektēsato does not mean “bought,” Luke never uses it of a cash purchase, and the reading that Judas acquired what his money acquired for him is the unbroken judgment of the commentators from Chrysostom to Theophylact, offered as ordinary idiom rather than as a repair. On the name the case is real but lighter. Matthew explains the name and Acts does not; Luke gives a consequence where Matthew gives a cause, and the second etymology usually set against Matthew is an inference from Luke’s silence rather than a statement of his text.

What holds the whole short of probable is that Luke’s silence sits next to a burst body and nothing else bloody, so the inference readers draw is a natural one and not a modern imposition — Chrysostom drew it; that the Aramaic behind the name is unstable enough that both explanations may be later rationalizations of a word that meant something else; and that most who work closely on Acts read the two verses as separate traditions attached to a real plot of ground. The notices can describe one purchase and one name without straining either text. That they do is not demonstrated. What both writers plainly attest is the same: the betrayal-money bought a field, the field was a burial ground known in Jerusalem by an Aramaic name, and Judas’s end was bound up with it.

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