Judas Iscariot was one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. He’s best known for betraying Jesus by smooching him. This ID’ed Jesus to the cops who swooped in for the arrest (all in a day’s work for Jerusalem’s finest).
Judas had been paid in silver coins for putting the finger on Jesus. Two Bible authors appear to blatantly contradict each other about what happened next.
In one version of the story (Mat 27:5) Judas is feeling terribly about what he did. He goes back to his financers, throws those nasty coins down, and goes off to commit suicide by hanging himself. Afterwards, the chief priests decide to buy a field with that money for burying foreigners (hopefully after they had passed on).
In another version of the story (Act 1:18) Judas doesn’t return to throw down the coins and he doesn’t commit suicide. He keeps the money and instead *he* buys the field with it, not the chief priests.
The author of Acts is very sparse on the details, but apparently Judas trips on something while skipping along in his new field and falls headfirst onto some sharp objects, gashing out his stomach and redistributing his vital organs back to nature.
Not so much a suicide as a terrible accident.
Apologetics try to reconcile the contradictions by ignoring the problem with who bought the field. Clearly one says Judas and the other, the Chief Priests. Instead they claim that Judas was a waffler, a flip-flopper who couldn’t make up his mind about how he felt about his betrayal. In their explanation Judas took the money, then he felt badly so he returned the money, and (what the Bible doesn’t tell you) he started feeling OK again (possibly after seeing his therapist?) and returned to gather up those nasty coins he had thrown down to buy the field (why couldn’t he have been a strong steady betrayist?)
Some apologetics then claim that Judas hung himself from a tree next to a hill on his ill gotten property and when his rope eventually broke, they have him cart wheeling down the slope to conveniently explain his stomach gushing.
Some apologetics however do away with the hill and have Judas simply hurling himself onto a huge spike which they claim was the standard method of “hanging” in his day. This turns Judas into a Shish Kabob which they assert solves the hanging vs. innards dilemma.
This just goes to show that if people are willing to jump through enough hoops they can rationalize just about anything that would spoil their day.
“Hammer to fit and then paint it to match.”
That pretty much describes the attempts at explaining contradictory scriptures.
The whole problem is where christians and atheists start:
The christians believe before they explain, so they conjure up impossible explanations to support the Bible inerrancy, which they should not question. So when you tell a priest that you can’t see God, he tells you to believe in God first in order to see God…
Atheists do things the old scientific way: First find and explain all the possibilities and then believe in what you have logically assumed. We only have logic to rely on through our lives, and though senses often trick us, it is the only way to produce solid assumptions.
It’s logic vs blind faith and that’s all.
Be carefull Mr. Capella, that’s a double edged sword that your are weilding. People do try to rationalize anything that would spoil their day. Christians and skeptics alike. Some Christians will believe no matter what is said, BUT, some skeptics will NOT believe no matter what is said. To be so against something is to be a hypocrite. When you talk to a Christian, would you not want him/her to keep an open mind, and vise versa. So by you saying things like that, isn’t that being guilty of the same crime.
Respectfully, Thank you.
Mr. Giannis Stamatakis,
That’s an interesting point that you bring up about LOGICALLY assuming what you have found. Now contrary to popular beliefe Christianity is not close your eyes and believe. It is “see for yourself”. I don’t believe the evidence because I am a Christian, I am a Christian because of the evidence. I have followed what I found and logic led me to the Conclusion that there is a God, and that he loves us all very much and wants what is best for our lives if we let him. Deep down one must ask himself why he is here and how much sense does it make *with GOD* and how much sense does it make WITHOUT.
Thank You.
Dear Zulla,
It is a moot point, isn’t it? I’ve never seen any evidence of the existence of the christian god or any other. And the gain of believing yourself the chosen of some omnipotent deity for eternal life is so evident that I am completely unable to believe in the intelectual honesty of anyone that claims to have LOGICALLY arrived to the conclusion of the existence of some god. All religion is wishfull thinking and self-delusion brought into being by fear of death.
be careful saying there isn’t any evidence when you haven’t looked for it. I have been and remain an atheist, but the bible has a little more going for it than you might think. Ignoring the contradictions, of course, you can more or less verify that the new testament was written by semi-reliable sources, and the apologetics back up the OT by saying its prophecies are fulfilled. But before you deny its validity outright, talk to a christian about it for a while. Your beliefs make a lot of sense to you but the Christians have had just as much time as you have to come to understand their beliefs.
Malahci,
Starets hasn’t posted for 1 1/2 years so I’ll respond for him/her.
I disagree with the idea that the New Testament is from semi-reliable sources and that the OT has any reliability whatsoever. For example it’s well known by non-apologetic scholars that the Gospels were not written by the biblical figures they are attributed to (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John).
Much of Matthew and Luke were copied from the earlier gospels of Mark and an unknown gospel that scholars call “Q” (there were actually about a couple dozen gospels considered for canonization by the early Catholic Church).
The Gospels of Mark and Q were likely oral traditions that circulated for decades after Jesus was executed and in the earliest known version of Mark there is no mention of the resurrection of Jesus, just that his body is missing. The Gospel of John was written about 60 years after the crucifixion.
There are many parts of the New Testament that either contradict or likely never happened such as the time of the birth of Jesus, genealogies of Jesus, the story about him going to Egypt as a baby, Herod’s purge of the innocents, when the transfiguration and when the fig tree withering supposedly occured, whether John the Baptist was supposed to be “Elijah,” how many animals Jesus was riding into Jerusalem, what color his robe was, what time he was executed, how many women supposedly discovered the empty tomb, how long after the resurrection Jesus was supposedly around before he ascended to heaven, how Judas died, what happened to Paul during his conversion, etc…
The OT is even more suspect because of it’s early stories being similar to neighboring culture’s mythologies, the presence of what scholars call “doublets” (two complete stories edited together, about 20 of them), different writing styles that were obviously later edited together, contradictions, errors, absurd stories (such as Jonah living inside of a fish underwater for 3 days and Lot’s daughters having sex with him without him knowing it), etc…
As far as prophecies, there are very few prophecies in the Bible that don’t follow the standard tricks of psychics and fortune tellers of being so vague and numerous that some prediction out of dozens can be later reinterpreted to loosely fit an event.
In rare cases where an OT prophet went out on a limb and gave concrete details about a future event either the event was inevitable or their predictions simply failed. I’ve listed a few of these prophecy failures that are iron clad.
In every case of so called fulfilled prophecies about Jesus from the OT there are three situations: either certain details of the prophecy obviously doesn’t fit Jesus (and in many cases the prophecy was cited in the OT to already be fulfilled), the prophecy cited obviously wasn’t a prophecy at all, or the author of a Gospel obviously contrived stories or changed what happened to Jesus to make it appear to fulfill an OT prophecy (often with errors or contradictioning other authors).
In various articles on my website I’ve listed all of these bible problems that I’ve mentioned here in more detail as well as others.