Note 79 — Chapter III · RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.

How active the harmonists of all times have been in reconciling these divergencies, may be seen in Suïcer79 and Kuinöl: here we need only briefly adduce the principal expedients for this purpose. As the divergency lay chiefly in the words ἀπήνξατο, he hanged himself, in Matthew, and πρηνὴς γενόμενος, falling headlong, in Luke, the most obvious resource was to see whether one of these expressions could not be drawn to the side of the other. This has been tried with ἀπήνξατο in various ways; this word being interpreted at one time as signifying only the torments of a guilty conscience,80 at another, a disease consequent on these,81 at another, any death chosen out of melancholy and despair;82 and to this it has been thought that the statement πρηνὴς γενόμενος κ.τ.λ. in the Acts added the more precise information, that the kind of death to which Judas was driven by an evil conscience and despair was precipitation from a steep eminence. Others on the contrary have sought to accommodate the meaning of πρηνὴς γενόμενος to ἀπήνξατο, understanding it merely to express as a circumstance what ἀπήνξατο expresses as an act: and accordingly maintaining that if the latter should be rendered se suspendit, the former should be translated by suspensus.83 From repugnance to the obvious violence of this attempt, others, sparing the natural meaning of the expressions on both sides, have reconciled the divergent accounts by the supposition that Matthew narrates an earlier, the author of the Acts a later, stage of the events which marked the end of Judas. Some of the ancient commentators indeed separated these two stages so widely as to see in Matthew’s statement (ἀπήνξατο) only an unsuccessful attempt at self-destruction, which from the bough whereon he suspended himself having broken, or from some other cause, Judas outlived, until the judgment of heaven overtook him in the πρηνὴς γενόμενος, falling headlong.84 But since Matthew evidently intends in his expression ἀπήνξατο to narrate the last moments of the traitor: the two epochs, the account of which is supposed to be respectively given by Matthew and the Acts, have in later times been placed in closer proximity, and it has been held that Judas attempted to hang himself to a tree on an eminence, but as the rope gave way or the branch broke, he was precipitated into the valley over steep cliffs and sharp bushes, which lacerated his body.85 The author of a treatise on the fate of Judas in Schmidt’s Bibliothek86 has already remarked as a surprising circumstance, how faithfully according to this opinion, the two narrators have shared the information between them: for it is not the case that one gives the less precise statement, the other the more precise; but that one of them narrates precisely the first part of the incident without touching on the second, the other, the second without intruding on the first; and Hase justly maintains that each narrator knew only the state of the fact which he has presented, since otherwise he could not have omitted the other half.87