Both Matthew 27:3-10 and Acts 1:15-19 record grizzly details about what became of Judas after his betrayal of Jesus. But the details are very different. In Matthew, Judas abandons the money he received at the Temple; in Acts, he uses the money to buy some property. In Matthew, he then went away somewhere and hanged himself; in Acts, he seems to have fallen in such a way that his body burst open. Both stories mention a place called the “Field of Blood,” but they have different explanations for how the field received that name.
The stories are very different — different enough that many skeptics point to Judas’s death as one of the greatest and most obvious of biblical contradictions.
But there are two facets of the story in particular that tell me, working as a historian, there is some common story underneath these tellings of it.
not quite art — not quite living 