Who did buy with the field?

[javid]

I don’t understand Who did buy the field with money that given to Judas, according to the Holy Bible:

So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. The chief priests picked up the coins and said, “It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money.” So they decided to use the money to buy the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners.(Matthew27:5-8)

With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out(Acts1:18)

They bought it or Judas bought it?

 

[javid]

I think I found the answer: The Jews bought the field in Judas’ name, on his behalf, not?

 

[Khalid]

The Jews gave Judas the thirty shekels, then he gave it back, which was used to buy a field, which Judas then died and/or was buried in. So, yeah, you figured it out. There are one or two other harmonizations (and, of course, the liberal view that everywhere one can read a contradiction in to the Bible is a real contradiction and shows the idiocy of the supposed redactors) which are given in some commentaries and study Bibles.

The same as Matthew has Judas hanging himself, and Acts has Judas falling over with his guts “being burst asunder”, and history likely has Judas hanging himself and then falling down from the tree (likely after rotting, which may have been accelerated, the inverse of incorruption) with his guts busting out. But we can never make our harmonizations gospel truth (pun intended): they are our interpretations, not the words of the Bible, and only the words of the Bible are inerrant: our interpretations are not guaranteed to be infallibly free from error.

In the Gospels (including Acts here for a moment, as it’s the “second chapter” of Luke, and forms along with it a continuous narrative), most seeming contradictions are caused by the fact that one author recorded one detail, one author recorded another, and God joined the two or more inspired accounts in to one inspired book where, when comparing the accounts, the reader can understand that seeing one side in Matthew and one side in Acts, for example, is just seeing the obverse and reverse of one whole coin, not two different coins called by the same name.

Here’s a good article (warning, the site is Protestant and should be read with discretion, etc. etc. when it comes to Catholic dogma) on all of the difficulties surrounding Judas’ betrayal, death, buying the field, etc., although some suggestions are incorrect and should be read with caution (e.g. the idea that we can do a conjectural emendation to the Greek text without overwhelming [or even any at all] Greek manuscript evidence to smooth over a difficulty: this is the “adding to and taking away from the words written in this book” mentioned, with a list of curses, in Revelation).