Hi,
Thank you for your responses.
Detective says:
Lin,
are you saying that Judah was pushed or thrown rather than fell? Following your thinking, it looks as if you are suggesting that a dead Judah was pushed or thrown or buried in a field that was bought in his name by some unmentioned third party.
Matthew 27:5-7 specifies that Judas brought the silver to the chief priests, threw the money into the temple where the chief priests took it, talked it over, and purchased a field with it for the purpose of burying strangers.
As for Judas being pushed or thrown:
In the Strongs Concordance: falling headlong is translated into two words as Joseph said, prenes ginomai, but the meaning could possibly be interpreted differently,
#4248. prenes, pray-nace'; from #4253; leaning (falling_ forward (prone)i.e. head foremost
#1096. ginomai, ghin'-om-ahee, a prol. and mid. form of a prim. verb; to cause to be (gen-erate), i.e.(reflex)to become(come into being), used with great latitude (lit.fig., intes., etc.):--arise, be assembled, be (-come, -fall,-have self), be brought (to pass), (be) come (to pass), continue, be divided, draw, be ended, fall, be finished, follow, be found, be fulfilled, +God forbid, grow, happen, have, be kept, be made, be married, be ordained,to be, partake, pass, be performed, be published, require, seem, be showed, X soom as it was, sound, be taken, be turned, use, wax, will, would, be wrought.
falling prone, to cause to be is the literal translation. It is not a far stretch to laid prone. Since he does not specify in Acts whether or not Judas was living when this happened, I offer this as a possible explanation.
Joseph says:
I also must disagree with your suggestion that throwing a body--living, or dead--from a height of perhaps two feet above the ground into a hole perhaps six feet would cause the abdomen to burst open. Perhaps you’ve seen the horrific photographs and film showing the tens of thousands of naked concentration-camp victims who had been thrown down into the pits? None of the bodies showed signs of having suffered a rupture for any reason, let alone from striking the ground.
I would be willing to entertain the idea that the fall did not do the bursting. It may have been that the Son's betrayer was split open by the Father. I would have been hard pressed to stop at that had it been my son. Besides, it isn't the first time that sort of thing happened. See 2 Chronicles 21:15,19
Or it could have been jagged rocks, or even the state of decompostion of the corpse. It is not pertinent to the reason that it happened, which was to fulfill Scripture, not is it relevant to your question, 'How did Judas die?'
detective says:
Are you uncomfortable with the idea that there may be some difficult passages to explain away or are you comfortable with that fact but are just offering up a few ideas for people to mull over?
The bible is wrought with difficult passages. If it were simple, it would require no faith on our part. I offer no apologies for God's Word. Nor will I ever try to 'explain away' any part of it. The bible's purpose is to teach. Since we are the dumb sheep who, by examples in both Testaments, are too impatient and stubborn to know what is good for us, God has made the learning a task we must strive to meet. I believe that we look for surface contradictions in order to avoid learning the deeper truths, truths which we do not want to face. We are supposed to take it on faith that we need tolearn the examples, no matter how impossible they seem, so as to prepare us in life for whatever God has planned for us.
An example that comes to mind;
I just told my 10 year old daughter that she must learn her multiplication tables. She wanted an adequate explanation of when she would need this information that she could not get to a calculator. I explained that she just had to trust to my years of experience that someday she will need to do multiplication in her head.
I believe God has asked us to take it on faith that no matter what the lesson is, we need to accept the statments as fact, trust to his wisdom, and go on from there.
Yes, I am offering an opinion. However, I must specify here that I feel some thing are not worth getting to upset about. If you believe one way or the other, it will not affect the outcome of God's plan for us.
Joseph says;
The key to understanding what Luke wanted us to understand is found in the following passage:“And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined.” (Luke 5:37)
Old skins cannot expand to accommodate the gases released from still-fermenting new fine, while new ones are still elastic enough to accommodate the release of gas. Luke was expecting his readers would see that Judas was holding on to the old law, the old way of thinking, and was unable to accommodate the new teachings of Jesus; thus, the Judas with the old ideas burst open just as does an old wineskin filled with new wine. Luke clearly never meant for his readers to take his description of Judas literally.
I do not clearly see anything here except a parallel word bursting. I fail to understand why you feel you can chop a section from the bible and paste it over another and call it a key to understanding. If I were to look for parallel words in bible passages that have nothing to do with each other, I could find hundreds.
I would like to point out that you, who apparently has no faith where the bible is concerned, would be the least likely person to show me what the writers of the bible clearly meant for their readers.
Joseph says:
Apologists who are trapped within the framework of a belief that the Bible is literally true will never accept this simple explanation, however. For them, it’s better to propose any possible explanation, no matter how far fetched, than to agree that a story about one of the principals in the Bible is not really true. They think they are in the daylight, and the rest of us are in darkness.
Since this is a general statement included in a personal response, I must assume that you have lumped me into this category. Personally, I try not to allow my personal prejudices to be thrown into peoples faces while I debate with them. However, I submit that personal opinion is all that it takes to label explanations far fetched. The truth of the bible will be revealed, Joseph, but not, I think, by you.
Lin
