According to the Matthew gospel (27.5) he hanged himself. A more grotesque version is given in Acts (1.18): falling face down he split open in the middle and all his guts gushed out: πρηνὴς γενόμενος ἐλάκησεν μέσος καὶ ἐξεχύθη πάντα τὰ σπλάγχνα αὐτοῦ. Papias (1st-2nd cent.) endorsed this account over Matthew’s.
In the Assyrian tale of Ahiqar (widely diffused: versions in Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and more), Ahiqar’s adoptive son betrayed him, was remorseful, and “swelled up like a bag and died” (Rendel Harris’s translation of the Syriac, 8.41).
I believe that alfalfa was a common crop, so they would easily have gotten the idea from cow/sheep bloat. Bloat will hit 1/5th of the animals in the wrong sort of the pasture. Looking at the Wikipedia article on alfalfa, I see that Palladius affirms that “medica” “a name that referred to the Medes” will give cows bloat.
Arius similarly spilled out his bowels, but didn’t have to burst open to do it.
That day was Sabbath, and the next day he was expecting to join [the assembly]. However, Justice was persecuting the audacious acts of Arius. After he left the royal palace, he was escorted with ostentation by the people of Eusebius through the city center. When they approached the market place named after Constantine, the column of purple, erected there, was covered with sweat. Fear caused by a sting of guilty consciousness seized Arius; the fear was followed by swelling of the stomach. Having asked whether there was a lavatory nearby, and hearing that there was one behind the Constantine market place, he hastened there. Meanwhile, he fainted evacuating the bowels and producing excrements; and immediately that what is called by the physicians intestinum rectum fell out through his anus. Next followed profusion of blood, his small intestine mixed with the very spleen and the liver, and thus he died on the spot. As I have already said, this lavatory is shown up to this day in Constantinople behind the Constantine market place and the butchers’ stalls in the gallery. All the passers-by raise their finger pointing to it as the place where happened a most memorable death.
According to Papias, he become obscenely fat (from his ill-gotten gains?). The death itself is off-scene (presumably there is a sulfur-pit somewhere billed to tourists as the location of Judas’ death?). And though Apolinarius claims that he got down from noose before this happened, the suggestion is not in Papias. I’m not sure that the story harmonizes that well with either the Acts or the Matthew version, though it’s more similar in gross detail to the Acts account.
Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum also has Hieronymus with the following, on the Matthew version: (Comm. in Matth. 27,0) Legi nuper in quodam hebraico volumine quem Nazarenae sectae mihi Hebraeus obtulit Hieremiae apocryphum in quo haec (Matth. 27, 9b-10) ad verbum scripta repperi.
My Latin is not great, but he is saying that he also found the Matthew section in a Jeremiah Apocrypha?
That’s why I mentioned Papias. I wouldn’t call it a third version, more a comic-book elaboration of the Acts account.(Perhaps Constantinus will translate it for us.)
The real parallel—I don’t know if it’s been noted previously—is between Ahiqar and Acts. It’s not just the manner of death that they have in common, it’s the sequence as a whole: betrayal, exposure, Death by Bloat.
An Aramaic meme? It looks as if the Aqihar tale (much older and wide-spread) served as a template for the account in Acts..
Athanasius expressly presents Arius’ demise as a duplicate of Judas’s. But by this time we’re firmly in the Christian era. Both had betrayed the Church.
Apollinarius was clearly out to harmonize the Matthew and Acts versions, an early instance of the inerrancy dogma.
It’s easy enough for me to imagine a famous traitor like Judas taking over for Ahiqar’s adoptive son in a folk tale, and this story making its way on into Acts in any number of ways. Especially if the Matthew version was unknown (even to the author of Acts?)
However, Acts does have several people dropping dead. Judas (πρηνὴς γενόμενος ἐλάκησεν μέσος καὶ ἐξεχύθη πάντα τὰ σπλάγχνα αὐτοῦ), Ananias (πεσὼν ἐξέψυξεν) and Sapphira (ἔπεσεν καὶ ἐξέψυξεν), and Herod (γενόμενος σκωληκόβρωτος ἐξέψυξεν).
Herod’s death seems like a more immediate version than what actually occurred (see Josephus). These sudden deaths seem to be part of the Acts author’s narrative style, and I feel that the Judas death is more closely related to the other Acts deaths than to the Ahiqar story. Perhaps Judas’ traitorous nature made a storyteller familiar with the other story think of bloat. But I’m not convinced that it’s a retelling.
Herod is a very different case, and Ananias-Sapphira belongs to a quite different paradigm. These can hardly be lumped together and lumped with Judas as a matter of “narrative style.” It’s rather a matter of narrative content and structure, as I’ve tried to show.
I had time to finish up the Life of Aesop and its version of the Ahikar story, and do some reading of Harris Rendel. Here is the Rendel article on Judas’ suicide:
I’m not convinced by the correspondence. Both you and Rendel have the difficulty that the remorsefulness of the traitor comes from the Matthew story, but the bloating comes from Acts version. To establish the link, you have to mix and match the mutually incompatible versions of Matthew and Acts. This makes the point about similar narratives far less compelling.
The only real link between the Matthew and Acts versions (Judas gives money back, goes and hangs himself; Judas takes money, buys field, is struck down by God) is clearly the place-legend regarding Aceldama. And an Ahikar correspondence does nothing to explain that.
My own solution to the riddle is that the Acts author had access to the Matthew version, but rejected it. It is possible that he disliked the idea of a remorseful Judas. Or that he had encountered another account. But more likely, I think, the Acts author thought that the red clay of Aceldama was clearly the source of the name, and that the Matthew story was fatally flawed in not explaining that. The necessary modifications become obvious. The place of Judas’ death needs to be the field, and needs to be bloody. The minimal changes are that Judas now keeps the money to buy the field, and that his method of death generates a miraculous amount of blood. Notice that now we have the Acts version exactly.
Rendel is loud in his silence on the real correspondence between Ahikar/Aesop and the Gospels: Ahikar/Aesop goes around having didactic discussions with crowds and wise men, tells parables, and is entombed and comes to life again. The Judas business is peanuts in comparison.
In the Aesop story, after the Ahikar section, the interpretation of the Egyptian King’s clothing is extremely similar to Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams regarding his father and brothers. The cup in the luggage ruse in Delphi also appears in the Joseph story. I would guess that Jewish/Christian sources were known to the author.