Annotation CCXXII

”Being hanged, he burst asunder in the midst: and all his bowels gushed out.” — Acts 1:18

Whether Judas died by hanging.

Oecumenius, in the Collectanea on the Acts of the Apostles, affixed to this passage such an explanation: “JUDAS did not depart from life by hanging, but survived. For he was cast down before he was choked; and this the Acts of the Apostles indicate — that, [falling] forward, he burst asunder in the midst. But this Papias, the disciple of the Apostle John, wrote more plainly, saying: ‘Judas remained in this world as a great example of impiety. For he was so swollen in body that he could not pass through where a chariot easily passes; and when a chariot was passing by in an easy course, he was crushed by the chariot, so that his bowels gushed out.’ IN ANOTHER MANNER [he tells it]: ‘For he was so swollen in body that he could not go forward where a chariot passed in an easy course — nay, not even the swelling of [his] head alone [could pass]. For they say that even the eyelids of his eyes were so swollen that he could not see the light at all, and his eyes could not appear even with the dioptra [physicians’ instrument]: with so great a depth were they separated from the outer view. But his genital member exceeded all obscenity and magnitude. Furthermore, gore and worms, flowing together disgustingly, were borne out of his whole body, going out through the secret places alone. But after many torments and punishments, when he had died in his own field (as they say), on account of the stench that field remained deserted and uninhabited to this day; nor even to this present time can anyone pass by that place except with nostrils stopped by the hand.’” These [things] Oecumenius [says] — from whose narration Theophylact, expounding chapter 27 of Matthew, seems not to have altogether recoiled. The common consensus of all the Fathers rejects this opinion, [the Fathers] writing that Judas perished, according to the evangelical sentence, by the choking of the noose. Nay, and Oecumenius himself, reporting these [things] from the records of others, testifies that Judas perished by hanging immediately after the betrayal was done. Which also Juvencus, a most ancient poet, comprehended in these verses in the fourth book of the Evangelical History:

But the traitor Judas, after he sees such [things] — [sees] that the received price of [his] crime has made [him] frenzied — unhappy, condemning his own deeds with sick complaints, and blaming the silver, cast [it] into the sacred temple; and, having begun to take punishment on himself by the noose, he snatched a shapeless death from the top of a fig-tree.

And Arator the deacon, in the first book of the Apostolic History, described the manner of the same death more fully in these verses. So the venerable [man] says:

You know that the mad traitor paid himself the wages of [his] crime; he himself dreaded the loathsomeness of his own [guilt], choking the voice in [his] throat — the example [Christ] no longer [being present] to answer for the guilty [deed]; he who deserved to be slain in [that] part in which the fault lay, and, revising [his] crime, by such a token committed [his] limbs to frenzy in the midst of the air, so that — hating both heaven and earth — he might set, for the common enemy, the due place of punishment. Between the two he perishes. His burst bowels fall, to be buried in no sepulchres; and, slipped away into the thin airs, [his] ash flees from the world, etc.