Contradiction claim
Who bought the field connected with Judas’s betrayal money?
Matthew reports that the chief priests took counsel and bought the potter’s field with the returned silver, to bury strangers. Acts says that Judas himself purchased a field with the reward of iniquity.
2 source records · no review date recorded
How to read this record
Passages side by side
TextThe primary text, as seeded. Nothing here is summarised or paraphrased.
And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.
And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.
Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.
Why they appear to conflict
AnalysisEach side states a proposition attributable to its passages. A claim is not assumed to have exactly two sides.
Matthew
The chief priests bought the potter’s field with the silver.
The chief priests
Matthew 27:5 · Matthew 27:7
Acts
Judas purchased a field with the reward of iniquity.
Judas
Acts 1:18
Formal analysis
AnalysisA contradiction requires a proposition and its incompatible counterpart under materially equivalent conditions. Every dimension below must hold for the formal test to succeed.
No formal analysis has been recorded for this claim yet. Until one exists, the classification cannot be stronger than a descriptive category.
Analytical questions
AnalysisWhat a researcher must answer to classify this record. Open questions are recorded, not resolved by preference.
- Does Acts attribute the purchase to Judas directly, or to his money as the means?
- Are the two fields the same field?
- Does the difference in how each account explains the field’s name affect the identification?
- Is Acts 1:18-19 narrator commentary or reported speech, and does that change what is being asserted?
Hebrew / Greek relevance
LanguageNo original-language dependency has been recorded for this claim.
Textual variants
ManuscriptA variant is a transmission phenomenon, never in itself a logical contradiction.
No textual variant record is linked to this claim.
Manuscript evidence
ManuscriptManuscript evidence has not yet been curated for this record.
Narrator and speaker analysis
AnalysisWhat the narration establishes, distinguished from what would additionally establish that the reported event occurred.
No narrator or speaker analysis has been recorded for these passages yet.
Proposed harmonisations
InterpretationEach proposal records the premises it must supply that the text does not state. Premises are never injected silently.
Judas is the purchaser through his money
Acts attributes the purchase to Judas because it was his money; the priests executed the transaction.
Premises this proposal must supply
- contextualActs uses agency loosely, attributing to a person a purchase carried out by others with his funds.
Editorial Harmonisation Cost Heuristic
2 / 5 — Ordinary contextual inference
Attributing a purchase to the source of the funds is an ordinary idiom, and Matthew explicitly ties the money to Judas. Ordinary contextual inference.
Reviewed by CodexTrace Editorial Board on 2026-09-07. This is an editorial heuristic, not an objective measurement.
Critical responses
InterpretationArguments that the proposed reconciliations do not succeed, treated structurally the same way as the harmonisations.
No critical response has been recorded for this claim yet.
Analytical classification
Analysis- Classification
- Narrative divergence
- What it means
- Accounts of the same episode differ in detail, participants, or emphasis.
- Requires formal analysis
- No
- Review status
- reviewed
- Categories
- Agency & causationNarrative detail
- Source collections
- codextrace_research
Sources
SourceEvery externally-sourced claim on this page resolves to one of these records.
- [1]
CodexTrace. "CodexTrace editorial research". licence: CC-BY-4.0
Critical / scholarlyotherCC-BY-4.0 - [2]
King James Version (Authorised Version)
"King James Version (Authorised Version)". licence: public-domain-us
Primarytranslationpublic-domain-usLink unverified
Related records
TextRelated claims
Community
CommunityCommunity discussion requires a configured Supabase project on this deployment. Research pages are unaffected.