Seeing that the fate of Judas often comes up in discussions with Muhammadans as a means of discrediting the Holy Bible, I post the response of the late Dr. Gleason L. Archer for the benefit of Bible believers. I also include his response to another specific aspect related to the story of Judas.
How did Judas Iscariot die?
Matthew 27:3-10 records Judas’s remorse at having betrayed Jesus to the Jewish authorities. Judas first attempted to return the thirty shekels that they had paid him for leading the temple posse to Gethsemane, where Jesus was arrested. But the priest and temple officials refused to take the money back, since it was the price of blood and therefore unsuitable as an offering to God. Judas therefore cast the money pouch onto the floor of the temple treasury, departed from the city, and “hanged himself” (apenxato–the aorist middle third person singular from apancho, a verb used with that specific meaning ever since the fifth century B.C). This establishes the fact that Judas fastened a noose around his neck and jumped from the branch to which the other end of the rope was attached.
In Acts 1:18 the apostle Peter reminds the other disciples of Judas’s shameful end and the gap he left in the ranks of the Twelve, which called for another disciple to take his place. Peter relates the following: “He therefore acquired a plot of land [chorion] from the reward of wrongdoing.” (This could mean either that Judas had already contracted with the owner of the field that he originally had wanted to buy with the betrayal money; or-as is far more likely in this context–Peter was speaking ironically, stating that Judas acquired a piece of real estate all right, but it was only a burial plot [chorion could cover either concept], namely, the one on which his lifeless body fell.
Acts 1:18 goes on to state: “And he, falling headlong, burst asunder, and all of his inwards gushed out.” This indicates that the tree from which Judas suspended himself overhung a precipice. If the branch from which he had hung himself was dead and dry-and there are many trees that match this description even to this day on the brink of the canyon that tradition identifies as the place where Judas died–it would take only one strong gust of wind to yank the heavy corpse and split the branch to which it was attached and plunge both with great force into the bottom of the chasm below. There is indication that a strong wind arose at the hour Christ died and ripped the great curtain inside the temple from top to bottom (Matt. 27:51). This was accompanied by a rock-splitting earthquake and undoubtedly also by a thunderstorm, which normally follows a prolonged period of cloud gathering and darkness (Matt. 27:45). Conditions were right for what had started out as a mere suicide by hanging to turn into a grisly mutilation of the corpse as the branch gave way to the force of the wind and was hurtled down to the bottom.
Why does Matthew 27:9 attribute to Jeremiah a prophecy from Zechariah?
Matthew 27:9-10 describes the purchase of Potter’s Field with Judas Iscariot’s money as fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy: “Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled, saying, `And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of one whose price had been set by the sons of Israel; and they gave them for the Potter’s Field, as the Lord directed me” (NASB). The remarkable thing about this quotation is that the greater portion of it is actually from Zechariah 11:12-13, which reads as follows: “And I said to them, `If it is good in your sight, give me my wages; but if not, never mind!’ So they weighed out thirty shekels of silver as my wages. Then Yahweh said to me, `Throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by them’. So I took the thirty shekels of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of Yahweh.” There are significant differences between the Zechariah passage and the quotation in Matthew, which has the prophet paying out–or least giving–the purchase money, and has him turning over the money for a field rather than giving it to the potter personally. Yet the whole point of the quotation in Matthew is directed toward the purchase of the field. The Zechariah passage says nothing at all about purchasing a field; indeed, it does not even mention a field at all.
But as we turn to Jeremiah 32:6-9, we find the prophet purchasing a field in Anathoth for a certain number of shekels. Jeremiah 18:2 describes the prophet as watching a potter fashioning earthenware vessels in his house. Jeremiah 19:2 indicates that there was a potter near the temple, having his workshop in the Valley of Hinnom. Jeremiah 19:11 reads: “Thus says Yahweh of hosts: `Even so I will break this people and this city as one breaks a potter’s vessel, that cannot be made whole again; and they shall bury them in Tophet.'” It would seem, therefore, that Zechariah’s casting of his purchase money to the potter dated back to the symbolic actions of Jeremiah. Yet it is only Jeremiah that mentions the “field” of the potter–which is the principal point of Matthew’s quotation. Matthew is therefore combining and summarizing elements of prophetic symbolism both from Zechariah and from Jeremiah. But since Jeremiah is the more prominent of the two prophets, he mentions Jeremiah’s name by preference to that of the minor prophet.
A similar procedure is followed by Mark 1:2-3, which attributes only to Isaiah a combined quotation from Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3. In that case also, only the more famous of the two prophets is mentioned by name. Since that was the normal literary practice of the first century A.D., when the Gospels were written, the authors can scarcely be faulted for not following the modern practice of precise identification and footnoting (which could never have become feasible until after the transition had been made from the scroll to the codex and the invention of the printing press). (Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties [Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, MI 1982], pp. 349-350)
The following Christian writer and apologist shows why this is a plausible scenario, even though he prefers another explanation:
The standard explanation given by harmonists is that Judas hanged himself, and then his body fell and broke open.
This has some promise: Judas hanged himself on Passover and before a Sabbath, and no Jew was going to touch the hanging corpse (touching a dead body caused defilement; it would have been work to take it down on the Sabbath; added to that, death by hanging was especially a disgrace; and hoisting a dead body isn’t an attractive vocation if it isn’t on your property), so it is safe to assume that Judas hanged himself and that the branch or rope eventually broke.
Polhill in his Acts commentary [92n] notes that the phrase translated “becoming headlong” (prenes genomenos — translated as “falling headlong” in the KJV, but literally being “becoming headlong” as shown in Green’s Interlinear translation, 366) is a mere transcription error away from being “becoming swollen” (presthes genomenos). The latter may well be what was originally written, and as such might describe Judas’ body swelling up after hanging for a while. This reading is found in later Syriac, Georgian and Armenian mss., though perhaps as an attempt at textual criticism of the sort we are doing.
Skeptics do regularly scoff at the suggestion that such a combination of events could happen, and yet be reported differently, but Eddy and Boyd in The Jesus Legend have discovered an almost exactly analogous case involving the lynching of two brothers in 1881. [424] Two different witness accounts indicated that the brothers were hanged from two different places: a railroad crossing, and a pine tree. Historians would have concluded that there was a contradiction until researchers found photographs proving that both accounts were correct: The brothers had been hanged in both locations, having been apparently first hanged from the crossing, and then later taken down and hanged on the pine tree.
Taken together I still consider the “hanging body/rope broke” solution possible — but now find something else even more likely. (J. P. Holding, Does Matthew contradict Acts on Judas Iscariot’s death?; emphasis mine)
FURTHER READING
101 Cleared-up Contradictions in the Bible, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, Pt. 4
Answering Islam Blog 
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