Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/465



new vulgate, has substituted suspensus for the pronus factus of the old Latin version, which our old English version of 1542 accordingly renders, and when he was hanged.

"That which follows, and which evidently determined the vulgar interpretation of [Greek: elakêse—exechynthê panta ta splanchna autou], all his bowels gushed out—states a natural and probable effect produced, by the sudden interruption in the fall and violent capture in the noose, in a frame of great corpulency and distension, such as Christian antiquity has recorded that of the traitor to have been; so that a term to express rupture would have been altogether unnecessary, and it is therefore equally unnecessary to seek for it in the verb [Greek: elakêse]. Had the historian intended to express disruption, we may justly presume that he would have said, as he had already said in his gospel, v. 6, [Greek: dierrêgnuto], or xxiii. 45, [Greek: eschisthê mesos]: it is difficult to conceive, that he would here have traveled into the language of ancient Greek poetry for a word to express a common idea, when he had common terms at hand and in practice; but he used the Roman laqueo, [Greek: lakeô], to mark the infamy of the death.

("[Greek: Prêstheis epi tosouton tên sarka, hôste mê dunasthai dielthein]. Papias, ap. Routh Reliq. Sacr. tom. I. p. 9. and Oecumenius, thus rendered by Zegers, Critici Sacri, Act. i. 18, in tantum enim corpore inflatus est ut progredi non posset. The tale transmitted by those writers of the first and tenth centuries, that Judas was crushed to death by a chariot proceeding rapidly, from which his unwieldiness rendered him unable to escape, merits no further attention, after the authenticated descriptions of the traitor's death which we have here investigated, than to suggest a possibility that the place where the suicide was committed might have overhung a public way, and that the body falling by its weight might have been traversed, after death, by a passing chariot;—from whence might have arisen the tales transmitted successively by those writers; the first of whom, being an inhabitant of Asia Minor, and therefore far removed from the theater of Jerusalem, and being also (as Eusebius witnesses, iii. 39,) a man of a very weak mind—[Greek: sphodra mikros ton noun]—was liable to be deceived by false accounts.)

"The words of St. Peter, in the Hellenistic version of St. Luke, will therefore import, praeceps in ora fusus, laqueavit (i. e. implicuit se laqueo) medius; (i. e. in medio, inter trabem et terram;) et effusa sunt omnia viscera ejus—throwing himself head-*long, he caught mid-way in the noose, and all his bowels gushed out. And thus the two reporters of the suicide, from whose respective relations charges of disagreement, and even of contradiction, have been drawn in consequence of mistaking an insititious Latin word for a genuine Greek word of corresponding elements, are found, by tracing that insititious word to its true origin, to report identically the same fact; the one by a single term, the other by a periphrasis."

Such was the end of the twelfth of Jesus Christ's chosen ones. To such an end was the intimate friend, the trusted steward, the festal companion of the Savior, brought by the impulse of some not very unnatural feelings, excited by occasion, into extraordinary action. The universal and intense horror which the relation of his crime now invariably awakens, is by no means favorable to a just and fair appreciation of his sin and its motives, nor to such an honest consideration of his course from rectitude to guilt, as is most desirable for the application of the whole story to the moral improvement of its readers. Originally not an infamous man, he was numbered among the twelve as a person of respectable character, and long held among his fellow-disciples a responsible station, which is itself a testimony of his unblemished reputation. He was sent forth with them, as one of the heralds of salvation to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He shared with them the counsels, the instructions, and the prayers of Jesus. If he was stupid in apprehending, and unspiritual in conceiving