Matthew 27:3-5 has Judas, remorseful, return the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests, then go away and hang himself, with the priests then buying a field with the money; Acts 1:18-19 says Judas himself 'acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness' and, 'falling headlong, burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out' -- an apparently different manner of death and a different account of who bought the field.

Be honest that this is one of the harder harmonizations in the New Testament and not free of real strain, while noting there is a longstanding, textually grounded harmonization with genuine exegetical plausibility. The standard proposal: Judas hanged himself (Matthew's apenxato, 'he strangled/hanged himself') from a tree or precipice on the field in question, a plausible physical setting given the traditional location of the Field of Blood on a rocky hillside outside Jerusalem; either the rope or branch subsequently broke, or, as proposed following patristic-era interpreters (a fragment attributed to Papias, preserved by Apollinaris of Laodicea, describes a similarly gruesome bloated and burst death), the body, left exposed for a period before discovery, decomposed and fell -- consistent with Acts's later, more graphic description of the state in which the body was found rather than the initiating cause of death. On the field-purchase discrepancy, Matthew has the priests use Judas's returned money to buy the field, since it could not lawfully enter the temple treasury (Matt 27:6-7), while Acts's ektesato ('acquired') can carry a looser sense of 'came to possess' via the indirect, ultimate source of the funds, Judas's own money, even though the priests executed the transaction. Reputable NT scholars treat this combination of harmonizing moves as reasonably plausible without claiming certainty, and this remains one of the harder cases in NT internal comparison, not a slam-dunk resolution.

Even granting genuine tension in physical detail, both accounts agree on the substantive core facts: Judas betrayed Jesus for money, came to a violent and ignominious end shortly after, the money was blood money unusable for the temple treasury, and a field near Jerusalem became associated with his fate and was known locally as 'the Field of Blood,' Akeldama, in both accounts (Matt 27:8; Acts 1:19) -- independent agreement on a specific, locally checkable place-name is notable corroboration, even where the exact mechanics of death differ in reported detail, a pattern of substantive agreement with peripheral-detail variance common between independent testimonies.