What Does Acts 1:18 Mean?

(18, 19) **Now this man purchased a field.**—Better, *acquired, got possession of, a field, *the Greek not necessarily including the idea of buying. On the difficulties presented by a comparison of this account with that in Matthew 27:5-8, see Note on that passage. Here the field bought with Judas’s money is spoken of as that which he gained as the reward of his treachery. The details that follow are additions to the briefer statement of St. Matthew, but are obviously not incompatible with it. Nor is there any necessity for assuming, as some have done, that there were two fields known as Aceldama, one that which the priests had bought, and the other that which was the scene of Judas’s death. The whole passage must be regarded as a note of the historian, not as part of the speech of St. Peter. It was not likely that he, speaking to disciples, all of whom knew the Aramaic, or popular Hebrew of Palestine, should stop to explain that Aceldama meant “in their proper tongue, The field of blood.”