282 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[S"* S. VI. 145., Oct. 9. '58. 



cule. And wc all, mingling amongst the spectators, ap- 

 plauiled the judges fur their righteous decision.'" — 

 S.'tnchoniathon, Hisloi: Plicci'ic. 1. vii. c. 5, 6., ed. Wagen- 

 feld, Bremen, 1837, p. 197. 



It is necessary to remark, regarding the edition 

 of Sanchoniathon from which this is taken, that 

 Wagenfeld, who published it about twenty years 

 ago, professed to have printed it from a MS. dis- 

 covered in a monastery in Portugal. Its authen- 

 ticity was at first supported by Grotefend, but 

 afterwards impugned by him, as well as by Mo- 

 vers, the historian of the Phoenicians. A pro- 

 longed controversy ensued amongst the German 

 classicists, the result of which (although it is far 

 from convicting Wagenfeld of wilful deception) 

 tends to show that the MS. from which he wrought 

 is one of considerable antiquity. It is anterior 

 either to the history of El-Is-hakee or the Chro- 

 nicle of Heuter. It appears to be one of those 

 concoctions of the Middle Ages in which it was 

 customary to ims. together history, geography, 

 and romance : and as Philo of Byblus is himself 

 believed to have forged the work of Sanchonia- 

 thon, this restoration of the lost books is in all 

 probability a mediaeval attempt to perpetrate a 

 forgery on Philo. J. Emerson Tennent. 



JUDAS ISCARIOT : ACCOUNTS OF THE MANNER OF 

 HIS DEATH RECONCILED. 



St. Matt, xxvii. 5. says that Judas, in bitter re- 

 morse for his crime, cast down the thirty pieces of 

 silver, the price of blood, in the temple, and 

 " departed and went and hanged himself." St. 

 Luke (Acts of the App. i. 18.), that he " pur- 

 chased a field with the reward of iniquity, and, 

 falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, 

 TrprjfTjs "yevSixivos ikan-qa^ fiicros), and all his bowels 

 gushed out." Dean Alford, in his late valuable 

 edition of the Greek Testament, after declaring 

 that " the various attempts to reconcile the two 

 narratives, which may be seen in most of our 

 English commentaries, are among the saddest 

 shifts to which otherwise high-minded men are 

 driven by an unworthy system," goes on to say 

 that irpnvris yfi'6fj.ei'os will hardly bear the meaning 

 assigned to it by those who wish to harmonise the 

 two accounts, viz. that having hanged himself, he 

 fell by the breaking of the rope, i^-privris, like the 

 Latin pronns, having the distinct meaning of 

 headlong, ivith the face downwards. 



" It is obvious," continues the Dean, " that while the 

 general term used by St. Matthew points mainly at self- 

 murder, St. Luke's account does not preclude the cata- 

 stroplie related having liappened in some way, as a divine 

 judgment, during the suicidal attempt. Further than 

 this, with our present knowledge, we cannot go. An ac- 

 curate acquaintance with the actual circumstances would 

 account for the discrepancy, but nothing else." 



Still it is very satisfactory (fully admitting the 



principle that, intelligible to our finite under- 

 standing or unintelligible, we should take the in- 

 spired narrative as_/oc<), to be able to throw light 

 upon and reconcile apparently contradictory pas- 

 sages, as modern discoveries are constantly doing ; 

 and a paper by Granville Penn on this subject, 

 read before the Royal Society of Literature in 

 1827, would probably, if known to Alford, not 

 have been included among those attempts at re- 

 conciliation which he has so unceremoniously dis- 

 missed. The Dean, with the rest, translates 

 iKaKTiae "burst asunder with a noise;" but this 

 interpretation is so forced, that it would be sup- 

 ported only in default of any other. It is even 

 much doubted whether the word had a place at 

 all in the Hellenistic dialect. Valpy indeed {Fun- 

 dametdal Words in the Greek Language) connects 

 it with i,\cerare ; but it is far better to take 

 XaKfbi in this passage, with Mr. Penn, as a render- 

 ing of the Latin verb laqueo, to halter or ensnare, 

 eXditrjcre being used, like many Latin actives, in a 

 passive or reflective sense — laqueatus est. Of 

 these Latinisms we have many examples in the 

 Greek Testament, e.g. (ppay€\\6u>, flagello ; KoSpdv- 

 Tr)s, quadrans, &c. Mr. Penn reconciles the ac- 

 counts of SS. Matthew and Luke by supposing 

 that Judas, being a very corpulent man, as the 

 early Fathers describe him (see the passage of 

 Papias quoted by fficumenius and Theophylact, 

 and referred to by Alford), threw himself head- 

 long from a height, and was caught midiuay in the 

 noose., and from his corpulence his bowels were 

 thereby disruptured. Executions in Southern 

 Europe were formerly performed in the same 

 way, the criminal being noosed with a long rope, 

 and then pushed from a high beam. The fall 

 would then take place in the precise position de- 

 scribed — headlong, with the face downwards, — 

 should by any means, as the noose not slipping 

 readily, or being made lai'ge enough to pass the 

 shoulders through, such an accident occur as is 

 here supposed in the case of Judas. (Cf. Senec. 

 Hiiypol. A. iv. 1086.) — 



" Pr«:ceps in ora fusus, implicuit cadena 

 Laqueo tenaci corpus ; et quanto magis 

 Pugnat, sequaoes hoc magis nodes ligat." 



E. S. Taylor, 



TETMINSTER : PRESENTMENT IN 1405. 



The following curious document has lately come 

 into my possession. It relates to a parish, &c. in 

 Dorsetshire, and has evidently been written many 

 years ago; the original may be buried in the cel- 

 lars of some diocesan registry : — 



" Translation of an ancient Visitation at YetnV in the year 



1405, entered among Dean Chandler's Records, — Cojii/ed 



bij M'' Boucher, and by him Translated. 



"1405. Yatminstcr Prebend. — On Thursday the 20'-'i 



day of July, in the year of our Lord aboves'', the s'' Dean 



'll 



