The translators are being ‘helpful’ by using histemi which means “set” or “place” or “establish” and translating it as “place (in the balance)” or “weigh”.

That gives your narrative symmetry argument more force. Still not enough that I’m going to give it a high rating, but perhaps a higher rating than it would otherwise have gotten.

I don’t really feel the force of it, but I get what you’re saying now.

This word Histemi is translated as weighed out exactly once in the NT NASB: Matt. 26:15. Everywhere else it is translated as “set”, “stand” or “establish”. Obviously, the translators know what they’re doing, but I can’t help thinking that Matthew is only telling us that they fixed the price of the betrayal.

Perhaps part of it is that I find it difficult to believe that the priests would hand out that much money to someone on the promise that one day he might betray his friend.

Anyway, yes, the question is: is Matthew in fact describing an up-front payment?

I think he is: he mentions the priests weighing out the money, and later mentions Judas returning the money. He surely expects his readers to understand that the “weighing out” was the actual payment.

I was arguing that even if he received payment only upon completion of his end of the bargain, there was still ample time, hours and perhaps days, for him to regret his betrayal and then return the money. So the proposed reason for Matthew to alter Mark does not exist.

Was there some other reason that you thought that Judas’s returning the money required an up front payment?

Now all of this is relevant to the main topic, presumably, because if Matthew had a strong incentive to describe an up front payment, then that counts as some evidence for the claim that he really is describing an up front payment.

I was saying that I don’t think Matthew does have a particularly strong reason to describe an up front payment. And, as I noted in my first post, he may well not have been describing an up front payment.

Or did Matthew make that up? Do we have here an example of the truism that when you tell one lie, you’ve got to tell a second to cover it.

Or are you claiming that he correctly reported the return of the silver and then inferred the up front payment?

These questions fall under the category of “Just Curious”. I’m not sure that anything about inerrancy really turns on the answer. I suspect that errantist Christians, like Errancy, will be more sympathetic toward option 2.

Either way, I don’t think Matthew is quite in the narrative bind you think he is in here.

For starters, I don’t think there’s any requirement that Judas return the money on the night he betrayed Christ (or that Judas hang himself that night). There is at least one event that Matthew describes that I will guarantee you did not happen exactly in sequence where Matthew places the vignette of Judas’ return of the money: The purchase of the potter’s field. The priests did not buy it with Judas’s silver at the crack of dawn on the way from the temple to Pilate’s court. That happened days or weeks later. So the events at the end of the story about Jesus’ betrayal by Judas, arrest and the trial in the temple take us well past the events a the beginning of the story of Jesus trial before Pilate and subsequent crucifixion.

Matthew notes, in any event, that Judas returned the money after Jesus was condemned. In context you might think he meant “condemned by the priests”, but it isn’t clear, and he might have meant “condemned by Pilate”. He might even have meant that it happened sometime after Jesus had died.

No matter when Matthew intended to say that Judas returned the money, there was ample time for him to first receive it in payment. That would probably have happened in the garden, and at any rate, no latter than when Jesus was delivered to the priests…well before he was actually condemned by them.

It seems likely to me that this is the whole cause of the discrepancy: Matthew wanted to report that Judas returned the silver, and therefore had to report that Judas was paid at once. Hence he altered the account in his source, Mark.