Why people resurrect 11 month old posts, I will never understand. I don't even think Disk is around any more. Wish he was...
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In Judas' case the money wasn't in his possession but it was his, as the priests did not want the blood money (especially after the betrayer had himself declared that Jesus was innocent) and nor could the treasury by law take it, so his throwing of the money which had been payment for a service provided (therefore a legal transaction) did not equate to a transfer of ownership.
No one in their right mind would say that Judas bought anything with money that he did not keep, your loose usage of the word bought notwithstanding.
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nor may you even like the comparison I make
Your imagined scenario does not parallel the bible story, so I don't know why you even presented it. That was a truly pointless (and wordy) exercise.
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What is actually stated in Acts is that Judas fell headlong etc. Nowhere does it mention that this is how he died, in fact the words death or died appear nowhere in the given text. Obviously for the body to burst open as it did, it had to have been in a state of bloat from the hanging possibly several days earlier, especially when the impact was from a headlong position.
Ah, the old, tired split story attempt at reconciliation. Obviously? When you point out to me the single, unbroken section of the bible that describes the entire story of Judas' death from hanging to exploding on a rock, then I will buy your reconciliation. But, such a passage does not exist anywhere. You are FORCING a reconcilation between these two passages. You are correct that the passage about the explosion does not say that it is describing his cause of death. But, can you, with all your magic imaginations, explain to me why the author of the explosion section described the explosion and not the death?

If one guy wrote that Jesse James was tried and hanged to death and another guy wrote that Jesse James was tried and shot, would you assume that Jesse James was hanged, then shot after he died from hanging? Or would you simply wonder if the two stories were contradictory? Please explain what you would assume about those two stories.
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The facts would have to be opposing each other, but as we see in this case, they actually harmonsie.
You are begging the question. You say that these two passages would have to be opposing each other in order to be a contradiction, but you have not shown that they do NOT oppose each other. Therefore, they might very well be a contradiction. IF the intent of the author of the fall and explosion was to describe his death, then this IS a contradiction. The problem is, you can't show that this was not the intent of that author. And until you can explain why he would describe ONLY the relatively unimportant end of the death sequence in a place where any NORMAL reader would expect to see the death explained, it should still be marked as a potential problem.

You say that these harmonsie, yet they only do so in your sympathetic mind. There is nothing in the text to indicate that this is not a contradiction. REMEMBER: Any REAL contradiction can be harmonsied with enough imagination. The existence of explanations does not eliminate contradiction.
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I suspect that your standpoint is tainting your perception.
And, I suppose you are above such self-centered kinds of error.
"It is my observation and experience that the only thing which is clear about Christianity in general is that it is not clear." - Mez1 on the Skeptics Annotated Bible Message Board