Why did Judas betray Jesus?

[Major Nikon]

31. Wages isn't ambiguous, so yes it most certainly does matter

And it matters from exactly the same comprehensive literal standpoint. It’s utterly ridiculous any other way. You don’t get wages out of a flock, you get wages for work. You are correct in that it does not say for a day, but wages pretty much everywhere in the bible are referenced per day so that’s a reasonable assumption.

The whole exercise was to come up with a meaningful value for the 30 pieces of silver Judas was given. If you can come up with a better guess, have at it. Even if you can’t it’s pretty safe to assume it was a relatively trivial sum of money or the made up story doesn’t work so well.

OTOH, you are correct, it’s not all made up. There are words that are actual words that taken by themselves mean something. So you sure got me there. I certain messed up by making you think I meant it was completely full of random numbers and letters. Remember that comprehension does involve a bit of reading between the lines and I can only imagine there’s volumes of information you’re missing out on if you derived nothing more than the strict literal meaning of what I wrote.

There’s also details in the bible that did not occur in the time period alleged. There’s contradictions, and descriptions of things that are just flat out wrong. All of the four principal gospels of Christianity were written anonymously and not by those attributed long after the events occurred. There are a few historical figures mentioned, but all of the major characters, including Jesus we know virtually zero about. As any sort of historical document the bible sucks. We know a shitton about other notable figures during the same time period and well before because the Romans wrote down pretty much everything, yet strangely here’s this guy traveling all over Roman territory doing awe inspiring miracles yet somehow they forgot to write any of it down.

So to provide the absolute level of precision you are demanding, I’ll correct my previous statement and estimate 99% of it is made up. Now if you can come up with a better number then by all means do tell and we’ll see if we can reconcile the two.