Q: In Matthew 23:35, Jesus refers to the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. But the Zacharias who was slain on the temple-grounds in Second Chronicles 24:20 was the son of Jehoida. His martyrdom occurred in about 825 B.C. Zacharias the son of Barachias (a.k.a. Berechiah) was the prophet who, in an entirely different era, served as one of the Minor Prophets -- Zechariah 1:1 identifies the author as Zechariah, the son of Berechiah and dates his ministry to the 500s B.C. Isnt this a case of historical error?
A: No, although there is not widespread agreement about what is the best way to resolve the apparent discrepancy. Ill review some proposed solutions before explaining my take on it.
Resolution #1: By using the phrase from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar, Jesus was alluding to the Scriptural history of the persecution of the righteous. Abel is the first martyr mentioned in Scripture, and Zechariahs martyrdom, though not the last martyrdom to occur chronologically, was the last martyrdom described in Scripture -- his death is described in Second Chronicles, which back then appeared as the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures book-collection (or, more precisely, as the last part of the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures).
The phrase son of Berechiah is absent from the important early manuscript Codex Sinaiticus, and a few other manuscripts. It was inserted by an early copyist who thought (mistakenly) that he was thus making a helpful and benign specification of which Zechariah was meant (since there are quite a few Zechariases in the Bible). But in the original text, the entire phrase son of Berechiah was absent from this verse in Matthew, just as it is absent from the parallel-passage in Luke 11:51. So what we have here in the KJV is the result of a copyists insertion which contaminated most, but not all, manuscripts.
Resolution #2: (Starting with the same premises contained in the first paragraph of Resolution #1.) Jesus is referring to the Zechariah whose martyrdom is described in Second Chronicles 24:20-22. Many individuals in Israel and the surrounding area had more than one name in Bible-times (sometimes even three or four). These individuals included Zechariahs father. Jehoida was also known as Berechiah. It is a case of sheer happenstance, or a case of a later generation wishing to mimic the names of an earlier one, that the Zechariah of the 800s B.C. and the later Zechariah both had identically-named fathers.
Resolution #3: (Starting with the same premises contained in the first paragraph of Resolution #1.) Jesus said Zechariah son of Jehoida (well the Aramaic equivalent), and Matthew wrote Zechariah son of Jehoida, but early copyists who were more familiar with the Minor Prophets than with the books of Chronicles mistakenly wrote Zechariah son of Berechiah out of habit, and this textual corruption occurred early enough to affect all transmission-streams. So, this error appears in the extant text (except in a few manuscripts which diverge from the original text in a different way by omitting the phrase entirely), but not in the original text produced by the author.
Resolution #4: Zechariah the son of Jehoida is not in the picture. The individual to whom Jesus refers is the Minor Prophet Zechariah, son of Berechiah. Although Scripture does not record his martyrdom, Jesus here recollects an incident that was nevertheless known to Jesus listeners via some other book or through oral tradition. If one grants that Zechariah ben-Berechiah was martyred, he would be the last prominent martyr, chronologically, in the Old Testament record.
I leave it to you, o reader, to gauge the relative strengths and weaknesses of those theories. Meanwhile, my approach is as follows: the passage has been mistranslated. In 23:42, the words of Jesus should be understood as only that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah. The rest of the verse consists of an authorial parenthesis about the identity of Zechariah. There are lots of Zechariahs in the Bible (Strongs Concordance lists 27 of them), and thats not counting the Zachariahs and Zaccurs. Matthew may have felt that he could avoid leaving his readers wondering Which Zechariah? by means of a parenthetical comment, so he made one.
The Zechariah ben-Berechiah referred to is not Zechariah ben-Jehoida; nor is he the Minor Prophet named Zechariah ben-Berechiah. Its someone else. In Josephus Wars of the Jews, in Book 4, Chapter 6, Section 4, Josephus describes a conspiracy that occurred during the First Jewish Revolt against an eminent citizen named Zacharias the son of Baruch. Josephus relates how Zechariah ben-Baruch was brought before a puppet-court on trumped-up charges of treason, but argued his case so well that the puppet-court, consisting of 70 judges, declared him Not guilty. At that point, the Zealots arose against the puppet-courts members whose consciences prevented them from serving as the puppets they had been appointed to be. And two of the boldest of them fell upon Zacharias in the middle of the temple, and slew him, and said, Thou hast also our verdict, and this will prove a more sure acquittal to thee than the other. They also threw him down out of the temple immediately into the valley beneath it.
Now, Baruch and Berechiah are essentially the same name, like Jeremy and Jeremiah. Only the -YH suffix makes the difference. And we have, in Josephus account of Zechariah ben-Baruchs martyrdom, an explicit mention of someone who was killed in the temple-grounds.
An objection may be made that the Zechariah in Matthew 23:35 was murdered between the temple and the altar, and the altar was closer to the Temple than the spot where Josephus says that Zechariah ben-Baruch was slain (with the result that an observer would say that when Zechariah was slain, the altar was between Zechariah and the Temple rather than that Zechariah was between the altar and the Temple). However, Josephus description of a location in the middle of the temple aptly describes a spot between the Temple and the altar. And in the preceding chapters, Josephus points out that the outer parts of the Temple had been tainted by bloodshed (4:5:1 ends with the statement that Now the outer temple was all of it overflowed with blood; and that day, as it came on, saw eight thousand five hundred dead bodies there. So it seems at least as likely, given the unfitnness of the Court of the Gentiles as a place to conduct a trial, that the martyrdom of Zechariah took place in the inner court -- between the Temple proper and the altar (the altar was located just within the Court of the Priests) -- as someplace else.
(In my edition of Whistons translation of Josephus works, theres a footnote explaining why the footnoter rejects this view, but the main ground for the objection -- that Josephus does not explicitly say that the rebels occupied the inner courts of the temple at this point -- is an argument from silence, which I think is outweighed by Josephus earlier statements to the effect that the outer Temple was a bloody mess. The footnoter also seems to have overlooked Josephus statement in 4:5:1 that the Zealots came boldly out of the inner temple which seems to suggest, at the very least, that the Zealots /did/ occupy the Court of the Priests.)
The martyrdom of Zechariah ben-Baruch serves as a pretty good marker for the high point of the revolt before everything started to fall apart, severe disputes emerged among the rebels, and the Romans began to move on Jerusalem. So if Matthew is explaining that the Zechariah mentioned by Jesus was Zechariah ben-Baruch, a sub-point of this is that the destruction of Jerusalem during the First Jewish Revolt is regarded by Matthew as the consequence of the Jewish leaders persecution of the righteous. And the following verses in Matthew 24 could hardly be more specific that the destruction/desolation of Jerusalem is exactly what is in view.
This resolution, dividing 23:35 between Jesus words and Matthews parenthetical comment/expansion, is attractive to me. It has the bonus of implying a date-boundary for the production of the Gospel of Matthew, in its canonical form, no earlier than A.D. 68. And it also helps settle the next SAB-objection.
Yours in Christ,
Waterrock
A: No, although there is not widespread agreement about what is the best way to resolve the apparent discrepancy. Ill review some proposed solutions before explaining my take on it.
Resolution #1: By using the phrase from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar, Jesus was alluding to the Scriptural history of the persecution of the righteous. Abel is the first martyr mentioned in Scripture, and Zechariahs martyrdom, though not the last martyrdom to occur chronologically, was the last martyrdom described in Scripture -- his death is described in Second Chronicles, which back then appeared as the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures book-collection (or, more precisely, as the last part of the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures).
The phrase son of Berechiah is absent from the important early manuscript Codex Sinaiticus, and a few other manuscripts. It was inserted by an early copyist who thought (mistakenly) that he was thus making a helpful and benign specification of which Zechariah was meant (since there are quite a few Zechariases in the Bible). But in the original text, the entire phrase son of Berechiah was absent from this verse in Matthew, just as it is absent from the parallel-passage in Luke 11:51. So what we have here in the KJV is the result of a copyists insertion which contaminated most, but not all, manuscripts.
Resolution #2: (Starting with the same premises contained in the first paragraph of Resolution #1.) Jesus is referring to the Zechariah whose martyrdom is described in Second Chronicles 24:20-22. Many individuals in Israel and the surrounding area had more than one name in Bible-times (sometimes even three or four). These individuals included Zechariahs father. Jehoida was also known as Berechiah. It is a case of sheer happenstance, or a case of a later generation wishing to mimic the names of an earlier one, that the Zechariah of the 800s B.C. and the later Zechariah both had identically-named fathers.
Resolution #3: (Starting with the same premises contained in the first paragraph of Resolution #1.) Jesus said Zechariah son of Jehoida (well the Aramaic equivalent), and Matthew wrote Zechariah son of Jehoida, but early copyists who were more familiar with the Minor Prophets than with the books of Chronicles mistakenly wrote Zechariah son of Berechiah out of habit, and this textual corruption occurred early enough to affect all transmission-streams. So, this error appears in the extant text (except in a few manuscripts which diverge from the original text in a different way by omitting the phrase entirely), but not in the original text produced by the author.
Resolution #4: Zechariah the son of Jehoida is not in the picture. The individual to whom Jesus refers is the Minor Prophet Zechariah, son of Berechiah. Although Scripture does not record his martyrdom, Jesus here recollects an incident that was nevertheless known to Jesus listeners via some other book or through oral tradition. If one grants that Zechariah ben-Berechiah was martyred, he would be the last prominent martyr, chronologically, in the Old Testament record.
I leave it to you, o reader, to gauge the relative strengths and weaknesses of those theories. Meanwhile, my approach is as follows: the passage has been mistranslated. In 23:42, the words of Jesus should be understood as only that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah. The rest of the verse consists of an authorial parenthesis about the identity of Zechariah. There are lots of Zechariahs in the Bible (Strongs Concordance lists 27 of them), and thats not counting the Zachariahs and Zaccurs. Matthew may have felt that he could avoid leaving his readers wondering Which Zechariah? by means of a parenthetical comment, so he made one.
The Zechariah ben-Berechiah referred to is not Zechariah ben-Jehoida; nor is he the Minor Prophet named Zechariah ben-Berechiah. Its someone else. In Josephus Wars of the Jews, in Book 4, Chapter 6, Section 4, Josephus describes a conspiracy that occurred during the First Jewish Revolt against an eminent citizen named Zacharias the son of Baruch. Josephus relates how Zechariah ben-Baruch was brought before a puppet-court on trumped-up charges of treason, but argued his case so well that the puppet-court, consisting of 70 judges, declared him Not guilty. At that point, the Zealots arose against the puppet-courts members whose consciences prevented them from serving as the puppets they had been appointed to be. And two of the boldest of them fell upon Zacharias in the middle of the temple, and slew him, and said, Thou hast also our verdict, and this will prove a more sure acquittal to thee than the other. They also threw him down out of the temple immediately into the valley beneath it.
Now, Baruch and Berechiah are essentially the same name, like Jeremy and Jeremiah. Only the -YH suffix makes the difference. And we have, in Josephus account of Zechariah ben-Baruchs martyrdom, an explicit mention of someone who was killed in the temple-grounds.
An objection may be made that the Zechariah in Matthew 23:35 was murdered between the temple and the altar, and the altar was closer to the Temple than the spot where Josephus says that Zechariah ben-Baruch was slain (with the result that an observer would say that when Zechariah was slain, the altar was between Zechariah and the Temple rather than that Zechariah was between the altar and the Temple). However, Josephus description of a location in the middle of the temple aptly describes a spot between the Temple and the altar. And in the preceding chapters, Josephus points out that the outer parts of the Temple had been tainted by bloodshed (4:5:1 ends with the statement that Now the outer temple was all of it overflowed with blood; and that day, as it came on, saw eight thousand five hundred dead bodies there. So it seems at least as likely, given the unfitnness of the Court of the Gentiles as a place to conduct a trial, that the martyrdom of Zechariah took place in the inner court -- between the Temple proper and the altar (the altar was located just within the Court of the Priests) -- as someplace else.
(In my edition of Whistons translation of Josephus works, theres a footnote explaining why the footnoter rejects this view, but the main ground for the objection -- that Josephus does not explicitly say that the rebels occupied the inner courts of the temple at this point -- is an argument from silence, which I think is outweighed by Josephus earlier statements to the effect that the outer Temple was a bloody mess. The footnoter also seems to have overlooked Josephus statement in 4:5:1 that the Zealots came boldly out of the inner temple which seems to suggest, at the very least, that the Zealots /did/ occupy the Court of the Priests.)
The martyrdom of Zechariah ben-Baruch serves as a pretty good marker for the high point of the revolt before everything started to fall apart, severe disputes emerged among the rebels, and the Romans began to move on Jerusalem. So if Matthew is explaining that the Zechariah mentioned by Jesus was Zechariah ben-Baruch, a sub-point of this is that the destruction of Jerusalem during the First Jewish Revolt is regarded by Matthew as the consequence of the Jewish leaders persecution of the righteous. And the following verses in Matthew 24 could hardly be more specific that the destruction/desolation of Jerusalem is exactly what is in view.
This resolution, dividing 23:35 between Jesus words and Matthews parenthetical comment/expansion, is attractive to me. It has the bonus of implying a date-boundary for the production of the Gospel of Matthew, in its canonical form, no earlier than A.D. 68. And it also helps settle the next SAB-objection.
Yours in Christ,
Waterrock
