Near the end of the series of woes upon the Pharisees found in Matt 23 (// Luke 11.37–52), Jesus declared that his generation would pay the penalty for all the righteous blood shed on earth, ἀπὸ τοῦ αἵματος Ἅβɛλ τοῦ δικαίου ἕως τοῦ αἵματος Ζαχαρίου υἱοῦ Βαραχίου, ὃν ἐφονɛύσατɛ μɛταξὺ τοῦ ναοῦ καὶ τοῦ θυσιαστηρίου (v. 35). The identity and significance of ‘Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the Temple and the altar’ has troubled exegetes from ancient times.Footnote 1 A common interpretation today relates Abel and Zechariah to the first and last books of the Hebrew Bible so that Jesus' statement refers to the contours of the canon. This ‘canonical’ interpretation so dominates the discussion of this passage that a decade ago H. G. L. Peels asserted that ‘[v]irtually all exegetes believe that Mt 23,35 and Lk 11,51 mirror the structure and scope of the Old Testament canon of that time’.Footnote 2 During the decade since the publication of Peels' article, while a number of scholars demur, the ‘canonical’ interpretation has continued to claim a large number of adherents.Footnote 3 But this interpretation has not always dominated the exegesis of Matt 23.35. In fact, the Church Fathers never considered it, nor did anyone else, apparently, until the rise of modern biblical criticism. This paper will examine the patristic interpretation of our verse, give brief consideration to some Early Modern interpretations (e.g. John Lightfoot, Calvin), and finally offer a suggestion for the origins of the ‘canonical’ interpretation.
Proponents of the ‘canonical’ interpretation make two assumptions about the exegesis of Matt 23.35 that were not always shared by earlier interpreters. First, they identify the Zechariah mentioned by Jesus with the Zechariah murdered by King Joash of Judah within the precincts of the Temple, as narrated in 2 Chron 24.20–2. Although this latter Zechariah has a different patronym (Jehoiada) from the one the Matthean Jesus specifies (Barachiah), few scholars in the modern period have considered this a serious deterrent to identifying the two.Footnote 4 We will see that in the patristic period this identification was much less obvious, especially to the Greek Fathers. The second assumption made by proponents of the ‘canonical’ interpretation is that the Hebrew Bible – or, at least, a very prominent form of it – already in the days of Jesus had a sequence concluding with Chronicles, just as is typical today. The Fathers were unaware of a sequence of Old Testament books with Chronicles at the end. If they did not relate Jesus' mention of ‘Abel to Zechariah’ to the borders of the canon, what significance did these two names carry for the Fathers? We will first consider the identity of Zechariah in the history of interpretation before turning to the explanations offered for why Jesus named these two characters.
1. Greek Fathers on the Identity of Zechariah
In spite of the obvious similarities between the death of Zechariah as described by Jesus and the death of Zechariah son of Jehoiada in 2 Chronicles, two features of the Chronicles passage deterred the Fathers from always interpreting Jesus' statement as a reference to it. First, of course, the problem of the variant patronym – Jehoiada versus Barachiah – could not be avoided and demanded explanation. Second, the Fathers did not always find in their Greek texts of 2 Chron 24 a character named Zechariah. The Old Greek translation of Chronicles gave this person the name Azarias son of Iodae.Footnote 5
The Greek translation of Chronicles is usually dated to the mid second century bce.Footnote 6 The well-documented tendency of the Greek translations to undergo revision towards the Hebrew text finds an example in the name of the prophet in 2 Chron 24.Footnote 7 While the Old Greek reads Azarias, several manuscripts, especially those identified as Lucianic or Antiochene, attest the reading Zechariah, thus adapted towards the Hebrew textual tradition.Footnote 8 This might explain how both John Chrysostom and Theodoret of Cyrus know the prophet of 2 Chron 24 by the name Zechariah.Footnote 9 Already in the first century, Josephus calls this prophet Zechariah (AJ 9.168–71).Footnote 10 The preserved manuscript of the Vetus Latina for 2 Chronicles also attests the form Zaccaria.Footnote 11 Nevertheless, even the great Origen is unaware of the reading Zechariah in 2 Chron 24; he only knows this prophet by the name Azarias. One would have thought that Origen would show familiarity with the name Zechariah based on his close study of the Greek Minor Versions, which surely contained this reading in harmony with the Hebrew text. Unfortunately, Field's Hexapla cites no information from Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion for our name.Footnote 12
As a result of Origen's ignorance of the name Zechariah in 2 Chron 24, he never interprets Jesus' statement in Matt 23.35 as a reference to this passage. It appears that Origen mentioned the prophet of 2 Chron 24 only twice in his extant works, both times in his Commentary on Matthew, once in the portion preserved in Greek, the second time in the Latin section. The comment preserved in Greek comes in his interpretation of the Parable of the Tenants (Comm. in Matt. 17.9). When Jesus says that ‘the tenants seized [the landowner's] slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another’ (Matt 21.35), Origen explains these crimes with references to specific actions recorded in scripture:
‘ὃν δὲ ἀπέκτɛιναν’, ὡς Ζαχαρίαν μɛταξὺ τοῦ ναοῦ καὶ τοῦ θυσιαστηρίου, ‘ὃν δὲ ἐλιθοβόλησαν’, ὡς τὸν Ἀζαρίαν υἱὸν τοῦ Ἰωδαὲ τὸν ἱɛρέα, καθάπɛρ γέγραπται ἐν τῇ δɛυτέρᾳ τῶν Παραλɛιπομένων· ἡνίκα γὰρ πνɛῦμα θɛοῦ ἐνέδυσɛ τὸν Ἀζαρίαν τὸν τοῦ Ἰωδαὲ τὸν ἱɛρέα …
They killed one, such as Zechariah between the Temple and the altar. They stoned another, such as Azarias the priest, son of Iodae, just as it is written in the second [book] of Paralipomena, for when the Spirit of God imbued Azarias the priest, the son of Iodae …
Origen continues by citing the rest of the passage from Chronicles (2 Chron 24.20–2). Note especially that, for Origen, Zechariah, murdered between the Temple and the altar (Matt 23.35), is a different individual from Azarias son of Iodae killed by Joash ‘in the court of the house of the Lord’ (ἐν αὐλῇ οἴκου κυρίου, 2 Chron. 24.21, quoted by Origen). The first serves as an example of those servants of the Lord who were ‘killed’, the second as an example of those who were ‘stoned’.
Origen mentions Azarias later in his Commentary on Matthew to illustrate the infrequency of references to the murder of God's servants in the Old Testament despite the repeated New Testament assertions that Israelite prophets routinely met a violent end.Footnote 13 Origen simply says unum autem legimus lapidatum Azariam filium Ioidae sacerdotis, populum arguentem (‘but we read of one stoned, Azarias son of Ioida the priest, while he was accusing the people’).Footnote 14 Again, these are the only two references to the prophet of 2 Chron 24 that I have been able to find in Origen.
On the other hand, Origen does mention Zechariah son of Barachiah, ‘whom you murdered between the Temple and the altar’, a number of times. The first time this Zechariah appears in his Commentary on Matthew (10.18), he says that Jesus drew on apocryphal documents:
καὶ Ἡσαΐας δὲ πɛπρῖσθαι ὑπὸ τοῦ λαοῦ ἱστόρηται. ɛἰ δέ τις οὐ προσίɛται τὴν ἱστορίαν, διὰ τὸ ἐν τῷ ἀποκρύφῳ Ἡσαΐᾳ αὐτὴν φέρɛσθαι, πιστɛυσάτω τοῖς ἐν τῇ πρὸς Ἑβραίους οὕτω γɛγραμμένοις· ‘ἐλιθάσθησαν, ἐπρίσθησαν, ἐπɛιράσθησαν’·Footnote 15 τὸ γὰρ ‘ἐπρίσθησαν’ ἐπὶ τὸν Ἡσαΐαν ἀναφέρɛται, ὥσπɛρ τὸ ‘ἐν φόνῳ μαχαίρας ἀπέθανον’ ἐπὶ τὸν Ζαχαρίαν φονɛυθέντα ‘μɛταξὺ τοῦ ναοῦ καὶ τοῦ θυσιαστηρίου’, ὡς ὁ σωτὴρ ἐδίδαξɛ μαρτυρῶν, ὡς οἶμαι, γραφῇ οὐ φɛρομένῃ μὲν ἐν τοῖς κοινοῖς καὶ δɛδημɛυμένοις βιβλίοις, ɛἰκὸς δ' ὅτι ἐν ἀποκρύφοις φɛρομένῃ.
And Isaiah is reported to have been sawn in two by the people. But if anyone does not accept the account because it is contained in an Isaiah apocryphon, let him give credence to the things written in the Epistle to the Hebrews, thus: ‘they were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted’ [Heb 11.37]. For the reference to those who were sawn in two relates to Isaiah, just as the phrase ‘they died the death of the sword’ relates to Zechariah murdered ‘between the Temple and the altar’, as the Saviour was teaching, testifying, as I think, to a writing not circulating in common and public books, but likely to be circulating in apocryphal books.
Here and elsewhere (cf. Ep. Afr. 14), Origen does not make absolutely clear which Zechariah he thinks Jesus had in mind. Of course, it cannot be the prophet of 2 Chron 24, whom Origen knows as Azarias, because Origen understands that Azarias was stoned whereas this Zechariah, he says, was killed by the sword. Even the patronym Barachiah used by Jesus in Matt 23.35 (but not by Origen in the quoted passage) does not point exclusively to a single scriptural Zechariah, since the Greek Bible knows two such characters: Zechariah the Minor Prophet (Zech 1.1) and a character mentioned in Isa 8.2 known in the Hebrew text as Zechariah son of Jeberechiah.Footnote 16 Origen actually connects the Zechariah mentioned by Jesus with neither of these Old Testament characters. In one place, Origen says that ‘it is not possible that he should be understood to be the Zechariah who is one of the Twelve’ in view of the second person plural verb used by Jesus: ἐφονɛύσατɛ.Footnote 17 This indicates that the Zechariah referenced must be a contemporary of those first-century scribes and Pharisees condemned by Jesus in Matt 23. Origen does not in this passage reveal his choice for this Zechariah, but he does indicate that Jesus did not refer to any story in the scriptural canon but rather relied on apocryphal writings.Footnote 18
More clarity comes later in the Commentary on Matthew (ser. 25) when Origen arrives at the passage under discussion (Matt 23.35). Here, emphasising the second person plural of ἐφονɛύσατɛ in Matt 23.35, Origen looks for a first-century Zechariah. The decisive clue to his identification comes from a tradition – Origen attributes it to Josephus – that the father of John the Baptist, whom Luke names Zechariah (Luke 1.5), was himself the son of a Barachiah. Origen continues by relating another tradition:
ἀλλ' ἦλθɛν ɛἰς ἡμᾶς τοιαύτη τις παράδοσις, ὡς ἄρα ὄντος τινὸς πɛρὶ τὸν ναὸν τόπου, ἔνθα ἐξῆν τὰς μὲν παρθένους ɛἰσιέναι καὶ προσκυνɛῖν τῷ θɛῷ, τὰς δὲ ἤδη πɛπɛιραμένας κοίτην ἀνδρὸς οὐκ ἐπέτρɛπον ἐν ἐκɛίνῳ. ἡ οὖν Μαρία μɛτὰ τὸ γɛννῆσαι τὸν σωτῆρα [ἡμῶν] ἐλθοῦσα προσκυνῆσαι ἔστη ἐν τῷ τόπῳ τῶν παρθένων. καὶ κωλυόντων τῶν ɛἰδότων αὐτὴν γɛννήσασαν ὁ Ζαχαρίας ἔλɛγɛ τοῖς κωλύουσιν ἀξίαν αὐτὴν ɛἶναι τοῦ τόπου τῶν παρθένων ἔτι παρθένον οὖσαν. ὡς οὖν σαφῶς παρανομοῦντα καὶ ɛἰς τὸν τόπον τῶν παρθένων ἐπιτρέποντα γυναῖκα γίνɛσθαι ἀπέκτɛιναν ‘μɛταξὺ τοῦ ναοῦ καὶ τοῦ θυσιαστηρίου’ οἱ τῆς γɛνɛᾶς ἐκɛίνης.Footnote 19
But a certain tradition has come to us such that there was a certain place at the Temple where it was permitted for virgins to enter and worship God, but they did not allow in that place those who had experienced the bed of a man. So Mary, after having given birth to [our] Saviour, having entered to worship, stood in the place of virgins. And while those who knew she had given birth were hindering her, Zechariah was saying to those hindering her that she was deserving of the place of virgins since she was still a virgin. So, on the assumption that he was clearly transgressing the law and allowing a married woman into the place of virgins, the men of that generation killed him ‘between the Temple and the altar’.
This story has some resemblance to the conclusion of the Protevangelium of James (chs. 23–4), in that both Origen's tradition and the Protevangelium have Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, murdered in the Temple precincts. But there are also substantial differences, including both the party responsible for the murder and its motivation.Footnote 20 Origen credits his information to a tradition (Comm. ser. Matt. 25) derived, he assumes, from certain apocryphal books (Comm. in Matt. 10.18). Possibly there is also some connection with Josephus' account of the killing within the Temple of a certain Zechariah son of Bareis during the First Jewish Revolt (BJ 4.334–4).Footnote 21
From whatever source Origen derived this tradition, his version of the story became influential among some later Greek Fathers. The same basic approach to the interpretation of Matt 23.35, linking Zechariah son of Barachiah to the father of John the Baptist, appears in Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Cyril of Alexandria.Footnote 22 Some Greek Fathers do know about an interpretation linking Jesus' statement with 2 Chron 24,Footnote 23 but no Greek Father known to me firmly advocates such an approach to Matt 23.35. For even when the prophet's name in 2 Chron 24 was known to be Zechariah, still the problem of the divergent patronyms would hinder any clear-cut identification of this Zechariah with the one mentioned by Jesus.Footnote 24 Rather, the idea that Jesus referred to the father of John the Baptist seems to be the most popular view among the Greek Fathers. Its appearance already in Origen as a tradition preceding him demonstrates how early the identity of Zechariah in Matt 23.35 was felt to be problematic. As John Chapman pointed out a century ago, ‘the identity of Zacharias was a question older than the story, which was invented to answer it’, and so his identity seems to have caused problems at least by the mid second century.Footnote 25
2. Latin Fathers on the Identity of Zechariah
Latin writers do tend to prefer the Zechariah of 2 Chron 24 as the one intended by Jesus in Matt 23.35. Two main points explain this. First, as mentioned earlier, the Latin translations of Chronicles, whether the Vetus Latina or the Vulgate, gave the reading Zaccaria as the prophet's name, rather than the LXX's Azarias.Footnote 26 Second, a suitable explanation for the divergent patronyms was provided by Jerome, the first author we see who argued strongly in favour of this identification. Most of the Latin exegesis favouring the interpretation depends for the argumentation on Jerome's views.Footnote 27
Jerome's most extended discussion of Jesus' statement naturally appears in his Commentary on Matthew 23.35. He first reviews the possibilities:Footnote 28
quaerimus quis sit iste Zacharias filius Barachiae quia multos legimus Zacharias. et ne libera nobis tribuatur erroris facultas additum est: quem occidistis inter templum et altare. in diversis diversa legi et debeo singulorum opiniones ponere.
But we need to ask who this Zechariah son of Barachiah is. For we read about many Zechariahs. He even removes the possibility of error for us by adding: ‘whom you killed between the sanctuary and the altar’.Footnote 29 I have read diverse things in diverse sources, and I ought to record the opinions of each of these.
Jerome begins by mentioning the most obvious candidate based on the patronym:
alii Zachariam filium Barachiae dicunt qui in Duodecim Prophetis undecimus est patrisque in eo nomen consentiat, sed ubi occisus sit inter templum et altare scriptura non loquitur, maxime cum temporibus eius vix ruinae templi fuerint.
Some say that Zechariah son of Barachiah is the eleventh of the Twelve Prophets. The name of his father is in agreement with this, but Scripture does not say when he was killed between the sanctuary and the altar, chiefly since in his time there were scarcely even ruins of the Temple.
This argument appears somewhat disingenuous. Jerome must have known from the Book of Ezra that the Second Temple had progressed sufficiently ‘through the prophesying of the prophet Haggai and Zechariah son of Iddo’ (Ezra 6.14) for the exiles who had returned to able to dedicate it in about 516 bce, during Zechariah's lifetime.Footnote 30 Jerome exploits the situation early in Zechariah's ministry, when the Temple did stand in ruins, in order to eliminate this prophet as a possibility for the interpretation of Matt 23.35.
Next, he discusses a second unacceptable option:
alii Zachariam patrem Iohannis intellegi volunt ex quibusdam apocryphorum somniis adprobantes quod propterea occisus sit quia salvatoris praedicarit adventum. hoc quia de scripturis non habet auctoritatem eadem facilitate contemnitur qua probatur.
Others want this Zechariah to be understood as the father of John. Based on certain daydreams in apocryphal writings, they affirm that he was killed because he had predicted the Saviour's advent. Since this view does not have the authority of the Scriptures, it is rejected with the same facility with which it is approved.
This second option is, of course, the one favoured by Origen, which Jerome surely must have known. However, the reason for Zechariah's death, predicting ‘the Saviour's advent’, differs from the tradition reported by Origen regarding Mary's entering the court of virgins in the Temple.Footnote 31 Nor does Jerome's statement match exactly what we find in Prot. Jas. 23, where Herod kills Zechariah for not revealing the whereabouts of his son John. Perhaps Jerome relies here on his memory for the specific circumstances associated with this second possibility. The end of the fourth century witnessed growing tension about the suitability of reading and learning from apocrypha, particularly in the wake of Priscillian of Avila's promotion of this literature and his execution in 385.Footnote 32 As Priscillian cited Matt 23.35 as part of his justification for reading apocrypha,Footnote 33 Jerome may have felt extra motivation to reject this interpretation and find an alternative.
Finally, Jerome discusses his third and preferred option:
alii istum volunt esse Zachariam qui occisus est a Ioas rege Iudeae inter templum et altare sicut regnorum narrat historia. sed observandum quod ille Zacharias non sit filius Barachiae sed filius Ioiadae sacerdotis … cum ergo et Zachariam teneamus et occisionis consentiat locus, quaerimus quare Barachiae dicatur filius et non Ioiadae. Barachia in lingua nostra benedictus Domini dicitur, et sacerdotis Ioiadae iustitia Hebraeo nomine demonstratur. In evangelio quo utuntur Nazareni pro filio Barachiae filium Ioiadae scriptum reperimus.
Others want this Zechariah to be the one who was killed between the sanctuary and the altar by Joash king of Judea, as the history of Reigns narrates. But one should observe that that Zechariah was not the son of Barachiah, but the son of Jehoiada the priest … Since, then, not only do we have Zechariah but also the place of the killing is in agreement, we need to ask why he is called the son of Barachiah, and not of Jehoiada. Barachiah means ‘blessed of the Lord’ in our language, and the Hebrew name of the priest Jehoiada signifies ‘righteousness’.Footnote 34 In the gospel that the Nazarenes use, in place of ‘son of Barachiah’ we have found it written: ‘son of Jehoiada’.Footnote 35
There seem to be four reasons why Jerome favours this Zechariah. First, the location of the death offers strong support. Second, the name Zechariah provides a match. Third, Jerome successfully devises an explanation for the variant patronyms: they present no real difficulty because Jehoiada and Barachiah mean similar things in Hebrew. Fourth, Jerome again employs his knowledge of Hebrew to inform his readers that the Gospel of the Nazarenes, written in Hebrew, contains the correct patronym for Zechariah.Footnote 36 He implies that this version of the Gospel may contain the original reading. Thus, Jerome favours this view not only because it makes sense and absolves him of relying on traditions preserved only in apocrypha, as Origen and Priscillian had before him, but also because it provides the opportunity, in multiple ways, of displaying his expertise in Hebrew and its usefulness for exegesis.
Jerome's contemporary John Chrysostom, almost uniquely among Greek Fathers, it would seem, evinces some familiarity with this interpretation relating the Zechariah mentioned by Jesus to the story in 2 Chron 24, but his description suffers from some confusion. While commenting on Jesus' statement in Matt 23.35, he asks:
ἀλλὰ τίς ἐστιν ὁ Ζαχαρίας οὗτος? οἱ μὲν τὸν Ἰωάννου πατέρα φασίν· οἱ δὲ τὸν προφήτην· οἱ δὲ ἕτɛρόν τινα διώνυμον ἱɛρέα, ὅν καὶ Ἰωδάɛ φησὶν ἡ Γραφή.Footnote 37
But who is this Zechariah? Some say the father of John, others the [Minor] Prophet, and others a certain double-named priest, whom Scripture also calls Iodae.
Chrysostom does not seem to know much about this interpretation or to put much confidence in it. He may have seen some Antiochian manuscripts revised towards the Hebrew text containing the name Zechariah in 2 Chron 24 (as mentioned earlier), but it is not clear that he knows which Old Testament passage relates the story about this ‘double-named priest’. Possibly, he was just familiar with an interpretation like Jerome's, though he botches some of the details. It is not Zechariah that is double-named, but rather his father (according to the interpretation); Iodae is not the alternative name of Zechariah but one of his father's names, the other being Barachiah. Nevertheless, Chrysostom represents a rare case of a Greek Father that connected, however tenuously, Matt 23.35 with 2 Chron 24.Footnote 38
The influence of Jerome ensured that this would become the standard interpretation among Latin writers.Footnote 39 Though Jerome attributes this view to his predecessors, who these predecessors might have been is not apparent from an examination of the extant exegesis of this verse. While Jerome's position is not universally accepted, later Latin authors, including Bede, Thomas Aquinas and several others, tend to agree with it, sometimes quoting him verbatim, with or without attribution.Footnote 40
3. Why Did Jesus Mention Zechariah?
The Fathers did not discuss why Jesus named these two particular victims in his condemnation of his generation. Given his identification of Zechariah, Origen probably favoured a chronological explanation: the blood from Abel to Zechariah (= the father of John the Baptist, according to Origen) would encompass all bloodshed from the foundation of the world to the very (early) lifetime of Jesus. It is perhaps less apparent what may have been Jerome's explanation in this regard, though it seems reasonable to guess that Jerome recognised that these two deaths served as particularly heinous examples of the category ‘murder of the prophets’.Footnote 41 The Old Testament contains very few accounts of the murder of prophets, and we have already noticed that Origen perceived this to be a problem in light of the New Testament's repeated assertions that the Israelites/Jews routinely killed God's messengers.Footnote 42 Jerome, then, probably also understood that the Old Testament presented few examples of murdered prophets, and so Jesus chose to mention these two not only because their deaths were especially scandalous but because there were not many other examples from which to choose.
What is clear is that Jerome did not relate ‘the blood from Abel to Zechariah’ to the first and last books of the Hebrew Bible. He does not link these names to the contours of the Hebrew Bible because he does not know that the Bible ends with Chronicles. Indeed, no Christian list of canonical books locates Chronicles at the end of the Old Testament, nor does any pre-twelfth-century testimony, Jewish or Christian, save only the Talmudic list preserved in b. B. Bathra 14b.Footnote 43 Jerome, alone among the Fathers of the first four or five centuries of the church, reflects an awareness that the contemporary Jewish Bible has three divisions: Law, Prophets and Writings. But even he does not place Chronicles at the end when reporting how the Jews organise their biblical canon, though he apparently concerns himself with getting the correct order. In his Preface to Samuel and Kings, he reports on the Jewish ‘order’ (ordo) of the Hagiographa, for which he lists the last three books as Chronicles, Ezra[-Nehemiah] and Esther, in that order.Footnote 44 Despite his intensive studies in Hebrew and Jewish traditions, and his obvious desire to report accurately on the number and order of the Jewish biblical canon,Footnote 45 Jerome fails to locate Chronicles at the end. This might suggest that the position of Chronicles as the conclusion of the Hebrew Bible was not so firmly established in ancient and Late Antique Judaism as scholars sometimes assume. Moreover, the medieval Masoretic manuscripts also contain no single order. While Chronicles concludes the Ketuvim in a great many manuscripts, it heads the Ketuvim in many others, including the earliest and most important, the Aleppo and Leningrad Codices.Footnote 46 It is for this reason that Biblia Hebraica quinta, now being published in fascicles, will begin the Ketuvim with Chronicles in conformity with its base text, the Leningrad Codex. Jerome did not interpret ‘the blood of Zechariah’ as a reference to the last book of the Hebrew Bible because it was not the last book of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as he knew it.
We find the same to be generally true much later for writers from the Reformation period onward. In 1555, John Calvin interpreted the Gospel statement as a reference to Zechariah son of Jehoiada, but he mentions nothing about the canon. Rather, the reason Christ spoke of this Zechariah was because his murder was ‘the commencement and source of base licentiousness, and afterwards led them [i.e. the Jews] to break out into unbounded cruelty’.Footnote 47 John Lightfoot, in his Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Hebraica, first published in 1658, also regarded Zechariah as the prophet from 2 Chron 24.Footnote 48 He agreed with Jerome that the priest Jehoiada had two names, and thought that Zechariah son of Jeberechiah (Isa 8.2) was the same as the son of Jehoiada (2 Chron 24).Footnote 49 According to Lightfoot, Christ chose to speak of Zechariah in Matt 23 because his death ‘was more horrible, as he was more high in dignity; and as the place wherein he was killed was more holy’.Footnote 50 This same period saw the emergence of the view identifying Jesus' Zechariah with the Zechariah son of Bareis killed, according to Josephus (BJ 4.334–44), in the Temple during the First Jewish Revolt.Footnote 51 Here again, as for Origen earlier, the reason for the explicit mention of Zechariah would be chronological.
4. The Origins of the ‘Canonical’ Interpretation
It was, apparently, not until the rise of modern biblical criticism that someone thought of relating the mention of Zechariah to the concluding position of Chronicles within the Bible. In 1780, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn published the first volume of his Einleitung in das Alte Testament, wherein we find this statement:
… und wenn er [d.h. Christus] das erste und lezte [sic] Beispiel vom unschuldigen Blutvergiesen [sic] aus der Geschichte des V. T. anführen will, so wählt er das Beispiel Abels aus der Genesis, als dem ersten Buch des V. T., und aus den Büchern der Chronik, als dem lezten [sic] unter allen, das Beispiel Zacharias (Matth. xxiii. 35).Footnote 52
Eichhorn cites no previous authority for this interpretation; he apparently devised it himself.
How did Eichhorn explain the patronym given in Matthew's Gospel? The comments quoted above comprise all that he says in his Old Testament introduction, but he enters more fully into the matter later in his New Testament introduction, in his discussion of the original Hebrew form of the Gospel of Matthew.Footnote 53 Eichhorn accepts Jerome's testimony that the Gospel of the Nazarenes contained the patronym Jehoiada, and he assumes that this was the original reading of the Hebrew version of Matthew. Earlier, Johann David Michaelis had held a similar position. Michaelis, however, did not connect this Zechariah to the last book of the Hebrew Bible; rather, the reason Jesus referred to Zechariah son of Jehoiada was that ‘the murder of this person was not only particularly known, but was supposed to call aloud for vengeance’.Footnote 54 But how did the patronym Barachiah come to be found in our text of Matthew? Michaelis does not address this question (at least, in this context), but Eichhorn suggests that the translator of Matthew into Greek, or perhaps an editor of the Hebrew version, changed the patronym from Jehoiada to Barachiah in order to update Jesus' statement by having it now point to the Zechariah killed during the First Jewish Revolt, as reported by Josephus. Thus, instead of the statement encompassing all righteous blood shed within the limits of the Hebrew Bible, it now encompasses all righteous blood shed up to the time of the final redaction of the Gospel. The original statement, as uttered by Jesus, however, relied on the familiar sequence of books in the Bible, with Chronicles at the end.
It did not take long for Eichhorn's new ‘canonical’ interpretation of Matt 23.35 to catch on. In his 1836 commentary on Matthew, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette advocates this interpretation of the passage.Footnote 55 In the English translation of de Wette's introduction to the Old Testament, within his discussion of the canon, the translator appended a note citing Eichhorn and paraphrasing his opinion on the order of the books, including the interpretation of Matt 23.35.Footnote 56 By 1845, Moses Stuart in America could say, ‘It has become general to speak of Chronicles, as the last book in the Hebrew Canon …’, and he makes reference not only to Eichhorn and de Wette, but also to ‘many others’ as appealing ‘to Matt. 23:35 as certain evidence, that the book of Chronicles was the last in the Old Testament in our Saviour's day’.Footnote 57 Though it was not without its challengers, including Stuart himself, within a century of its being suggested by Eichhorn, this interpretation had gained so many adherents that it was now spoken of as the traditional view and the consensus of interpreters.Footnote 58
We might ask why this interpretation found expression and met with such popularity at this particular time, at the end of the eighteenth century, whereas no one seems to have thought of it earlier. Surely the stability of the sequence of books in printed Hebrew Bibles made a contribution. As noted earlier, of the many patristic lists of Old Testament books, none transmits a sequence with Chronicles at the end. In fact, no certain evidence before the twelfth century locates Chronicles at the end of the canon except for the list preserved in b. B. Bathra 14b. Even the Masoretic manuscripts, which often conclude with Chronicles, do not maintain this sequence universally. However, when the first Hebrew Bibles came off the press in the fifteenth century, they featured Chronicles at the end, and this has been true for every major printed Hebrew Bible up to the present day, although, as already mentioned, BHQ will overturn this tradition. By the time Eichhorn published his Einleitung in das Alte Testament, the printing press had for three centuries established Chronicles as the definite conclusion to the Hebrew Bible.Footnote 59
5. Conclusion
To which Zechariah did Jesus refer in his remarks about the righteous blood ‘from Abel to Zechariah’? Why did he single out these particular individuals, Abel and Zechariah? Exegetes through the centuries have struggled with these two questions as they encountered Matt 23.35. The Greek Fathers often identified Zechariah with the father of John the Baptist and apparently understood the reference chronologically – all the righteous blood from the beginning of the world up to Jesus' own time. The Latin Fathers, on the other hand, often identified Zechariah with the murdered prophet of 2 Chron 24.20–2 and seem to have thought that the heinous nature of the deaths of both Abel and Zechariah prompted Jesus to mention them. The most popular interpretation today, relating Zechariah to the story in 2 Chron 24 as the final murder mentioned in the Bible viewed canonically, arose in a situation when the printed Hebrew Bible had firmly established Chronicles as the final book of the Bible. We have seen that exegetes throughout the centuries have usually not even considered such an explanation as they were completely unfamiliar with an order of books for the Old Testament concluding with Chronicles. The ‘canonical’ interpretation of Matt 23.35 proves convincing only in an era which allows little deviation in the sequence of scriptural books. Though we have lived in such an era for a number of centuries now, neither Jesus nor anyone else could assert the same until the late fifteenth century. It is doubtful whether the ‘canonical’ interpretation can do justice to the blood of Zechariah.
