In his commentary on the New Testament, Robert Gundry offered the following translation of Matt 23:34-36:
On account of this I’m sending to you prophets and sages and scholars of them you’ll kill and crucify. And of them you’ll flog in your synagogues and persecute from city to city so that on you may come all righteous blood that was being shed on the earth from the blood of Abel, the righteous one, up to the blood of Zechariah, Barachiah’s son, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Amen I tell you, all these things will come on this generation.
Gundry then offers the following interpretation of Matthew’s reference to “Zechariah”:
Abel counts as the first martyr in the Old Testament, Zechariah as the last (canonically though not temporally speaking [see Jeremiah 26:23]). Zechariah’s martyrdom appears in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22. Originally one book, Chronicles stands last in the arrangement of books making up the Hebrew canon of the Old Testament. Chronicles calls this Zechariah “the son of Jehoiada”; but Jesus calls him “Barachiah’s son,” which agrees with Zechariah 1:1. The Chronicler’s Zechariah lived and died before the Babylonian exile, however, whereas the career of Zechariah the minor prophet followed that exile. So what is Jesus doing by calling the preexilic Zechariah the son of a man who fathered the postexilic Zechariah? Well, in 27:3-10 Matthew will quote the postexilic Zechariah 11:12-13 in regard to “innocent blood,” “the price of blood,” and the “field of blood.” But Matthew will ascribe the quotation to Jeremiah, from whose prophecy part of the quotation does indeed come. So the martyred preexilic Zechariah is here associated with the father of the postexilic Zechariah to make up in advance for the nonmention in 27:3-10 of the postexilic Zechariah in favor of Jeremiah and to correlate the betrayal of Jesus’ innocent blood, which fulfilled the prophecy in the Minor Prophets by Zechariah the son of Barachiah, with the shedding of the righteous blood of Old Testament martyrs, which culminated in the murder of Zechariah the son of Jehoiada in Chronicles. Thus theology trumps biology. (Robert H. Gundry, Commentary on the New Testament: Verse-by-Verse Explanations with a Literal Translation [Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2010], 104, italics in original)
While Gundry is wrong about Chronicles being the final book in the Old Testament during the time of Jesus (see the section “Luke 24:27, 44-45” in my article Not by Scripture Alone: A Latter-day Saint Refutation of Sola Scriptura), the above is rather interesting in attempting to resolve the problem of the identity of the Zechariah in this pericope.
