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'. 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. 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. 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.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, 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. 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'. 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 24.48 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). 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'. 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.
Here again, as for Origen earlier, the reason for the explicit mention of
Zechariah would be chronological. (Edmon L. Gallagher, “The Blood from Zabel to
Zechariah in the History of Interpretation,” New Testament Studies 60,
no. 1 [2014]: 133-35)
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