Some Protestant apologists cite Matt 23:35 as evidence that the Old Testament was closed at the time of Jesus (“From the blood of the righteous Abel . . . to the blood of Zechariah”). Proponents claim that this verse defined the limits of the entire Old Testament, understood by Jews to end at 2 Chronicles where the murder of one Zarcharias was recounted; some (e.g., Norman Geisler) have used this “fact” against Latter-day Saint claims (see his essay, “Scripture” in The Counterfeit Gospel of Mormonism [1998]). This, however, simply muddies the water on the concept of both inerrancy and Sola Scriptura because Jesus referred to Zachariahs, the son of Barachias. The Zacharias referred to in 2 Chron 24:20 was the son of Jehoiada. But remember that such is used to support a closed canon--which would also place the New Testament outside the limits of scripture. It is likely that Jesus’ quotation referred not to the Zacharias of 2 Chronicles but to another Zacharias who lived much later and had been killed by the Jews in Jesus’ time. The Lord accused the Jews in his audience of being the murderers of Zacharias by stating, “whom ye slew between the temple and the altar” (Matt 23:35). If those Jews were the murderers, the Lord’s comments cannot apply like some (e.g., F.F. Bruce, Canon of Scripture) have contended.
Another problem, among many others, to such a line of argument is the a priori assumption that there was a fixed and clearly identifiable order of the Hebrew Bible by the time of Jesus and that the reference in Luke 24:44 to “the Law of Moses, prophets, and the psalms” does not interfere with that order. If the order of the Writings (Hebrew--Ketubim) was already set by the time of Luke’s writings (after 70 C.E.), it is strange that Josephus (around 95-100 C.E.) does not have such an ordering in his writings (Against Apion 1.37-41). Also, it is strange that none of the early Christians picked up on this three-part biblical canon, and it is not found in any of the church fathers. The best explanation of this, of course, is that the three-part biblical canon of the Jews was developed in the second century C.E., long after the Jews ceased having an influence on the scope of the Christian Scriptures.
Rather than Chronicles being the last book in the Hebrew biblical canon, however, Noel A. Freedman argues convincingly that Chronicles stands in first place in the Writings, and he supports this by reference to the major medieval manuscripts, including the standard Masoretic Aleppo Codex and Leningrad Codex (Noel A. Freedman, “The Symmetry of the Hebrew Bible,” Studia Theologica 46 (1992): 83-108, here, pp. 95-96). Rather than concluding with 1-2 Chronicles, the Writings end with Ezra-Nehemiah (treated as one book in the Hebrew canon). A further argument against the position of F.F. Bruce is Freedman’s assertion (ibid., 96) that because 2 Chron 36:22-23 and Ezra 1:1-4 are identical, the books were separated spatially since, had they been consecutive, there would have been no need for the repetition. By contrast, the primary historical books that are consecutive (i.e., 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings), have no repetitive texts connecting them.
For more on Matt 23:35 (cf. Luke 11:48-51), see Lee Martin McDonald, The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2007), 96-100.
