Protestant apologists are fond of appealing to Matt 23:35//Luke 11:48-51 as "proof" of Jesus defining the limits of the Old Testament, understood by later Jews to end at 2 Chronicles where the murder of one Zecharias is recounted. Commenting on the (1) identity of the Zechariah mentioned by Jesus and (2) whether ancient Jews actually believed 2 Chronicles to be the final book of the Old Testament, Gary Michtua wrote the following:
There was an understanding in the Church that Zechariah died a martyr's death. When Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees that "all the righteous bloodshed upon the earth [will come upon you], from the righteous blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar," (Matthew 23:35) some early fathers believed Jesus was speaking about John the Baptist's father, Zechariah. Seeing that no other person mentioned in Scripture perfectly fits the description of this Zechariah, John's father is certainly a possible candidate.
Apocryphal writings that contain accounts about Zechariah's martyrdom in the temple area also circulated in the early Church. In fact, one of them, the Protoevangelium of James, was written sometime in the first quarter of the second Christian century, which is quite early since it is traditionally believed that St. John the Apostle died only a few decades earlier. According to this apocryphal writing, King Herod was searching for John the Baptist and sent guards to Zechariah to find out where he was. Zechariah replied that he is always in the temple area serving God and had no idea where John could be. When threatened with death, Zechariah is said to reply: "I am God's martyr, if you shed my blood; for the Lord will receive my spirit, because you shed innocent blood at the vestibule of the temple of the Lord." (Protoevangelium of James, 23). According to this story, the guards killed him and his body was found later on . . . It's also possible that Jesus was referring to an otherwise unknown Zechariah who had recently been murdered. After all, this would be no different than the other times Jesus mentions contemporary events that are not otherwise recorded in Scripture, such as the 18 people being killed by the falling tower of Siloam (Luke 13:4). Maybe Jesus is doing the same here? In any case, identifying Jesus' Zechariah is not as easy as it seems. But even if Jesus did refer to the Zechariah in Second Chronicles, was Chronicles always the last book in the Jewish Bible?
This point is [speculative]. There is only one Jewish list in all of antiquity that places Chronicles at the end of the Hebrew Bible (b. Baba Bathra, 14b). Every early Church fathers who attempted to reproduce the contents of the Jewish Bible, ended his list with either Esther or Ezra-Nehemiah. One of them put Chronicles last. Even the oldest complete Hebrew Bibles (the Aleppo and Leningrad codices) place Chronicles first among the Writings, not last. The earliest evidence of any Jewish writing putting Chronicles last, outside of b. Baba Bathra 14b, is from the 13th century! (Gary Michuta, Behind the Bible: What the Bible Assumes you Already Know [Livonia, Mich.: Nikaria Press, 2017], 108-9, 147-48)
As I wrote in my book Not by Scripture Alone: A Latter-day Saint Refutation of Sola Scriptura, pp. 111-13:
[S]ome Protestant apologists often use Luke 24:44 with Matt 23:35 (“From the blood of the righteous Abel . . . to the blood of Zechariah”) as evidence that the Old Testament was closed at the time of Jesus. 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 [Eugene, Oreg.: Harvest House Publishers, 1998], p. 17). 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.
The common Protestant appeal to these texts to support Sola Scriptura is based on eisegesis, not exegesis, as is so much of their theology.
