《Selections from Josephus》 - 免费有声读物

V. Note on § (45). The Blood of Zacharias

This incident is of interest to the N.T. student because of the suggestion, made long ago and recently revived by Wellhausen, to identify the Zacharias of Josephus with the “Zachariah son of Barachiah” of Matt. xxiii. 35. “Son of Barachiah” is a well-known crux in that passage, but, pace Wellhausen, there is little or no doubt that our Lord there referred to the murder of Zechariah son of Jehoiada described in 2 Chron. xxiv. 19 ff.

The theory of Wellhausen and others evades the difficulty of an apparent confusion in Matthew between the pre-exilic prophet and the prophet of the Restoration, but introduces far greater difficulties. The text of Josephus just fails to supply the desired evidence. The name of the father of the Zacharias of Josephus resembles, but, it will be observed, only resembles, the Βαραχίας of the N.T. There is a variety of readings, but Βαρίσκαιος (LMmg) has the appearance of being what Josephus wrote or at least the nearest approximation in the MSS to the original name. Βάρεις of most MSS is a corruption of this. The reading “Baruch” (the nearest approach to “Barachias”) is doubtless a correction; it occurs only in cod. C which in other instances replaces an unfamiliar by a Biblical name (Niese, vol. VI, p. xxxix), and as an alternative to “Bariscæus” in cod. M.

Again, it may be urged in support of this theory that the two murders mentioned in Matthew are cited as the first and last of a series, and that as that of Abel was the first recorded in Biblical history, so that of Zachariah ben Bariscæus was the last outstanding murder of a Jew by his own countrymen before the Fall of Jerusalem, which is the culminating event in the mind of the Speaker in Matt. xxiii. The contemporaneous murder of Ananus is regarded by Josephus as the beginning of the end.

The obvious difficulty of this identification is that in the mouth of our Lord the words must be prophetical, whereas the past tense is used in both reports of the words (“whom ye slew,” Matt., “who perished,” Luke xi. 51).

The passage in Matthew and the parallel passage in Luke are both derived from an older source, an early collection of the Sayings of Jesus (commonly called “Q”); and behind that again apparently lies a still older source, an apocryphal Wisdom book from which Christ is quoting (“Therefore also said the Wisdom of God,” Luke xi. 49). Luke does not insert the words “son of Barachiah,” and it is therefore doubtful whether they stood in Q; Harnack (Sayings of Jesus, p. 104) concludes that they did not. But that they belong to the original text of the first Gospel and are not a later interpolation there seems no reason to doubt. If the error originated with the Evangelist himself, we may compare the rather similar confusion (“Jeremiah” for “Zechariah”) in Matt. xxvii. 9; if, as seems more probable, he has taken it over from Jewish tradition, it is natural to find such influence in this particular Gospel.

The three persons bearing the name of Zacharias who come primarily^[431] into the question are:—

(1) Z. ben Jehoiada, murdered in the first Temple (2 Chron. xxiv.).

(2) Z. ben Berechiah ben Iddo, the prophet of the Restoration (Zech. i. 1).

(3) Z. ben Bariscæus, murdered in Herod’s Temple (Josephus).

There is every reason for identifying the Zacharias referred to by our Lord with the first of these, whether we look at the original text of Chronicles or at the Jewish Haggadah which grew up round it.

(i) With the words of Christ, or of the personified Wisdom in the work from which He quotes, “I send unto you prophets” (Luke “I will send unto them prophets”) compare 2 Chron. xxiv. 19, “Yet he sent prophets to them to bring them again unto the Lord.”

(ii) With St. Luke’s twice repeated “may (shall) be required of this generation” (xi. 50 f.) cp. the dying words of Zechariah, “The Lord look upon it and require it,” as also Abel’s blood “crying from the ground” (Gen. iv. 10).

(iii) Turning to Jewish tradition, we find that legend has been active in connexion with the murder in the Temple of a pre-exilic Zachariah who can be no other than the son of Jehoiada. And it is noteworthy that the two points dwelt on are just those which appear in the N.T. passage, viz. (a) the exact spot in the Temple where the murder occurred (cp. the precise localisation “between the sanctuary and the altar”) and (b) the crying out of the blood from the ground for vengeance, like that of Abel, and the terrible expiation required to still it. “R. Johanan said,” we read,^[432] “‘Eighty thousand of the flower of the priesthood were slain on account of the blood of Zachariah.’ R. Judan asked R. Aha ‘Where did they kill Zachariah? In the Court of the Women or in the Court of Israel?’ He answered, ‘Neither in the Court of the Women nor in the Court of Israel, but in the Court of the Priests.’” The legend goes on to tell how the murder was rendered more heinous by being committed on a sabbath and that the Day of Atonement, and how Nebuzaradan when he entered the Temple saw the prophet’s blood welling up from the floor, and of the holocaust of priests which hardly availed to quench the stream.

(iv) Furthermore, there is evidence to show that the Rabbis, like the author of the first Gospel, confused or, disregarding chronology, identified the pre-exilic victim with Zechariah the prophet of the Restoration. The Targum on Lam. ii. 20 (“Shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?”) runs, “Is it also fit that they should slay a priest and prophet in the Temple of the Lord, as ye slew Zacharias the son of Iddo ... in the house of the Sanctuary, on the day of Expiation?” (Lightfoot l. c.). The Midrash (tr. Wünsche) interprets the same passage of Lam. of Zechariah son of Jehoiada.

(v) What is the intended series or line of which Zechariah is the last representative? Abel is naturally the first, but, chronologically, Z. ben Jehoiada was not the last prophet whose murder is recorded in the O.T.; Uriah (Jer. xxvi. 20 ff.) was later. The usual explanation that his murder stands last in the arrangement of the Hebrew Bible with Chronicles at the end is unsatisfactory; the books of the O.T. still circulated separately in the first century of our era. Moore’s answer is “It is not because the death of Z. was the last crime of the kind in Jewish history that it is named in the Gospel, but because it was in popular legend the typical example of the sacrilegious murder of a righteous man, a prophet of God, and of the appalling expiation God exacted for it.” But the identification of the victim with the prophet of the Restoration suggests another answer. Zechariah ben Berechiah did in fact stand chronologically at the end of the prophets; as Josephus writes (§ 63), the succession failed after Artaxerxes (i. e. Ahasuerus). The context in Matthew relates to the ancient prophets; the later generation that built the prophets’ tombs is set over against that of the forefathers who murdered them. That the final instance of such murder should be drawn from recent (to say nothing of future) history would be inappropriate. The son of Bariscæus was no prophet or priest and “as a layman would have no business in the part of the court between the temple and the altar” (Moore).

For the opposite view see Wellhausen Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, ed. 2 (1911), pp. 118 ff. His main points are that Chronicles was a learned, not a popular, book and not likely to have been known to or quoted by Christ (but Christ is apparently quoting at second hand from one of those apocryphal books which were essentially popular), and that the rabbinical legend is in its origin unconnected with the story in Chronicles and really an echo (Nachklang) of the episode in Josephus, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans having here, as elsewhere, been confused with the earlier destruction by the Babylonians.