ZACHARIAS, SLAIN BETWEEN THE TEMPLE AND THE ALTAR

TL;DR

Chapman argues that the Zacharias of Matthew 23:35/Luke 11:50 is Zacharias son of Jehoiada, not Zacharias son of Baruch, the rich man murdered by Zealots in 69 CE. He also argues the passage is not a later interpolation in Q but part of the original Q material, so it should not be used to date Luke/Acts after 69.

Key findings

• The paper concludes that the correct identification is Zacharias son of Jehoiada, whose death is recorded in 2 Chron. xxiv and whose dying words call on God to “look upon it and require it”; this matches the Abel–Zacharias blood-reckoning in Q.
• It rejects the rival identification with Zacharias son of Baruch, whom Josephus (*Bell. Jud.* iv 5.4) describes as a rich man killed by Zealots in 69 CE after a jury of seventy had acquitted him; the paper says this would make Matthew/Luke later than 69 and conflict with the sense that the blood was shed by the fathers’ generation.
• It argues there was no interpolation in Q: the Matthaean and Lukan passages explain and are demanded by the preceding woes, and the phrase “the Wisdom of God said” stood in Q, not as a quotation from a post-70 book or a Christian prophet of 69.
• It notes that Origen already records a tradition identifying Zacharias as the father of John and that the identity question was older than the story invented to answer it, going back to the second century or an apocryphal Gospel.

Methods

• Source-critical and exegetical study of Matt. 23:29–36 and Luke 11:47–51, with Greek text tables and comparison of the two evangelists’ wording and sequence.
• Uses the Q hypothesis to explain shared material; examines Josephus, Origen, LXX/2 Chron. xxiv, patristic testimony, manuscript variants (e.g., omission of “son of Barachias”), and rabbinic traditions.
• Main analysis weighs rival identifications, the meaning of “Wisdom of God said,” and the *terminus ad quem* of the blood-reckoning saying.

Limitations

• The author states he must not be understood to hold definite views on the Synoptic problem, which he assumes for the sake of argument and does not defend here.
• He acknowledges serious difficulties with the son-of-Baruch identification (the view he rejects), including the need to assume an exegetic interpolation in Q and that both evangelists would have misunderstood it; he calls these objections serious but not conclusive.
• He notes he cannot attempt here to add arguments on the date of Acts, and he has not seen Berendts’s study on Zacharias apocrypha/legends; the argument also evidently depends on the assumed Q source and particular reconstructions of Q.