Bible Lexicons

Ζαχαρίας, Ζαχαριου, ὁ (זְכַרְיָה and זְכַריָהוּ i. e. whom Jehovah remembered), Zacharias or Zachariah or Zechariah;

1. a priest, the father of John the Baptist: Luke 1:5, 12f, 18, 21, 40, 59, 67; Luke 3:2.

2. a prophet, the son of Jehoiada the priest, who was stoned to death in the middle of the ninth century before Christ in the court of the temple: 2 Chronicles 24:19ff; Matthew 23:35; Luke 11:51. Yet this Zachariah is called in Matthew, the passage cited the son not of Jehoiada but of Barachiah. But most interpreters now think (and correctly) that the Evangelist confounded him with that more noted Zachariah the prophet who lived a little after the exile, and was the son of Barachiah (cf. Zechariah 1:1), and whose prophecies have a place in the canon. For Christ, to prove that the Israelites throughout their sacred history had been stained with the innocent blood of righteous men, adduced the first and the last example of the murders committed on good men; for the books of the Chronicles stand last in the Hebrew canon. But opinions differ about this Zachariah. For according to an ancient tradition, which the Greek church follows (and which has been adopted by Chr. W. Müller in the Theol. Studien und Kritiken for 1841, p. 673ff, and formerly by Hilgenfeld, krit. Untersuchungen üb. die Evangg. Justins, etc., p. 155 and die Evangg. nach ihrer Entstehung, p. 100), Zachariah the father of John the Baptist is meant (cf. Protevangelium Jacobi,

c. 23); others think (so quite recently Keim, iii. 184 (English translation, see 218), cf. Weiss, das Matthäusevang., p. 499) a certain Zachariah son of Baruch (according to another reading Βαρισκαιου), who during the war between the Jews and the Romans was slain by the zealots ἐν μέσῳ τῷ ἱερῷ, as Josephus, b. j. 4, 5, 4 relates. Those who hold this opinion believe, either that Jesus divinely predicted this murder and in the prophetic style said ἐφονεύσατε for φονευσετε (cf. Buttmann, § 137, 4; Winers Grammar, 273 (256) n.; § 40, 5 b.), or that the Evangelist, writing after the destruction of Jerusalem, by an anachronism put this murder into the discourse of Jesus. These inventions are fully refuted by Fritzsche on Matthew, the passage cited, and Bleek, Erklär. der drei ersten Evangg. ii., p. 177ff; cf. Hilgenfeld, Einl. in d. N. T., p. 487f; (and Dr. James Morison, Commentary on Matthew, the passage cited; B. D., under Zechariah 6, and under Zechariah 11).