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DR. MARTINEAU AND THE GOSPELS.

IN an address recently delivered at University Hall, Dr. Martineau (according to a newspaper report) selected Matthew xxiii. 35 (with its reference to Zacharias the son of Barachias) as a passage helping to demonstrate the comparatively late date and the untrustworthiness of the Gospels. The report runs as follows:

"Christ inveighs against the Scribes and Pharisees and hypocrites, and charges them with the guilt of all, the blood shed from Abel down to Zacharias the son of Barachias, 'whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.' This last event must have been fresh in recollection; it was the latest crime, the lecturer argued, committed by those who were addressed. Now Josephus gives an account of this crime in his histories. In the end of the Jewish war, which finished with the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70, Zacharias the son of Baruch that is, Barachias-was slain in the temple by a tumultuous mob, because he was a moderate man, and was disposed to make terms with the Romans. Yet-here was Dr. Martineau's startling conclusion -this very crime is mentioned by Jesus, who died in the year 30, thirty-eight years before, as having been committed by those whom He was denouncing."

This report is obviously a mere abstract, and cannot be taken to represent the close historical criticism which, I have reason to believe, Dr. Martineau laid before his audience. But I can hardly be wrong in assuming that he offered the identity of the Zacharias of Matthew and the Zacharias of Josephus as a premiss of conspicuous force. Whether therefore the report, as a whole, does justice to Dr. Martineau or not, those who were "startled" by his conclusion may be interested to see what there is to be said on the other side.

I have no right, on the authority of an abstract, to conclude that the lecturer propounded his parenthesis-" that is, Barachias "—as a universally acknowledged fact, or as a fact which at least deserves universal acknowledgment;

such however is the practical effect produced by the newspaper report upon its readers. But the evidence that Zacharias the son of Baruch was the same as Zacharias the son of Barachias is not by any means solid enough to sustain the edifice Dr. Martineau erects upon it. First of all, there is no proof whatever that Baruch and Barachias were convertible names. John Lightfoot, it is true, accepts their equivalence, but he accepts it without any attempt at justification; his manner of speaking is as curt as Dr. Martineau's seems to have been, for in his Exercitations on St. Matthew, vol. xi. p. 289 (English translation), we find a similarly insinuated parenthesis: "Zacharias the son of Baruch (which is the same thing with Barachias)." But all the evidence that we have is against this somewhat hasty identification. In the Septuagint Version the Hebrew Baruch is always transliterated into Bapoúx, while Bapaxías (once, apparently, Bapaxía, 1 Chron. xv. 23) is the invariable reproduction of the Hebrew Berechiah (cf. 1 Chron. vi. 39, 2 Chron. xxviii. 12, Zech. i. 1). In the book of Nehemiah the two names Βαρούχ and Βαραχίας stand several times for different persons; the former for Baruch the son of Zabbai (iii. 20, x. 6) and Baruch the son of Colhozeh (xi. 5); and the latter for Berechiah, the father of Meshullam (iii. 30), who helped in rebuilding the walls of the holy city. These names are never known to be confused. In Josephus also they are quite distinct, though he is not content with the transliteration of Baruch, but Grecises it into Bapoûyos; and in the passage to which Dr. Martineau refers, found in the Wars of the Jews iv. 5. 4, the expression is Zaxapías viòs Bapoúxov. Dr. Neubauer tells me that in rabbinical literature, from 1000 to 1500 A.D., the names were not considered identical, neither are they now convertible among the Jews. That the names differ in signification may not go for much; but Baruch is Latinised by Gesenius into Benedictus (blessed),

while he translates Berechiah by Cui benedicet vel benedixit Jehova, "He whom Jehovah will bless, or has blessed." We may fairly therefore refuse to admit the vitally important parenthesis of Lightfoot and Dr. Martineau, and affirm that Baruch is not the same as Barachias; whereupon Dr. Martineau's appeal to Josephus becomes, for us at least, very questionable, and his reliance upon it as an ancillary proof of the late date and untrustworthiness of our Matthew correspondingly unjustifiable.

But this is not the whole of the case for the defendant. According to Matthew's account, Jesus painted the enormity with heightened colour by reminding the Jews how they had slain Zacharias "between the sanctuary (vaós) and the altar"; or, as Luke phrases it, "between the altar and the house (of God)." Now the space here referred to was in the court reserved exclusively for the priests, and was specially sacred, this court being the inmost court of all the temple precinct, and reaching up to the steps of the sanctuary itself. But Zacharias the son of Baruch was, according to Josephus, murdered by two Zealots "in the midst of the temple" (èv μéow τ iep). The spot Josephus indicates was, in all probability, the "court of the Israelites," separated by a barrier from the "court of the priests." Josephus has left us a minute account of the temple and its various divisions, and may be relied upon to remember the differences between one part and another. Whiston (who knew his Josephus), in his note upon this passage, declines to "believe that our Josephus, who always persists on the peculiar sacredness of the inmost court, and of the holy house that was in it, would have omitted so material an aggravation of this barbarous murder, as perpetrated in a place so very holy, had that been the true place of it." And Whiston's view is supported by the fact that Zacharias the son of Baruch, not being a priest, but only a citizen, would naturally have been found, not in the court

of the priests, but in that of the Israelites. Further, Josephus gives no hint that the Zealots had as yet profaned the inmost court; and when they do profane it several months later, he takes care to record the profanity (see Wars of the Jews v. 1. 2). All that he says on this occasion is that "two of the most audacious (Zealots) fell upon and murdered Zacharias in the midst of the temple." And from the rest of the account, before and after, we are led to think of some part of the temple near to the place where Zacharias had just been tried and acquitted by an improvised court of seventy of the principal citizens; and judicial assemblies sat in one of the outer courts of the temple. The very fact moreover that this murder was altogether against the will of these citizen judges, who acquitted Zacharias, "as choosing rather to die themselves with him than to have his death laid at their doors,"would somewhat blunt the edge of Christ's general accusation against the Jewish nation.

But if Zacharias the son of Baruch is for such reasons unsuitable to our passage, who was the Zacharias son of Barachias therein mentioned ?

The common explanation is that he was the same as the Zacharias son of Jehoiada whose murder is recorded in 2 Chronicles xxiv. 20. It is an explanation accepted not only by the orthodox apologist, but also by critics like Schürer and Holtzmann, who may be regarded as indifferent to apology. Holtzmann, it is true, mentions the hypothesis adopted by Dr. Martineau, but introduces it with a depreciatory "wofern nicht," as a hypothesis of inferior probability. (See Hand Commentar, i. 255; also Schürer, Jewish People, English translation, ii. i. 309.) I cannot see why, in spite of certain difficulties, this explanation should not be considered rational and credible. It was most natural for Christ to have taken, as examples of the righteous blood shed upon the earth, the first and last

murders recorded within the compass of the Jewish canon, according to the conventional order of the books. In the strict order of chronology the death of Urijah, recounted in Jeremiah xxvi. 20-23, came later; but in the canon the book of Jeremiah stood eleventh and the books of Chronicles twentieth, according to the enumeration of Jerome "as that customary among the Jews." And, in the words of Schürer, "According to the order of the canon, the assassination related in 2 Chronicles is certainly the last." This assassination was viewed in rabbinical literature with special abhorrence. The Talmuds both of Jerusalem and of Babylon (see Lightfoot xi. 288) declare that the blood continued to bubble till Nebuzaradan had slain 94,000 priests, old and young, to appease it." "They committed seven wickednesses in that day [of the murder]. They killed a priest, a prophet, a judge; they shed the blood of an innocent man; they polluted the court [of the priests]; and that day was the sabbath day and the day of expiation." In regard to this murder and that of Abel, and these alone, there is in the Old Testament the same cry for vengeance. "Behold," says God in Genesis iv. 10, "the voice of thy brother's blood crieth out to Me." "And when [Zechariah] died, he said, The Lord look upon it, and require it" (2 Chron. xxiv. 22). Furthermore it is noticeable, though not of course convincing, that when our Lord in Matthew xxiii. 37 (two verses later) laments over Jerusalem, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee," the stonest, the word of specialization, suits the case of Zacharias the son of Jehoiada, and not that of Zacharias the son of Baruch, who was slain with the sword (see Josephus, Wars of the Jews, 1.c.; and as to Zacharias son of Jehoiada, Antiqq. ix. 8, 3).

The following points moreover make in favour of the common explanation. (1) Christ says (ver. 34), "Behold,