A beautiful emendation of Harnack's for οὖν σφίγγεται of the MS; but he could have kept closer to the tradition by writing συνσφίγγεται. xxvii 1. 12 οὐδεὶς γεννητὸς . . . ἄξιος εὕρηται.

MS γενητός, and it is a rash procedure to change the word.

are to establish on a secure basis an induction as to the earliest use οἱ γενητὸς γεννητὸς ἀγένητος ἀγέννητος, we must not begin by deserting MS authority.

xxvii 1. 13 τὸν τῆς προνοίας λόγον διακρίσεως καὶ διοικήσεως φανερῶσαι.

Wohlenberg much improves the sentence by writing διὰ κρίσεως as two words.

xxvii ll. 16-19 οὗτος ὁ ἐκ τῆς φυλῆς Ἰούδα λέων, ἡ ῥίζα Δαυίδ, τὸ ἀρνίον τὸ ἐσφαγμένον τυγχάνει περὶ τούτου τοῦ βιβλίου. καὶ Μωϋσῆς ἔγραψεν καὶ ἐν Ἠσαΐᾳ γέγραπται κτλ.

All the critics, Robinson, Stählin, Wohlenberg, have seen that the new sentence must begin not at καὶ Μωϋσῆς, but four words earlier at περὶ τούτου τοῦ βιβλίου. The reference to Isaiah is I suppose to Is. xxix II καὶ ἔσται ὑμῖν τὰ ῥήματα πάντα ταῦτα ὡς οἱ λόγοι τοῦ βιβλίου τοῦ ἐσφραγισμένου τούτου κτλ. I do not know whether the Mosaic reference is to Deut. xxxii (a chapter which we have twice found cited in these scholia) 34 οὐκ ἰδοὺ ταῦτα συνῆκται παρ' ἐμοί, καὶ ἐσφρά γισται ἐν τοῖς θησαυροῖς μου;

xxvii l. 19 ἐπεὶ πρώτης ἐπιδημίας κτλ.

The editors have rightly corrected ἐπί of the MS to ἐπεί; they should have gone on, as Wohlenberg has noted, to correct πρώτης into πρὸ τῆς.

C. H. TURNER.

ZACHARIAS, SLAIN BETWEEN THE TEMPLE AND THE ALTAR.

THE date of St Luke's Gospel, and consequently the date of Acts, both depend largely on the answer we give to the question: Who was the Zacharias mentioned in Mt. xxiii 35 and Lk. xi 50?' The difficulty of identifying this personage was felt before Origen's day. He tells us':

'Those who are reproved here by Christ cannot have destroyed? Zacharias the son of Barachias, [one of the twelve prophets, whose writings we have in our hands; but he means Zacharias the father of John,] (But it is likely, as Josephus says, that Zacharias the father of John is meant), as to whom we cannot prove by the [canonical] Scriptures either that he was the son of Barachias, or that the scribes [and Pharisees] killed him (in the holy Place) [between the Temple and the Altar].

But the following tradition has come down to us, that there was a certain spot around the Temple, where it was lawful for virgins to enter and worship God, but those who had already lost their virginity they did not allow in it. Now Mary, having come to worship after she had given birth to our Saviour, stood in the place of virgins. And when those who knew that she had had child prevented her, Zacharias said to those who were preventing her, that she was worthy of the place of virgins, since she was still a virgin. Therefore the men of that generation killed him between the Temple and the Altar as being plainly a transgressor, and one who permitted a woman to be in the place of the virgins. So they are reproached by the Saviour not as the sons of those who killed the prophets, and Zacharias among the prophets, but as themselves his murderers. [If then the word of Christ is true which He spoke to the Pharisees and scribes who were then present, "whom you killed between the Temple and the Altar", it is not possible for the Zacharias to be meant who is one of the twelve.] But it is not wonderful if it happened that as Zacharias the father of John had the same name as one of the twelve, so was it with his father's father likewise.'

This passage is interesting on many grounds. Here we have only to note that the identity of Zacharias was a question older than the story,

1 In Matt. xxiii 35 (De la Rue, iii 845; Lommatsch, iv 228). The Greek of most of the passage is fortunately preserved in a catena on Luke. The Latin translator is not to be trusted.

? So the Greek, ȧvņрηкévaι. The Latin has dicere, perhaps having read eipŋréval. I enclose in square brackets what is preserved in Latin only, and in round brackets what is only in the Greek.

which was invented to answer it. The story was a 'tradition', and must go back to the second century, perhaps to some apocryphal Gospel.

At the present day no one is likely to support Origen's candidate. There are two rivals only who still shew any claim: the Zacharias of 2 Chron. xxiii, and Zacharias the son of Baruch, whose murder in the Temple is related by Josephus. If the latter is the right man,' then the passages of Mt. and Lk. are later, as they stand, than the year of this murder, 69; and it follows that St Luke did not write at the early date which Harnack now champions.

I give the two passages, marking the coincidences of language after Rushbrooke :

According to Josephus Bell. Iud. iv 5. 4, this Zacharias was a rich man of high character, whom the Zealots wished to kill, because he was a friend of the good and an enemy of the wicked." Josephus relates the whole incident after the death of Nero and in connexion with the slaying of twelve thousand persons of distinction by the same party of Zealots. Thus the year is certainly 69.

The Zealots chose a jury of seventy respectable men of the people, and accused Zacharias the son of Baruch of designing to betray the city to Vespasian. The accused was imprisoned, but was able to defend

1 Many German writers assume it as certain. The latest I can refer to is von Dobschütz Eschatology of the Gospels, 1910, p. 90, note.

2 In Josephus the MSS give for the name of Zacharias's father, Βάρεις (so Niese), Βαρισκαίου and Βαρούχου, but not Βαραχίου,—so Zahn has pointed out (Einleitung ii 309).

himself, and to prove the absurdity of the charge. He boldly inveighed against the crimes of the Zealots, and, in spite of the fury of these last, the seventy jurors acquitted him, declaring that they would rather suffer death themselves than that his death should be ascribed to them. But two of the boldest Zealots set upon Zacharias and slew him in the midst of the Temple.

Nobody to-day is likely to hold that the passages of Mt. and Lk. contain words of our Lord which refer prophetically to this Zacharias. Hug, Keim, and Weiss are quoted by Knabenbauer for the view that the Evangelists explain the words of Christ as referring to him. Others more naturally take the words with which St Luke introduces the paragraph (διὰ τοῦτο καὶ ἡ σοφία τοῦ θεοῦ εἶπεν) as proving that the whole section was given in the common source of Mt. and Lk. as a citation from a book written in the year 69 or later,' and was added to our Lord's woes' on the scribes and Pharisees and lawyers as a commentary.

There is, however, no necessity for assuming the existence of such a book. The supposed title 'The Wisdom of God' is too like that of the Wisdom of Solomon. There is no trace extant of such a work. All that needs to be postulated is a prophecy, committed to writing by those who heard it or heard of it. The date is pretty clear. At the moment the prophecy was uttered, Zacharias the son of Baruch was the latest victim of Jewish fanaticism, and the destruction of Jerusalem was imminent. The date will evidently be just after the death of Zacharias and before the final investment of the city by Vespasian.2

The passage was certainly found by Mt. and Lk. in their common source Q, for it occurs in both in the same connexion. Now it is extremely difficult to explain its presence in Q, unless it was a Christian prophecy. It cannot, indeed, have formed part of Q in its original form, not only because that document was certainly of an early date, and was beyond all question current long before 69, but for the simple reason that Q was a collection of discourses of Christ, and evidently contained no extraneous matter of this kind. The passage, if a quotation, is an insertion in a late edition of Q. But the Christian who interpolated it after A.D. 69 was hardly likely to adopt a Jewish pro

1 Of course, many (e. g. Harnack Sayings of Jesus, 1908, p. 103) think that our Lord Himself is quoting from an apocryphal book of Wisdom, and place its composition at an earlier date. I see no good argument in favour of this view.

2 It might be urged that it is a vaticinium ex eventu, composed after 70. In this case the murder of Zacharias would be taken as the last crime before the retribution actually began. Even though many other crimes followed, this murder within the precincts of the Temple might naturally be singled out as a culminating outrage But there seems no object in supposing that the prophecy (no difficult one to make in 69!) was a fraud.

phecy; and it seems perfectly natural to take the words as the utterance of some Christian prophet at Jerusalem in 69-some prophet like Agabus in Acts-who introduces his denunciation of the unbelieving Jews not with the old formula 'Thus saith the Lord', but with the words: The Wisdom of God saith.' This would, in fact, be another way of saying: 'The Spirit of Christ saith', for St Paul had taught that Christ is 'the Wisdom of God' (1 Cor. i 24), and had declared that He 'is made unto us Wisdom from God', and had called his own higher instruction given to the perfect 'the speaking God's Wisdom in a mystery' (1 Cor. i 30, ii 7).* This Christian prophecy would be written down by Christians, or at least repeated and remembered. It would be quite natural to add it as a commentary to our Lord's words in which He declared that the Jews of His own day were as guilty of the blood of the prophets as were their fathers. The interpolator of Q would regard the words as truly words of Christ, spoken not in His lifetime by His own lips, but by the mouth of an inspired disciple, and as amplifying and explaining the denunciations to which he was appending them.

Thus we arrive at a simple and attractive theory. It rests upon three arguments; first, the words of St Luke 'Therefore the Wisdom of God said' suggest that in his source the passage that follows was not a saying of Christ, but a quotation from some prophecy; secondly, we obtain a clear terminus ad quem to correspond to the terminus a quo— from the blood of Abel, the first ever spilt, to the last of all, the blood of Zacharias the son of Baruch, which was spilt yesterday. All the wickedness of the world is heaped upon the head of the Jews of the generation which had rejected Christ,—this is clearly the meaning of the Christian prophet. Thirdly, Mt., though omitting 'the Wisdom of God said', has retained the prophet's words 'whom you slew', which seem to distinguish Zacharias from the earlier prophets whom not 'you' but 'your fathers' slew.

§ 2. Difficulties against this identification.

At first sight it looks so obvious that to correspond with Abel's blood, the first blood shed, we must needs have the latest blood shed by the Jews, that one feels that no objections, however forcible, can destroy the enormous a priori strength of the identification of Zacharias slain between the Temple and the Altar with the son of Baruch. This has at least been my feeling. Yet there are many real difficulties.

I. It is hard not to suppose that this Zacharias must have been a Christian, if the prophecy is the utterance of a Christian. For a Christian would scarcely resent so fiercely the murder-even though in the Temple-of a rich and prominent person in Jerusalem who had