(3) If there has been error, it is older than St. Luke and goes back to his authority. Torrey in the above-mentioned work seems to have proved conclusively that Acts i-xv is based on an Aramaic source, to which St. Luke was “singularly faithful.” “He disliked to alter, even slightly, the document in his hands, even where he believed its statements to be mistaken, and where he found himself obliged to contradict them” (p. 40). On the alleged use of Josephus in Acts v., after referring to the horror which must have been aroused in Judæa by the crucifixion of the _sons_ of the insurgent Judas, he adds: “Any history dealing with this period would have been pretty certain to mention Theudas and Judas at this point, and in this order, although the revolt under Judas really happened much earlier. From some history of the kind, in which the facts were not clearly stated, the author of Luke’s Aramaic source obtained his wrong impression of the order of events” (p. 71). 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.