The obvious difficulty of this identification is that in the mouth of our Lord the words must be prophetical, whereas the past tense is used in both reports of the words (“whom ye _slew_,” Matt., “who _perished_,” Luke xi. 51). The passage in Matthew and the parallel passage in Luke are both derived from an older source, an early collection of the Sayings of Jesus (commonly called “Q”); and behind that again apparently lies a still older source, an apocryphal Wisdom book from which Christ is quoting (“Therefore also said the Wisdom of God,” Luke xi. 49). Luke does not insert the words “son of Barachiah,” and it is therefore doubtful whether they stood in Q; Harnack (_Sayings of Jesus_, p. 104) concludes that they did not. But that they belong to the original text of the first Gospel and are not a later interpolation there seems no reason to doubt. If the error originated with the Evangelist himself, we may compare the rather similar confusion (“Jeremiah” for “Zechariah”) in Matt. xxvii. 9; if, as seems more probable, he has taken it over from Jewish tradition, it is natural to find such influence in this particular Gospel. The three persons bearing the name of Zacharias who come primarily[431] into the question are:— (1) Z. ben Jehoiada, murdered in the first Temple (2 Chron. xxiv.). (2) Z. ben Berechiah ben Iddo, the prophet of the Restoration (Zech. i. 1). (3) Z. ben Bariscæus, murdered in Herod’s Temple (Josephus). There is every reason for identifying the Zacharias referred to by our Lord with the first of these, whether we look at the original text of Chronicles or at the Jewish Haggadah which grew up round it. (i) With the words of Christ, or of the personified Wisdom in the work from which He quotes, “I send unto you prophets” (Luke “I will send unto them prophets”) compare 2 Chron. xxiv. 19, “Yet he sent prophets to them to bring them again unto the LORD.” (ii) With St. Luke’s twice repeated “may (shall) be required of this generation” (xi. 50 f.) cp. the dying words of Zechariah, “The LORD look upon it and require it,” as also Abel’s blood “crying from the ground” (Gen. iv. 10).