In the message on Sunday, we saw that Matthew recorded Judas fulfilling Zechariah 11:12-13 which reads: Then I said to them, "If it seems good to you, give me my wages; but if not, keep them." And they weighed out as my wages thirty pieces of silver. Then the LORD said to me, "Throw it to the potter"-- the lordly price at which I was priced by them. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the LORD, to the potter.
Matthew’s in 27:8:3-10 reads: Then when Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, "I have sinned by betraying innocent blood." They said, "What is that to us? See to it yourself." And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, "It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is blood money." So they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field as a burial place for strangers. Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, saying, "And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a price had been set by some of the sons of Israel, and they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord directed me."
Should we be troubled that Matthew attributes this prophecy to Jeremiah and not Zechariah? Do we have a bona fide instance of error in the Scriptures? Certainly not.
Matthew’s quotation includes words and ideas from Jeremiah 19:1-13 and Zechariah 11:11-13. Jeremiah 19, like Zechariah 11, addresses the people’s rejection of the Lord. There are multiple parallels between the passages, including the imagery of the people eating one another’s flesh. If you take the time to read the two in one sitting, you’ll see that it is very natural to associate them. Accordingly, Matthew has combined them and attributed the quotation to Jeremiah, the greater of the two prophets.
This is not an unusual thing to the Jewish mind. We find something similar in Mark 1:2-3, where the evangelist combines words from Isaiah and Malachi, but attributes the quotation to Isaiah as the greater of the two prophets. Another example is in Matthew 2:23, “…that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled: ‘He shall be called a Nazarene.’” The words, “he shall be called a Nazarene,” are found nowhere in the OT. To find an explanation for that, you can read this blog article from January 2011.
All of this is to say that the first century Jew had a much looser understanding of what it means both to quote a source and to fulfill a prophecy than we do. We tend to expect strictly verbatim quotations and strictly literal fulfillments. The biblical writers did not think that way. This phenomenon, in addition to how the NT authors quote the OT and attribute fulfillments in general, should lead us to interpret OT prophecy far more loosely than many in the modern church do.
No Jew would have had a problem with this quotation or with the claim that the purchase of this field fulfilled it. The Holy Spirit inspired text says what it says, and it is right and true. These things were foretold in the OT, they occurred in the events surrounding the life and death of Jesus Christ.
I have found the more I read the whole Bible, intentionally considering OT texts as did the NT authors—that is, reading every text in light of the coming of Christ AND reading the OT text as a unified whole—the more I make connections similar to the one found in Matthew 27:8-9. May these things challenge us to become more faithful readers and students of the Bible!
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