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 [Greek: Barachias] of the N.T. There is a variety of readings, but [Greek: Bariskaios] (LM^{mg}) has the appearance of being what Josephus wrote or at least the nearest approximation in the MSS to the original name. [Greek: Bareis] 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.
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
