266 VISIONS AND PROPHECIES OF ZECHARIAH
tJiey shall be in bitterness for him, as one ttiat is in bitterness for his first-born " and proceeds to describe an intense universal mourning throughout " the whole land," when every tribe shall mourn apart, and " their wives apart."
Even Jews believed that this is a prophecy of solemn events in the future though, on grounds which we cannot stop here to indicate, they wrongly applied ver. 10 to a "Messiah ben Joseph," who, according to them, .was to precede the Messiah ben David.
Certainly the remarkable correspondence in this case, between the prediction and that part of it which has already been fulfilled in the Gospel narrative, is one of the most striking proofs of the divine inspiration of the prophecy, as well as of the Messiahship of our Lord Jesus of Nazareth. But for Canon Driver and the school which he represents, New Testament history is evidently non-existent, or, if it exists, it has no relation whatever to Old Testament pro phecy ; and rather than admit the possibility of a divine fore-announcement in reference to a distant future, this sublime scripture is made to refer to " some deed of blood " in which the leaders and the people were implicated some time before these chapters were zvritten, which, according to him, was some time between 518 and 300 B.C. of which " deed of blood " which could occasion such deep and universal mourning, history knows nothing !
Now, to quote another author :
" The human authorship of any books of Holy Scripture and so of these chapters of Zechariah is, in itself, a matter which does not concern the soul. It is an untrue imputation that the date of books of the Bible is converted into matter of faith. In this case Jesus has not set His seal upon it ; God the Holy Ghost has not declared it. But, as in other cases, what lay as the foundation of the theory was the unbelief that God, in the way above nature, when it seemed good to Him, revealed a certain future to His creature man. It is the postulate (or axiom, as appears to these critics), that there is no superhuman prophecy, which gives rise to their eagerness to place these and other
