At this point, I’ve written many preparatory drafts for the actual Bible study portion of this blog, but I think actually that actually an ideal starting place is to take a look at the prophetic book Zechariah and its interaction with the Gospels. “Why,” you might ask yourself, “is a close reading of a relatively minor prophetic book an ideal starting place?”  Dear reader, there is a method to my madness, but rest assured that prior to the close reading for this set of blog posts, I had read Zechariah at most once, and during that reading I had almost certainly given it little thought beyond something like “Whoa, that’s super metal” in reaction to some of the more lurid passages about eyeballs melting out of their sockets and whatnot. But this recent examination has made it obvious that the interaction between Zechariah and the Gospels is actually a good starting point, because it introduces several themes that I think are quite important to understanding the New Testament. 

The actual impetus to look at Zechariah came from a new version of the Greek New Testament that I bought, which has marginal notes that list parallel passages among the Gospels and also citations and allusions from the Hebrew Bible.  I cannot emphasize how helpful these marginal notes are, because the New Testament has many, many citations and allusions to Hebrew Scripture.  In the ancient world, where literacy was much less common, these allusions would have been quite apparent to the average Christian who read Scripture, or who had Scripture read to them, simply because they would have had large portions of Scripture memorized (as indeed some people still do today).  But I don’t have this same command of Scripture, and so it is quite helpful to have those citations and allusions listed so that I can read the Hebrew Scriptures which are being referenced.

As it happened, I was comparing the Gospels’ several versions of the passage in which Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane prior to being seized and delivered up to be crucified.  In Matthew and Mark, prior to going to the Garden, Jesus quotes Zechariah 13:7, “Strike the shepherd and the sheep shall be scattered.” And again, I have probably only read Zechariah once, and remembered basically nothing about it, so it seemed worthwhile to read the whole book, to get a sense for what was actually being quoted here.  It is also the case that one of my general principles is that the Bible should always be read in such a way that you have as much context to a given section of Scripture as possible, and this seemed to obviously further that aim. This effort proved to be something of a rabbithole, but let us turn our attention to what I have found.  

According to this website, which provides what is certainly an incomplete list of citations or allusions, Zechariah is cited in several places in the New Testament.  Three of these citations appear in Matthew, with parallel citations in either Mark or John, one of those citations appears in John and Revelation only.  All of these citations are from Zechariah 9 or later.  This is no accident! Modern scholars typically divide Zechariah into two parts, with the first part consisting of Chs. 1-8, which are closely related to Haggai, the prophetic book which precedes Zechariah, and which are plausibly dated to the reign of the Persian King Darius, around 518-520 BCE.¹ The historical context for this section is that the Persians had conquered the Babylonians, who had destroyed the first temple and exiled a substantial portion of the Hebrew aristocracy, and after this conquest repatriated the Hebrews and seemingly funded the restoration of the Temple (as part of a policy to placate subject peoples and head off revolt).  This first section responds to these events by prophesying that the restoration of the Temple will usher in utopia and the degraded morals of the Hebrews will be restored by God.  This section is not cited by New Testament authors.  

The second section is probably of later composition and possibly related to the book of Malachi, and it is sort of a mixed bag of prophecies.  This is the section that is cited by New Testament authors, and although they are not a perfect match, the citations seem closer to the Hebrew text form than the LXX² text form. As we shall see, this second section of Zechariah is somewhat similar inasmuch as it ultimately ends describing a utopian state for Jerusalem, but its composition is less unified than Zechariah 1-8, and wavers between the expectation that God’s Kingdom will arrive and neighbors nations will be subject to it, and lamentations that various shepherds are bad shepherds who do not care for their flock.

By citing or alluding to these passages in Zechariah, New Testament authors indicate that they view Jesus as fulfilling those prophecies, and that early Christians shared that understanding.  But it is not always clear that these early Christian interpretations of Zechariah have the same understanding of what these passages mean as the people who wrote and compiled Zechariah.  This idea that early Christians inserted their own beliefs into texts that might not have originally contained them (and that modern readers do the same to texts composed by early Christians) is one of the important themes that will be considered as we dive deeper into Zechariah.  

Another important theme that will be introduced in this examination is the difference between the Hebrew and LXX manuscript traditions, because the Greek and Hebrew texts differ from each other in various ways. Sometimes these differences are fairly trivial, sometimes they clarify or expand the meaning of both versions, and sometimes they introduce conflicts between the texts that would lead to different interpretations of the meaning.  We will also consider important themes including: expectations for judgment day (as opposed to the idea of Hell), the idea of a Kingdom of Heaven where God literally takes the place of worldly emperors, various understandings of the extent to which Gentiles will be saved, and many other themes.  

Hopefully this has whetted your appetite for a deeper dive into Zechariah!

<Click here for the full list of posts in this series>

Footnotes

[1] All of this information is taken from the introduction to Zechariah in the New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VII. <back to top>

[2] LXX is an abbreviation for “Septuagint,” which is the Greek manuscript tradition of the Hebrew Bible.  An excellent introduction to this is the book When God Spoke Greek, but the short version here is that the LXX was widely used in the ancient world, particularly by early Christians, and in some cases it preserves variant forms of the manuscripts.  It should also be noted that the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible is based off of medieval manuscripts, whereas for the Septuagint, many of the manuscripts that we have are from early papyri and are actually older than the Hebrew text form.  I highly recommend reading When God Spoke Greek for a fuller picture! <back to top>