and mid unto them, Thus saith God,
Why transgress ye the commandments of the Lord that ye cannot prosper?
Because ye hive forsaken the Lord, he hath also forsaken you. And they
conspired against him, and stoned him with stones, at the commandment of
the king, in the court of the house of the Lord." 2 Chron. xxiv. 20, 21.
_________

There is also Zacharias the prophet; who was the son of Barachiah, and
is so described in the superscription of his prophecy, but of whose
death we have no account.

I have little doubt but that the first Zacharias was the person spoken
of by our Saviour; and that the name of the father has been since added
or changed, by some one who took it from the title of the prophecy,
which happened to be better known to him than the history in the
Chronicles.

There is likewise a Zacharias, the son of Baruch, related by Josephus to
have been slain in the temple a few years before the destruction of
Jerusalem. It has been insinuated that the words put into our Saviour's
mouth contain a reference to this transaction, and were composed by some
writer who either confounded the time of the transaction with our
Saviour's age, or inadvertently overlooked the anachronism.

Now, suppose it to have been so; suppose these words to have been
suggested by the transaction related in Josephus, and to have been
falsely ascribed to Christ; and observe what extraordinary coincidences
(accidentally as it must in that case have been) attend the forger's
mistake.

First, that we have a Zacharias in the book of Chronicles, whose death,
and the manner of it, corresponds with the allusion.

Secondly, that although the name of this person's father be erroneously
put down in the Gospel, yet we have a way of accounting for the error by
showing another Zacharias in the Jewish Scriptures much better known
than the former, whose patronymic was actually that which appears in the
text.

Every one who thinks upon the subject will find these to be
circumstances which could not have met together in a mistake which did
not proceed from the circumstances themselves.

I have noticed, I think, all the difficulties of this kind. They are
few: some of them admit of a clear, others of a probable solution. The
reader will compare them with the number, the variety, the closeness,
and the satisfactoriness, of the instances which are to be set against
them; and he will remember the scantiness, in many cases, of our
intelligence, and t