When I was an undergraduate I took a course in Medieval History. Since part of the course involved the history of the Roman Catholic Church, the issue of papal infallibility came up. According to recent Catholic theology, the Pope is preserved from even the possibility of error when he solemnly declares to the Church a dogmatic teaching on faith or morals. This concept that the Pope speaking ex cathedra does so without the possibility of making a mistake did not become dogma until 1870.

Despite the dogma, the Pope is not infallible. My professor showed us a speech by a certain Pope who had announced that “As the apostle Peter says,” just before quoting from Paul. I found it all very amusing—until I ran across the following in the Gospel of Matthew:

Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: “They took the thirty silver coins, the price set on him by the people of Israel, and they used them to buy the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.” (Matthew 27:9-10)

Rather than quoting something from the book of Jeremiah, Matthew quotes Zechariah 11:12-13. As a person who believed that the Bible was error-free, I was confronted with a serious challenge to my beliefs. The same mistake a Pope had made, the author of Matthew had apparently been guilty of. What was I going to do?

I had no immediate solution. In fact, I was troubled by the matter for over ten years. During those long years I ran across several attempts to explain what was going on.

Explanation One

The most common attempt to explain the introduction of Jeremiah’s name in place of that of Zechariah in Matthew, is to argue that somehow Matthew was quoting and combining odd bits of Jeremiah 18 and 19. This argument works only so long as one doesn’t bother to actually read those two chapters of Jeremiah.

Explanation Two

A second answer to the problem is that Matthew is simply quoting from either a now lost prophecy of Jeremiah, or to a saying of Jeremiah’s that was passed down by oral tradition.
Unfortunately, this is a little too convenient. It lacks any evidence, and it feels like desperation. I was neither satisfied nor comforted.

Explanation Three

Some commentators tried to explain that “Jeremiah” heads the books of prophesy in the Hebrew Bible and that “Jeremiah” is therefore synonymous with “a prophet.” Unfortunately, neither Matthew nor any of the other New Testament writers follow this supposed practice with any other Old Testament citations. Worse, Jeremiah does not, in fact, actually begin the Book of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Rather, Joshua leads as the first book of the section that the Jewish people labeled “the Prophets.” They divide the “Prophets” into two sections, the Former Prophets (Joshua-Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah-Malachi).

Explanation Four

A fourth idea is that the attribution to Jeremiah is simply a transcription error on the part of an early copyist. Unfortunately, all the hundreds of ancient copies of the book of Matthew are unanimous in the reading of Jeremiah’s name in Matthew 27:9. So again, no satisfaction.

Explanation Five

Matthew simply made a mistake. This is what the reformer, Martin Luther believed:

This chapter gives rise to the question, Why did Matthew attribute the text concerning the thirty pieces of silver to the prophet Jeremiah, whereas it stands here in Zechariah? This and other similar questions do not indeed trouble me very much, because they have but little bearing upon the matter; and Matthew does quite enough by quoting a certain scripture…

Certainly not the solution I had hoped for, but the one I was increasingly thinking I might be forced into.

So What to Do?

For years I was left unsatisfied until one day I was reading a commentary of Zechariah which mentioned an idea that the Cambridge theologian, Joseph Mede, had proposed in 1638.

Since Matthew identifies Zechariah 11:12-13 as coming from Jeremiah rather than Zechariah, he decided to depart from the tradition that Zechariah wrote the whole book that bears his name. Mede argued, “There is reason to suspect that the Holy Spirit (through Matthew) desired to claim three chapters 9, 10, 11 for their real author.” Thus, we simply take Matthew’s words at face value.

So why would Jeremiah’s prophesies be added to the end of a book by Zechariah? Because Zechariah was actually the last book of the prophets.

Zechariah 9-11, Zechariah 12-14, and the last “book” of the Old Testament, Malachi were, in fact, three short, otherwise unattached prophecies that were put in their present position in the Bible when the books that make up the Old Testament were being arranged into their current order. Two were attached to the end of the book of Zechariah, while the third was given the title “Malachi” from a word in Malachi 1:1 and 3:1.

The word translated in Malachi 3:1 as “my messenger” is the same word that was left untranslated and turned into a name in Malachi 1:1. Rather than understanding the word “Malachi” as the name of a prophet (a name, by the way, that otherwise shows up nowhere else in the Bible but in Malachi 1:1), it can simply be taken to have the same meaning that it does in the third chapter: “my messenger.”
Why was all this done? So that there would be twelve minor prophets instead of only eleven: twelve had theological significance (twelve tribes of Israel) where eleven did not.

In conclusion, Zechariah 1-8 was written by Zechariah. Zechariah 9-11, according to Matthew 27:9-10 was written by Jeremiah. Malachi, according to Mark 1:2-3, was actually written by the prophet Isaiah. We are left with Zechariah 12-14 as one more anonymous scripture, joining many other anonymous books of the Old Testament.

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