It’s 2:30 am and I am in day 2 of a 21 day fast. Praying to God for direction. So what does one do at 2:30 am when he is still seeking God? Well if you are budding theologian (or at least want to be more than a armchair theologian) then you ponder the great unsolved mysteries of the bible.
Two particularly thorny textual issues have been Matthew 27:9-10 where Matthew says that Jeremiah spoke X but X doesn’t show up in the book of Jeremiah but instead shows up in the “book” (pay attention to those “”) of Zechariah. Another thorny issue is where Mark in Mark 1:2-3 says Isaiah quotes Y yet the quotes is both Y plus a passage from Z. You guessed it Z is not even in the book of Isaiah. There is a good solution to both of these problems.
So how do do we solve these XYZ problems? Well we let the NT be our guide.
The “Book of Malachi” does not have the authors name given in it, much to modern readers dismay. The KJV translators translated the name Malachi from the Hebrew for my messenger. The reason for this? Well it makes it easier to have 12 minor prophets, agree with the majority or Church fathers, and it makes a nice tidy spiritual parallel to the 12 apostle possible. Oh and since Malachi 3 has a easy prophecy of John the Baptist it makes a great seg way from the OT corpus to the NT. Interestingly, no NT author quotes Malachi directly as a independent author. “Malachi” i.e. my messenger could be anyone. Well what about its place in the OT? Well that’s simple in the Hebrew Bible it wasn’t the last book, instead that honor belonged to 2 Chronicles which has the story of the death of Zechariah. Notice Jesus affirms the Hebrew order in Matthew 23:35 with the quote from the blood of righteous Abel to Zechariah. Jesus affirmed the first murder in the OT to the last in the OT tacitly affirming the original Hebrew order of scripture.
The “Book of Zechariah” does not have the authors name in it after chapter 8. Zechariah 7:1 is the last place it ascribes the visions given to a prophet named Zechariah. This allows chapters 9-14 to possibly be written by some one else. Since it is actually one of three sections (two in Zechariah 9:1 to 14 and the book of Malachi) without a immediate author being given in the Hebrew, they are all started by a generic phrase of the writer speaking for God after being given “a burden of God”. In my humble opinion, this means that they were most likely they were written by another author for various internal reasons and later scribes and translators mixed up what went where. Zechariah in the Hebrew Bible is the last book in the prophets section of the Tanak. It also the last prophet where the known author is given. After Zechariah (particularly 1-8) comes the anonymous section of Zechariah (9-14) and the book of “Malachi.”
So what do you as ancient Jewish scribe do when you aren’t sure where sacred text is suppose to go? Well you put it in as an appendices. The ancient Hebrew scribes didn’t agree or know where to put “Malachi” and the “Zechariah” chapters 9 to 14 of what now is known as part of the book of Zechariah. Since the original scribes put it at the end of the prophets section and later scribes thought that the 9th to 14th chapters of Zechariah were written by Zechariah, it left only the Malachi section which was thus wrongly attributed to a actual person named Malachi and not to some yet to be named prophet.
There are three problems with what the scribes did here. First Malachi has no known genealogy, odd for a OT prophet. Read the other prophets, a pedigree is given pretty much every time (the exclusion being Obadiah). Second, excluding 3:16-18 of Malachi the prophet really doesn’t speak. Instead God speaks through the prophet. There is no need for this be considered to be written by someone actually named Malachi. The later part of 9 to 14 have chronological events that could not easily have been referred to by Zechariah but would have been familiar to a later writer.
Fast forward a few centuries and we get to the NT writers of Matthew and Mark. Well Matthew comes along to write a gospel and the Holy Spirit informs Matthew that part of the Zechariah chapters 9 to 14 were written at least in part by Jeremiah. This explains why Matthew says “thus spoken by the prophet Jeremiah” instead of the “thus spoken by the prophet Zechariah”. When Mark wrote his gospel the same Holy Spirit informed him that the “Malachi book” was written by Isaiah. Hence the reason there is no error in Matthew or Mark’s quote. Instead they are revealing what was lost knowledge of who really penned those books.
Solution: Malachi in whole is actually written by the Prophet Isaiah and Zechariah Chapters 9 to 14 were not written by the prophet Zechariah who wrote the “book of Zechariah 1 to 8″ but were instead written at least in part if not in whole by Jeremiah. NT theologians should trust that the Apostles and NT writers under the inspiration of Holy Spirit wrote accurately and if we do the research we see that God has not only persevered his word without error but that the NT reveals mysteries and secrets of the OT. Will this satisfy all the skeptics of the NT? Nope. The gospel is still a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles, but to those of us being saved it is life. Yet now we have a little more security in the NT writers quoting the OT and can answer those pesky skeptical questions that keep us up to 2 something in the morning.
Possibly related posts:
- Advent Coming
- The Voice – A book review of the new NT translation
- Spinning the Bible
- Genesis: Overview
- thoughts of a book title against Brian McLaren