| Potter's Field Prophecy and Thirty Pieces of Silver
Joseph Francis Alward The author of the Bible's book of Matthew believes that the prophet Jeremiah prophesied that blood money paid to Judas would be usedto purchase a potter's field. In fact,there is no such prophecy in Jeremiah; the closest thing to such a prophecy is instead found in the book by Zechariah. |
 The Prophet Zechariah |
| Matthew Mistakenly Attributes Prophecy to
Jeremiah
According to Matthew, Jesus says that Jeremiah spoke of events which would foreshadow the priests' purchase of the potter's field with the thirty pieces of silver Judas obtained for his betrayal of Jesus:
However, there is no "prophecy" like this in Jeremiah;
the only thing close is found in the story below, in which a man buys a field
from his cousin; it has nothing to do with anyone's blood money paying for
a burial field:
The "Prophecy" is Actually in Zechariah The closest match to the words in Matthew's prophecy-fulfillment claim are found in Zechariah, not Jeremiah ("Jeremy"), as Matthew claimed:
Proof that the Zechariah verse is the one Matthew had in mind is found in the striking parallels between the words in Matthew's verse and the ones in Zechariah; these are shown in Table 1 below. Table 1
The Zechariah passage above is almost certainly the one Matthew had in mind, because it is the only place in the Old Testament where a potter is given silver, and it's also the only passage which parallels the valuing of a man's work at thirty pieces of silver, the blood money received by Judas for turning over Jesus. Unfortunately for those who believe the Bible is without error, the Zechariah story concerns a shepherd being insulted by low wages and throwing them contemptuously at a potter; it has nothing to do with a potter selling a field; there's no field, and nobody sold anything. Thus, the Zechariah story clearly is not a prefigurement of priests purchasing a potter's field with Judas' blood money; Matthew was mistaken.
Matthew, or his source, might also have had the following passage in Amos in mind when he invented the story of a righteous man being sold for 30 pieces of silver:
Some apologists attempt to explain away this obvious discrepancy by claiming that it must have been common practice in those days for one to speak of all prophets collectively as "Jeremy", after Jeremiah, who they claim was the major prophet. Thus, these apologists argue that even though Zechariah was the prophet who actually made the prophecy, it was proper for Matthew to attribute it to Jeremiah. However, since the apologists offer no evidence that no authors other than Matthew ever said "Jeremy" when they meant some other prophet, one suspects if Ruth, not Zechariah, had been the author of the above passage, inerrantists would have argued that Ruth was a "major prophet" and that her name was commonly used to refer to all of the prophets collectively. This "explanation" simply doesn't stand the test of common sense. Furthermore, Matthew did, in fact, mention Esaias (Isaiah) four times as the source of some of the alleged prophecies (3:3, 4:14, 8:17, 12:17), and Daniel once (24:15); except for 27:9, where Matthew wrongly identified "Jeremy" as the prophecy source, all of the other prophecy fulfillment claims by Matthew were attributed to "the prophet." If Matthew, as some apologists claim, wanted to refer to a prophecy without actually giving the prophets name, then why wouldn't he just have said that the words were spoken by "the prophet," as he did on other occasions? 1 In any case, the Zechariah passage has nothing whatever to do with blood money being spent to buy a potter's field, so Matthew was completely wrong about the source of his alleged prophecy.
Another Apology Fails In desperation, some apologists claim that the words to which Matthew was referring were spoken by Jeremiah, and are not to be found in scripture. This claim is really too unbelievable to pursue, since the parallels shown in Table 1 are just too striking to be coincidental. Furthermore, all of the prophecy fulfillment claims made by Matthew in which he uses words like "had been spoken" correspond to written passages in the Old Testament. Why should we believe that the Jeremy reference would be the ONLY one which didn't have to have a written antecedent in the Old Testatment? A list of these correspondences is shown in Table 2.
Table 2
Was There No Potter in the Zechariah Story?
Another reason to doubt Matthew's potter's field
story comes from the Hebrew word for paymaster or treasurer:
atsar, which is suspiciously close in spelling to yatsar,
the Hebrew word for potter. It's not hard to imagine
that Zechariah's words were incorrectly transcribed, because it makes far
more sense for an man insulted by his low wages to toss them back at the
paymaster than for him to cast them to a potter. The editors of the
Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible probably got it right when
they translated it as "treasury". So, if there never was a potter in
Zechariah's story, then Matthew probably made up the whole
thing. How Could Matthew Have Made Such an Egregious Error?
The reason Matthew thought there
was a story in Jeremiah about a man buying a field for thirty pieces of silver
may have been that he didn't have the scripture at hand when he wrote
his book and was relying on his memory. If he had had the scripture
to refer to, it's hard to understand why he wouldn't have realized that there
was nothing in the Old Testament to back up his prophecy-fulfillment claim.
If Matthew was basing his claim on his recollection of verses, he may
not have realized that part of it came from Zechariah where thirty pieces
of silver is thrown at a potter, and the other part from Jeremiah where
a man buys a field for seventeen shekels of silver from his cousin. Thus,
perhaps without realizing it, Matthew came up with his prophecy-fulfillment
claim by unknowingly blending the thirty pieces of silver and potter in
Zechariah, with the purchase of a field with silver in Jeremiah, and the
statement in Amos about selling the righteous for silver, and then
attributed the whole prophecy to "Jeremy". He thus made two mistakes:
the "prophecy" wasn't actually a prophecy at all, and the source of
his "prophecy" wasn't where he remembered it was. An Alternative View of the Meaning of Matthew 27:3-10
Notes
1. Ray Briggs, private
correspondence, May 23, 2001.
|
Then
Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented
himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests
and elders... And they... bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers
in. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,
And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that
was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value; And gave them
for the potter's field
(Matthew
27:3-10)