Page:Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah (Baron, David).djvu/278



262 VISIONS AND PROPHECIES OF ZECHARIAH

Now in order rightly to understand or explain the prophetic element in these chapters, and to know whether these forecasts have already been fulfilled or not, much will depend on the question of the date of their origin. It makes all the difference, for instance, whether chaps, xii. xiv. were composed by an unknown contemporary of Jeremiah, whose prophecies of a siege of Jerusalem, and " anticipations " of God s manifest interposition on behalf of His people in the hour of their greatest extremity (which, however, were falsified by the events), refer to the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by the Chaldeans, or whether the writer is the inspired post-exilic prophet under whose name these chapters stand, who not only lived after the destruction of the Temple, but witnessed the rebuilding of the Temple after the partial restoration from Babylon, and who therefore must speak of another Temple and a yet future siege.

Now, while Zechariah s authorship of the first eight chapters (with which I have already dealt so far) is uni versally acknowledged, strong objections have been raised in modern times against the assumed authorship and date of the last six chapters.

The Spirit of the Early English Criticism

On examining the great amount of criticism on this subject, we find that it divides itself into two separate streams, which are impelled by two different motives.

The earliest critics of the traditional authorship of these chapters were learned English divines, men who believed in the plenary inspiration of Holy Scripture, whose actuating motive was to justify the inerrancy of the citation in Matt, xxvii. 9, 10, which ascribes to Jeremiah a prophecy found in Zech. xi. Thus Joseph Mede * (the very first who sought to establish a pre-exilic authorship of these chapters) says, in his note on the above passage in Matthew : " It

1 Joseph Mede, born in 1586 at Borden, Essex, author of the Cla-vis Apoca- liptica; died in 1638.