Who was Zechariah's father?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This contradiction has troubled Christian commentators since antiquity; Jerome already flagged it in the fourth century, noting that the Gospel of the Nazarenes read "son of Jehoiada." The death scenario Jesus describes in Matthew 23:35 — a Zechariah murdered "between the sanctuary and the altar" — matches 2 Chronicles 24:20-21 precisely, the only canonical Hebrew Bible account of a priest-prophet stoned in the temple court, and a resonant one on the prevailing scholarly reading because Chronicles stood last in the Jewish canonical order, making Abel-to-Zechariah a sweep from Genesis to the final book ("from A to Z"). That ordering is the explanation Luz and most commentators favor, though it should be flagged as a widely-held hypothesis rather than a certainty, since the canonical sequence in the first century is not firmly fixed and the Chronicles-stood-last arrangement is securely attested only in later tradition (b. Bava Batra 14b). The dying Zechariah of 2 Chronicles even cries, "May the LORD see and avenge!" (24:22), which Jesus's blood-guilt saying echoes. The difficulty is the patronymic: 2 Chronicles names him son of Jehoiada the priest, while Matthew calls him "son of Barachiah." Tellingly, the Lukan parallel (Luke 11:51) names the same Zechariah and the same death but supplies no father's name at all, which many scholars take as evidence that the patronymic in Matthew is a secondary, and erroneous, expansion.

The apologetic harmonizations branch. Archer proposes that Jehoiada bore two names, or that Barachiah was Jehoiada's father, so "son of" means grandson or descendant. There is no textual support: the Hebrew Bible never links Jehoiada with the name Barachiah. A second route identifies the victim as Zechariah the post-exilic prophet, "son of Berechiah" (Zech 1:1) — a near-exact name match. But there is no record, biblical or otherwise, of that prophet being martyred in the temple; this rescues the patronymic only by abandoning the death scenario that anchors the saying. A third route appeals to Jewish tradition: the Targum to Lamentations 2:20 and several rabbinic texts (e.g. the traditions surveyed by Sheldon Blank) recount the murder of "Zechariah son of Iddo, the priest and prophet" in the temple, and rabbinic memory itself conflated the Chronicles priest with the prophet, since the prophet Zechariah is called "son of Berechiah son of Iddo" (Zech 1:1) while Ezra 5:1 calls him "son of Iddo." That conflation in Jewish tradition is real — but it is evidence that the two Zechariahs were already being merged, not that they were one person.

The critical reading, developed by Davies and Allison in their ICC Matthew and Raymond Brown in The Death of the Messiah, is that Matthew (or his tradition) conflated two figures: he intends the Chronicles martyr, whose death scenario he reproduces, but attaches the prophet's patronymic, "son of Berechiah/Barachiah." A further candidate, raised by Dale Allison and others, is the Zechariah whose patronymic in Josephus is textually uncertain — commonly printed "son of Baris," though the manuscripts are corrupt at this point and the name should not be presented as fixed — a prominent Jerusalemite murdered by Zealots in the temple court during the Jewish War, recorded by Josephus (War 4.334-344, c. 67-68 CE), close enough in name, place, and manner that some suspect Matthew, writing after 70 CE, read a recent atrocity back into Jesus's words, though the chronology makes direct dependence debated.

Where the critical reading lands: a genuine error of identification, almost certainly a conflation of two (possibly three) men named Zechariah. The harmonizations either invent an undocumented double name, or save the name at the cost of the temple-court death, or rest on a Jewish tradition that itself reflects the same conflation. The absence of any patronymic in the Lukan parallel makes the simplest explanation — that Matthew's "son of Barachiah" is a mistaken expansion — the most probable.