GEBible — Godless Engineer's Bible App
Matthew 27:9 attributes the quotation about the thirty pieces of silver to Jeremiah the prophet. The actual quotation comes from Zechariah 11:12-13, not Jeremiah. Jeremiah has nothing about thirty pieces of silver — the closest material is the potter's house and the field-purchase narrative in Jeremiah 18-19 and 32, but the specific wording Matthew quotes is unambiguously Zecharian.
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
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; (Matthew 27:9)
Cited passages
Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled, saying, “They took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him upon whom a price had been set, whom some of the children of Israel priced,
And I said unto them, If ye think good, give [me] my price; and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty [pieces] of silver. (Zechariah 11:12)
Cited passages
I said to them, “If you think it best, give me my wages; and if not, keep them.” So they weighed for my wages thirty pieces of silver.
Notes on manuscript readings that bear on this passage — where the surviving witnesses differ over what the text says. Presented for transparency as the textual critic’s description, not as GEBible’s conclusion about the tension.
Examining the tension
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.
Matthew 27:9-10 is among the most scrutinized citation problems in the New Testament. The evangelist introduces a fulfillment formula — "Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet" — and then quotes language that derives almost entirely from Zechariah 11:12-13: the thirty pieces of silver, the weighing out, and the casting of the money to the potter (or, in the Masoretic Hebrew, to the treasury — the consonantal ambiguity between *yotser*, potter, and *otsar*, treasury, is itself relevant). The book of Jeremiah contains nothing about thirty pieces of silver. The nearest Jeremianic material is thematic rather than verbal: the potter's house in Jeremiah 18, the broken flask and the renaming of a valley as a place of slaughter in Jeremiah 19, and the prophet's purchase of a field with weighed-out silver in Jeremiah 32:6-15. Matthew names Jeremiah, but the words on the page are Zechariah's.
Four harmonizations recur. The first, defended by Gleason Archer and given a fair hearing by Davies and Allison in the ICC, appeals to a rabbinic convention of citing a composite or conflated quotation under the name of the more prominent prophet. There is genuine precedent for grouping prophetic books and citing the head of the collection; Mark 1:2-3 famously ascribes a blend of Malachi and Isaiah to "Isaiah the prophet." The difficulty is that Matthew 27:9-10 does not visibly fuse two texts the way Mark 1 does — the quotation is Zecharian throughout, with no embedded Jeremianic clause to justify naming Jeremiah as the speaker. The second move, developed by Robert Gundry and Krister Stendahl in his work on the Matthean "school," reads the citation as a deliberate typological midrash drawing on Jeremiah's potter-and-field complex while quoting Zechariah's wording; on this view Matthew names Jeremiah because the Jeremianic motifs of the field, the blood, and the renamed burial ground are the controlling images, with Zechariah supplying the price. This explains the thematic gravity of Jeremiah but not the grammar of the formula, which attributes the spoken words, not the imagery, to him.
The third move is text-critical. A handful of witnesses ease the problem: minuscule 33, the Syriac (including the Peshitta and Syr-s), and the Bohairic omit the prophet's name entirely, and a few late witnesses (e.g. 21, 22) substitute "Zechariah." Bruce Metzger's Textual Commentary concludes decisively that "Jeremiah" is the original reading and that the shorter and substituted readings are scribal attempts to remove an obvious embarrassment — itself evidence that ancient copyists already perceived the error. The fourth move posits a lost Jeremianic source or oral tradition containing the thirty-silver oracle; this is unfalsifiable and explains nothing that the text actually preserves.
Raymond Brown, in The Death of the Messiah, surveys all of this and lands on the most economical reading: Matthew, or the testimonia source he drew on, simply misremembered or misattributed the citation. John Nolland in the NIGTC is more sympathetic to the conflation thesis but concedes the data are awkward on any reading. The convergence of the manuscript evidence (scribes correcting it), the purely Zecharian wording, and the absence of any Jeremianic price-oracle points the same direction.
Where the critical reading lands: most plausibly a misattribution — a genuine citation error preserved as the original text — only partially softened by the real but secondary presence of Jeremianic field-and-potter imagery in Matthew's typology.
Sources for this reading