In Matthew 23:35, Jesus mentioned the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, seeming to point to the prophet mentioned in the last book of the Hebrew Bible (Chronicles). But Jesus refers to this Zechariah as the son of Jehoiada not Berekiah. Is Zechariah son of Berekiah one of the postexilic prophets? And does the choice of this Zechariah have anything to do with the blood of Abel? -- Woochul (Seoul)

Critics (and most biblical scholars) claim that Jesus was mistaken about Zechariah's father's name. He must mean the son of Jehoida who was killed in the temple. And yet several considerations must be taken into account:
* There are several Zechariahs in the Old Testament.
* There were a number of men killed near the altar of the Temple.
* Zechariah the son of Jehoida, though mentioned in 2 Chronicles 24:21, (the last book of the OT in the order of the Hebrew Bible) is not the last Zechariah chronologically. Surely if Jesus is making a sweeping statement, the span would more likely be from Abel (the earliest OT martyr) to Zechariah (one of the final figures of the OT around 500 BC), not from Abel to the son of Jehoida (8th century BC). (If Esther had been executed--fortunately she was not--she might have been the final martyr of OT times in the 400s BC. Or if Jesus was including the "intertestamental" period, the martyrs of the 2nd century BC would have made a good reference.)
* There are other executions referred to by the NT (e.g. see Hebrews 11) which are not recorded in the OT, yet this does not mean they never took place.

No, Jesus did not get his facts wrong, nor did Matthew put erroneous words into Jesus' mouth. Zechariah is linked with Abel because they represent the righteous persecuted of the OT appearing at the beginning and the end chronologically. That is the link between Abel and Zechariah.

Finally, two helpful reference books in resolving Bible difficulties are Gleason Archer's An Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties and Norman Geisler's and Thomas Howe's When Critics Ask. Though they are necessarily selective and not exhaustive, these books do show many creative approaches to difficult apparent discrepancies.

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