Until All Is Fulfilled
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Josephus, who always insists on the peculiar sacredness of the inmost court, and of the holy house that was in it, would have omitted so material an aggravation of this barbarous murder, as perpetrated in a place so very holy, had that 133 been the true place of it.
Thus, Whiston attempts to explain away the troubling parallel by arguing that the slaying of Zacharias in Josephus could not be the incident that Jesus prophesied because 1) Zacharias the prophet died before Jesus' birth. 2) Barachiah and Baruch are different words. 3) The "middle of the temple" is not "between the temple and the altar" Whiston's first point is irrelevant. His second ignores the many slight changes in spelling between the same words in Josephus and the New Testament. For example, a type of fish from the Sea of Galilee is spelled "Coracin" in Josephus and "Chora'zin" in the New Testament. His third point, regarding the possible differences in the location of the slayings, is contradictory of his acceptance of the other parallels between the same passages in the New Testament and Josephus as evidence of Christ's divinity. Further, it is obvious that Jesus' prophecy regarding, "Zechari'ah the son of Barachi'ah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar,"134 would have been understood by an uneducated first-century convert to Christianity as having come to pass by the passage in Josephus that states, "so two of the boldest of them fell upon Zacharias (the son of Baruch) in the middle of the temple, and slew him." Josephus and the New Testament consistently avoid verbatim parallels by one degree. In the chapter ahead on the Book of Daniel, Jesus speaks of the "abomination of desolation," while Josephus refers to the "end of the daily sacrifice." In fact, both expressions refer the same thing. Someone to whom the two works would be read would then make the connection between the "different" terms and thereby come to the conclusion that Jesus had been able to see into the future. By means of this name-switching technique, the authors of the New Testament and Josephus playfully hide the fact