Part One · The Clues · Chapter 2
He named the amount five hundred years before anyone paid it.
Zechariah 11:12–13 · Written ~500 BCELet me be precise about what Zechariah wrote.
Not "he will be betrayed for some money." Not "his enemies will pay someone to hand him over." Zechariah named the amount. He named what would happen to the money afterward. And he named what that money would buy.
Thirty pieces of silver. Thrown into the temple. Used to purchase a potter's field.
Three details. Written around 500 BCE.
"I told them, 'If you think it best, give me my pay; but if not, keep it.' So they paid me thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said to me, 'Throw it to the potter' — the handsome price at which they valued me! So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them to the potter at the house of the Lord."
"When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests... So Judas threw the money into the temple and left... The chief priests picked up the coins and said, 'It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money.' So they decided to use the money to buy the potter's field."
Read that. Then read it again. No, seriously. Read it twice.
I know what the skeptics will say. I said it myself. "The disciples obviously changed the story to fit the prophecy." That's a fair question. It was the first one I asked. But stay with me for a second.
If the Gospel writers were making this up in a vacuum, writing for people two thousand years in the future who had no way to check the facts — sure, they could say whatever they wanted. But that's not what happened. The people who wrote this were writing it while the men who counted out those thirty pieces of silver were still alive. While the priests who decided the coins were blood money were still walking around Jerusalem. While the potter's field was still there for anyone to go look at.
Did the disciples call ahead and ask the Pharisees to please make sure they paid exactly thirty pieces of silver to kill their Rabbi? No. I don't buy that. And neither should you.
Here's what I keep coming back to. The same Pharisees who handed Judas that money were the same people whose descendants watched this Gospel story spread across the known world. If my father told me some man claimed to be the Messiah and I didn't believe it, I would go to the ends of the earth to prove it false. These men had every opportunity to do exactly that. They had the resources, the authority, and the motivation. They could have produced witnesses. They could have located the body. They could have shown the receipts that proved the amount was different, or that the field was bought for something else entirely.
They didn't. Because they couldn't.
My proof is in the Bible. Where is yours?
Now — I can hear what you're thinking. Okay, there's something to this. There's more here than I expected. But people lie all the time. What's to tell me these men were telling the truth?
Good question. Keep reading.