Revised Standard Version continues in this verse with the sentence begun in verse 34, which leads to an accumulation of almost seventy words in some extremely difficult constructions. Both Good News Translation and Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch introduce a new sentence here, and consideration should be given to the need for doing something similar in other languages as well. The problem with Good News Translation‘s “As a result,” however, is that the idea of purpose of Revised Standard Version‘s that … may come is not obvious. It may be good to start the verse with “I will send them like that so that.” Barclay restructures the passage beginning verse 34 with “Let me tell you why I send,” and then begins verse 35 with “The reason is that.”

Righteous here has the specialized meaning of “innocent” (so Phillips, New English Bible, An American Translation, Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch), and blood means “murder” as in verse 30. Therefore that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth may be rendered as in Good News Translation: “As a result, the punishment for the murder of all innocent men will fall on you.” One may even translate “And so God will punish you for the murder of all innocent people who have ever lived.”

According to Genesis 4.8, Abel is the first person to have been murdered, but there is much uncertainty regarding the identification of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, and at least three solutions have been put forward: (1) The prophet Zechariah was the son of a man named Berechiah (Zech 1.1), but there is no intimation that he was ever murdered. (2) Josephus the Jewish historian records the murder of a certain Zechariah son of Baruch in the Temple shortly before the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. (3) More probable is the Zechariah mentioned in 2 Chronicles 24.20-22 (the last book in the Hebrew Bible). Although his name is given as Azariah in the Septuagint, he is called Zechariah in the Hebrew text, and he was a priest, which would have given him access to the area between the sanctuary and the altar. That Luke (11.51) refers to him merely as Zechariah, without mention of his father’s name, suggests either (a) that the identification was problematic for Luke as well, or (b) that Luke thought in terms of the Hebrew Bible, according to which the murders of Abel and Zechariah would have been the first and last ones recorded in the Scriptures.

In some cases translators will have a short footnote saying “Abel and Zechariah were the first and last people listed as having been murdered in the Hebrew Bible, in which Chronicles, not Malachi, is the last book. Jesus means by this phrase all the innocent people murdered in the Old Testament.” However, this information is not really essential to the understanding of the text, and certainly it would never be included in the translation itself.

The text says whom you murdered, but obviously it was not the people Jesus was speaking to here who murdered. He was speaking to them as a continuation of the people of the Old Testament. In many translations, retaining the you poses no problem, as readers will understand that these people did not themselves kill Zechariah. In other cases translators will say something like “you Jews.” Another solution is to emphasize shared responsibility; for example, “whom your people murdered between the Temple building and the altar for sacrifices.”

Between the sanctuary and the altar may need to be translated “between the Temple building and the place where sacrifices are offered.”

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on the Gospel of Matthew. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1988. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .