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What did Jesus accuse the Jews of doing?
Matthew: Of having slain prophets and wise men, among them “Zacharias son of Barachias” ([xxiii, 35]).
The Zacharias mentioned was slain in Jerusalem, 69 A. D.; so that Matthew makes Jesus refer to an event that occurred forty years after his death.
Referring to this passage, the Catholic scholar, Dr. Hug, says: “There cannot be a doubt, if we attend to the name, the fact and its circumstances, and the object of Jesus in citing it, that it was the same Zacharias Barouchos, who, according to Josephus, a short time before the destruction of Jerusalem, was unjustly slain in the temple.”
Commenting on this passage, Prof. Newman says: “There is no other man known in history to whom the verse can allude. If so, it shows how late, how ignorant, how rash, is the composer of a text passed off on us as sacred truth” (Religion not History, p. 46).