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Matthew writes, “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued … And gave them for the potter’s field” (Matthew 27:9–10). The thirty pieces of silver cast to the potter are in Zechariah 11:12–13, and no such words stand in the book of Jeremiah. Modern critics, and some older commentators, call it a slip of memory.

Preferred: Matthew doesn’t say “written by Jeremy,” but “spoken.” What he cites joins two prophets, and the heart of it is Jeremiah’s. Jeremiah was sent with “a potter’s earthen bottle” to the valley of the son of Hinnom, where Judah had “filled this place with the blood of innocents,” to say that it would become a place to “bury them in Tophet, till there be no place to bury” (Jeremiah 19:1–11); and he bought a field with weighed silver as a sign (Jeremiah 32:6–15). The field of blood, bought with the price of innocent blood to bury strangers in, lay in that very valley. Zechariah supplies the thirty pieces and the casting to the potter. Matthew names the greater and earlier prophet, as Mark 1:2–3 (“As it is written in the prophets”) joins Malachi and Isaiah.

Also given: the Jews placed Jeremiah first among the latter prophets (the Talmud: “Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the twelve”), and a section of Scripture could be called by its first book, as Christ calls the whole third division “the psalms” (Luke 24:44). Gill thinks this “seems best to solve this difficulty,” and notes that the Jewish writer who objected to everything he could in Matthew found no fault with him for naming Jeremy.

“Jeremy” stands in all the Greek copies and in the Latin; the KJV keeps what Matthew wrote.