Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value;
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George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias. Jeremias is now in all Latin copies, and the general reading of the Greek; whereas the passage is found in Zacharias xi. 12. Some judge it to have been in some writing of Jeremias, now lost; as St. Jerome says he found it in a writing of Jeremias, which was not canonical. Others conjecture, that Zacharias had also the name of Jeremias. Others, that St. Matthew neither put Jeremias nor Zacharias, but only of the prophet: and that the name of Jeremias had crept into the text. Jeremias is not in the Syrica; and St. Augustine says it was not in divers copies.
And they took the thirty pieces of silver; each of which was called an argenteus. The evangelist cites not the words, but the sense of the prophet, who was ordered to cast the pieces into the house of the Lord, and to cast them to the potter: which became true by the fact of Judas, who cast them into the temple: and with them was purchased the potter's field. The price of him that...
This prophecy does not come from Jeremiah but from a similar passage in Zechariah, who is almost the last of the twelve prophets. Although the meaning does not differ much, Zechariah’s word order and vocabulary do conflict with Matthew’s quotation. In a copy of the Hebrew Scriptures given to me by a member of the Nazarene sect, I recently read an apocryphal edition of the book of Jeremiah in which this quotation from Matthew appeared word for word. Nevertheless it still seems more likely to me that Matthew took this prophecy from Zechariah, since it was the ordinary practice of the Evangelists and apostles to communicate only the meaning of texts from the Old Testament while neglecting to observe their word order. .
All these things had been foretold from ancient times by prophecy. It was not the apostles alone but the prophets who were also declaring these events precisely as they occurred. Don’t you see how they foresaw in every way the suffering of Christ? How they knew of its chastisement beforehand? The Gospel of Matthew, Homily
This field then is this entire world, in which we who have been dispersed and scattered bear the fruit of good work for the Lord. Yet perhaps you would inquire of me, if the field is the world, who the potter might be who could have the ownership of the world. Unless I am mistaken, the potter is the one who made the vessels of our body from clay. Scripture says of him, “Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust from the earth.” The potter is the one who, with the warmth of his own breath, made alive the slimy clay of our flesh and with fiery heat put together the fluid and earthly matter of our bodies. The potter, I say, is the one who fashioned us unto life with his own hands and who is refashioning us unto glory through his Christ. The apostle says, “We are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.” That is to say, we who from our previous condition have broken to pieces because of our own misdeeds are restored in a second birth through the loving kind...
