Matthew 27:9-10 introduces a quotation as 'what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah' — the thirty pieces of silver given for the potter's field — but the wording quoted actually matches Zechariah 11:12-13 ('they weighed out as my wages thirty shekels of silver... throw it into the treasury... this lordly price'), not anything in Jeremiah. Matthew has misattributed a Zechariah text to Jeremiah.

This should be conceded plainly as a real and long-recognized difficulty — it is not resolved by pretending the wording matches Jeremiah verbatim, because it does not. Two complementary, well-established scholarly explanations account for it without requiring an error: (1) Ancient Jewish scroll-naming convention: the 'Latter Prophets' (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets, including Zechariah) often circulated as a single combined scroll or collection, and in at least one attested rabbinic ordering (Baba Bathra 14b), Jeremiah stands first among them. Ancient citation practice regularly named a composite or collection-wide quotation after its lead or most prominent book, even when the specific wording came from later in the collection — much as a modern reader might say 'as it says in the Torah' while actually quoting Leviticus. (2) Matthew's quotation is not pure Zechariah; it also draws on specific Jeremiah material: the potter's house and broken vessel (Jer 18:1-3; 19:1-13, which includes purchasing a piece of pottery, going to the potter's field/Topheth, and a symbolic act tied to bloodshed and judgment on Jerusalem) and Jeremiah's purchase of a field with weighed-out silver (Jer 32:6-9). Matthew's account — thirty pieces of silver thrown into the temple, used to buy a 'potter's field' as a burial ground, explicitly called 'blood money' — conflates Zechariah's price-of-thirty-shekels wording with Jeremiah's potter's-field and field-purchase imagery, and names the more thematically dominant prophet (Jeremiah) for the combined citation. This is not idiosyncratic to Matthew: Mark 1:2-3 does precisely the same thing, conflating Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3 under the single attribution 'as it is written in the prophet Isaiah' (see failed-prophecies-014 below) — the same convention, applied by a different Gospel author, confirming this is a recognized technique rather than a one-off mistake.

Recognizing Matthew's conflated citation technique reveals a more, not less, sophisticated use of Scripture: he is weaving together Zechariah's betrayal-price oracle with Jeremiah's potter-field and blood-purchased-field material into a single typological tapestry around Judas's betrayal and death, naming the source according to a known ancient convention rather than committing a careless error a first-century Jewish audience, familiar with their own Scriptures, would have immediately caught.