Cleon Skousen notes that John the Baptist had been born in the vicinity of Bethlehem where his parents lived in "the hill country" of Judea. (Luke 1:39-40) Thus he would have also had a connection with the massacre of the children at Bethlehem, the purpose of which was to eliminate the Christ child (see Matthew 2:16). Joseph Smith described these circumstances as follows:
When Herod's edict went forth to destroy the young children, John was about six months older than Jesus, and came under the hellish edict, and Zacharias caused his mother to take him into the mountains, where he was raised on locust and wild honey. . . . When the father [Zacharias] refused to disclose his [John's] whereabouts, and being the officiating high priest at the temple that year, he was slain by Herod's order, between the porch and the altar, as Jesus said. (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 261).
During his ministry, Jesus referred to this tragic event and equated it with the murders of many other prophets down through the years. He said:
Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute: "That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation . . . From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple. (Luke 11:49-51)
Notice that according to Luke, Jesus made no attempt to identify which Zacharias he was talking about, because no doubt this heinous murder of the priest at the temple just three decades earlier was fresh in the minds of all the people. However, since there were numerous prophets by this or similar names in the Bible, some ancient scribe who was working on the Gospel of Matthew decided to identify this Zacharias mentioned by Jesus as the "son of Barachias."(Matthew 23:35) This created all kinds of problems because the ancient prophet Zechariah (note the slight difference in spelling)--who is described as "the son of Berechiah," (Zechariah 1:1)--was not slain in the temple. He was one of the prophets involved in the building of the second temple (Temple of Zerubbabel dedicated in 516 B.C.), but there is no indication he was slain there. (see LDS Dictionary under 51 "Zachariah")
Nevertheless, there was another ancient prophet named Zechariah who was slain in the temple, but he was the "son of Jehoiada" (2 Chronicles 24:20-21).
All of this confusion was eliminated when Joseph Smith learned that Jesus was not talking about either of those ancient prophets. He was talking about Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist.
Many years after Joseph Smith's death, Bible scholars found certain early Christian writings that sustained Joseph Smith's statement concerning Zacharias.
Dr. Robert Matthews, in his splendid definitive work on the life of John the Baptist, quotes this material. He said there is:
A very old tradition, as old at least as the second century, that Herod also sought to destroy at the same time the son of Zacharias and Elisabeth--the young St. John, whose greatness had been foretold to him; that Elisabeth escaped with her son from amid the slaughter, and was afterwards miraculously preserved, and that Herod, in his rage at being thus baffled, sent and slew Zacharias between the altar and the Temple. (Robert Matthews, A Burning Light, Provo, Utah: BYU Press, 1972, p. 25: a similar account has also been found in the Apocryphal New Testament, published in 1953, and quoted by Dr. Matthews in his book on p. 26.)
[W. Cleon Skousen, Days of the Living Christ, Vol. 1, pp. 64-66]
Note* Early Christian tradition states that the elderly Elisabeth died while John was still a boy and he was thereafter adopted by one of the desert communities. (Matthews, A Burning Light, p. 27; see also W. Cleon Skousen, Days of the Living Christ, Vol. 1, p. 67). Was the community to which John the Baptist was supposedly sent a rightful heir to priesthood authority, or just a devout group of humble Jews?