Prof: The Gospel of
Matthew, from the second century on,
has been pretty much the most popular famous of the Gospels,
that's probably why it's first in our Bible,
simply because it was the most populous.
It's certainly the Gospel
that's most familiar to people nowadays and pretty much
throughout history, if people were familiar with
the text at all. Both for Christians and
non-Christian often, so for example,
you have the familiar birth story.
Joseph has a dream,
he's warned, the star appears in the east,
the Magi, the wise men, come and they go to Herod
first. This is Herod the Great,
so they go to Herod the Great's palace in Jerusalem and they
say, where do we find this new king
that's been born because we want to go and worship him and bring
him gifts. Herod gets all worried because
he doesn't want to [lose] his own throne.
Remember this story?
He tells the wise men,
well I think you have to go Bethlehem--
his wise men, his own wise men,
they looked it up in the scriptures,
and they say go to Bethlehem. But he says,
come back and tell me once you visit him because I want to go
worship him too, and the wicked evil king does
not want to go worship Jesus, the baby Jesus,
he wants to kill the baby Jesus.
The wise men are warned in a
dream not to go back. You know the story, right?
The whole thing about that,
the Egyptian sojourn, the holy family goes to Egypt
to escape the wicked king. The slaughter of the innocents.
The beatitudes:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven, blessed are those who mourn for
they will be comforted, blessed are the meek for they
will inherit the earth." All these blessed,
there are some in Luke, but if you start saying them
and somebody starts picking it up after you,
and repeats it and they--it shows at least they know it
enough so they can kind of finish one every now and then.
They almost always finish it in
the Matthew form, not the Luke form.
The beatitudes are slightly
different in Matthew and Luke, and people are--they're famous
in their Matthean form. Turn the other cheek,
that's also in Luke 6:29, but most people know it from
Matthew 5:39. In Matthew, the Pharisees are
called, over and over again,
hypocrites, and in fact if you look up the word
"Pharisee" in a dictionary,
an English dictionary, "hypocrite"
will be one of the definitions you'll find for it.
Now this is all part of a long
tradition of Christian anti-Semitism because of course
the word Pharisee doesn't mean "hypocrite"
to most Jews, but who traced back Rabbinic
Judaism to the pre-seventy Pharisees themselves,
Gamaliel in the Book of Acts is considered a Pharisee,
and he's a famous rabbi in rabbinic materials.
Jews don't think of the word
Pharisee as being a bad term, but in a lot of English,
and a lot of languages it is because Christians used it.
They took it straight out of
Matthew, where the Pharisees are called hypocrites over and over
again, and they just take that into their own language.
Then you have the great
commission that ends the Gospel of Matthew,
that people might recognize, Matthew 28:18:
Jesus meets the disciples in Galilee after his resurrection,
and he says, "All authority in heaven
and on earth has been given to me.
Go therefore and make disciples
of all nations, baptizing them in the name of
the Father, and of the Son,
and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey
everything that I have commanded you and remember I am with you
always to the end of the ages."
That's a very famous verse
that's called "the Great Commission"
because this is Jesus telling his disciples after his
resurrection, go out and proclaim the Gospel
throughout the earth, not just to the Jews.
All these things make Matthew
look very familiar even to people who may not know much
about Christianity because this is stuff that you see in our
culture over again. Matthew, therefore,
is at the same time unfamiliar to people if they start reading
it carefully because it's the most Jewish of the Christian
Gospels that are in the canon, that is.
There are some other Gospels
from the ancient period that are even more Jewish than Matthew,
but they didn't make it into the New Testament.
It's the most Jewish,
and yet it's also at the same time,
one of the most universal of the Gospels because you
precisely have an ending with Jesus commanding the apostles to
make disciples of all nations, that is all the Gentiles too.
In the Gospel of Matthew,
Jesus limits his ministry during his lifetime pretty much
to Israel, he's going to Jews. He makes a point of this in the
Gospel of Matthew. After his resurrection then the
message is supposed to go out. Look also at the way that
Matthew begins. I talked about this the very
first lecture of class. Matthew begins with,
"The book of the genesis of Jesus Christ,
son of David, son of Abraham."
Notice he calls him son of
David, as a descendant of the great king of Israel,
son of Abraham as the father of the Jews.
Even the Greek word there,
"the book of the genesis;"
"the genesis" means "the
beginning", and of course it's the Greek
term that was given for the first book of the Hebrew Bible
when they translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek,
genesis just means "the beginning."
Of course in the Hebrew Bible
it's the beginning of the world, the beginning of earth,
the beginning of history. Matthew appropriates that term,
and he begins his own text with that same word,
probably meaning for his readers to recall the book of
Genesis in a way. Then you have what we call an
Haggadah on Moses. The term Haggadah is
used in rabbinic scholarship. Rabbinic work often divides up
a lot of rabbinic materials into Halakah and
Haggadah. Halakah refers to the
teachings that are about how you should live.
Haggadah, though,
are stories that are about the patriarchs or great figures,
and they're meant to make a moral lesson or something like
that, but they don't give
straightforward teachings. They tell stories and that's
how Matthew starts out. All that stuff about the evil
king wanting to kill the baby Jesus because he's afraid that
it'll be a threat to him. Think of--who does that remind
you of? Who does that sound like?
The child that comes out of
Egypt, who does that sound like? These are all meant to remind
you of Moses and so Moses--Jesus is portrayed over and over again
like Moses or like Joseph, also from the Hebrew Bible.
Then again you have the
fulfillment-of-scripture motif. Now notice that in spite of the
fact though that Matthew has throughout Christianity been
interpreted as actually a rejection of the Law,
the Jewish law, or it presents Jesus as a new
Moses, but Christians they'll often
taken that to say that Jesus is not only the new Moses who can--
fulfills Moses, He displaces the old Moses.
So Matthew's may have been put
first in the canon because it was read by Christians as being
sort of almost like the new Law, the new Torah.
And so you have Jesus talking
about the Law, the Jewish law Torah,
and also getting new commandments.
Christians have taken that to
mean the displacement of the Jewish Torah with now a new
Christian Torah, and that actually puts Matthew
in a very odd position. Of the different Gospels in our
canon it's the most Jewish looking and sounding,
and I'll emphasize later in the lecture today,
but Matthew has also been the source of some of the worst
Christian anti-Semitism. Precisely by portraying Jesus
as rejecting the Law of Moses, in much of Christian
interpretation, and substituting his own law
that's Christian anti-Semitism. Notice it's from--as I said
it's from Matthew that you get the idea that Pharisees are all
hypocrites, and then that gets transferred
to being that all Jews are hypocrites.
You get the idea in
Christianity traditionally that Jesus rejected the Law because
that's legalism. The Jews are all legalistic and
we Christians are all full of grace and truth.
So this idea that the Old
Testament represents a God of anger,
and a God of strictness, and a God of judgment,
and the New Testament represents a God who's a father,
and loving, and full of grace. This dualism that's so much a
part of European history, even common sense,
even people who are not religious will often come up
with this caricature that the Old Testament God is the God of
anger and judgment, the New Testament God is a the
God of grace and forgiveness. Well that's just not true.
If you read either testament
with any care at all. The Gospel of Matthew has been
one of the texts that's been used in this way.
Remember it's in the Gospel of
Matthew that you get the most anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic
line that's been used throughout Western history,
when the Jew--when Pilate wants to release Jesus from being
crucified the people, the Jews say,
"His blood be upon us and our children."
That became the Christian
charge of deicide; the Jews were then accused of
killing God, and especially in medieval Europe.
So Matthew is in this very
peculiar place when it comes to the history of the
interpretation of the New Testament.
It is at the same time the most
Jewish of our canonical Gospels, in many ways,
and yet it's been used in Christian anti-Semitism more
than any other Gospel, possibly maybe with the Gospel
of John being a rival for that. Look at the structure of
Matthew though. Some people have even suggested
that Matthew is intentionally structuring his Gospel to make
it look like the Torah, the Jewish law.
There are five speeches by
Jesus in Matthew. These same sayings--you learned
about the synoptic problem last week.
If you take a synoptic problem
kind of analysis of a lot this stuff that are in some of these
speeches in Matthew, a lot of these sayings might
have occurred in another context in Luke or in Mark.
Matthew seems to have taken
tradition-- materials that were traditional
to him, that he found either in written
sources or in oral sources, and he combines them into five
separate speeches. Some people say maybe he meant
to reflect the five books of Torah;
the Pentateuch is the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Pentateuch is just the
Greek word meaning "the five," so the first five
books of Jewish scripture are called the Pentateuch and maybe
Matthew is imitating that and making five separate speeches
for Jesus and his Gospel. First, chapters 5-7 you have
Jesus giving--with the famous Sermon on the Mount.
Then chapter 10,
you have him giving a speech to his disciples about the mission
to Israel, so all of chapter 10 is here's
how you're supposed to do your mission when you go out to
preach to Israel. You'll be persecuted;
this will happen, do this, do that.
Chapter 13 in Matthew is all
parables. The parables that you'd find in
different places in Mark or Luke,
Matthew kind of groups them into one chapter and has Jesus
kind of give it as one sort of speech.
He likes neatness like this.
If you look at chapter 18,
it's another speech by Jesus, again to His disciples,
and this one is mainly about church rules.
Jesus talks about when you're
neighbor does something that you don't like,
go to the neighbor first, try to settle it peaceably,
if your neighbor won't receive you or won't settle,
take it to the church and let the church handle it.
That sort of thing.
Jesus is giving instructions
about how the church should behave itself and what the
church will be like. Then in chapters 23-25,
you get a very long speech by Jesus which includes a big
synoptic sermon. Remember last time I talked
about Mark 13 and about Jesus' prophecies of all this happening
when the end of time would come, and the Messiah would swoop
down in the clouds. Matthew takes over that speech
from Mark, where he finds it,
he adds a lot of materials on his own,
he also brings it up to date, because remember I talked about
last time, Mark didn't explicitly tell us
about the destruction of Jerusalem in his Gospel.
You'll find that when we get to
Matthew and Luke, they put more stuff in there
that shows they were writing after the time of Mark,
and using Mark as a source. That's all in that chapter,
but then there's all these long woes to the scribes and
Pharisees. Woe to the blah, blah, blah;
woe to you who do this, there's a whole section of that
speech. So five different speeches that
some scholars have even suggested may be designed to
imitate the five books of the Pentateuch.
As I said, the ending of
Matthew is universalizing. It takes this Israelite vision
that you've seen all the way through the book and then
universalizes it to the whole world.
It's a universalism to all
that's firmly anchored in Judaism and the Torah.
What does the Torah,
the Law, mean in Matthew? Look at 5:17;
I hope you did bring your Bibles.
Remember, we're all bringing
our Bibles to class all the time because you have to check me
out. Most Christians are taught,
and most people just under the influence of Christianity have
the idea that what Christianity is,
is the supercession of Judaism. The thing that makes Jews and
Christians alike, they both worship the same God.
One of the things that make
them different is not only the worship by Christians of Jesus,
but also the neglect by Christians of the Jewish law.
Christians can eat shellfish,
bacon, and pork; don't have to keep the Sabbath.
Is that the view of the Law we
find in Matthew? 5:17:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the
prophets. I have come not to abolish but
to fulfill. For truly I tell you,
until heaven and earth pass away not one letter,
not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until
all is accomplished. Now in a lot of Christian
doctrine what you're taught is that Jesus did fulfill the law
in his own person. But that's not what he says
here. Notice, "Until heaven and
earth pass away," that's what he's talking about
the fulfillment of it." Therefore whoever breaks one of
the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the
same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven,
but whoever does them and teaches them,
will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
For I tell you unless your
righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,
you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus is not saying,
okay I've come, now you don't have to keep the
Jewish law. He's actually teaching his own
disciples-- remember if Matthew didn't want
this as a message to the members of his church he wouldn't have
put it in his Gospel. One of the things that I'm
trying to teach you in my lectures is: what does it mean
to do an exegesis of this text? Because you're going to have to
write exegesis of your own and this Friday your section leads
will walk you through how to write an exegesis paper.
There are a couple things that
are not exegesis. It's not exegesis to try to
figure out what actually happened.
Did Jesus actually say this?
Did Jesus actually believe that?
That's part of the historical
Jesus quest which we'll talk about later in the semester too,
but exegesis doesn't do that. Exegesis doesn't assume you're
trying to read the text to get behind the text for something
that happened in history. Nor does exegesis try to figure
out is this true or not. We don't care if it's true or
not in an exegesis class. What we want to do is what did
the writer--what was the writer trying to do with this text?
You have to imagine yourself in
an ancient context. What would he have been saying
to members of his own Christian community in the first century?
This obviously means that we
read this text as not Jesus necessarily teaching this.
We don't know yet whether Jesus
actually taught this. Matthew could have gotten it
from some written source, from some oral source,
or he could have just made it up.
We'll talk about that problem
later when we talk about the historical Jesus.
Right now we're not going to
concern ourselves, we're just going to say,
Matthew could have written this but we're trying to figure out
what did Matthew want to do with it.
What was this testament to them?
Obviously it means this writer
believes that the proper Gospel and the proper church should be
a Law abiding church. He's expecting people in his
church not to do away with the Jewish law.
Look at "the
antitheses," we call these,
the Matthean antithesis, 5:21: "'You have heard
that it was said to those in ancient times you shall not
murder, and whoever murders shall be
liable to judgment. But I tell you that the time of
the law is over and it's okay to murder.'"
That's not what it says, right?
What does it say?
Just shout it out.
What?
Students:
> Prof: Don't even be
angry. "'If you are angry with a
brother or a sister you will be liable to judgment,
and if you insult a brother or sister you'll be liable to the
counsel. If you say, 'You fool,' you'll
be liable to hell of fire.'" A lot of us are in
trouble, a lot of us are in trouble.
He's not saying I'm not--I'm
getting rid of the law, murder's okay now.
Keep going 5:27:
"'You have heard that it was said you shall not commit
adultery, but I say that's okay,
adultery is just fine.'" No!
He says, "'But I say to
you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already
committed adultery with her in his heart.'"
Wait, what?
Well I'm gay so I'm okay about
that, but a lot of guys are in a lot of trouble.
He's basically saying not only
is adultery not okay, even desiring her if she
belongs to another man is not okay.
That's not getting rid of the
law. Look at 5:38:
"You have heard that it was said an eye for an eye,
and a tooth for a tooth, but I say do not resist an evil
doer. If anyone strikes you on the
right cheek turn the other also, if anyone wants to sue you take
your coat, give your cloak as well.
If anyone forces you to go one
mile go the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from
you and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow anything from
you." These antitheses have been read
throughout Christian history by many people as implying that
Jesus is doing away with this bad,
strict, legalism of the Jewish law,
and he's teaching you a law of grace,
instead, and forgiveness. That's not what's going on
here, right? What Jesus has said,
he's not doing away with the Law here, he's
intensifying it. If it's hard not to commit
adultery, and believe me for a lot of people it is hard not to
commit adultery, it's even harder not to lust.
If it's hard not to murder
someone, and if you knew some of the
people I have to work with around here you'd know that it
is hard not to murder someone, it's even harder not to be
angry with them. And if it's hard not to
retaliate when someone knocks you down, it's even harder to
let them knock you down again. Jesus is intensifying the
Jewish Torah and making it almost impossible to keep.
But he's still expecting His
disciples to keep it. What Matthew presents Jesus is
doing is not getting rid, at all, of the Torah,
the Jewish law, he's intensifying it.
There are a couple of places
where it sounds like Jesus is going again.
You have a hand washing
incident, let's look at that, that's in chapter 15:17--well I
think I have to start reading a bit earlier.
Where is it?
Yeah, the very first part of
the chapter: The Pharisees and scribes came
to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, "Why do your
disciples break the tradition of the elders?
For they do not wash their
hands before they eat." He answered them,
but why do you break the commandment ...?
And He goes onto this sort of
thing and He basically says that they're not keeping the law
perfectly themselves, that they should keep it
better. Verse 10, "
He called the crowd to him and said to them,
"Listen and understand. It is not what goes into the
mouth that defiles a person, it is what comes out of the
mouth that defiles the person. Now in Mark's version of this
story, right around here, Mark adds a little sentence.
Remember when I talked about
Mark, he gives you little clues that you're really supposed to
pay attention. Here Mark gives a little
parenthetical comment he says, "By saying this,
Jesus declared all foods clean."
In other words,
Mark does a good little Gentile Christianity move.
He takes this saying of Jesus
and he says, Jesus was declaring all foods clean so we don't have
to keep kosher. Matthew doesn't do that,
he saw that sentence in Mark, but you read this whole
chapter, that sentence which Matthew knew was in Mark is not
in Matthew. Matthew took that out.
Why?
Because he didn't want Jesus to
declare all foods clean; because in his Gospel Jesus
teaches that Christians have to continue keeping the Law.
Matthew has Jesus disagree with
the scribes and Pharisees, but what he says here is that
it's much more important-- sure, keeping kosher may be
important but it's much more important what's going on in
your heart and your mind, it's much more important what
you say. So Jesus spiritualizes in a way
or he-- again he intensifies the law
and he's saying, yeah it's important to wash
your hands perhaps but that's not a big deal.
It's important to pay attention
to the kosher but that's not a big deal.
He makes it a moral lesson.
That's not anti-Jewish,
that's not at all-- you have all kinds of Hebrew
prophets in the Old Testament doing that kind of stuff all
over the place saying things like,
God doesn't want just your sacrifice he wants your heart.
This is the way Jesus is
presented in Matthew as-- just like a Jewish prophet,
an Israelite prophet who is intensifying the law,
giving it a moral teaching, but he never teaches anything
about giving it up. Jesus, though,
also besides being the one who teaches about Torah,
and He's being presented as Moses, and Matthew presents
Jesus more than any other Gospels as the founder of the
church. In fact, if you look for the
word "church" in some of the Gospels it's
very hard to find it because it's anachronistic.
Jesus didn't go around in his
own life talking about the church, the church developed
after His death; Matthew retrojects the
conversation about the church, and even the foundation of the
church, and sort of laws about the
church into the mouth of Jesus. Look at 16:17,
and this is one we already read very carefully in Mark,
the same story. Remember in Mark,
Jesus says to the disciples, "Who do people say that I
am?" Peter says, "Some of them
say the Elijah, or some of them say one of the
prophets, or John the Baptist."
Jesus said, "But who do
you say that I am?" and Peter says,
"You're the Messiah." Jesus tells him,
"Be quiet," and then Jesus rebukes him when
Peter tells him that he's not supposed to be crucified.
Matthew takes that story again
from Mark, but notice how Matthew changes it.
Verse 13, "When Jesus came
from the district of Caesarea of Philippi,
he asked his disciples, "Who do you say that I
am?" You get the story again.
When Simon Peter says,
"You're the Messiah, the Son of the Living
God," look what Jesus says in verse 17,
now in Matthew's version. Remember in Mark's version
Jesus said, okay don't tell anybody.
Jesus said to him,
"Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!
For flesh and blood has not
revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.
And I tell you,
you are Peter, and on this rock I will build
my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against
it. I will give you the keys of the
kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth
will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth
on will be loosed in heaven."
Then he sternly ordered the
disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.
Between the command to silence,
which came right after the confession in Mark,
Matthew puts all this foundation-of-the church stuff.
Now this is a very famous text
that has caused all kinds of disagreement between Roman
Catholics and Protestants. Roman Catholics take this text
as teaching that Jesus, particularly selected Peter as
the first Pope, and that when he says,
I'm giving you the keys to the kingdom,
it means the Pope or the Bishop of Rome is the one who has the
right to bind or loose that Jesus is talking about here.
Protestants rejected that
interpretation and they said well no he's talking--
sure he's talking to Peter in one sense but he was really
talking to all the apostles, and in fact,
the issue of binding and loosing is not--
is given to the apostles not just to Peter.
So there's a debate
among--between Protestants and Roman Catholics traditionally
over this passage. I think the debate kind of
misses the point because I think Matthew's point is basically
just to have Jesus be the one who founds the church and puts
it into the hands of his disciples.
That's definitely one of the
things that Jesus does. And then in Chapter 18,
as I've already pointed out, you have a whole chapter where
Jesus gives rules to the disciples for how the church
should be run, how it should be organized.
The church is also this mixed
group. Over and over again,
Matthew--you'll have-- you'll see a phrase that's only
in Matthew where Jesus talks about "little ones."
He also talks about people of
little faith. Matthew also has a parable
about a man goes out and throws a field with seed.
And during the night his enemy
comes and sows brambles and weeds seeds in and when it all
comes up the wheat comes up but it's all mixed in with brambles
and thorns, and weeds. And so the servants--the slaves
of the man come to the master and they say,
What should we do? Should we try to weed out all
the weed stuff so we can gather the wheat?
Should we try to trim it all
out now? Matthew says,
no don't worry about it now because if you try to pull up
all the thorns and the brambles, you're bound to pull up some of
the wheat too, we'll just wait until the end,
until it's all ready, and then we'll harvest the
whole thing and then we'll separate it out and the wheat we
will keep in storehouses, and the brambles and thorns
will burn in hell! You're getting the last little
hellfire and brimstone sermon at the end.
The main part of the parable is
that Matthew is saying is that the world, and possibly even the
church, is a mixed bag. In other words,
not everybody you see around you is truly who you think they
are. There's good and there's evil
mixed together but the--you're just going to have live with
that. The church is an organization
that has both people of little faith and people of greater
faith. It has maybe even weeds and
wheat in it, so these are all concerns of
what kind of-- there's a whole group of
parables in chapter 13 that we call the "mixed group"
parables of Matthew. They're particular to Matthew
because Matthew seems to be making the point with these
mixed group parables that the church itself is sort of a mixed
group. Another important theme of
Matthew-- I'm giving you several
different major themes in Matthew because I'm going to ask
in a moment, why are these things here?
What is Matthew trying to do
with these different things altogether?
For example,
why is Jesus the law giver and still Jewish and teaches the
acceptance of the Jewish law, and yet this universalistic
message at the end of the Gospel of going to all nations.
Another thing that exegesis is,
is finding problems in the text and then using the text itself
to try to find answers to those problems.
That's what exegesis does.
Why I'm setting up some of
themes of Matthew, because these are going to be
the problems that then I, as the wonderful scholar and
exegete that I am, am going to swoop in with my
angels on the clouds of heaven at the end of the lecture and
give you answers to all the problems of Matthew,
and then you'll do that with your exegesis papers later.
One of the things that Jesus
is, also in Matthew, is a teacher.
Mark had told us in his Gospel
that Jesus was a great teacher, and people said,
Wow, he's a great teacher, He teaches not like the scribes
and the Pharisees. He teaches as one with
authority. Mark didn't really tell us much
of what Jesus taught. There are a few parables,
a few controversies, but Mark tells you that Jesus
is a great teacher without presenting Jesus teaching a lot.
Matthew not only tells you
Jesus is a good teacher, he presents a lot of teaching
of Jesus, and so you get a lot of that.
Then you get this interesting
passage in 13:51. Turn in your hymnals to 13:51
"Have you understood all this?"
This is towards the end of this
big long parable chapter. Remember I told you that
chapter 13 in Matthew is where Matthew puts a ton of parables.
So toward the end of this
parable chapter Jesus asked them,
"Have you understood all this?"
They answered, "Yes."
And he said to them,
"Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the
kingdom of keaven is like the master of a household who brings
out of his treasure what is new and what is old."
When Jesus had finished these
parables he left that place. This is a parable that Matthew
is putting in there, I think, to give a hint to his
readers. This is what Jesus was,
Jesus was a good scribe. That's why Jesus talks about
things like, you have heard it said, but I say to you.
Jesus is taking out of the
Jewish scripture and taking out of the Jewish law the most
important parts of it and emphasizing those,
and then adding some of his own teachings.
He's taking some of the old and
some of the new, and that's what a good scribe
is like. But Matthew also believes that
he and his fellow disciples in his church should be that way
too. He writes his Gospel to help
people figure out how to imitate Jesus in being a good scribe.
How do discern what of the old
you should use and what of the new you should use.
On of the last problems that I
want to give is this really big problem in Matthew because Jesus
is also something-- well just right on the surface
Jesus comes across as a big like a coward in the Gospel of
Matthew. Look at 4:12 in Matthew,
in the first part of this chapter 4 you get Jesus going
around preaching the gospel, doing some miracles and that
sort of thing. He becomes very famous so that
people hear about Him. But then you get to 12,
"Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested,
he got on his white charger and He rode to the prison and he
sprang his friend John the Baptist out of prison."
Indiana Jesus,
no that's not what it says, right?
"He withdrew to
Galilee," the word "withdraw"
here is the Greek word for "retreat."
He retreated to Galilee because
he had heard that John had gotten arrested.
"He left Nazareth,
make His home in Capernaum by the sea,
in the territory of Zebulin and Naphtali,
so that what had been spoken to the prophet Isaiah might be
fulfilled," and then he quotes that--
verse 17 "From that time Jesus began to proclaim,
'Repent for the kingdom of keaven has come near.'"
In other words, Jesus retreats in the face of
danger, he doesn't go toward it,
but instead of retreating and hiding,
he goes to another place and then he starts giving the
message out. This is when He really starts
his own preaching ministry, after John the Baptist is
arrested. Notice what happens there,
look again at--now look at 12:15, Matthew 12:15.
Reading just a little bit above
that, Jesus is disputing with the
Pharisees and verse 14 says, "But the Pharisees went
out and conspired against him how to destroy him,"
another threat this time from the Pharisees against Jesus.
Verse 15, "When Jesus
became aware of this he departed,"
again he withdrew, there's that word again,
"Many crowds followed Him and He cured all them,
and He ordered them not to make him known.
This was to fulfill...."
Notice again Jesus withdraws in
the face of danger but the withdrawing in a sense increases
the ministry in an odd paradoxical way.
Then look at 14:13--well I
won't read that one, 14:13 if you can look it up,
that's another case of danger and Jesus withdrawing.
Let's do spend a little more
time looking at chapter 12 because,
have you noticed that the Gospel of Matthew likes to
foreshadow things and fulfill things?
The Gospel of Matthew likes to
have Jesus do something, and then he'll tell you
something that was not in Mark. He'll say, This was to fulfill
the scripture that said-- for example when Jesus and the
holy family run off to Egypt he then quotes to the fact when
they come back he says, "Out of Egypt I will call
my Son," the prophecy.
Matthew takes an Old Testament
reference, a Jewish scripture reference,
because remember it's not the Old Testament yet,
it's just Jewish scripture, and he takes a quotation in
that and saying it's fulfilled by Jesus.
In the same way in Matthew
2:13-14 "After they had left," this is after the
wise men left, "An angel of the Lord
appeared to Joseph in a dream and said get up,
take the child and His mother and flee to Egypt and remain
there until I tell you, for Herod is about."
They flee, there's that word
again, withdraw--even Joseph with Jesus retreats in the face
of danger to Galilee. Then when he hears they come
back in verse 22 of the same chapter.
Now why is all this--Jesus
retreating? The other thing is if you look
at 10:23, we again get this same word.
When you're doing an exegesis
you might want to use a concordance.
You'll learn on Thursday or
Friday in your sections what a concordance is,
and you'll learn how to use it. Basically a concordance is a
book that takes all the words of the Bible and shows you where
they occur. If you looked up
"withdraw" in an English concordance it
would tell you every time in a certain English translation that
the word "withdraw" occurred in Matthew,
or Mark, or Luke; you can test them out.
You'll also learn how to use an
analytical concordance, even if you don't know Greek,
which will kind of give you an idea,
once you learn how to use it, what's the Greek word lying
behind these English words. If you did that you could find
out that these different English words that I've been reading
from translate the same Greek word "withdraw"
anakoresis. This word is here too,
and in 10:23 you have Jesus and his instructions to the
disciples telling them that they also should retreat in the face
of danger. What is all this going on?
How do we take these different
issues? Jesus is almost a new Moses,
Jesus is teaching the disciples should keep the Torah,
the Law, but then Jesus when he faces troubles he withdraws from
trouble, and he goes off someplace.
But when he withdraws he ends
up preaching more. And the Gospel then is
expanding, and then the disciples, Matthew believed,
will be the next version of Jesus.
They also will be threatened.
They also will be taught to
retreat. They also will then go preach,
and they'll eventually go preach to the entire world in
the form of the Gentiles. All of this is Jesus functions
as a model for the disciples, the apostles,
and the apostles function as a model for Matthew and the
members of his own church. What is all this doing here and
why is it--what's the context in which this kind of picture of
Jesus would make sense? We're going to spend a bit more
time on one important passage, Matthew 14:22.
This is the famous story called
"The Stilling of the Storm."
Now you will have--if you
remember this you could look at Mark 6:45 and it has the same
story. If you took your parallel
columns, one from Mark and one from Matthew,
and you did your little colored pencil exercises you did last
week for your section, it's very interesting to see
what does Matthew add to Mark's story?
If you figure out what Matthew
added to Mark's story you can really get an idea about what
was Matthew's own editorial interests.
Why did he take something out
of Mark, tell it differently, add new stuff to it?
That gives you a great clue for
what Matthew wanted to say. Remember each of these writers
is not just telling you stuff that happened because it
happened, they each are writing a book
intending to put across a theological message.
If you compare what Matthew
says to what he gets from Mark, and see what he adds and what
he takes out, you have a really good idea of
what his editorial message is, what his editorial concerns
are, and we call this Redaction Criticism.
Redaction is just a fancy word
for editing. Why did scholars not call it
"editing criticism"? Because we like two-bit words
when one-bit words would work just as well.
So it's Redaction Criticism is
what you'll see in the scholarship.
It just means paying attention
to how the Gospel writers edited their sources to get out their
own message. So look at 14:22,
and if you want to you can flip over to Mark 6:45 and see the
change, or if you have Throckmorton you
can look it up in Throckmorton sometime.
I'll indicate some of it.
Immediately he made the
disciples get into the boat [this is after one of the
feedings of a bunch of people] and go ahead to the other side
while he dismissed the crowds. After he had dismissed the
crowds he went up to the mountain by himself to pray.
When evening came he was there
alone, but by this time the boat battered by the waves was far
from the land for the wind was against them.
Notice for the wind was against
them, the boat is battered, the wind is against them.
Some of these details won't be
in Mark, the basic story will be there,
but this thing about the boat being battered by the wind,
the wind is against them, I don't think that's in Mark if
I remember right. And early in the morning he
came walking toward them out on the sea.
But when the disciples saw him
walking on the sea they were terrified, saying,
"It is a ghost!" And they cried out in fear.
Immediately Jesus spoke to them
and said, "Take heart, it is I;
Do not be afraid. In Mark, Jesus then gets in the
boat, stills the storm,
and Mark ends it with his own clue that they didn't
understand, they still didn't understand,
so that's part of Mark's theme about the misunderstanding.
That's not the way Matthew ends
it here. Notice what he says:
Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you,
command me to come to you on the water."
He said, "Come."
So Peter got out of the boat,
started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus.
But when he noticed the strong
wind he became frightened, and beginning to sink,
he cried out, "Lord save me!"
"Lord save me!"
Now the Greek word for
"save me" can mean just "rescue
me"-- save me from illness,
but it also can mean "save me" like I need salvation.
The same Greek word means both.
Jesus immediately reached out
his hand and caught him, saying to him,
"You of little faith [that's a Matthian clue,
see Matthew likes this little faith theme so that's one of the
things you see he's added here] Why did you doubt?"
When they got into the boat,
the wind ceased. And those in the boat
worshipped him, saying, "Truly you are the
Son of God." Now if you compare this what
you've got is some important different changes.
First, for example,
I said the boat is beaten by the waves, that's not in Mark.
Why did Matthew add that?
Then you have this whole verses
28-31, the whole thing with Peter and all that sort of
thing, that's not in Mark. Matthew added that whole little
chunk. And then in verse 33 in says,
"They worshipped him," and they have this
confession, "Truly You are the Son of
God," which is a Christian confession.
A famous German scholar,
Günther Bornkamm, whom you don't need remember,
and one of his students wrote a very famous article published in
the 1950s in which they analyzed this story.
And they said,
if you read this carefully this story's not about Jesus walking
on the water and stilling the storm and that sort of thing,
this is a story Matthew intends for you to see the boat--
it's almost--it's like an allegory,
it's almost like an allegory. The boat represents the church,
and Matthew sees the church as being persecuted,
we've seen that theme throughout Matthew.
Jesus prophesied the disciples
would be persecuted. So the boat is persecuted and
that's represented by the storm, and the winds,
and the waves buffeting them, and they're afraid.
Peter, who represents every
Christian says, I want to be like you Jesus and
I want walk on water. I want to overcome all these
problems. He gets out of the boat,
but he doesn't have enough faith, he has a little faith,
and his doubt causes him to start sinking.
When he does that,
what should he do? He should cry out to Jesus and
Jesus will save him. Then Jesus gets in the boat,
calms the storm, and they worship him and
confess him. Bornkamm used this Redaction
Criticism, he was one of the first
pioneers of using this method and calling it by this term to
say, compare Matthew with what he
gets from Mark and what you do is you see that--
what was just a miracle story, just a basic story about the
power of Jesus, has now become a moral story
about the church. And it's now become something
that Matthew is writing to encourage his own church.
They are small,
lonely, people of little faith, they're a mixed group,
remember, some people in the church seemed to have a lot more
faith than other people in the church.
Some people in the church may
not even be true disciples after all.
They're not yet perfect.
Matthew has a saying that is
different from Luke; they seem to both get it from Q.
Luke's version says,
"You should be merciful as Your Father in Heaven is
merciful." Does anybody happen to know
what that comes out in Matthew, it's in the Sermon on the
Mount? "You should be perfect as
your Father in Heaven is perfect."
Matthew has perfect and Luke
has merciful. Again, we see little bitty
clues of how they write this. But that's Matthew telling his
church I know you're not perfect now, but God--Jesus calls you to
perfection. They need more faith and
according to Matthew's story they do it by focusing on Jesus
and worshipping him as the Son of God as they should.
What I've done is walk through
several different passages in Matthew.
An exegesis wouldn't ask you to
do all of those things together. You could write an exegesis
paper on just one section of any of those things that I talked
about. Notice what I've had to do.
I've had to compare Matthew
with Mark and Luke, I've tried to figure out why
did Matthew include what he included,
and why did he leave out stuff, why did he change things from
Mark? I've also said he probably used
Q, this hypothetical document because we find that by
comparing Luke and Matthew. And I might guess at
how--whether Matthew has the more original version of Q or
whether Luke does, and I might try to imagine what
was in Q and how Matthew may have changed that-- edited that.
That's all of course pure
speculation because we don't have Q as a physical document to
actually compare it with like we've got Mark as a physical
document, but scholars still do that.
But the purpose is to--all the
way through to figure out what did this author want to do?
It's not concerned with whether
he's telling us the correct history;
we'll leave that for another day.
It's not to say whether it's
true or not. Notice this:
it's also not to come up with sappy Sunday school kinds of
readings. This is the hardest thing for
people to learn, and, notice,
it doesn't matter whether people have grown up in churches
or not. Modern people have just come to
think that when you read this book you're supposed to get
Sunday school type sappy answers out of it.
What is the meaning of this
story? Well Jesus is teaching us to
love one another. Well, okay yeah maybe so,
but dig deeper. Try to figure out--try to
imagine a historical context in which a human author is writing
the story this way in order to do something socially in his own
early community. We imagine an early Christian
community, and we imagine what problems
they had, by reading the text,
and then we see the text as being written consciously by an
author to address those problems.
With Matthew what you get is
this: Matthew teaches that a Torah observant form of
discipleship to Jesus. Now this will be very important
because one of the themes of this whole course is that the
diversity of different early Christianities.
It's anachronistic in the first
century to even talk about "Christianity"
as one thing, because as we'll show,
there were different views of Jesus,
there were different views of the Jewish law.
And what you'll see very
quickly in this course is Matthew has one--
has a very different view of what Christians should do with
the Jewish law than does Paul, or Luke, or Mark,
or John, or several of the other writers.
One of the things that makes
Matthew present a peculiar kind of Christianity when judged by
the standards of Paul's kind of Christianity is that Matthew
teaches Jesus as teaching a Christianity that observes
Jewish Torah. Even if Gentiles come in,
which the Gentiles do come in, Gentiles must be expected to
keep the law also. Whereas Paul spent his whole
career trying to get Gentiles to understand,
no you don't, you're not supposed to keep the
Jewish law if you're a Gentile, Jesus absolves you from keeping
the Jewish law, Matthew's not that way.
He sees Gentiles coming into
the church but still being Torah observant.
He has a Torah observant form
of Christianity, with Jesus as the recognized
Messiah. Gentiles are included in
Israel, they're not included as a separate church,
Gentiles are brought into Israel, it looks like for
Matthew, and Matthew presents a church
that is in conflict with other forms of Judaism.
I think Matthew was written
after the year 70, certainly after the destruction
of temple in Jerusalem, that seems pretty clear.
Most of the scholars date it to
somewhere in the 80s, maybe not earlier then the year
80, maybe not later than the year
90, we're guessing on this, but it seems to be--it has to
be after 70, but he's in conflict with
whoever is-- there are still Pharisees
around, there are still scribes, there are other who are
offering a slightly different version of what it means to be
Jewish, and that's the last thing that
I'll say about this, is that Matthew is not
presenting a new religion. He thinks what we would call
Christianity is simply the right way to be a Jew.
What Matthew is presenting is a
different sect within Judaism from the form of Judaism that's
represented by the Pharisees or the Sadducees perhaps.
A lot of people think that the
Sadducees may have become extinct after the destruction of
the temple in Jerusalem because the Sadducees were very--
they're power base was the temple, but if the Sadducees are
still around Matthew is presenting a different form of
Judaism than they followed. He's presenting a different
form of Judaism represented by the Jewish writer Josephus,
or Philo, but he is presenting a form of Judaism.
In fact, scholars nowadays say,
Matthew does not represent a new religion with his Gospel;
he actually represents a different Jewish sect.
Any questions?
Yes sir?
Student: Does Matthew
believe Gentiles should be circumcised?
Prof: Does Matthew
believe that Gentiles should be circumcised?
I think so because I can't
imagine him teaching a completely law observant--
when he says not one dot or tiddle,
or jot of the law will pass away until heaven and earth
passes away. Well, any Jew at the time
pretty much would have thought that circumcision was a very
important part of Jewish law not just a dot or a tiddle.
So I think so,
you'll find lots of scholars who disagree with me,
but of course they're all wrong.
Any other questions?
Okay, see you on Wednesday.
