The Gospel of Matthew is Pure Brilliance!

[Music] welcome to misquoting Jesus with Bart ehrmann the only show where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little-known facts about the New Testament the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity I'm your host Megan Lewis let's begin there we oh all right editor please put in our introduction today on misquoting Jesus we're talking about the gospel of Matthew who was it written by what's the overriding theme of the book and how does it portray Jesus but before we get to that art hi how is your new semester going yeah well okay so it's uh you know it's back in the saddle it was off last semester and of course you know if you know a research scholar isn't really kind of ever off it's just like you're doing it you just keep going but you know it's a different set of things and both are important but I you know the thing is I love the classroom I love teaching undergraduate students and my students at Chapel Hill are um they're they're smart they're smart people and they're interested and interesting and uh and they're kind of a self-selecting group because people who wouldn't like the kinds of things I do don't take my classes and so uh yeah so it's it's great it's it's a it's a different kind of grade but it's for me teaching is actually the perk of the job because you have so many other things you got to do but actually undergraduate teaching that's great so yeah very well yeah actually just on a personal note what's your favorite class that you've ever taught oh well that's it's really hard to say it's kind of like my children I love more than one of them but but I um you know that um the class I'm doing now I'm kind of fond of the the class on Jesus and scholarship and film um where the students um have to you know they we study ancient gospels and to see what they what they say about Jesus and then we watch film to see well what uh what playwrights say about Jesus excuse me God damn cool um editor take that out um so um so it's a lot of fun and one of the fun things about this class is that the Jesus movies that I really like from back in the day my students have never heard of like Jesus Christ Superstar oh it's such a fantastic book and its music is in my bones and they've never heard of it and so like they love it because it's such a period piece so oh that's wonderful yeah so so you're you're not in the classroom so what what is new uh for you at this point what's new for me that's a really good question I am actually not currently in the classroom but preparing to teach in uh later in the summer but I'm started starting to get um everything together because it's I'm teaching a like a community course through a college called Pennsylvania college and and not Pennsylvania colleges I can't talk today editor if you could cut that little bit out that would be great too I'm going to be teaching a Sumerian language class through a community college called Peninsula College which I'm really excited about actually it's it's not um a class for typical students it's a um kind of like an evening class for the local community to get them involved yeah I thought you're gonna say it's an evening class for Sumerians wow okay okay get on it that sounds good yeah we'll see how it goes it's it will be my first time teaching Sumerian to people yeah like rather than just writing it down yes exactly and doing it over video but no I'm I'm very much looking forward to it I think it'll be fun okay great yeah good okay so we should we should dive into Matthew why do you think it's important to look at the gospel of Matthew in detail but you know one of the one of the things that Scholars have emphasized for a long time Scholars of the New Testament is that each of these gospels is a is a different book we tend to read them as if they're all saying the same thing and so when when casual readers read the gospels rarely do they actually start at the beginning of a gospel and go all the way through to read that gospel usually you pick passages here and there and you just read them and they all sound kind of similar but even if you read them straight through you start at the beginning of a book and you go to the end of it um uh they sound they sound similar to most people so you read you read uh you know you read Matthew's gospel and you start chapter one verse one you read all the way through and okay it's about the life of Jesus right his life his miracles his his teachings his death is resurrection great uh then you read Mark and it's about the life of Jesus it's about his life his miracles his teachings of death rise or any Luke's same thing John John's different it's like oh that's a little bit different that sounds a little different but it's basically the same thing and so you read them they all sound the same and if there are things that are different between one or another you just you just in your head you think well okay okay so he added that story the other one didn't have it but you know they're just telling parts of the stories but they're basically all the same and what's what modern scholarship has discovered I mean um it really is kind of a discovery it's since since just the 19th century and especially uh in the uh in the 28th century and then until down today Scholars have recognized these books are each individual books they're written by different authors in different places at different times and their perspectives are different it's not that they're the the overall perspectives are contradictory it's not that Matthew says that Jesus is the Messiah and Mark says oh no he's not you know it's not like that but it is that they have a very different perspective that they're putting on the uh the the they're applying to the story and they're they're seeing Jesus in in different ways sometimes significantly different ways there are of course contradictions as well but those tend to be kind of on the smaller level but but the overall perspective and the thing that each one's trying to emphasize is different and so you have to read Matthew as a book by itself without pretending he's saying the same thing that John is saying because he's not saying the same thing John is saying or Mark or Lucas so we read them do Scholars read the four as different things and so it's important to let each one each author have his say uh otherwise you miss his perspective and we'll we'll obviously get into the specifics of that and Matthew's personal message as we go through today's episode I thought we should start with a couple of easier questions um who wrote the Gospel of Matthew and if we know when and where it was written yeah good I'm all for the easy questions except these are not easy it turns out these are these are a little bit complicated so the gospel of Matthew of course is attributed to somebody uh named Matthew and in the Christian tradition that refers to a tax collector that Jesus chose as one of his uh disciples this is a an episode that's narrated in Matthew chapter nine uh Jesus is going by this tax collecting booth and this man named Matthew is there and Jesus calls them to be his disciple and Matthew leaves everything and follows him um you have you have the same episode in the gospel of Mark very with with some differences but it's the same episode but there the person is called Levi uh and so even in the early church people were a little bit puzzled by that and they they concluded that uh this person had two names that Matthew and Levi was somebody with two names that that actually doesn't happen in Antiquity it hardly ever happens in Antiquity that somebody has two bona fide different names but but anyway it's biblical Scholars often not well biblical readers often assume that that's the case here so the thing is though that when you read the account in Matthew 9 people should just do it just read it and ask yourself is there anything in this account to make you think that the person Matthew is the being described in this account is the one who's writing it is he writing about himself is there anything to indicate that any more than in the case with Levi in in Mar um but the thing was that in the early church they certainly wanted these Anonymous gospels to be ascribed to actual followers of Jesus so that they would be authorized as people who knew what they were talking about when they describe his words and deeds and so this seemed like a care character that would be likely to have written a gospel for some reason I guess because he's a tax collector maybe people thought well he's more Highly Educated or something and so and so they um so they ended up assigning to Matthew but we don't we don't know who it was do we know anything about the when and the where of the writing well we know a little bit um one of the um one of the pretty assured findings of scholarship um is that Matthew had as one of his sources of information uh the gospel of Mark about 93 of Mark's gospel is replicated in Matthew's gospel where they'll tell the same many of the same stories and usually in the same sequence and often the same words word for word the same and there are reason there there are reasons we'll get into later podcasts for thinking why it's Matthew who copied Mark not the other way around so he's writing after mark and um and he and Mark Mark is usually dated around the year 70 of the Common Era right around the time of the end of the Jewish war against Rome around the year 70 Matthew had it as a as a source and it's usually thought in Matthew it had to be in circulation for a while before Matthew got a hold of it and so usually Matthew's dated in the mid 80s like around the year 80 or 85 so so uh so you know 50 or 55 years after Jesus death do we know where roughly it was written or is that a tricky one yeah it's also a tricky one um and in some ways it's the it's really kind of the hardest one to answer because who wrote it well it's Anonymous and we don't know who wrote it but we we know it's probably what we do know uh about who wrote it relates to the where it was written because it's written in high and fairly high level Greek it's not it's not high level Greek the way you know like euripides is or something like a really high class like top but but it's you know this person is hot is more Highly Educated than 99 of the world at the time and so um any and his native language is Greek some people have argued that the book was originally written in Aramaic and then translated into Greek but there's absolutely no sign of that and very very good reasons for thinking that in fact it was written uh originally in Greek one being that this author copied the words of Mark which was written in Greek and so this person's writing a Greek and so uh so as to the where it'd have it would have to be it was it would have to be somewhere in the Greek speaking part of the Roman Empire um it is sometimes located to the city of Antioch in Syria uh but the grounds are really flimsy for that even though Scholars often stated as something that's you know pretty certain yeah well no there's nothing certain about it's just that Matthew shows that there's a lot of conflict between Jews who are not followers of Jesus and Jews who are followers of Jesus and Scholars say well so where is there a large Jewish community and a large Christian Community that would be behind that Antioch why not so we don't know it wasn't written in Israel because the language if he was writing in Israel would have written an Aramaic almost certainly and so uh yeah probably somewhere else but probably a big city someplace in the room and I bought her outside so you mentioned that Matthew used Marcus his primary source for writing the gospel do we know anything about the other sources that he may have used or or is this really all we have well it's a big it's a big um issue in scholarship and has been for a very long time and in fact it goes all the way to the early Church in the early church uh Saint Augustine believed that he knew that there there had to be some kind of relationship between Matthew and Mark because they're just too closely related you can't you can't have two human beings write down what something they've seen or heard someone do even if they saw and heard it and come up with exactly the same words over the course of you know a paragraph it just doesn't happen and so um Augustine thought that what happened is that Matthew was first and that Mark made a kind of a condensed version of it what we might call Reader's Digest version of Matthew where he cut out a lot but but since the 19th century Scholars have thought that he used the Matthews Mark um Luke also on the same grounds is thought to have used Mark and so Matthew and Luke both used mark But the thing is that both Matthew and Luke also have materials that they have in common that are not in Mark and these tend to be sayings materials the sayings of Jesus like the Beatitudes or the Lord's Prayer or some of the Parables you'll get them you'll get the same ones in Matthew and and in Luke sometimes word for word the same but they're not marked so they didn't get them from Mark and so Scholars have long thought that they had some other source available to them this is uh their reasons for thinking that Matthew didn't copy from Luke to get those stories or that Luke didn't copy from Mark from those stories but so if there's some other sores out there the scholars who developed this Theory were German and they called it it's mainly sayings of Jesus and so they called it the sayings Source the word for Source in German is covella he's filled with the Q q-u-e-l-l-e and so the short for that is q and so the Q source is the source that Matthew and Luke had in addition to mark Matthew also has some so Mark so Matthew had Mark he had probably had q and then Matthew some other stories that he himself tells that nobody else tells and so they don't know where those come from but probably from a written Source or an oral Source or a bunch of written sources or a bunch of what and so they call that M so Matthew's special Source NQ and and Mark excellent thank you so we we touched on this in a prior episode and you mentioned it um a couple of minutes ago but this is definitely the place to go into more detail one of the things that historians do when they're looking at ancient texts is try and ask like why was this written and how does the author try and achieve their purpose and I know that asking this question of the gospels may seem a little redundant to some of our audience obviously they were written to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ but there's like more to consider here if we're coming at it from a scholarly perspective you mentioned that each of the gospels is different with a different emphasis and therefore a different portrayal of Jesus specifically for Matthew why was this gospel written and what version of Jesus does he portray to try and Achieve that goal well it's it's the great question and it's the I think it's the most important question and um it's when you study Matthew carefully uh a question the the answer emerges pretty quickly um especially when you know that Matthew used Mark as his Source uh for for many of his stories Mark's gospel as we'll see in a later episode begins with Jesus as an adult being baptized by John the Baptist uh and so that's the very beginning of Mark Matthew begins uh in a different place Matthew begins uh by uh describing by introducing his gospel by saying uh the book of the genealogy of of Jesus Christ the son of David the son of Abraham and then he launches into a genealogy where he gives Jesus genealogical line um that uh that starts with starts with Abraham who's the father of the Jews uh and then it goes down from father to son Abraham was the father of Isaac Isaac father Jacob Etc and goes on down and it goes down to David uh who's the king King David and uh then it goes from King David and goes from fathers David's son goes down and father and son to the Babylonian exile when the the nation of Judah was destroyed and people were sent into Exile and then it goes from there and it goes all the way down down to Jesus or it goes down to Joseph uh goes down to Joseph who's not really Jesus father because Jesus is born of a virgin in this account so it goes down to Joseph and then and that he's the he's the husband of Mary who was the mother of Jesus but then Matthew summarizes this and says so the genealogy of Jesus is it starts with David and after 13 generate I mean after 14 Generations after 14 Generations it gets to David and after 14 Generations from David it gets to the Babylonian exile and after 14 Generations after that Babylonian exile you come down to the Christ and so what he's got he's given you this genealogy of Father and Son relationships where every generation is 14 generate is every section is 14 Generations there are three of them three being a very good number in the Bible and so uh from from the father of the Jews to the greatest King of the Jews is 14 generations and the Messiah is supposed to be the son of David right so from the greatest King of the Jews to the greatest disaster of the Jews the destruction by Babylon 14 generations and from the destruction of the Babylon to the Messiah 14 Generations 14 14 and 14 and the whole point of this is to trace Jesus line back to King David because he's the son of David and to Abraham the father of the Jews and to show that this whole thing was preordained this is this is the Christ now that God has promised who has appeared and so the the kind of the big point about this is Jesus in this gospel is going to be really Jewish of course he's Jewish and Mark but here you have this emphasis face in Matthew it just hits you in the face and you know a lot of people don't like genealogies but like this one's not hard for a reason yeah it's 16 verses you know it's not like first Chronicles where yeah after chapter of it and so you know it's not nine chapters it's 16 and and there are lots of interesting things about this particular genealogy um and one of the things interesting by the way is that this 14 business 14 14 and 14. it really does sound like it's preordained very convenience it's it's yeah it's convenient and it's been made convenient um because to get to the 14 in the um in the second set of 14 he had to drop out some names says somebody so and so is the father and so and so yeah actually he was his great grandfather you know and then in the third set if you just add them up they're around 14. there's only 13. so oh ah but but he has a point you know so it's trying 14. 14 significant for several reasons one is that so Scholars aren't sure why I pick 14 you know why not 17 you know we're not 12 or why 14 and they're the two big theories about this there are lots of theories but the two big theories are that um the perfect number in uh the Bible is seven and what's 14. it's doubly perfect so that's the line of the Messiah it's doubly perfect but the other interesting thing is that the whole point is to show that Jesus is the son of David the Messiah if you spell the name David in Hebrew uh the Hebrew doesn't use vowels it just has consonants and in ancient languages they didn't have a different numerical system from their alphabetic system and so in Hebrew all of the first letter is one Abate the second is to guimal three Etc they go through the alphabet this way and so every number every letter has every letter has a number attached to it if you spell David it'd be in English it'd be DVD the D is worth uh four the V is worth six so the name David uh adds up to 14. and so he's the son of David 14. so yeah all right so anyway so like this see this is the kind of thing like you just wouldn't when you're reading math and of course they do because it's like oh God a genealogy are you kidding me that's why I'm starting a new testament but no it's like it shows that this is really going to be emphasizing something about the jewishness of Jesus and uh Matthew just hammers that home throughout his whole book Jesus is is a Jewish Messiah and as a Jewish Messiah he fulfills in Matthew a lot of prophecies um yeah the first is is I think a whole 23 verses in when his he's born of a virgin which supposedly fulfills a prophecy from Isaiah so can you talk about the impression that this prophecy fulfillment creates for Jesus especially when so many of them come so early on in the gospel of Matthew well that's right right after you get this genealogy then you get you then you get hit with the uh with the infancy narrative the story of Jesus birth which is one of two in the New Testament the other is in the Gospel of Luke but there are birth accounts are completely different I mean they just they tell just different stories they're just all different stories and so but in Matthews the thing that one of the most striking things is that he narrates stories and at every key point he points out that this fulfills what the prophets had predicted the Jewish prophets the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament and so you're right the first one is he gets um uh we we find out that his mother is a virgin and in Matthew the reason the mother is a virgin is to fulfill Isaiah chapter 7 verse 14 which uh Matthew quotes as saying a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and you shall call his name Emmanuel which is god with us and so um the reason Jesus is born of a virgin is because Isaiah predicted he would that she would that I'm sorry the reason Jesus boy yeah because that he would be he would be more of a virgin right but then why is he born in Bethlehem because Micah chapter 5 verse 2 said that the savior is going to come from Bethlehem and why why is it that he goes down to Egypt because Hosea says out of Egypt I shall call my son and so so right at the beginning these first two chapters you get five places where Matthew tells you this is to fulfill what the prophets said so these are called fulfillment citations and you get you get six more in the gospel in the gospel of Matthew and you don't get them in any other gospel they're not in Mark and so this is like an emphasis Jesus is the Jewish Messiah who fulfilled all the prophecies so we've talked a little bit previously about how the gospels are a kind of Greco-Roman biography so the audience for these Works wouldn't necessarily expect the kind of factual accuracy that a modern audience would biographies were stories that showed someone's essential character rather than like a historical account of what they did in their lifetime do you think that Matthew believed or intended his audience to believe that Jesus really did fulfill these Jewish prophecies or are these statements more about showing his essential nature as a Jewish Messiah foreign that's a great question and I wish we knew what was going on just hop back and ask him it's very very simple I know the problem is who do you ask we don't even know who he was I was like oh God so um there's several things that can be said about it uh though I think with some Assurance for one thing is we do know that the um the early readers of Matthew believed that he was saying that it really had that these are literal fulfillments that the prophet's really worth thinking about Jesus and Jesus fulfilled the prophet prophecies so that's not evidence that that's what the author had in mind but it's you know it's suggestive that people in his environment assumed that that's what he had to do in in his mind and so that that's helpful my sense is that Matthew my sense is that Matthew really did think that Jesus fulfilled these prophecies but it's important to understand what Matthew means by fulfilling a prophecy um for example just uh I think a really good example of this is the one about out of Egypt have I called my son so what happens in Matthew's gospel only in Matthew's gospel is that um King Herod finds out that the king of the Jews has been born by the wise men are following the star and they show up and Herod finds out and he interviews them and they say well we've seen the star and it shows the king of the Jew and here it is has been born and herod's a little bit upset because he's the king of the Jews and so like so he wants to get rid of the child and so he sends in the troops to kill every child in Bethlehem this is only in Matthew and there's no historical record of this happening at all but Joseph the Father the adopted father I guess finds out in a dream it's going to happen so he takes the child and the mother down to Egypt and then after her dies um months years I don't know how many how long later they come back uh to to Israel and Matthew tells you that the reason this has happened was to fulfill what was spoken of by the prophet out of Egypt have I called my son now that's that's from the book of Hosea chapter 11 one of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and Hosea when you read Hosea he's clearly talking about God saving Israel from their slavery in Egypt at The Exodus under Moses so out of Egypt have I called my son means that these he's he's delivered his people from their slavery in their oppression in Egypt Matthew says that's been fulfilled by Jesus and it appears that in this case what Matthew means is that what had happened in the Old Testament was hugely meaningful and now it's been filled with more meaning it's fulfilled it's got more meaning now when you realize that in fact it was foreshadowing what would happen with the true salvation of Jesus coming so God provided salvation for the Jewish people at the Exodus but he provided salvation for the entire world through the Messiah and so this is a foreshadowing of what would happen and the and the event with Jesus going down to Egypt fulfills fulfills the event fills it full of meaning do you see additional parallels in Matthew between Moses and Jesus uh yeah this is this is this is something people don't pick up on that they you know if they read it carefully they probably will pick up on it but most people don't notice this and again it's only in Matthew you don't this isn't in Mark uh and Luke has doesn't have it done this way at all so the way it works is that um the whole birth narrative is set up to replicate what happened in the birth narrative and following set up to replicate what happened with Moses You could argue the first seven chapters are set up to show that Jesus is the new Moses or the the new interpreter of Moses or probably the new Moses so what happens is G so Jesus uh is Jesus is miraculously born and um and he's protected it protected birth Moses was born and was protected at Birth Jesus is uh the the ruling King is out to get him and Pharaoh was out to get Moses so he had to be hidden and so uh they're they're similar things so the Monarch out to kill them Jesus this goes to Egypt where Moses is from uh right after his soon after his birth Jesus then comes up out of Egypt just as Moses leads to people out of Egypt when Jesus as soon as he the next thing that happens in the in the account is he's an adult he goes he gets baptized he goes through the water Moses takes the children of Israel through the water at the Sea of reeds Jesus then goes into the Wilderness and he's tempted for 40 days Moses takes the people of Israel Into the Wilderness for 40 years and then Moses Moses goes up on the mountain and he gives them the law Jesus goes on the mount and gives The Sermon on the Mount and in The Sermon on the Mount he quotes the law of Moses and gives his interpretations of it and so this is like so clearly this is modeled on on the Moses story and any Jewish reader is going to read this and say oh yeah boy that sounds familiar but um but so again it's another way of emphasizing that Jesus is he's thoroughly Jewish and that there's continuity between the law of Moses and the teachings of Jesus and that Jesus is fulfilling what had been set out earlier which was in a sense I guess incomplete because now it has been filled out and now it has reached fullness uh from its kind of partiality before so if if Jesus um elaborates on explains the laws of Moses I'm assuming that Matthew is not saying or the writer of Matthew is not saying that now Jesus has come and given his own laws Jewish law is is completely moods and inapplicable well here here again this is a distinctive mathian emphasis that you get just in Matthew and people just don't notice this one Jesus begins The Sermon on the Mount by not the very beginning first he tells the Beatitudes but then he then he tells his followers he says uh don't think that I've come to destroy the law the law of Moses I haven't come to destroy it I've come to fulfill it truly I tell you not one what not one letter not one part of a letter will pass away from the law before everything is fulfilled and so it sounds like okay he's going to fulfill the law so it's all over with now right no he goes on to say that you have to keep the law better than the scribes and the Pharisees and that uh just keeping the letter of the law the way other Jewish leaders uh argue you need to do this this and that you know you need to do he Jesus in Matthew says you need to do that but that's not the whole thing and then he launches into his um what are called the antitheses this is in The Sermon on the Mount still in chapter five where Jesus says you've heard uh you've heard it said you know that you shall not murder so that's one of the one of the Ten Commandments and Jesus says I say to you that you shouldn't even get angry you've heard it said you shouldn't commit adultery I say you shouldn't even lust for another woman in your heart and he kind of goes through these things and and the and the the important point that people Miss is Jesus does not negate the law of Moses he doesn't say Moses says don't murder and I say yeah go ahead and murder you know he doesn't see the opposite he says of course go ahead and command it over what you know he doesn't say the opposite what he does is he tries to get to the heart of what the law is about just the letter he's bringing it out he's trying like what's the point not murdering you need peace in your community you can't go around murdering each other and Jesus saying being peace means like don't go around getting angry at everybody you know and adultery in in the Old Testament the problem with adultery is um that you're you're stealing somebody else's house and Jesus don't even want to do it you know don't it's not that you know of course you're gonna have desires he's not saying don't desire anything he's saying don't don't try to get somebody else a spouse don't do it or the law says an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth and people misread that one all the time they think well God that's a rough law no it's not a rough law it's a law of Mercy if if somebody if somebody knocks out your tooth you don't have the right to Lop off their head right the the punishment has to make the crime and so Jesus says you've heard eye for an eye for tooth for tooth I say unto you turn the other cheek you know so Mercy he elevates the mercy so for all of these he Embraces the law and he tries to get to the heart of it so given that Matthew paints Jesus as a very Jewish Messiah and as the second more perfect Moses if you will why is he so critical in Matthew of the Jewish leadership that he comes across so he has run-ins with them it's scattered through the whole book um and chapter 23 is essentially just one long rant against them and he kind of just details all the ways in which they're incredibly hypocritical how does that work right this is this is I think the key to understanding Matthew that he is he portrays Jesus as being vehemently in support of the Jewish religion as correctly understood and vehemently opposed to other Jewish leaders for misunderstanding it so when you ask sometimes with my students at um at Chapel Hill I'll ask them is you know what's Jesus relationship to Judaism and the short one and you know is he for it is he against it and the short answer is well he he's completely for the Jewish religion and he's completely against the Jewish leaders and so it's that um and that's not a contradiction most people read Matthew as if he's like opposed to Judaism and that's completely wrong the chapter 23 as you mentioned is this long harangue uh against the um against the scribes and the Pharisees and it's famous for Jesus starting out like each harangue with woe to you scribes and Pharisees you know you Hypocrites you whitewash sepulchers that's a great image by the way so it's like this this tomb like it's whitewashed you know that's nice and white and pristine on the outside you go inside there's rotting bodies in there that's what you're like you know you look great on the outside but inside oh my God and so Jesus goes after these leaders but he does it after saying at the beginning of chapter 23 that um that you are to do what the scribes and fair what the Pharisees tell you to do he says that people don't read this verse you are supposed to do what the Pharisees say do what they tell you do their follow interpretation but don't be like them and then he launches him because they are hypocrites they say one thing and they do another thing they uh you know and they try to get by by following the letter without being concerned about the spirit of the law Etc so he so it's really setting up Jesus as the true Jew I mean it's the one who really is a Jew and the odd thing then is the question that a lot of people have asked is is Jesus telling his Gentile followers that they have to be Jews is he um in Christianity of course Christians historically have said well no if you're if you're Gentile you don't have to this is because of Paul if you're Gentile you don't have to be circumcised you don't have to keep kosher you don't have to observe the Jewish sabbath those are Jewish things and um uh because Paul insists on that and there's a bona fide question about whether Matthew agrees because Paul in Matthew says keep the laws keep the laws and just don't be like the Pharisees and Ma and and it's not clear is he he seems to be talking to Jews and Gentiles but does he mean the Gentiles have to keep kosher um it's it's a it's a Live question I think that that brings up another point that I wanted to ask you about Gentiles in Matthew when they appear seem to more readily recognize Jesus power than his own Community does so if you look at the Centurion who asked Jesus to heal his paralyzed servant and has so much Faith he says you don't even need to see him just speak and he will be healed is this kind of interaction included do you think to emphasize further the hypocrisy of the Pharisees or is it to try and make the gospel appeal more to maybe Matthew's Gentile audience yeah okay yeah this is another you're full of complicated questions today and this is one of them that is especially intriguing and that is uh there's no and I don't think there's a crystal clear answer but I think that uh that it it's a question that really has to be delved into deeply by people reading this book um why is it the Gentiles seem to come off so much better than Jews uh in in this gospel there's a there's a kind of a theme that runs throughout uh most of the early Christian literature through each of the gospels I'd say and through Paul and through the book of Acts that um that the message of Jesus as the Messiah came to the Jewish people and most Jewish people rejected the message and so the message therefore went to the Gentiles now in the Apostle Paul Paul thinks that's the plan of God you know that that's how God's going to save the world because Jews have to reject the message so that followers of Jesus are compelled to take the message to non-jews and so it's part of the plan of saving the world Matthew doesn't lay it out quite that way but in Matthew Jesus emphasizes that he himself has come just to minister to Jews and he sends his followers to minister to Jews but every now and then Jesus encounters a gentile and the Gentile seems to get it better than anyone else does um and at the very end of the Gospel Jesus said during his ministry says that he's come only for the lost sheep of Israel um but at the end after his resurrection he meets with his disciples and he tells them to go into all the world and Make Disciples of all the nations teaching them what Jesus has taught them and baptizing them and so the idea I think is that Matthew emphasizes that the Jewish leadership rejected Jesus and that's why he got executed because the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem rejected him and handed him over to the Romans to be crucified so he was the rejected Messiah after his rejection after okay well that's it you know they killed him so they're not accepting him then the message goes to the Gentiles and I think that the idea that Gentiles come off seemingly better in the account than Jews is is foreshadowing that that in fact Gentiles are going to welcome this more than others I see thank you it's the last question before we we move on is there a part of the Gospel that illustrates all of these themes together you know when I'm teaching my class um uh my undergraduate class at Chapel Hill I have my students study um this very early story I mentioned it earlier about the wise men um coming to Jesus the visit of the Magi magi the Magi the and so these so you only get this in Matthew and the deal is is that Jesus is born and uh you know Luke tells a set Luke tells a set of stories about what happens when Jesus is born and Matthew tells another set of stories and Matthew said a story includes that there's these there are wise men from the East who are following the star so there there's some kind of astrologers and they're uh they see a star in the sky and they're they're following it because the Stars indicating that the king of the Jews will be born um and the star leads them to uh to Jerusalem and they go into uh they go into Jerusalem and they start making inquiries because apparently the star stopped somehow like it was it was leading them and all of a sudden it stops over Jerusalem so they don't know where to go now and so they go in and they start making inquiries and King Herod finds out that uh you have these these why these wise men from these we're not told how many of them there are there's there are three they're eventually they're going to leave three gifts so people talk about the three wise men but we don't know how many wise men they're supposed to be but they the King Herod finds out about them and he brings them in to find out because he's curious like is it really a king of the Jews that's been born uh and they uh and they say but we don't know where and he inquires of his scripture Scholars Herod asks brings in biblical Scholars and says where's the king of the Jews to be born and they tell him well uh according to the prophets he's to be born in Bethlehem and they quote Micah 5 2 that a savior will come out of Bethlehem and so Herod tells them it's in Bethlehem and so Bethlehem is a short distance from Jerusalem and so the wise men go off and the the star reappears and takes them to Bethlehem and then stops over the house the Jesus is in and so they go in and worship him with gold frankincense and myrrh and then the interesting story how does a star stop over a house exactly he's going to ask them If You by my local planetarium has a has a show every year to try and show oh you know it might have been uh you know it might have been a comet you know it might have been a supernova it might have been yeah yeah they don't stop over houses and you know and if it's if it's something that's like uh you know 30 feet off the ground that could go over houses you know then you could see that but it's a star and so and really interesting is to see how movie directors deal with this uh like how do you how do you do that and so like the best ones are things where you got the star way up you know millions of miles away but then a light beam comes down you know hits the house and so they know that the best one actually is the Life of Brian wise men go into the wrong house yes all right all right all right so so they go to the house they wear something and then they leave and Herod then realizes that they haven't come back to tell him where the child is is what they want what he wanted and so he's not sure which one is so he sends in the troops and uh and they kill all the children okay so what's that got to do with what we're developing about Jews and Gentiles and Jesus being a Jewish Savior and things well this is what has to do with it this story is an early illustration of the entire message of the Gospel of Matthew in a very subtle way when you read the story you ask who is it who knows where the king of the Jews the Messiah is supposed to be born the non-jewish people in the story they don't know it first they find out from the Jewish scripture Scholars the scripture Scholars of the Jews who know their scriptures Inside Out know exactly where the Son of God is to be born where the Messiah is to be born the Gentiles don't know they find out from the Jewish Scholars and then who goes to worship Him the Gentiles are not the Jewish Scholars the Gentiles go the Jewish scripture Scholars who knew full well what the scriptures were saying don't accept their Messiah the Gentiles who don't know find out and they do worship the Messiah and so this is foreshadowing the entire gospel already in chapter two and so it's a brilliant story that you know people get all hung up on you know following stars and who these people are and you know and that kind of thing and they're missing the point this is this is showing that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish god to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish scriptures only to be rejected by the people to whom he was set and so the message goes out to Gentiles and they're the ones who accept it that is fascinating oh that's beautiful foreshadowing yeah it's great it's great it's real these these gospels I'm telling you they they you know it's so easy just to read through them and not even to think about it and and when people do think about it usually they think they'll take a verse and just think well how does this apply to my life and and that's that's absolutely fine but you know these are there there are moments of Brilliance in these books that you have to you have to look really carefully to figure out that oh my God that's amazing in every one of these gospels you get stuff like that and so this is this is one of those moments in Matthew when that happens I've said it I can't remember before I've said it when talking to you but I've definitely said it elsewhere that so much is lost I think in the appreciation of the Bible as a literary construction when you just focus on it as a religious text there's there's just like this this story from Matthew I've I hear it every year at church and this is a whole new dimension on it that I have never known about never considered and it's fascinating and beautifully crafted and I really appreciate it well you know the gospels are multi-functioning books functioning is not the right word they're multi-layered books they they you know they they um they're trying to describe something that happened and so historians have to figure out did this happen did this happen did that happen did you say this there and so they're kind of historical sources on one level that that's history they they're religious their religious documents obviously their their documents of faith that people believe in and that they they shape people's lives their religious lives their thinking about God and Christ and salvation and such they're also literary texts they you know even even those who believe that God inspired them he inspired texts and that means to understand these books you've got to treat them as texts you need to treat you need to explore them as pieces of literature or you're not going to understand them and especially if you think God inspired them you might want to know what God had to say maybe so and so I would think that you know I think the best approach is to understand them as historical and religious and literary literary texts well I think we will end our conversation on Matthew there but thank you that was fascinating as always we have a brief announcement bot has a new course coming up called the unknown Jesus revealing the secrets of Mark's misunderstood gospel but could you give us a brief brief summary of what this course is very brief yeah it's just so in this you know this episode here we've talked about Matthew we're going to be doing something similar with Mark where I'm going to be doing a it'll be an eight lecture course that deals with um the kinds of things we've done in Matthew here in about 45 minutes we're going to do with with Mark in eight lectures of 45 minutes each uh going into Plumbing The Depths and it's not like you know it's going to be so much that oh god really here's more no like every bit of it's interesting there's so much that's interesting in these books and so this will be an eight lecture course on Mark I call it um the uh so one of the themes in Mark is going to be the basis for the course about how nobody in Mark can figure out who Jesus is and people don't get this reading Mark they people just don't see it and so I'm going to explain how it's a misunderstood gospel about somebody that is misunderstood in the gospel wonderful thank you it is currently on early bird special for those who are interested the regular price will be 59.95 but if you purchase before Friday January 27th at midnight then you will only pay 47.95 and as always you can still use the code MJ podcast for an additional discount at checkout with the early bird and if you miss it you can use that discount as well afterwards so um we are going to have Bart's weekly update this is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr ehrman's book releases speaking engagements irman blog.org happenings and online course launches but what do you have for us this week well I was saying earlier you were asked about my teaching and and I was saying that you know this is this is the perk of the job and um you know people I think people don't know like being a university Professor it seems kind of like pretty easy right a few classes a week and like you got the rest of the week off right you sit around watching soaps and eating bon bons or something I don't know so uh yeah but the thing is like the the academic job is there's a lot to it um and so I'm finding that out Anew when you go on leave you try and forget it all you forget about the committee meetings and the department meetings and the obligations and the yeah it's like and the the advising of students is like oh my God yeah there's a lot here and so uh so I'm I'm just my update is yeah I'm realizing keeping your head above water trying to keep that above above water in the professorial life oh well I hope you continue your acclimatization back to Professor life with little uh problems or few problems well I mean I think everybody's busy everybody has to do everything so it's not that I'm saying I'm different from anyone I was just like yeah there's some busyness you like like you know teaching students some things you don't like like committee meeting but yeah I do I mean they're important they're important I I can absolutely understand that we are going to have our next round of outsmart parts [Music] Dr Roman has written six New York Times best-selling books and holds a PhD from Princeton it's not often you'll see him made a fool but it doesn't hurt to try it's time for outsmart Bart [Music] so this week's outsmart bark questions come from Joel Zahn I hope I'm saying your name right Joel if I'm not please accept my apologies which middle platonist philosopher is attributed with this phrase what is Plato but Moses speaking attic Greek what okay I assume I assume I assume it's Philo of Alexandria but I don't know it is a pneumenius of apamaya middle photography last time I thought we'd go for something a little bit more tricky oh yeah well thanks so much okay but I do need to explain to people that what middle because like people aren't even going to understand the questions I didn't understand the question I just read the words at one time I actually probably knew I did know the answer actually numinous but because we don't have his writings we only have fragments of his writings and so middle platonism was Plato was back in the fifth century and he developed his philosophy through these dialogues that we have and um there's a phenomenon that's more not widely known as plate platonic thought but there's something called neoplatonic thought that was um developed that was developed in the third fourth fifth century CE so 800 years later which is a very mystical thing that sounds to to people reading it sounds a lot like uh kind of like uh gnosticism without the kind of religious aspect but it's kind of spiritual connecting with the dog and the idea is that the God is this spiritual being up there and we're down here and there's a lot of intermediaries between and how do you access the Divine middle platonism is something that's not very well attested uh Philo is one of them but we have fragments of others who are sort of they're very platonic in their thinking but they haven't kind of gotten to neoplate they're a bunch of these guys and they're they're all we just have a little fragments of them yeah sorry okay I should know that one right give me give me another one I don't know uh so this is another question I I don't really understand um according to the Gospel of Truth which entity caused Jesus to become powerless and thus crucified oh God all right so I'm gonna say I didn't even know what the Gospel of Truth is the Gospel of Truth is a great gospel it's one of these um it's one of these gospels of and again it's a question I should know the answer to it's one of the Gospels found in the nag hamadi Library which was discovered in 1945 uh this nakamadi library is often called the Gnostic Gospels although a number of the gospels in the Gnostic Gospels are not necessarily Gnostic and the Gospel of Truth is one of those there's it it it's it may be it may have Gnostic influence on it but it's really kind of a dualistic conflict between uh Darkness and Light and and uh and so it's and so it's it's a celebratory uh book that allegedly was written by one of the famous gnostics uh and so I don't know Darkness it says era error yeah okay good yeah um please I'm so glad this is the final one we're really pressing over the coals today uh in the Ascension of Isaiah what is used to carry out Isaiah's martyrdom uh yeah so this one I know so the the Ascension of Isaiah is a uh obviously it's a non-biblical text with Isaiah the prophet at the um as the key figure and um there are two separate sections of it one part is sounds kind of like a biography trying to do kind of a biographical sketch of of the prophet Isaiah and the other is an account of Isaiah's um Ascent back to Heaven going through remember how I just said out in neoplatonism you have these various levels of heaven and then some Gnostic texture of these various levels of heaven and in the Ascension of Isaiah is not uh it's not Gnostic but it does have this Gnostic theme that the soul has to go through these various levels to get up to the true heaven and each level has a ruler and you have to give a password to the ruler for him to let you through and so and so this is his text I some people date it very early some people I think crazily or previously it's from the first century I think there's no way it's from this probably the middle of the second century but the biographical part I believe that Isaiah is a so is a sod in half yes yes uh and so that's not a good way to go but uh and it wasn't a magic trick where he came out okay he was saw on in half well thank you Bart for attempting these questions you did one out of three oh my God you at least recognized what the questions were I'm like once again if I played baseball I'd be batting 333 I'd be in the All-Star Game glasses and thank you I'm thanking you because these are questions that I don't have to come up with so um before we finish for the week would you mind just briefly summarizing what we talked about and why it's an important topic um we talked about the gospel of Matthew as its own distinctive book and the overarching writing kind of methodological argument I want to make is that if you want to know what Matthew wants to say about Jesus how he wants to portray Jesus you have to bracket your knowledge of what you yourself think about Jesus uh religiously or historically you have to bracket what every other author says about Jesus including Mark Luke and John and you have to focus on Matthew as a literary text when you do that it's when you focus just to see what this gospel is trying to say it emphasizes that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah who was sent from the Jewish god to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish law who ends up being rejected by the Jewish people and so he he stresses the importance of the Jewish law the importance of Moses the importance of keeping the law not just in the letter but in the spirit uh as and Matthew Matthew thinks you have to do that if you're a follower of Jesus and being a follower of Jesus of course believing that what Matthew says about his teachings and his death and his resurrection but believing that doesn't get you off the hook of of doing what God commands and what God commands is in the Torah so you have to have to keep the law but thank you very much for your time audience thank you all for listening I hope you enjoyed the show and if you did please remember to subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes remember also that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of box courses including his brand new one the unknown Jesus revealing the secrets of Mark's misunderstood gospel over at www.barterman.com Miss quoting Jesus will be back next week but what are we going to be talking about well next week we're talking about a topic that I've spent a good deal of my career doing research and writing on uh involving the diversity of early Christianity people often think of the earliest Christian Community as being fairly unified and then later it kind of got all fragmented and and like it is today but I'm gonna we'll be talking about how in fact very very early in Christianity it wasn't just a monolith there are various kinds of groups that had various kinds of views theologies practices understandings of the world and they all call themselves Christian they all said that they followed the teachings of Jesus and they were completely at odds with each other so and what one view ends up emerging from this it becomes the standard view which also has many facets so yeah we'll be talking about the diversity of Christianity schisms the heresies uh along with the along with uh what becomes Orthodoxy well I am very much looking forward to it so we will see you all next week thank you everybody and goodbye [Music] there's been an episode of misquoting Jesus with Bart um we'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on bar turman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Hermann and myself Megan Lewis thank you for joining us

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 131,799

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Id: hCyFw3jnoUk

Length: 58min 4sec (3484 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 17 2023