There’s a fairly broad consensus, I think, that Matthew wrote at first for Jewish Christians. My question is how Jewish were they? Matthew portrays Jesus as not requiring hand-washing before eating, and allowing both healing and certain other kinds of work on the Sabbath. At the same time, he says he requires stricter adherence to the Law than the Pharisees practiced. From the Sermon on the Mount it’s clear than he’s saying Christians need to go beyond the mere letter of the Law to embrace the spirit of it. But neither does he abrogate the letter. So which if any letters of the Law could Jewish Christians afford to ignore?
I propose that Matthew’s people were pretty much “fully Jewish” but that they were not strictly observant when it came to things like hand-washing and Sabbath observance. Moreover, I think there were plenty of other Jews who acted in the same way, and not just the unwashed masses so to speak but also even some Pharisees, Sadducees and others who took the Torah seriously. In Jesus’ time, these issues were not written in stone. Hand-washing isn’t a biblical law [for laypeople], it’s a rabbinical law that was promulgated by the Pharisees. Whether one could heal on the sabbath was also controversial. The Essenes were against it, but the rabbis [not all of them] thought as Jesus reportedly did.
An unresolved question for me:
Did Matthew’s congregation allow Gentile Christians to join without becoming Jews?
Thoughts?
Robert said
I think Matthew’s community and readership probably contained somewhat divergent views on various aspects of the law. As an author and or community leader, Matthew tried to hold together these divergent views from a higher perspective, struggling to be respectful of as many sides of the debate as he could but without achieving an entirely consistent synthesis. To a certain extent, I’m tempted to believe that Matthew wanted to turn his community’s focus away from some of the older disputes and to embrace more enthusiastically the mission to the gentiles, making disciples of all nations, probably not insisting on their becoming Jewish, but rather being baptized and obeying Jesus’ commandments. Just a thought or two.
Sounds right to me, unless the “making disciples of all nations” part was a later addition. This section also includes an overtly trinitarian formula: “baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Makes me suspicious of later scribal tampering. Could it have originally ended before the Great Commission?
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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Robert
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