Are you familiar with the Gospel of Matthew? If not, read on! If so, try to summarize its distinctive portrayal of Jesus in one sentence. (of say, 50 words or so max). If you really can’t, then again, read on! If you give it a try, check to see that you have both described it accurately and shown how it is distinctive among the other Gospels.
Here’s a sentence that I might try if I were given the assignment:
Great summary Bart.
I would also summarize the Gospels as Matthew = Faith is shown by actions while the others have Faith being shown by belief. I find this to be a pretty profound discrepancy. (And yes, my summary was a broad brush, owning that).
Effective synopsis. A few comments.
First, why use phrases indicating the author is someone named Matthew? Example:”Matthew later stresses…” I think this feeds the false premise that someone named Matthew is the author. Rather, stating as “The author later stresses…” would be more accurate and, I think, more informative.
Second, I am struck at how consistently this gospel follows the Old Testament main themes, to obey god’s laws. i.e. “…Jesus emphasizes that he did not come to abolish the law of Moses but to fulfill it, and that his followers need to keep the law even better than the religious leaders of the Jews (5:17-20).”
Third, I conclude that the author is extending OT themes, using Jesus as a prophet, yes, but also as an analogy of the failure of that contemporary Jewish state. His death is synonymous to the destruction of Jerusalem, the temple and the Jewish state by the Romans in 70 CE. Why? Consistent with OT stories of destruction and exile because the Jews did not follow Yahweh but did what they thought was right in their own eyes.
Thoughts?
“Matthew” is often used to refer to the book as well as to the author.
Second: yup. Third: It appears that Matthew sees the destruction of Jerusalem as God’s response to the Jews’ rejection of Jesus.
My point is: Even if using the names of this, and other gospels, is often used, i.e. is a convention, that is no reason why those who know better should perpetuate the use. We can help those who think a real Matthew wrote the gospel by bucking the convention by saying “the author”.
Yeah, you may be right — I’m trying to think if we do it with other texts. I guess we talk about “Amos” and “Job” (Job says that…). But outside the Bible? Good question. The problme is that saying “the author” everytime can be a bit awkward, in part because at some points we have to say “The author of Matthew” and ….
Do you think that the author of Matthew was Jewish (member of the Jewish diaspora?) or Gentile?
I suspect he was Jewish.
In Matthew, the early followers of jesus seem to give less emphasis on Jesus bringing good news to the oppressed.
When and why did this emphasis on liberation of the oppressed get lost?
Did it simply get pushed to the back burner by the resurrection?
Moses, the prophets, Jesus were all about relieving the oppression of the disinherited poor, but Christians today seem focused on paying their obligation so they can live after they die.
When and why did we go wrong?
Is it time for another reformation?
J. Grant Lowe
There were clear indications of it in some times and places. 1 Clement, around 95 CE, from Rome, indicates that “many” Christians in the Roman church took on incarceration in the place of prisoners and some sold themselves into slavery to use the money to set others free. It’s gotta be an exageration, I should think (many??), but it seems like that kind of thing did happen.
Your 50 words sentence is spot on! It really encapsulates the whole book! You must be an expert or something! 😂
Hi Bart — do you see any reason to think this gospel was first written in Aramaic/Hebrew?
Are there Greek features that would not make sense as translations (or functional equivalents) from Aramaic/Hebrew?
Is there any reason to think the author is Jewish, or does he demonstrate notable familiarity with Judaism and/or Palestine? (or is he wrong a lot?)
Thanks
Written in Aramaic: No compelling evidence, I’d say. None. It’s clear he is copying Mark, which was written in Greek, and copying the very Greek itself. Was Matthew Jewish? I tend to think so, but it’s really hard to say.
What can be said about how Matthew saw Jesus and the Kingdom of God? Was Jesus divine god to Matthew, or just a mortal that God had ‘adopted’ to his son?
Was the Messiah just the future anointed king of Jerusalem, coming from the line of David, and the Kingdom of God just the powerful earthly realm that Jesus would reing ‘with a rod of iron’, or did Matthew see the Kingdom of God being heaven somewhere outside of this planet as modern Christians understand it?
Lastly, is it plausible that some of the parables, teachings or anything Matthew wrote about Jesus’s deeds and utterings, would be based on real life of Jesus, or do we need to simply trust his word on everything?
Matthew certainly thinks that Jesus is divine, as probalby did nearly all early Christians. The question is, In what SENSE is he divine? Did he become divine at the resurrection (as the earliest believes thought)? Or when he was baptized (as possibly Mark thought)? Or Or when he was born (as Luke thought). Or was he a pre-existent divine being who was like God but only later came to be equal wiht God (as Paul thought)? Or one who was fully God from the beginning, the one who created the universe and then became human (as John thought)? It’s more difficult to tell with Matthew. He was divine in the sense that he was born of a virgin, but Matthe gives no hint that Jesus existed prior to his birth… These are issues I address, if you’re interested, in my book How Jesus Became God. (Matthew saw teh Kingdom as coming down to earth for eternal life of resurrected bodieshere; and yes, some of Matthew’s sayings of Jesus certainly go back to hijm.
Matthew: Jesus is the new Moses. Moses apostasizes to an ancestral God, Egyptized as a Living God. Love the Lord *your* God,” doesn’t mean *our* God, because Jesus has different patrilineality.
‘YA Saves’ (no -H) = Ya theophoric of Ea at rebirth-obsessed Ebla + Saves, Moses’ suffix per Josephus that appears post-Amarna.
This is a perfect complement to my own reading: I picked up the Harper Collins NRSV study Bible and am just recently starting the New Testament. Great timing.
Matthew’s most significant contribution was to add the Jonah prophecy uttered by Jesus in Matthew 12:40 and by doing so wrote his gospel such that the Jesus of his conception was raised on the Jewish, seventh-day Sabbath and not a half-a-day later (on Sunday morning) as was the case with Mark, Luke and John. Matthew’s “resurrection day” (“the third day”) was the Sabbath of commandment, though at its tail end. The Book of Jonah recounts that Jonah was awakened before being tossed overboard which leads me to believe he was in the belly of this big sea creature for three nights and three days; as such, there is no big problem with saying that this was the same as three days and three nights. When Matthew is correctly translated we find that the Jewish Sabbath was the third day following (or after) Jesus’ crucifixion on Nisan 14 at mid-week. The Matthewan Jesus did not “eat” the Pascha; quite to the contrary, he “kept” it at the beginning of Nisan 14 or long before the Passover lambs would even be slain.
Bart, An excellent summary, but perhaps more useful for believers.
From many of your writings, I got the sense that Matthew was creating a literary work to explain the theological cognitive dissonance created by the crucifixion of a Messiah figure (who should have conquered His oppressors instead of being executed by them)
It seems like a work of apologetics that sorted through the Septuagint for passages (some misinterpreted) that would support the thesis of a resurrected savior Christ. Then, with those in hand, Matthew created an appealing narrative that squared the circle.
Seems like the gospel would have provided comfort and worship structure to an existing community of believers as well as proving proof of oral claims to potential converts
I’m not sure what you mean about being useful for believers. That’s my view of the essence of Matthew as myself an atheist. For cognitive dissonance, I think Mark is the one more focused on it.
” died for others before being raised from the dead”
Jesus- divine died not for others but for that divine cause. As we have no consciousness of divine. but only what we can understand as humans
>> Matthew is more interested in making both points than in figuring out how they could both be right.