The Three Nativities. Pt. 3 - Matthew and Gospel

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us." When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

In this post, I am beginning to look at the nativity story as it is told in the Gospel according to Matthew. Before we dig into the tale itself, let me clear a bit of brush and talk about five issues which, if we don’t deal with them straight on, they will come back and interrupt the conversation. A second post quickly follows.

Matthew’s Text as Gospel

When most of us talk about gospel, we tend to speak of a literary genre - a life of Jesus - kind of like a primitive biography. In that sense of the word, our Bible contains four gospels; three in the synoptic tradition and one, John, which is markedly different than the others. Most of us know that the Greek has something to do with “good news,” but the word gospel was never simply generic happy reports.

Classically, there were two meanings, first a military connotation. A gospel was a positive battle report from the front lines. In the 52^nd chapter of the oracles of Isaiah, the prophet proclaims,

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion (the city of Jerusalem), - Your God reigns (i.e. Yahweh won)!"

We have all attended civil war movies where the townspeople are gathered in the square awaiting a rider who will rush into the village and post some sort of dispatch on the Post Office door for all to learn what has been happening in the war.

The second classical meaning of the word gospel had to do with royal proclamations, either a birth announcement of the arrival of a newly born heir to the throne, or a coronation announcement celebrating that heir’s ascendancy into office.

Gospel proclamations traditionally carried the news of a general amnesty as well.

In both Luke and Matthew, we have the gospel celebration of a newly born monarch. Luke tells of that announcement sent forth from the heavenly courts proclaimed by an angel choir whose glorious presence lights up the sky. In Matthew, the gospel proclamation does not come from the palace; the present royal court is out of the loop. It is brought by foreign visitors beckoned onward by a rising star.

Theologically, the writer of Mark’s gospel is more ambiguous about the notion of a restored Davidic throne and therefore we should not be surprised to discover that there are no nativity materials. Mark portrays Jesus primarily as prophet obsessed with spreading the message that the Kingdom is at hand and it is a good time to repent.

The Synoptic Tradition

Most scholars understand that both Matthew and Luke draw heavily on Mark as a resource. In Matthew, we can find (with some editing) 91% of Mark’s text. Luke uses 49% of the earlier gospel. Apparently, both also draw on a “sayings” tradition usually designated as “quella,.” the German word for source.

Additionally both redactors have their own materials that are not shared or known by each other. These are usually designated Proto-Luke and Proto-Matthew. So, for example, only in Luke would we find the story of the “prodigal son” or the “good Samaritan”

Most scholars would account for the differences between the two sets of nativity stories as coming from these unique threads in the oral tradition. Luke speaks of shepherds. Matthew tells of court intrigue and wise men.

I If we date the initial writing of the Gospel of Mark in the late 60s of the first century and Matthew and Luke as emerging around the 80s, we notice that these accounts straddle one particularly significant event in the life of the Jewish community, i.e. the civil war with Rome that occurred from the year 64 CE until 72 CE. Particularly important is the destruction of the temple and all of the structures found on the temple mount in 70 CE.

It is hard to get one’s mind around the scale of such an event both physically and spiritually. One writer has suggested that it might be as if the National Mall, with the Smithsonian museums, the Washington monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Wall remembering our Vietnam veterans had been razed to the ground. Recognizing this fact, we should not be surprised at the harsh critique of the illegitimacy of the Herodian client King relationships with Rome and the culpability of the people of Jerusalem in the regime’s accommodation. We will return to that subject in the next post.

Christ (Messiah)

Matthew designates his genealogy “The Book (perhaps record) of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” See previous post – The Three Nativities, Pt. 2. Now it is popular to remind students that Christ is not Jesus’ last name. Instead, the word Christ (Messiah from the Hebrew) functions as a title. This is certainly true, but truth being told, the grammatical expression which we would expect to see reading “Jesus as the Christ” is not found either here in Matthew or in Paul’s letters.

The title, which roughly translates as anointed, points to the symbolic pouring of olive oil on the head of the newly ascended Jewish monarch during the ritual marking the covenant declared between the new king and the people. So, in this classic sense, David is Messiah (Christ), Solomon is Messiah (Christ), Rehoboam is Messiah (Christ), and so forth.

However, by the period of 2nd Temple Judaism, this Kingly title has come to point to not just any King, but in the apocalyptic tenor of the times, a final King. So in his genealogy, Matthew is declaring salvation history as a series of three 14 generation epochs where particular promises are realized – the promise to Abraham with God (Yahweh) giving his descendants the land, the promise made to David of a powerful House ruling in the context of the promise made to Abraham that all nations would be blessed and finally the promise made to Jechoniah (on the other side of the Babylonian exile) concerning the restoration of that Golden Age. Jesus-Christ becomes messiah as the one who will fulfill that third promise.

Jesus, born of Mary

Matthew, without any personal sense of ambiguity, declares that Jesus’ birth is special. The child Jesus is conceived “through the Holy Spirit.” Mary, who is recently betrothed to Joseph and therefore under obligation by Jewish custom to keep chaste in their first year of marriage, remains a virgin. For Matthew, this is matter of fact. He argues that it is anticipated in the Hebrew Scriptures. For Matthew, though while it is special, it is not necessarily unique. Unusual births sort of go with the territory when Kings are involved.

Matthew clearly has no problem with the notion of a virgin birth. For Joseph, and one can infer others in the immediate family and extended community, this is a problem and he reports that Joseph upon discovering that Mary is with child is wrestling with a difficult decision. He can publicly accuse her of immorality, which without a witness will maybe entail some sort of trial by ordeal. That alternative is apparently not his way of doing things.

Matthew tells us that because Joseph is a just person, he decides to quietly move on, giving Mary her privacy, but at the same time all arrangements are off.

Joseph decides to sleep on his decision and like his namesake in Genesis, he has a dream where an angel, who will appear again later in our story tells him that it is all okay. In faith, Joseph claims Jesus as his own son which is absolutely necessary if Jesus is to be seen as a son of David in the context of being a son of Abraham.

Citings and Echoes

Part of what seals for Matthew the plausibility of Mary’s conception as a virgin birth is that he finds it anticipated in scriptures. He writes,

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us." (Mt 1:22-23)

As you know, there is a problem with this citation. Our evangelist regularly references texts from what was referred to as the “Law and the Prophets.” In particular, this text harks back to Isaiah 7:14. In Hebrew the text reads, “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” The Hebrew word for young woman is aalmah. Matthew, however, regularly drew from the Greek translation, the Septuagint. The equivalent Greek term reads parthenos and while it is rightly translated as young woman, the word also has a secondary meaning not found in Hebrew which can be translated as a virgin. So, ironically, if Matthew only had an Isaiah scroll in Hebrew, he could not have spoken of a virgin birth, or at least he would not have been able to quote his scripture to justify that contention.

Clearly, the circumstances of the birth of Jesus were controversial. As the image of an immaculately conceived child emerged, these subtleties in translation became very significant.

Some people suggest that Matthew is the most Jewish of the four Gospels. By that, I think it is more proper to note that Matthew may be the most Rabbinic of the four Gospels. Following the destruction of the temple, some of the pluralism found earlier in the century is simply gone. The Essenes are killed at Masada. The Sadducees, with their aristocratic presence centered in Jerusalem are scattered. There is no High Priest. The insurgent forces like the Zealots are defeated.

What is left, with no temple, are the Pharisees and the Christian Jews arguing over the meaning of Torah and its implications for holy living. In Matthew, we find a charter document if you will for a different sort of rabbinic understanding of the meaning of the Torah. It comes as no surprise that Jesus’ parting words to the apostles in the 28^th chapter of his narrative is to keep making disciples of the “nations,” (i.e. make them pupils). Jesus’ advice is that the immediate task is to enroll folks in Jesus’ school. This advice, which is generally discussed as the “Great Commission” does not serve as some sort of differentiation between those saved and not, .that distinction is drawn in chapter 25, where the standard of judgment will be whether one feeds the hungry and visited the poor.

Matthew cites the Law and the Prophets directly some 14 times (have we seen that number before?) In the nativity material, he quotes scripture on five occasions, each time introducing it by saying, “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord.”

Similarly, the text is rife with indirect echoes of other stories found elsewhere in scriptures. The dreams of Joseph are reminiscent of the dreams of Jacob’s son in Egypt.

Scriptural references to ancestors suffering under Pharaoh are hard to miss. Brown points to the story in Number 22-24, where Baalam, the foreign astrologer can not be paid enough to go against the Word of God blessing the people of Israel. Baalam announces their succession in the land, a sucession marked with scepter and rising star.

The Moses connections are numerous. Geza Vermes points to popular myths of the day.

A

contemporary of Matthew, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (AD 37-c.100), reports, and later rabbinic literature confirms, a folk tale which was in circulation in New Testament times. It relates to the birth of Moses and his miraculous escape from the hands of Pharaoh of Egypt. In the Old Testament, the extermination of the new-born male children of the Jews was decreed by the Egyptian king in order to stop the growth of the dissatisfied Jewish population, perceived as a threat to the Egyptian state.

The rabbis recorded a similarly murderous plan. Pharaoh - like Joseph in St Matthew's Gospel - had a dream. In it, he saw two scales, with the whole of Egypt lying in one of them, and a lamb in the other. But the lamb turned out to be weightier than Egypt. The court magicians were summoned and explained to the king that the lamb symbolised a Jewish boy who would become a lethal threat to Egypt. In Aramaic, the word talya, like "kid" in English, can mean both a young animal and a child.

Amram, the father of Moses, also had a dream and learned that his son was the future redeemer of the Jews. Afraid of breaking the royal command, yet intent on saving his son, he constructed a papyrus basket and entrusted the fate of the child to God. As in the Bible, little Moses is said to have been found by Pharaoh's daughter who persuaded her father to appoint Moses as his heir. The willing Pharaoh took the baby in his arms, but Moses grabbed the king's crown and threw it to the floor. The sacred scribe, who had foretold the birth of the liberator of the Jews, realised who the baby was and advised the king to kill him. However, Divine Providence in the person of Pharaoh's daughter quickly stepped in, and Moses survived.

Citations and echoes of previous scripture by Matthew (see also Paul) and other rabbinic writers of day is good hermeneutical practice. For us, as post-modern Christians however, this strategy is more problematic. First, it simply doesn’t convince. Such a technique reeks of proof-texting and it turns scripture into a series of Nostradmus-like predictions whose fulfillment is directly proportionate with the vagueness of the details involved.

Secondly, post-holocaust, we as Christians must evaluate our notions that the Old Testament is primarily about Jesus. The citation of Jewish scripture by Jewish evangelists is one thing, but at the point these texts were taken up by non-Jewish Christians who had appropriated Jewish scripture without the attendant relationship to Torah, to the land and to the particular people Israel, such hermeneutics easily becomes a foundation of Christian anti-Semitism. Jarolav Pelikan’s final book with its provocative title, “Whose Scripture Is It?” captures the inherent problems with these issues. He writes: “despite our speaking about a weather prophet who appears on radio or television, or about the more or less reliable “prophesies” of the stock market that comes from a broker, the word prophet (a compound from the Greek word for speaker) does not mean in the first instance someone who predicts the future, but one who speaks our on behalf of God – not one who foretells, therefore, but one who tells-forth…” In my Bible studies, I have tried to distinguish between the fulfillment of scripture which has to do with predicting the future and, to coin a phrase, scripture filling-full a present reality or experience by appropriating the wisdom and lessons of the past.

Matthew’s tale is both fantastic and jarring. Our next post turns to the basic story line and its satire of authority.

See Also:

The Three Nativities, Pt 1 - Introduction

The Three Nativities, Pt. 2 - Lineages

The Three Nativities, Pt. 4 - Matthew and Illegitmacy

This essay is part of a series written in memory of Judy Sparks Montgomery

© John C. Montgomery – All Rights Reserved 2007

Photo used by permission: I-Stock Photo

This blog entry is cross-posted on 7 Villages