[Dialogue] 10/31/13, Spong: Part V Matthew: Isolating This Gospel from All the Others

Thu Oct 31 07:22:25 PDT 2013

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	Part V Matthew: Isolating This Gospel from All the Others
	Having now introduced you to a different way of reading the gospel of Matthew, and puncturing for you, I hope forever, the assumption that this book along with all the other gospels was ever intended to be either history or biography, I want in this column to double back and focus on the gospel of Matthew as a whole. My purpose now is to isolate this gospel from all of the others so that we might see it in its pristine uniqueness. What does Matthew’s gospel contribute to the developing Christian story? Where in this gospel has the author introduced new ideas, new stories or new concepts that have never before been heard in Christian circles? Most people, I fear, know the Christian story only as one grand, homogenized blend and they have no idea what parts of the Jesus tradition are the gifts of the various gospel writers. Today I seek to separate Matthew from everything else in the Christian tradition and force it to stand alone.
	First, the date of this work needs to be established. Most scholars tend to date this gospel in the middle years of the ninth decade, or in the 82-86 CE year range. It is all but universally agreed that the author of Matthew was familiar with the gospel of Mark. He clearly used Mark and quoted from it directly although expanding it considerably. Most scholars date Luke well after Matthew, the consensus being perhaps a decade later, but with a minority making the radical suggestion that Luke might be as late as 140 CE. The intensely Jewish character of Matthew’s gospel is also generally acknowledged. It appears to be the most traditionally Jewish of all the gospels. Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus in passionate debate with the Pharisees also tends to support a date in the middle years of the ninth decade when Pharisaic power was dominant in the land of the Jews. A coterie of biblical scholars believe quite firmly that the author of this gospel was in fact a Jewish scribe, who had become a follower of Jesus and who served as the head of a congregation of Jewish Christians somewhere in one of the more urban centers of Syria, perhaps around Antioch. There is even some agreement among scholars that the author of this gospel has placed a self-revealing, autobiographical note into his text in which he identifies himself as a scribe: “Therefore, every scribe, who has been trained for the Kingdom of Heaven, is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt, 13:52). Certainly this gospel reveals a passion for things Jewish and an openness to dramatically new Christian understandings.
	I will begin this phase of Matthean study simply by listing in bullet-point form the things about this gospel that are unique to this gospel.

		Matthew is the first gospel writer to trace the ancestral line that produced Jesus of Nazareth. He opens his account with seventeen rather boring verses of “who begat whoms.” We will return to these verses later in this series for they contain some powerful interpretive clues, but for now we simply note that it was important for Matthew and for his community to ground Jesus in the DNA of Judaism. Jesus is portrayed as the son of Abraham, the father of the Hebrew nation, who left his home in Ur of the Chaldees to form a new people in the wilderness. Abraham was said to have made a covenant with the God who called him to this new place. Jesus in this genealogy is also designated the son of David, a fact the served to establish his messianic credentials, for a major piece of Jewish messianic thinking was that the promised deliverer had to restore the throne of David. Jesus was also said to have been descended from survivors of the Babylonian Exile. Matthew thus rooted Jesus in the crucial events of Jewish history.

		Matthew is the first New Testament writer to introduce the story of the Virgin Birth. The idea that Jesus had a miraculous birth had never before been mentioned. Since this gospel was not written until the 9th decade of the Christian era we are forced to acknowledge that the idea of a Virgin Birth for Jesus is a very late developing tradition and thus not part of original Christianity. Paul, who wrote between 51-64 CE, had clearly never heard of this miraculous birth tradition. He refers to Jesus only as one who was “born of a woman” like every other person, and “born under the law” like every other Jew. Mark, the first gospel to be written (ca.72 CE), also appears to know nothing about a miraculous birth tradition. Mark even portrays the mother of the adult Jesus as thinking that he was mentally disturbed (Mark 3:31-35). That is hardly the stance of one who was told that she would be the mother of the Son of God. So, embrace the fact that Matthew is the gospel writer who introduces the Virgin Birth tradition into Christianity. Please note the fact that only in Matthew do we find stories about a star in the east, the journey of the magi, the slaughter of the innocent children by Herod, the flight of the infant Jesus into Egypt and the subsequent settlement of the holy family in the Galilean village of Nazareth.

		Matthew is the first Christian writer to introduce Joseph as the earthly father of Jesus. This Joseph was also destined to disappear from the Jesus story almost immediately after he plays his role in the birth narrative.

		Matthew alone suggests that Jesus preached “The Sermon on the Mount.”

		Matthew introduces a number of parables into his narrative that no one else in the developing Christian tradition seems ever to have heard or known. Among them are the parable of the weeds (13:24-20), the parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the pearl of great price (13:44-46), the parable of the net (13:47-50), the parable of the householder (13:51-52), the parable of the unmerciful servant (18:23-25), the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (20:1-16) and, probably the best known of all the Matthew parables, the parable of the judgment in which the sheep and the goats are separated (25:31-46).

		Matthew alone adds to the biography of Judas Iscariot the narrative of his receiving thirty pieces of silver for his act of betrayal, the narrative of Judas repenting and trying to return the money and the narrative of his act of committing suicide by hanging.

		Matthew alone asserts that guards were placed around the tomb of Jesus to prevent the disciples from stealing his body and then using that story to fuel resurrection fantasies. One of those fantasies was that the descending angel struck the guards causing them to sink into a state of unconsciousness while the angel removed the stone from the entrance to the tomb.

		Matthew was the first New Testament writer to narrate the details of the risen Christ appearing to anyone. Please note that this means that appearance stories of the resurrected Jesus do not enter the Christian tradition until the ninth decade. In Matthew’s first narrated resurrection story, Matthew has the risen Christ appear to the women at the tomb at dawn on the first Easter morning. That is of special interest since Mark, who wrote earlier than Matthew, and Luke, who wrote later, both say that the women did not see Jesus at the tomb on Easter morning.

		Matthew is the first gospel writer to describe the actual appearance of the risen Jesus to the disciples. Matthew tells us that this appearance took place in Galilee on a mountain top, not in Jerusalem at the tomb, and that Jesus appeared to them from out of the sky already glorified. He was not a resuscitated body appearing out of a grave. Since the story of Jesus’ ascension does not enter the tradition until Luke, a decade or so later, this scene argues strongly that the earliest conception of resurrection was not that of a physical, resuscitated body rising from the grave back into the life of this world, but rather of one who had somehow been transformed into the eternal life of God from which he could be manifested in some visionary way to certain chosen witnesses. That puts the resurrection of Jesus into the Old Testament category that was believed to have included Enoch, Moses and Elijah.

		Matthew is the first gospel to quote the resurrected Jesus as speaking. Before Matthew he had said nothing to anyone. The words Matthew quoted him as saying were what we now call “the Great Commission.” That commission had two parts, a command and a promise. The command was to go into all the world, make disciples of all nations, baptize and teach them to observe “all that I have commanded you.” The promise was that they would never be alone, for the risen Lord was quoted as saying: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age.” Matthew has no concept of the Holy Spirit coming after Jesus has departed, no sense of a “comforter,” who would replace him as appears in the later gospels of Luke and John. The closest thing to Pentecost that Matthew offers is this promise of the eternal presence of the living Christ. Matthew opened his gospel with an angel stating that Jesus would be called “Emmanuel,” meaning “God with you.” The circle is completed in Matthew when Jesus makes this claim for himself: I am Emmanuel, the eternal presence of God, who will be “with you always to the end of the age.” The Christ presence is thus Matthew’s version of the Holy Spirit.

	Those are some of the distinguishing marks of the gospel we call Matthew. Embrace its uniqueness and listen to its special contributions. We will examine them all in more detail as this series of columns unfolds.
	For now, grasp first the Jewishness of this gospel and then grasp the fact that at the beginning of his Jesus story Matthew shows Gentiles in the persons of the Wise Men, compelled to come and worship this Jewish Jesus and at the end of his gospel Matthew portrays the risen Jesus commanding his followers to go to the Gentiles to make disciples of all nations. It is inside that interpretive envelope of the Gentiles coming to Jesus and then the disciples being sent to the Gentiles that Matthew’s story of Jesus of Nazareth unfolds.
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Ken McRae from Toronto, Canada, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
Thank you for your insightful scholarship. My question has to do with free will. If we believe we have free will this helps explain the rampant, human-induced evil in the world. On the other hand, the Lord's Prayer, wherein we ask that "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" must have been uttered millions of times to no apparent avail. Those who believe in a benevolent God who answers prayers must be stymied and dismayed that these millions of prayers go unanswered in the face of evil or - if they are answered - that God’s will included mayhem. My take is that there is not a God that answers these prayers and that we are on our own - or God’s will is to endorse our free will to carry on as usual. Your comments on free will, the will of God and, in this context, evil itself would be greatly appreciated.
Answer:
Dear Ken,

The debate between free will and determinism will not be solved in this question and reply format. The issues are far too deep, far too complex and our knowledge’s far too limited. Just the insights from the field of psychology alone help us to understand how much we are motivated by the realm of the unconscious.

At the same time to treat God as an external power ready to be supplicated to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves is a product of the childhood of our humanity that we are outgrowing more with each passing generation. People interpret this as the death of God. I see it as the death of our human projection and believe that this death will actually open us to a new birth into a new dimension of spirituality.

I see nothing wrong with giving voice to our yearning that God’s will might be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” The problem with most of us is that we identify God’s will with our desires. They are not the same.

To say that there is not a God who answers prayers is not to say that there is no God. It is to say that the popular image of God is woefully inadequate. People often in the immaturity of their childish theism confuse God with Santa Claus. They are not the same!

John Shelby Spong

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