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Part XII Matthew
Matthew Introduces John the Baptist-The New Elijah
Matthew has thus far mined the Hebrew Scriptures for texts that will advance his thesis that Jesus has fulfilled the Jewish messianic expectations. In the opening genealogy, he has made Jesus “the son of Abraham,” the son and heir of King David and portrayed him as one who with his people survived the Babylonian exile. Only then did he flesh out his story with the narrative of Jesus’ miraculous birth, based on a text from Isaiah. When he introduced Joseph into his story, he patterned him quite intentionally on Joseph the patriarch, whose story fills the chapters in Genesis between 37 and 50. Matthew’s Joseph serves to bring together the Hebrew nation, uniting finally the two sides that had split apart after the reign of Solomon. Every one of his Jewish readers knew that this was a major expectation of the promised messiah.
The messiah had cosmic implications, so his birth was announced with a star, the light from which shone all over the world. It drew Gentiles in the persons of the magi, suggesting that messiah will not only heal the divisions among the Jews, but he will also bind Jew and Gentile together in a single human family. They would bring symbolic gifts: gold for a king, frankincense for a deity and myrrh, which presaged the fact that the messiah would accomplish his purpose through suffering and death. The story of the magi, we now know, was based on a text from Isaiah 60. Matthew was weaving an interpretive narrative around the one who would be called Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew then proceeded to tell a Moses story, designed to remind his readers that Jesus was a new and greater Moses. Like Moses, Jesus was not only God’s deliverer, but he was also one who would be called out of Egypt. Next Matthew quoted Jeremiah who had portrayed Rachel, the ancestral mother of the Northern Kingdom, as weeping for her children, who had been destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 BCE. After all of these preliminaries, Matthew has properly set the stage to introduce the pivotal character we know as John the Baptist who, for Matthew, would stand as the life upon whom the Old Covenant would be transformed into the New Covenant. By this point in our study of this gospel, we ought to be aware that Matthew is not a historian, eager to set the literal record straight; he is rather one who proclaims the good news that he has experienced in the person of Jesus. His task is to interpret the significance of the life of Jesus and he will bend the record and history wherever necessary to serve this interpretive purpose.
There was, quite clearly, a historical, first century itinerant preacher named John, whose movement was symbolized by an act of baptism. This John of history is, however, not the person we meet in Matthew’s gospel. As we piece the fragments of the historical record together, we can see the shadows of the one called “the Baptist” begin to emerge. We share those shadows in this column in order to put Matthew’s story into a context.
The John movement was both independent of the Jesus movement and connected with it. There is much historical evidence to support the fact that the two movements were competitive at the beginning. A reference in the book of Acts indicates that the John movement existed late into the first century quite independent of the Jesus movement. The fact that the earliest three gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus being baptized by John suggests that Jesus actually began his career as one of John’s disciples. Certainly some of Jesus’ first disciples appear to have been former disciples of the Baptist. The constant references in the gospels to the priority of Jesus over John reflects the discomfort that the followers of Jesus appeared to have that John came first in history and that Jesus built on John’s ministry. That is why Matthew and the other Christian writers spend so much energy in the scriptures trying to diminish John the Baptist. Matthew has John say things like: “I baptize you with water, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Matthew, perhaps embarrassed by the fact that John actually baptized Jesus, has John say: “I have need to be baptized by you and you come to me?” Later writers will have John say, “He must increase, I must decrease.” Luke goes so far as to suggest that even the fetus of John the Baptist leapt in the womb of its mother Elizabeth to salute the fetus of Jesus, still in the womb of Mary. So it is interesting to watch how Matthew interprets John. He takes his cue from Mark, who in his opening verse says, “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare the way.” That is a quotation from the book of the prophet Malachi (3:1). Malachi had been re-interpreted in the light of the Jesus experience. Malachi actually closes his book with the identification of that messenger as a forerunner of the messiah. The messianic tradition had assigned this role to Elijah. So Malachi wrote: “Behold, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers.” In the messianic tradition of the Jews clearly an Elijah-like prophet would prepare the way for the messiah’s arrival. The followers of Jesus, probably between the writings of Paul (51-64) and the creation of the first gospel Mark (ca. 72), had decided that John the Baptist was in fact that “new Elijah.” This idea had been introduced in Mark, but now Matthew would take it over and develop it to a new intensity. It is fair to say, that in this gospel we do not really meet the historical John the Baptist, we meet the John of Christian interpretation. Yes, John came first, they were saying, but this does not mean that John was primary. His role, as far as the followers of Jesus were concerned, was clear: He was the forerunner not the principle figure. Matthew now proceeds to develop this character.
John the Baptist is described by Matthew as one who came preaching in the wilderness of Judea. Every Jew knew that Elijah was a preacher in the wilderness. Matthew then moves to solidify this identification by giving to this wilderness preacher the message: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” To make sure that Matthew’s readers got his point, he clothed John with the clothing of Elijah. Elijah was described in I Kings (1:8) as one “wearing a garment of haircloth with a girdle of leather about his loins.” Matthew says of John the Baptist that he “wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather girdle around his waist.” The identification is clear.
Next, Matthew described John’s diet. It was the diet of the wilderness: locusts and wild honey. He then records John’s message to be like Elijah’s. John is quite confrontational. Elijah confronted King Ahab and his Queen Jezebel. John the Baptist will be portrayed as confronting King Herod and his Queen Herodias.
The story of the ultimate confrontation between Elijah and the royal family of Ahab and Jezebel was told in the first book of Kings (18:17-46). It took place on top of Mt. Carmel in the Northern Kingdom. It took the form of a dramatic contest pitting Elijah alone against 450 prophets of Baal, who was the God of the Canaanites and the God worshipped by Jezebel. The contest was to determine whether Yahweh, Elijah’s God or Baal, Jezebel’s God, could bring fire from heaven to burn up the sacrifice that each side had prepared and laid on their respective altars. The prophets of Baal were invited to go first, so 450 prophets of Baal came out praying, singing, dancing and cajoling their God to send fire from heaven upon their erected altar. This went on for quite a time while Elijah taunted them from the sidelines, urging them to cry louder, suggesting that perhaps Baal was asleep. When their efforts proved futile and their time was up with no response from Baal had been forthcoming, it was finally Elijah’s turn. According to the biblical narrative, Elijah stepped forward in the style of a great showman. First, he erected his altar using twelve stones, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Next, he laid his wood on his altar before placing the sacrificed animal on the wood. Then he built a trench around the altar and followed this by his ordering four cisterns of water to be filled and then poured over his altar. This procedure was repeated three times until the altar, the wood and the sacrificed animal were soaked and even the trench around the altar was overflowing with water. Only then did Elijah pray for God to answer with fire from heaven that would be of such strength that it would consume the offering. According to this story, the fire of God fell from heaven immediately and consumed the offering, licking up the water in the trench. Vindicated, Elijah then turned on the 450 prophets of Baal and beheaded them on the spot with his sword. It must have been a gory sight! When Queen Jezebel heard of this, she uttered this vow about Elijah: “So may the gods do to me and more also if I do not make your life like the lives of one of them (the prophets of Baal) by this time tomorrow.” Elijah, hearing this treat fled and so these solemn words uttered by the queen were left unfulfilled. Eventually, the sacred story tells us Elijah escaped death altogether by being transported into the presence of God in a fiery chariot drawn by fiery horses.
The Christian tradition now asserted that Jezebel’s solemn vow had finally been fulfilled on John the Baptist, who died the death vowed for Elijah. John was beheaded with a sword on the orders of Herodias, the new Jezebel. His identification with Elijah was now complete. We are not reading history; we are reading interpretive writing by Jewish followers of Jesus, who are reading the Hebrew Scriptures in such a way that they seem to find their fulfillment in Jesus. To literalize these stories would have been nothing short of nonsense to this gospel writer.
Christian scholars are not modern people seeking to destroy the scriptures by declaring them not to be literal history, they are rather people who are discovering the original meaning of the gospels themselves, a meaning that was lost when Christianity became a totally Gentile movement. Biblical literalism is nothing more than Gentile ignorance. We turn next week to the baptism of Jesus. It is a new Red Sea experience.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Geoff Heaviside from Portland, Victoria, Australia, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
Portland, Victoria, Australia, a small tourist town 400 kilometers west of Melbourne, has a branch of every denomination of tribal religion and one can imagine, one by one, they get to broadcast a Sunday sermon on the Sunday morning religious program which is encased in a jukebox of favorite hymns. Despite our multi-cultural country, a December sermon equated the Chaldeans to the Muslim community and stated they were all destined for hell. Babylon was described as still existing in southern Iraq and getting ready to overrun the earth. My knowledge of Habakkuk is restricted to the Chorus that comes from chapter 3, verse 17. I have not seen any comments from you about the Minor Prophets, in particular Habakkuk but I would like you to - if you run out of questions, all of which I enjoy reading. I am looking forward to a hymnal that uses the favorite tunes with some progressive lyrics. Good health and congratulations on the way your contributions are being elaborated on while you are still with us.
Answer:
Dear Geoff,
I have commented on Habakkuk in my series of columns that were published under the title: Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, but it was very brief. Habakkuk is one of the Minor Prophets that I judged to be unworthy of much attention. In that same category I put Nahum, Zephaniah, Haggai and Obadiah. All of these books came out of the postexilic period of Jewish history between 500-350 BCE when the Jewish nation was weak and not established and was beset by marauding, nomadic bands on a daily basis. These books are little more than rants at the fate of the Jews or pleas to God to intervene on their behalf. That being said, however, what you describe as the content of the sermon in Portland is little more than massively uninformed ignorance. If we take the Bible literally, Abraham and Sarah were Chaldeans since their town of origin was Ur of the Chaldees. Islam is a religion that developed in the 7th century CE, but it comes out of the same Middle East that produced both the Jews and the Christians. The Bible even suggests that Abraham was the father of the Arab people through his son Ishmael, whose mother, Hagar, was an Egyptian and he was the father of the Jewish people through his son Isaac, whose mother, Sarah, was part of the nation that would become the Jewish people and nation. The name Israel is the name given to Jacob after he wrestled with an angel and the name “Jew” comes from Judah who was the son of Jacob.
One cannot keep well-meaning but uneducated people from saying anything they want about the Bible on the airways, but the vast majority of people recognize ignorance and prejudice for what it is. Dumping tribal hostility into the bloodstream of Australia or any nation is not positive so a letter of protest to the station might be in order. Otherwise ignore it or turn it off. That is what most listeners will do.
My best,
John Shelby Spong
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