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Part XIII Matthew
"A Prophet like unto Moses"
Introducing the Sermon on the Mount
It should not be surprising that a Jewish scribe in the first century, which is what the author of the gospel we call Matthew was, would make constant references to Moses, the founder of the Jewish faith tradition. Moses dominated official Judaism and was in every way its creator and guide. The Torah by which Judaism lived was attributed to Moses. Moses was viewed as the liberator of the Jews and thus as the founder of the nation. The radical sense of God’s oneness, which set Judaism apart from the other religious systems of the Middle East, seemed to stem directly from Moses, who appears to have stamped his own monotheism on the nation. The heart of the Torah, which was called the Law of Moses, was the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The Shema then went on to exhort the people of Israel to live into that “Oneness.” The Torah also quoted Moses as saying that in the fullness of time “God would raise up another prophet like unto Moses.” Matthew would then move to develop his portrait of Jesus in such a way as to claim that “new Moses” identification for Jesus. We have already met these themes in Matthew’s birth narrative, in which he drew material from the Moses cycle of stories in the book of Exodus and proceeded to wrap it around his narrative of Jesus’ infancy. This was a traditional practice among Jewish writers. They called it Midrash. It was the process whereby material from the life story of a Jewish hero of the past would be used to illumine the life of a Jewish hero of the present, binding the two lives together in a dramatic fashion. Both Moses and Jesus were thought of as promised deliverers of their people. Both were said to have had their lives threatened at the moment of their births by an evil ruler: in the story of Moses it was the Pharaoh, ordering all the Jewish male babies born in Egypt to be put to death; in the story of Jesus it was King Herod sending his soldiers to Bethlehem to kill all the Jewish boy babies up to two years of age. The Jewish readers of Matthew’s gospel would know that this was not to be understood as literal history. It was Midrash at work, allowing Jewish story tellers to lift a story from their Jewish past in order to interpret an experience in their Jewish present. Matthew’s readers would have recognized this. They would never have confused Midrash with history. Matthew was interpreting the Jesus experience in a typical Jewish way. Jesus was not just the expected messiah, he also fulfilled the Jewish Scriptures as the prophet about whom Moses had spoken. That was the way Matthew set the stage that now allowed him to proceed into a series of Moses stories, which he had adapted to the life of Jesus. For those with eyes to see it, it is a powerful and profound narrative.
First came the account of Jesus’ baptism. Though this gospel story is clearly not history, I suspect there is in it a germ of truth associated with the fact that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. By the time that Matthew wrote, however, the suggestion that Jesus had been baptized by John had become somewhat embarrassing since it seemed to elevate John over Jesus. So Matthew treated it in such a manner as to minimize that embarrassment and still enable it to remind his readers of the story of Moses at the Red Sea. According to the Exodus account, Moses split the waters of the Red Sea so that the Hebrew slaves, escaping from Egypt, could make their way to the “Promised Land.” Jesus, the “new Moses,” as Matthew interpreted him, would proceed to split the heavenly waters. Matthew’s Jewish readers would know from the creation story that the sky was “the firmament” that separated “the waters above from the waters below.” Jesus’ purpose in splitting the heavenly waters was, therefore, to pattern him after Moses. Moses split the waters of the Red Sea in order to lead the chosen people from the “bondage of slavery.” For Jesus it was to deliver the New Israel from the “bondage of sin.” Moses’ purpose was to bring about the new life of freedom. Jesus’ purpose was to bring about the new life of salvation. Matthew’s story of Jesus’ baptism was deliberately framed to be a Moses story, heightened and magnified, and then retold about Jesus. If one were tempted to think of this baptism narrative as history, Matthew moved swiftly to counter that suggestion by continuing to follow his Moses story line.
After the Red Sea experience (whatever it actually was) the book of Exodus tells us that Moses wandered in the wilderness for “forty years.” During that time the Hebrew people, now seen as the people of the Covenant, wrestled with what it meant to be “The Chosen People.” Now watch as Matthew develops his parallel story of Jesus. Following Jesus’ baptism by John, Matthew had Jesus follow Moses’ path by also being forced to wander in the wilderness. Moses was said to have spent forty years in the wilderness trying to discern what it meant to be the “Chosen People;” Jesus would spend forty days in the wilderness seeking to discern what it meant to be the promised messiah. The two stories are clearly and deliberately told to enable the similarities to be riveted into the minds of his readers.
While Moses was on his forty-year wilderness sojourn, he had three specific trials through which he defined his understanding of the Covenant, The first came with the shortage of food, which Moses met by praying to God to send “heavenly bread.“ In answer to those prayers, we are told, God sent “manna” raining upon the people from the sky. God would be to this chosen nation, the source of their “daily bread.”
The second trial in Moses’ wilderness years came when he “put God to the test.” This episode centered on a shortage of water and occurred near a place called Meribah. As a response to the crisis, Moses struck a rock and demanded that God bring water out of the rock. According to the Torah, God complied, but Moses was judged to have committed a grave sin. He had presumed to tell God what God must do. He had dared to place his will above God’s will. For this breach of behavior in the divine-human relationship, Moses would be punished by being denied entrance into the “Promised Land.” As a consolation prize, he would only get to gaze into the “Promised Land” from a mountain top prior to his death.
Moses’ third trial came when the people turned away from the worship of God to worship a golden calf, an idol of their own creation. This additional breach in the divine-human relationship was punished by purging the people. That is the way the story was told in the Torah.
Now look at how Matthew developed the forty days in the wilderness, which he had assigned to Jesus in his magnified Moses narrative. Jesus also had three crises, which we call the “temptations.” Matthew was the first writer to describe and give content to these temptations. All Mark, the first gospel writer had done was to inform the readers that Jesus had spent forty days in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. He gave no hint as to what the temptations were. Matthew filled in these blanks. He made the temptations three in number and then he quite obviously fleshed them out with content from the Moses story. When one discovers the Jewish key to reading the gospels, suddenly it all seems very obvious.
Jesus’ first temptation was just like Moses’. It arose in the context of a shortage of food. “Turn these stones into bread, Jesus.” Jesus, however, responded to the tempter by saying that human beings do “not live by bread alone.” Full stomachs do not create human wholeness. Jesus’ second temptation was to put God to the test: “Cast yourself off the pinnacle of the Temple, Jesus,” God will protect you. Jesus, however, responded “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” The third temptation, clearly borrowed from the golden calf episode in the story of Moses, was: “Bow down and worship me, Jesus, and I will give you all the kingdoms of the world.” To this test Jesus responded, “The Lord your God is one and God only is to be worshiped.” Matthew was saying in this episode that Jesus’ call to people to enter the kingdom of God was not spatial, but internal. It was a call to wholeness and to human oneness. The Covenant people of Israel had now, in Matthew’s mind, become the community of the followers of Jesus, the company of believers.
Now, with the identity of Jesus as the new Moses firmly set in the minds of Matthew’s readers, he turned to create one of the most dramatic Moses portrayals in the entire New Testament. We call it “The Sermon on the Mount.” It appears no where else in the Bible except in Matthew. It forms the first of Matthew’s five long segments of Jesus’ teaching. It stretches over three chapters, Matthew 5, 6 and 7. It opens with a series of sayings called the Beatitudes, which were eight in number, with each beginning with the Greek word makarios, which means “blessed” or “happy.”
In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew was pointing his readers to a portrait of Jesus as the New Moses. Like Moses Matthew had Jesus go up on a new mountain to give the world a new interpretation of the Torah. Over and over in this sermon, Matthew contrasted Moses: “You have heard it said of old,” with Jesus: “But I say unto you.” This sermon was divided into eight parts designed to carry the worshiper through the eight three-hour segments of a twenty-four hour vigil. It reflected the Jewish liturgical tradition in which Matthew and his congregation lived. This is not a literal account of a literal sermon, actually preached by Jesus of Nazareth at a specific time and place in history. This analysis presents us with a very different way to understand not only the Sermon on the Mount, but also the entire gospel tradition. A literal approach to scripture will never get to the meaning the gospel writers sought to communicate.
When this series continues, we will look at how the Jewish audience would have heard the Sermon on the Mount, which was, I am convinced, the creation of the Jewish Matthew.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Lee Garlington, Ph.D. via the Internet writes:
Question:
I have often wondered why Jesus was supposed to have never married. A celibate tradition was nowhere to be found in the Hebrew religion except with the Essenes. As I understand the Jewish laws and duties in the first century, a father’s responsibility was to secure a wife for his teenage son. Yet Joseph did not (apparently). Why didn’t he? There could be several answers. The most obvious is that there was no father around at the proper time. If this was the case, why did Jesus not find a wife for himself or at the very least ask his mother find one? We must remember that this period is over ten years before his ministry. The other possibilities were that he was not inclined to marry, or he was gay and left the family so as not to be pressured. Another was that he was known in his neighborhood as illegitimate, that is, a bastard, and no decent woman would have him. In which case if he had wanted to marry, he could have gone somewhere where he was not known to find a wife. The logic of this exercise is that Jesus did not want a woman in his life and preferred the company of men; this is until he met Mary of Magdala whom he clearly liked or loved.
Answer:
Dear Lee,
Thanks for your question. You certainly did roam over the range of possibilities in your letter. It seems to me you omitted only one, which I think trumps all of the other possibilities, namely that Jesus was in fact married.
I think we have been programmed through centuries of a church led by a “celibate priesthood” to portray Jesus as a role model for celibacy. Is his unmarried state accurate? Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Jesus was not married, nor does it say that he was. We have made that assumption and then imposed that assumption on the text and on history. In the first century Jewish world, if Jesus was unmarried it might have been unusual enough for the gospel writers to comment on that fact. If he was married it would be so commonplace and expected that it might not have merited comment. So the absence of any biblical comment on this question may actually be said to give weight to the possibility that he was married.
I don’t think you can argue historically, from the duty of Joseph to his son. I am convinced and have documented in this column and in my books the reasons for my conviction that Joseph was not a person of history at all, but a literary character created by Matthew to play a crucial role in the story of Jesus’ supernatural birth, which Matthew introduced into the developing Christian tradition in the middle years of the 9th decade. Joseph had never been mentioned by any Christian writer prior to Matthew’s virgin birth story.
There are also many hints in the New Testament that suggest that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. I listed all of those hints in my book, Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth and the Place of Women in a Male-Dominated Church. I do not think this is a proposition that can be proved, but it is one for which a strong case can be made.
What interests me most is that within the church, there is now, and has been for centuries, in official church circles, a strong negativity to the idea that Jesus was married. I think that is based on a negative definition of women that has always infected the patriarchal church. A woman was traditionally regarded by the church as the corrupter and polluter of “holy men.” Jesus might, therefore, have his divinity compromised if he were married. I think that is nothing but male sexism masquerading as “sacred tradition.”
Does a wife corrupt a husband? I don’t think so. The only chance I have to be whole (i.e. holy) is that I live inside the love of my wonderful wife. She makes me whole or holy; she does not corrupt my holiness.
The sexism of the church hides in all sorts of funny places.
My best,
John Shelby Spong
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Bishop John Shelby Spong, "Why Christianity as We Know It is Dying"
This is Bishop Spong’s first lecture in the “Future of the Progressive Church” conference held on August 3, 2013 at the Community Christian Church in Springfield, MO
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