Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of New Testament, Part XXII:
The Figure of Moses as the Interpretive Secret in Matthew
 Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
May 6, 2010
Matthew’s gospel has always fascinated me more than the others. It is not the most profound of the gospels, but it does open interpretive eyes for me more widely than the others. The doorway into this perception is found in the process of being able to ask the right questions. Matthew is the “Jewish Gospel,” par excellence, and if one does not understand what it means to be a Jewish Gospel, one will never understand this book. Two biblical characters are taken by Matthew from the Jewish scriptures and used as symbols around which he weaves his story of Jesus. Today I will look at both of them in an effort to illustrate that Matthew is deeply dependent on his audience having a sufficient understanding of Judaism to recognize his allusions both to Jewish history and to Jewish scripture.
The first of these Jewish characters is Joseph, the patriarch whose story is told in Genesis 37-50. This is the Joseph of the coat of many colors, the first born son to Jacob by his favorite wife Rachel. In our earlier trek through the Old Testament, we noted the deep and historic division between Judah, the dominant tribe in the south and the Northern Kingdom of which Joseph was the principle ancestor. Recall that the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, both sons of this same Joseph, were the dominant tribes in that separate part of the Hebrew nation. You may also recall our earlier discussion of how it was that the tribe of Judah not only produced King David but also produced the Yahwist version of the Hebrew scriptures, while the Joseph tribes in the North produced the Elohist version of the same scriptures, and how these two strands of Jewish history were later put together by an interpreter to form a major step in the production of the Torah.
One agenda that drove Matthew’s gospel was to present Jesus as the messianic life who was capable of binding up this deep historic division that had long divided the Jewish people. When we read Matthew knowing this background, we can watch just how he does it. Matthew opens his gospel with a seventeen verse genealogy in which he traces the lineage of Jesus through King David and the kings of the Jewish world that centered in Jerusalem. In this passage he clearly roots Jesus in the tribe of Judah, which was the tribe to which David and his royal house belonged. Jesus was clearly the son of Judah.
Then Matthew introduced into the developing tradition the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth and, in the process, confronts us with a new character who is also going to be portrayed as Jesus’ father. His name is Joseph and he has never before been mentioned anywhere in Christian writing. In the new story of Jesus’ birth to a “virgin,” there is a clear need for someone to play the role of “earthly father” and to give the child the protection that only a man could give in that fiercely patriarchal society. By having Joseph name this child, thus claiming him as his own, Matthew sought to dampen the rumors of illegitimacy that were swirling around from the ninth decade critics of the Christian movement. In this manner, Joseph, the name of the other major patriarch of Jewish history enters the story as this child’s protector and defender. In this manner, Matthew has bound Jewish history together in the person of Jesus.
Next look at the portrait of Joseph as Matthew painted him. Everything we know about Matthew’s character Joseph we learn in Matthew’s birth narrative. Joseph never appears in any part of the gospel tradition except in the birth narratives. From Matthew’s account we learn three things about Joseph. First, he has a father named Jacob (Matt. 1:16). Second, God only speaks to him in dreams (Matt. 1:20, 2:13, 2:19, and 2:22). Third, his role in the drama of salvation is to save the child of promise from death by taking him down to Egypt (2:13-16).
Now go back to the story of the patriarch Joseph in the book of Genesis (37-50) and read that narrative. There you will discover three things about the patriarch Joseph. First, he has a father named Jacob (Gen.37:2). Second, he is constantly associated with dreams (Gen. 37:5-11) and was even called the dreamer by his brothers (Gen. 37:19). As the story of his life unfolds he is noted primarily as the interpreter of dreams (Gen. 40:1-19), and even rides into political power in Egypt based on that gift (Gen. 41). Third, his role in the drama of salvation is to save the people of the covenant from death by taking them down to Egypt (Gen. 46).
Is this simply coincidence or are we beginning to discern how the Jewish Scriptures were used to interpret the Jesus experience? Matthew was not writing a biography of Jesus, he was interpreting Jesus in the light of the Jewish scriptures. Literalism is not the way to read a Jewish story. Literalism is, in fact, a late-developing Gentile heresy. To make Jesus simultaneously the son of Judah and the son of Joseph was something Matthew’s Jewish readers would understand.
The second shadowy figure from the Hebrew Scriptures around which Matthew weaves the story of Jesus is Moses. Moses was the founder of the Jewish nation, the giver of the Law, or Torah, and the ultimate hero of Judaism. Moses makes his first appearance in Matthew’s birth narrative in the account of the wicked King Herod, who slaughtered the male babies in Bethlehem in a vain attempt to wipe out this threat to his throne (Matt. 2:16-18). Every Jewish reader of Matthew’s gospel would have recognized that story as a Moses story. When Moses was born, a wicked King Pharaoh decreed that all the Jewish boy babies were to be destroyed so that his power would not be threatened (Ex. 1:8-22). To save their son from this fate, Moses’ parents put him in a basket on the River Nile where, according to that story, he was rescued by the Pharaoh’s daughter. Matthew in these opening verses of his gospel is signaling to his readers that he was interpreting Jesus under the popular messianic image of the New Moses. This theme is picked up later in the birth narrative when Matthew quotes Hosea as saying, “Out of Egypt have I called my Son.” This was once again a clear reference to Moses but used by Matthew to mark Jesus’ return from his flight to Egypt to which he had fled to avoid Herod.
Matthew next interprets the baptism of Jesus in such a way as to frame it as an analogy to Moses’ crossing of the Red Sea, by separating the waters so that the people could walk through the sea on dry land. Once again Jewish readers would recognize this theme for splitting the waters was a regular theme in the Jewish Scriptures. Moses did it at the Red Sea; Joshua did it at the Jordan River. Both Elijah and Elisha also split the waters of the Jordan River on their way to and from the place of Elijah’s departure in a fiery chariot. Now Matthew brings Jesus in the first story of his adult life to the Jordan River for baptism. In this narrative, he was clearly seeking to say that the God presence we have met in Jesus is even greater than the God presence our ancestors met in Moses. It was a stunning claim. How did he develop this theme? At the baptism, Jesus steps into the waters of the Jordan River, but he does not split these waters. That had been done so many times that it represented nothing special. Jesus rather splits the heavens that we are told in the creation story was “the firmament” that separates the waters above from the waters below (Gen.1:7). Jesus thus splits the heavenly waters, which then fall on him as the Holy Spirit, for that is what “living water” means in the Hebrew Scriptures (see Zech.14:8).
What did Moses do after his “baptism” in the Red Sea? The Torah says he wandered in the wilderness for forty years trying to determine what it meant to be the “chosen people.” What did Matthew have Jesus do after his “Red Sea” experience in the Jordan River? He wandered in the wilderness for forty days trying to determine what it means to be the chosen messiah.
While Moses was in the wilderness he had three critical experiences. The first involved the shortage of food and it was solved with manna from heaven. The second was when the shortage of water forced Moses to “put God to the test” by striking a rock and demanding that water flow from it. The third occurred when his people in his absence turned away from God and began to worship a golden calf as “the god who brought them out of Egypt.”
Matthew, as noted previously, is the first gospel writer to give content to the temptations, which Jesus had to endure in the wilderness. Examine that content. The first temptation involved the shortage of food. “Turn these stones into bread, Jesus.” The second had to do with putting God to the test. “Cast yourself off the pinnacle of the Temple, Jesus. He will give his angels charge over you.” The third temptation had to do with worshiping something other than God. “Bow down before me, Jesus, and I will give you all the kingdoms of this world.”
Once more, do you think this is coincidental? Or are you beginning to see Matthew’s gospel as interpretive writing designed to show that Jesus relived the messianic image of being the new Moses by having Moses’ stories from the Hebrew Scriptures wrapped around him. Matthew’s Jewish audience would immediately have understood the interpretive tools he was employing. Western, non-Jewish, literalists still do not comprehend.
The most distinguishing marks of Matthew’s gospel begin to form a pattern. The baptism story with the heavens parting is a Red Sea story. The temptations are shaped by the Moses narrative. Then comes the powerful Matthean portrait of Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount. No other gospel in the New Testament includes the Sermon on the Mount. It is Matthew’s special creation because it enables him to portray Jesus as the new Moses on a new mountain, giving a new interpretation of the Torah. In this sermon, Matthew has Jesus compare Moses with him: “You have heard it said of old—-but I say unto you.” He reinterprets Moses driving the external Law of Moses toward the internal level of motivation. Moses is quite clearly one of the great interpretive clues to Matthew’s gospel. One has to read this book with Jewish eyes.
~ Bishop John Shelby Spong
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