On Matthew 2:10 through Matthew 2:12

Greetings, friends, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.

I had a day off the other day, which means I have time to bring you another installment of this study in quicker succession than normal.  This elates me.  I wish I had more time to work on this than I do, but I promise to occupy my free time with this as much as possible.

I want to take a moment to say thank you to anyone who is reading this.  Whether it is your first time here or you are a repeat visitor: thank you for taking the time.  It means a lot to me.

Last time, we went forward in time from the Gospels (just slightly) to the Book of Acts, where we witnessed the "Birth of the Church."  We talked about the way the first Christians lived, and discussed the cultural and ethnic diversity of that first community.  Then we followed the "Herod vs Baby Jesus" narrative down a little further in Matthew.

I know my rhetorical approach here thus far has been relatively scatter-gun, and I am sensitive to the needs of some readers for more focus.  So, today, I'm going to introduce a multi-part series within The Moral Vision.  Let's call this: Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus - A Shallow Survey.  This will provide a temporary sense of increased focus, and will last a few weeks at least.

As I have promised from the beginning, we will be working hard to understand the historical context for Jesus' Galilean Ministry.  I currently argue that the biggest edifice within the realm of Christ's historical context is the Second Temple.  That is to say that the most important thing we can learn about Jesus, in order to understand his teaching, is the nature of his Jewishness.

So, let's not waste any more time.  Here we go.

Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus - A Shallow Survey

Number One: The Pharisees

For a long time, I thought of Judaism as a monolith.  Growing up outside of an ecosystem of thought, it is hard to recognize the variation and diversity represented within that ecosystem.  Because of this myopia, things we aren't immediately concerned with tend to coalesce and become monolithic in the mind.

For Christians, I think, there is a tendency to think of ancient Judaism only as it existed in the Biblical Era, hundreds of years before Christ.  For our interests here at The Moral Vision, we want to know as much about the Judaism(s) that existed in the year 4 BC as we do about the Judaism of Moses' time.  Jesus' relays his teachings primarily to Jews, and explains his morality in part by constantly referencing known Jewish teachings and customs.  If we don't have a thorough historical understanding of the references, how can we really get his meaning?  Simply put, the answer is that we absolutely cannot.

Any veteran of the Gospels will recognize the first sect in our shallow survey immediately.  "The Pharisees" appear prominently and frequently in the Gospels as some of Jesus' primary philosophical sparring opponents.  He encounters The Pharisees and another group, "The Sadducees," over and over again, and he debates various points with them over and over again.  The two come up so frequently that, again, I think the tendency for many Christians is to begin to think of the two groups as more singular than they are.  However, The Pharisees had a unique tradition that it behooves us to understand.

Let's start with some easy stuff.  The word "pharisee" comes from the Aramaic "prīšayyā," meaning "the separated ones."  We see it in Ancient Greek as "Pharisaios."  We actually first learn of The Pharisees by name from The Gospels, and second from the famous first century Romano-Jewish historian, Josephus, who you will remember has already helped us out before.

We should think of The Pharisees as a popular separatist movement existing concurrently with several other exclusive movements in Jewish thought.  The Pharisees arose out of traditions that began at the time of the Babylonian exile, when the First Temple had just been destroyed.  The Pharisees exist in contrast to the elite priestly sect, eventually called The Sadducees, who derived their power from their direct management of the ongoings at the Temple.

During the Babylonian exile, when there was no Temple from which the elite could derive authority, their power waned.  For many Jews, oral traditions and small religious services put on by scribes and sages in homes or synagogues became more important than the whims of an elite priestly class.

In 540 BC, on his way toward the history books, Persian leader Cyrus the Great eventually freed the Jews from Babylon (thus the "Great" in his name,) and they were allowed to return to Israel to build another Temple.  While Cyrus allowed their return to Jerusalem, and allowed the construction of a Second Temple (the one Herod would eventually add on to,) the Jews were not allowed to re-establish their own monarchy.  The elite priestly group that were empowered at that time in Cyrus' Jerusalem were seen by some as lackeys beholden to external nations, because their power could now be seen as being derived from Persia.

The Pharisees differed from the priests in many ways, but the biggest difference was that The Pharisees believed in the aforementioned "oral traditions," while the priests believed only in the Torah.  Without a Jewish monarchy, these competing ideas were allowed to grow in opposition to one another, and religious homogeneity slipped away.

The priests favored much stricter readings, generally, of the scriptures.  For example, where the scripture recommends "an eye for an eye," The Pharisees saw a prescription for indemnity, while the priests saw a prescription for literally scooping someone's eye out as punishment.

The Pharisaic tradition is the tradition that evolved into what we call "Rabbinic Judaism," or modern, mainstream Judaism.

The Pharisees were likely not concerned about a "hell" to be avoided in the afterlife, but, rather, were concerned about their acceptance into the "world to come," commonly understood as a time here on Earth when things would be ideal for those who had followed God's laws.  Many Pharisees likely believed that, at God's institution of the "world to come," good law abiding Jews would be resurrected from the dead to share in God's bounty on Earth.  Thus heaven, for The Pharisees, would have been a secure, independent Jewish monarchy instituted by God himself over a prosperous Jewish people in the area of Jerusalem.

As it turns out, there was significant ambiguity about the concept of the afterlife within Pharisaic thought.  That ambiguity has lasted up until the present day, but we can say for sure that the "Doctrine of Hell" was not something that was fleshed out and accepted by the Pharisees at the time of Jesus.

So, here are the points I'd like you to remember about The Pharisees at this time:

a)  They believed in an Oral Tradition that was supplemental to the Torah.  That Oral Tradition eventually became what we call the Mishnah.

b)  They are the sect of Judaism that evolved into what we know of today as mainstream Rabbinic Judaism.

c)  By and large, they didn't technically believe in Heaven and Hell, but many of them did likely believe in a coming resurrection of the faithful dead into a glorious "world to come."

d)  They were growing in popularity among the common people in Jerusalem at the time of Christ's Galilean Ministry.

As I admitted, this is shallow.  Given the vast amount of time we have before us, I am certain that we will revisit The Pharisees as a topic of discussion over and over again, but this should suffice as introduction, for now.

Next time: The Sadducees.

Now let's get back to our Gospel.

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Matthew 2:10 through Matthew 2:12

10 They were overjoyed at seeing the star, 

11 and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. They prostrated themselves and did him homage. Then they opened their treasures and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 

12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed for their country by another way.

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Recall that Herod has sent the magi in his employ out to find Baby Jesus, under the lie that he wishes to "do him homage."  They follow their guiding star to the house where Jesus is with his mother, and they prostrate themselves before him, give him gifts, and generally do him homage.

We know that Herod is up to no good, since we already learned that he is "troubled" by the word of Christ's birth.  Here, the magi learn that Herod is up to no good through a dream, and they make the choice to abandon their mission for Herod.

There is plenty going on here in these verses, but little of it is anything but apparent, so I'll just leave you with two quick things that come to mind with this reading.

First, I'd like the reader to take note of how much data God seems to transmit to people via dreams throughout the Gospel.  I will try to be diligent about studying dreams in the context of the Gospels at some point in the future.  I think we might derive meaning by studying which data are relayed via dreams versus which data are relayed by other means.

Second, I'd call attention to this particular action of "prostration" by the magi.  It is of a personal note, and probably not relevant, but I prefer to pray in a prostrate position, with my belly and forehead or lips touching the ground, the way these magi are said to have greeted Jesus.  It is the most humbling position in which to put the body, to my mind, and seems to aid in focused prayer.  I'd love to know if anyone else out there ever finds occasion to prostrate themselves.

Alas, now your brain is reeling, like: "why would the guy who says he doesn't believe in supernatural phenomena of any kind spend any amount of time praying?"

This question will be answered in full at a later date.  For now: my prayers to y'all, whoever you are.  I hope to see you next time.

Love.

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On Matthew 2:7 through Matthew 2:9

Happy thanksgiving.

To help you celebrate, please note that there is a built in navigation system for this text now, which appears at the bottom of each post.  From the end of any given post, you can travel either to the prior post or the subsequent post.  I'm aware that this is redundant with the navigation clumsily provided by the digital platform, but I sometimes find the navigation provided by the platform to be counterintuitive or easy to miss.  So there it is: my thanksgiving gift to you.

Now, let's take a look at some learnin'.

Before we get to the Gospel this week, I'd like to jump past the Gospels just slightly.  (Not too far.)  Today, on thanksgiving, we're going to take a look at Acts, Chapter 2.  In Acts 2, we witness what some call "The Birth of the Church," and learn a little about what the very first Christians were living like.

Part of my broad philosophical thesis is that, if we decide to call ourselves Christian, we should ensure that our ideals align well with the ideals that the actual living-Christ espoused.  This means that we want to go back to the oldest possible sources of data regarding Christ and his teachings.  If we are looking for a model of Christian life, and we have more than one to choose from, we ought to always choose the oldest known reliably documented model.

Why would we be after the oldest model?  Obviously, the oldest model is the one most informed by the actual living-Christ.  In that sense, the oldest model is the most purely Christian.  We see the very oldest model of Christianity described in the Book of Acts, the fifth book in the New Testament.

Acts 2 shows Peter, Jesus' Apostle, giving his "Pentecost Sermon."  This is the first time that one of the Apostles is recorded as speaking to the public in Jerusalem, or anywhere else, subsequent to the grisly execution of Christ.

The context: Peter's friend and leader has just been executed publicly, and everyone in town is talking about it.  Peter and the boys get together there in Jerusalem and are overcome by the "holy Spirit," the result of which is that they all start speaking in tongues.  A big crowd gathers.  Jerusalem being an international city, the crowd that gathers are not just Jews from the area, but Jews and Gentiles alike from all over the world.  As the Apostles speak about the acts of God, the Egyptians in the crowd hear the words in their native tongue.  The Medes in the crowd hear the words in their native tongue.  The Cretans and Arabs and the travelers from Rome all hear the words the Apostles speak in their respective native tongues.  The crowd marvels at this, and some of them say "these Galileans are just drunk!"

Peter stands up before the huge crowd of thousands that has gathered and says, approximately, "nah, nah, we ain't just drunk!  And I have some choice words for y'all"  Remember: this is the first time an Apostle addresses the masses after Christ's death.  They've just killed his friend and leader.  Don't be surprised by the fact that he just lets them have it.  He says that he believes that God has made Jesus Lord and Messiah of the Jews, and he seems furious at his fellow Jews who went along with the execution of said Messiah.

Peter's speech goes so well that three-thousand people are converted to the cause of Christ that day from the crowd.  (Please note that this crowd of what we can call the first "Christians" was extremely diverse, as we just mentioned.  It would have contained Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs and others, in addition to Jews.)

Immediately subsequent to this Pentecost Sermon and the "Birth of the Church," which coincides with the moment when the three-thousand convert, the Book of Acts tells us how these very first Christians lived.  It shows them living in accordance with what they are taught by their leaders, the Apostles, who had received their teaching directly from Jesus Christ.

From Acts, Chapter 2:

42 They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers. 

43 Awe came upon everyone, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. 

44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 

45 they would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to each one’s need. 

46 Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple area and to breaking bread in their homes. They ate their meals with exultation and sincerity of heart,

47 praising God and enjoying favor with all the people. And every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Interesting.  These words are the first in the Bible to describe the earliest Christians.

Recall that, somewhere near the recent inception of this writing, I said that part of my goal here is to compare and contrast the ideals of Christ with the ideals of the modern Americans who call themselves "Christians."

I'd like the American reader to think about the self-proclaimed Christians they know.

Then, I'd like the reader to think about the very first Christians, and their description in Acts Chapter 2.

"They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life."

Is there a difference?

"All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to each one’s need."

Is there a difference?

The constant refrain from the Christian-Conservative movement in America, as I've ascertained it over thirty-four years, is that unchecked capitalism is the ideal for human societies.

How is it, then, that we find the very first Christians, who were closest to Jesus himself and thus most capable of following his exact teachings, living in a way that seems to completely contradict this modern ideal?

If we admit that there is a difference between the living model of the first Christians and the living model of modern American Christians, then when did this difference begin to take shape?  At what point did Jesus' message, as it is interpreted by his followers, change?  Why would Jesus' teachings evolve over time?

These questions burn in my heart.  We will be following them all, all the way down.  For today, I want to just leave you with those questions, as we open up to Matthew again.

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Matthew 2:7 through Matthew 2:9

7 Then Herod called the magi secretly and ascertained from them the time of the star’s appearance. 

8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search diligently for the child. When you have found him, bring me word, that I too may go and do him homage.” 

9 After their audience with the king they set out. And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.

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Recall that Herod has just become suspicious that Jesus is going to become the King of the Jews and displace him in power as the current King of the Jews.  He asked his priests and scribes where the coming King was to be born, and they said "Bethlehem."  He now gets the time frame of Christ's birth from some magi.  (The magi were Persian sorcerers of a sort.)  Herod then sends the magi out to find Jesus.  As they depart on their trip, they see the same star they'd seen on their way into Jerusalem.  The star leads them to Jesus.

This story may be old news to many of you.  As we've discussed a little before, for our purposes, the miraculous or outlandish aspects of the narrative of Christ will prove to work as story structure for us, but we will not accept them as historical.  We will work to de-couple Christ's moral philosophy from the mythologies that surround his life, a task that proves easier than it sounds at first.

Whether or not we believe we are reading something that is historical or not, all the stories about Jesus in the Gospels serve as critical context for his real-world philosophy, which I assure you, does shine through.

We will leave our study here today.  I hope you have a wonderful thanksgiving.  I hope you've taken some questions away from this writing.  I hope you share this and I hope you come back soon.

Love.

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On Matthew 2:4 through Matthew 2:6

Welcome back.

If this is your first time, and you would like to be well oriented, you can refer to the Introduction here.

Today there's much to discuss, so we will jump right into it.  We will first talk briefly about the dating of Christ's birth, which we have just read about in Matthew.  After that, we'll move on to today's Gospel reading, which will prompt some study of the Book of Micah, another Old Testament prophet.

First of all, today: the dating of Christ's birth.  You will recall what we discussed a few weeks back regarding the two Roman Emperors who ruled during the life and ministry of Jesus.  Upon reading that entry, a reader expressed confusion at the following sentences:

From that point, Augustus had a long and effective reign over the nascent Roman Empire which lasted until his death by natural causes in 14 AD. Jesus Christ would have been around 18 years old at the time of Augustus' death.

The reader wondered how it could be possible that Jesus' birth year was in 4 BC, especially when "BC" stands for "Before Christ."  A great question.  Let's get to the bottom of this.

Some people believe that Christ was born on Year Zero.  Those people would be surprised to find that there is no Year Zero in the Anno Domini (Year of Our Lord) system.  The dating system we use goes from 2 BC to 1 BC, straight to 1 AD and then to 2 AD.  Upon learning that there is no Year Zero, I think that many would assume that Christ's birth occurred in either 1 BC or 1 AD.  This misses the mark again.  We can understand why only once we've understood how they decided where 1 BC and 1 AD were in the first place.

For a long time, people in the West dated things differently than we do now.  The Romans (read: everyone in the West) dated their years according to the consul(s) of that year.  (The Consuls were like presidents who reigned for one year, starting on January 1st.)  You would say "I was born in The Year of the Consulship of Whoeverus," Whoeverus being the Consul who had been in power the year you were born.

That system was slowly supplanted by what we call the "Anno Domini" system, beginning when a monk named Dionysius Exiguus started dating everything based on what he believed to be the year of Jesus' incarnation.  Dionysius did this during the consulship of Probus Junior, and it was believed at that time that Jesus had been "incarnated" 525 years earlier, so "The Year of the Consulship of Probus Junior" became "525 AD."  Arguments over the accuracy of this started almost immediately, but for a long time the common understanding in the West was that Jesus was born circa 1 AD. 

Modern Bible scholarship does not agree on the date of Christ's birth.  A couple of methods for attempting to precisely date Christ's birthday exist.  We can date it based on historical events or figures mentioned in our two nativity narratives, or we can try to work backwards through Jesus' ministry based on chronological references that we get primarily from Luke.  Both methods bring us to similar date ranges, but we will stick with the more direct "dating by events and figures associated with the nativity narrative."

It's like this:

Recall last week when we learned about King Herod?  Historians date Herod's death to 4 BC. According to the Gospel, Herod was still alive when Jesus was born.  Given these two facts, we are obliged to set 4 BC as the upper range for Jesus' birth.

The narrative of the massacre of the infants by Herod in Matthew (which we've yet to cover) causes us to push the window out from 4 BC to 6 BC.  We get the extra two years when Matthew shows Herod ordering all the boys in the Bethlehem area "two years old and under" put to death "in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi."

Since every event in history was already tied to their respective Anno Domini date by the time scholars looked into this, the date could not be changed again to match Jesus' birth, so today we paradoxically know him as being born four years "Before Himself."

We say that Jesus was born circa 4 BC and admit that we do not currently know the exact date and that it could be as far back as 6 or even 7 BC.

I hope that clears that up for the reader in question.  Later we will talk about the ambiguity surrounding the date of Jesus' death, which is quite interesting.

Now for a reading.

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Matthew 2:4 through Matthew 2:6

4 Assembling all the chief priests and the scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. 

5 They said to him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it has been written through the prophet: 

6 ‘And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
since from you shall come a ruler,
who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

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Remember that the "he" doing the inquiring in v. 4 is King Herod aka Herod the Great.  This section of text refers us back to the Old Testament, the same way Matthew 1:23 did.  This time, instead of Isaiah, we will look at the Book of Micah.  In Micah 5, we see the following:

But you, Bethlehem-Ephrathah
least among the clans of Judah,
From you shall come forth for me
one who is to be ruler in Israel;
Whose origin is from of old,
from ancient times.

This is immediately apparent as the source for the material quoted in Matt 2:6.  What is Micah talking about here?  He does indeed seem to prophesy that a great king would come forth from Bethlehem, where Jesus was born.

Reading further, we see that the salvation the messianic figure in Micah is supposed to bring is a worldly salvation from war or internal strife in Judah.  The book consists of rather poetic verses describing how the cities of Judah had erred and describing the ways they would be punished, and then the way Jerusalem would again be elevated.  Micah accuses the aristocracy of Jerusalem of coveting and seizing fields, cheating owners out of their houses, and allowing soothsayers, diviners and priests to greedily trick the people of Judah out of their resources.

Unlike the comparison of Matt 1:23 and Isaiah, there is no glaring translation error here.

Tradition says that Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah, and thus was writing in the eighth century BC, although modern scholarship says that Micah may not have actually been written until a couple hundred years later, during the era of the Babylonian exile.

Micah is notable for its talk of social justice, peace, and humility, as well as its aforementioned poetic style.  The book is short, and I would recommend it as good supplementary reading at this point, as it is a good example of the content of the Prophetic Books.

I will sound like a broken record at some point, but Matthew's pointing back to Jewish scriptures will inform everything else he tells us.  The author is a Jew who is writing for other Jews, and sees the cosmology of Christ as a new tradition within Judaism.

So, now that Herod is all worked up into a paranoid fit over this newborn potential "Messiah," who could potentially displace him in his glory, what will Herod do?

You'll have to come back next week to find out.  Please share this writing.

Love
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To read what's next, click here.
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On Matthew 2:1 through Matthew 2:3

Welcome back, friends, to "The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ."  This is an ongoing and (eventually) exhaustive survey of the morality of Jesus Christ.  If this is your first time here, it may behoove you to start at the beginning, here.  Then again, I think wherever you pick this up, it will be fine.

Today we have two topics of discussion.  As I mentioned last week, we will look at some "miraculous" or "virgin" birth narratives aside from that of Jesus.  We will look at accounts of the birth of Buddha (the founder of Buddhism,) Dionysus (the Greek God of Wine,) and Romulus (the founder of the city of Rome.)  After that, we will check out our Gospel reading for today (Matthew 2:1 through 2:3) and talk a little about a man they called "Herod the Great."

Before we start all that, I have one other thing to say.  I fear this may be out of vanity, but please indulge me.

I want you to know that I will never attempt to profit financially from this writing.

It has occured to me that a lot of words have been written and are being written about Jesus so that those words could be sold.  I am wary of any philosophizing done for money, and I want my readers to rest easy knowing that my writing in this vein will be motivated only by a lust for truth and for good human ideals, never by a lust for money.  You will never pay to read this, and you will never see advertising in conjunction with this writing.

I will not protect this work.  Consider my words "open source."

Thank you for this indulgence.  I feel better now.

Onto today's exciting first topic: miracle births!

Recall that Matthew contends that Jesus was born to a virgin, conceived by the Holy Spirit.  For context's sake, we will take a look at some other figures who have been said to have been born of a virgin, or otherwise miraculously.  I offer these instances to dissuade the reader from getting too caught up on this "virgin birth" story, which has nothing to do with the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ.

First on our list is the Buddha, aka Siddhartha Gautama, who lived around the late fifth to early sixth centuries BC.  Buddha, like Jesus, became a spiritual leader after a period of isolated asceticism.  He lived around what we know as Nepal.  Over half a billion people worldwide are adherents to his teachings in one form or another.

The Buddha is particularly known for his "Four Noble Truths," from which his well known "Eightfold Path" arises.  We will find cause later to investigate the inner-workings of Buddhist thought in order to compare that thought with the emerging Moral Vision of Christ.  Today, we look at the Buddha's birth narrative.

The Buddha's mother was named Maya.  Maya's husband, Śuddhodana, was an elected chief of the local ruling clan.  According to some traditions, the Buddha was conceived in Maya one night when she had a dream of a white elephant.  The white elephant had six tusks, and it pierced her side with these tusks during the course of the dream.  She became pregnant by this piercing action of the tusks.  To be sure, other accounts simply state that Śuddhodana was the father of the Buddha, but, to my understanding, the miraculous conception story of the Buddha far pre-dated the birth of Christ.

As I said, we will learn more about Buddha later when we find time to compare Jesus with other religions of the world.

Second, we have Dionysus, a Greek God who is frequently compared to Jesus.  Dionysus is known as the God of Wine, and is one of the oldest known Greek deities.  Though the exact origins of Dionysus are not known, they predate the Greek Classical Era, and may have reached all the way back to the Minoans.  Cult worship of Dionysus was ingrained in Greek culture by the seventh century BC.

Dionysus, in legend, was not exactly born to a virgin.  As the story goes, a mortal woman by the name of Semele had an affair with the God Zeus, and got pregnant.  Enraged, Zeus' wife Hera hid her form and visited Earth to talk to Semele.  Hera convinced Semele to doubt Zeus', which led Semele to demand that Zeus prove his Godhood.  When Zeus gave in and showed himself to Semele in an undisguised form, she perished from the shock of it.  (It was understood that any human who laid eyes on an undisguised Greek God would die in a similar manner.)

Although Semele died, Zeus cut his leg open, took the unborn child out of Semele, and put the child inside his leg.  A few months later, from his thigh, Zeus miraculously gave birth to Dionysus.

The legend of Dionysus' miracle birth was a staple of Greek mythology, and would likely have been known by any Greek speaking literates who lived during Jesus' time or during the time when the Gospels were written.

Finally, let's discuss Romulus.  For those not in the know, Romulus is one half of the brother and brother duo of "Romulus and Remus."  Romulus and Remus are the two brothers who founded the city of Rome.  Their earliest years were weird ones, to say the least.  They were conceived in the womb of Rhea Silvia, a "vestal virgin*."  Her father was Numitor, the former King of Alba Longa, a city state adjacent to the site where Rome stands today.

* Vestal virgins were the celibate priestesses of the goddess Vesta.  Their virginity was sacrosanct.

Rhea Silvia said that Mars, the God of War, had gotten her pregnant.  However, the ancient historian of Rome, Titus Livius, described it thus:

The Vestal was ravished, and having given birth to twin sons, named Mars as the father of her doubtful offspring, whether actually so believing, or because it seemed less wrong if a god were the author of her fault.

Let's dwell for a second there.

"...because it seemed less wrong if a god were the author of her fault."

Fascinating.  Could we apply these words of Livy's to Mary, the mother of Jesus?

Silvia had the children, but the then king of Alba Longa, Amulius, saw those children as a threat to his sovereignty, as they were descended from a deposed king.  He ordered the babies thrown into the river Tibre to drown.  The legend then goes that they washed ashore where a female wolf found and adopted them.  A common depiction of the brothers shows them as infants, nursing from the wolf.

Later, Romulus killed his brother, possibly in a spat regarding the height of a wall, which is why it's all really about him, and not Remus.  "So perish any man who mocks the walls of Rome."

Livy, who lived and wrote when Christ lived and spoke, says he believes Silvia was raped, and that she'd lied when she said she'd been impregnated by Mars.  This was seven hundred years after the fact, though, so we can imagine that, between Rome's founding and the invaluable writings of Titus Livius Patavinus, many in Rome believed the "Mars as father" version.

The writers of the Gospels might have known this story.

There are certainly other "virgin birth" narratives and "miraculous birth" narratives to be had from ancient history, but we will retire of that here by merely concluding, as many have before, that the ancient world was chock full of such stories.  These stories constitute, in part, what we can call the literary context of the Gospels.

Now, on to the Gospel.

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Matthew 2:1 through Matthew 2:3

1 When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, 

2 saying, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage.”

3 When King Herod heard this, he was greatly troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.

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Trouble on the horizon, my friends.  When King Herod is troubled, the world is troubled.

So who is King Herod?

King Herod was the King of the Jews as appointed by Rome during the time of Christ.

We can learn much about Herod from the great ancient Romano-Jewish historian Josephus.  In his "War of the Jews," Josephus gives the following account of Mark Antony, who we mentioned last week, appealing to the Roman Senate to make Herod the King of the Jews.

So he (Antony) called the senate together, wherein Messalas, and after him Atratinus, produced Herod before them, and gave a full account of the merits of his father, and his own good-will to the Romans. At the same time they demonstrated, that Antigonus was their enemy, not only because he soon quarrelled with them, but because he now overlooked the Romans, and took the government by the means of the Parthians. These reasons greatly moved the senate; at which juncture Antony came in, and told them, that it was for their advantage in the Parthian war that Herod should be king; so they all gave their votes for it.

Herod was a "client-King."  He was a Jewish man raised in the aristocracy of his time and place.  Herod leveraged social and political position in Judea into political favor with Rome.

He is known as Herod the Great to some because his relationship with the Romans gave him the power and resources that allowed him to build lavishly for his people.  He was known for commissioning the construction of forts, cities, aqueducts, and, most importantly, a colossal addition to the Second Temple of Jerusalem.  As we will come to understand, the Temple of Jerusalem was and is one of the most important things in the Jewish faith.

Herod was also known to be a vicious ruler who at times would have members of his own family put to death.

Josephus says the following about Herod in "Antiquities of the Jews:"

And now Herod the tetrarch, who was in great favour with Tiberius, built a city of the same name with him: and called it Tiberias.

If you recall our discussion of this detestable character Tiberius from our last installment, then you'll take pause here to wonder just what kind of person Herod must have been, to find himself in said Emperor's favor.

We will discuss Herod a little further next week because, as I said, trouble is coming in the context of the Matthew narrative.  For now, recall these important highlights: a) Herod was the Roman client-King of the Jews, and b) Herod was and is known as "Great" to some Jewish people, not least of all because of his grandiose work on the Temple of Jerusalem.

That's all we have time for today.  Please share this writing and come back often.

Love.
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On Matthew 1:24 through Matthew 1:25

Welcome back.

Today we are rounding out our first chapter!  We've discussed a lot during the course of this first chapter, Matthew 1, even though it's relatively short.  We learned about Abraham, the ancient father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  We learned about David and Solomon, Kings of the Jews.  We discussed what Jesus' name would have translated directly to English as.  (We would have called him Joshua Christ.)  We learned that the Gospels were all written anonymously and at least a generation after Christ's death.  We learned that "parthenos" is a Greek word for "virgin."

I hope that, by now, the reader has some idea of the pace and level of detail we will be studying at here.  Suffice it, perhaps, to say that we have our work cut out for us.  That said, we will now, as always, immediately push forward into the data.

Before we look at the text today, we will deviate slightly for a moment to gain a little more contextual data.  Part of my broad thesis, which I will illuminate more clearly as we proceed, is that Jesus Christ was opposed to power and to empire.  On the coattails of Leo Tolstoy and others, I will contend that Jesus Christ meant for his followers to eternally eschew all things associated with human authority.

Power, empire, and human authority, in Christ's time, had just been newly defined by the fall of the Roman Republic in 27 BC and the subsequent rise of the first Emperor of Rome, Imperator Caesar Divi filius Augustus (aka Caesar Augustus.)  Given the influence of Rome over all of the Mediterranean at the time, Caesar Augustus was the most important and powerful person in the western and near eastern worlds on the day Christ was born.

Caesar Augustus, nephew of the famed Gaius Julius Caesar, found himself in sole control of the Roman Empire after a period of civil war and upheaval.  His recently deceased uncle had effectively leveraged battlefield-prowess, political boldness, and popularity among his troops and the people of Rome against the Roman Senate.  Julius Caesar had snatched and consolidated military, political, and religious powers upon returning to Rome from Gaul "illegally" at the head of his thirteenth legion in 49 BC.

Julius assumed control of the Republic by vesting himself with the republican powers of a tribune and censor.  With these powers, he devalued the Senate by increasing the number of its seats and filling those seats with people who were beholden to him personally.  In March of 44 BC, as he consolidated power, Roman Senators invited Julius to a statehouse on pretenses and stabbed him to death upon his arrival.

Julius' newly consolidated powers fell to his nephew, then known as Octavian.  At this point there were several years of civil war to be had, as Octavian fought first beside, and then against the famed Mark Antony for control of Rome.  Mark Antony, one of Julius Caesar's closest confidants and best military leaders, died by his own hand famously on August 1, 31 BC after being defeated by Octavian at the Battle of Actium on the sea near Alexandria.  It was not long after, in 27 BC, that Octavian became Augustus Caesar, the Emperor and Living God of the Roman people.

From that point, Augustus had a long and effective reign over the nascent Roman Empire which lasted until his death by natural causes in 14 AD.  Jesus Christ would have been around 18 years old at the time of Augustus' death.  Jesus came of age, then, under the rule of Augustus, who had made a Roman Province out of Judea in 6 AD.

Upon the death of Augustus, his adopted son Tiberius Julius Caesar (formerly Tiberius Claudius Nero) took the throne.  Tiberius thus became the second of the two Roman Emperors who would hold dominion over Jesus Christ and everyone Christ interacted with during his lifetime.

Tiberius was less popular among his people than Augustus had been, and proved at times to be a reluctant statesman.  A few years into his rule, he began to defer much of his legislative responsibilities to underlings while taking frequent trips out of Rome to vacation destinations in Campania.  A few more years, and the Emperor appears to have taken his leave of Rome all together, having become paranoid that people there wished to hurt him.

Tiberius holed up in a massive and luxurious vacation home on the Island of Capri to live out the rest of his days as Emperor.  The ancient Roman historian Suetonius wrote Life of Tiberius, and in it recounted details about how Tiberius lived out his final years, exactly during Jesus' Galilean Ministry.

Quoting Suetonius writing about Tiberius in Life of Tiberius:

"Moreover, having gained the licence of privacy, and being as it were out of sight of the citizens, he at last gave free rein at once to all the vices which he had for a long time ill concealed..."

And then:

"Even at the outset of his military career his excessive love of wine gave him the name of Biberius, instead of Tiberius, Caldius for Claudius, and Mero for Nero."

So, Tiberius gets away from the sight of the people and lets loose any morality he has.  He is such a drunk that his own people call him, in place of Tiberius Claudius Nero, "Biberius Caldius Mero."  This translates approximately to "heavy drinker who is made hot by wine served neat."

Suetonius tells us more:

"On retiring to Capri he devised a pleasance for his secret orgies: teams of wantons of both sexes, selected as experts in deviant intercourse and dubbed analists, copulated before him in triple unions to excite his flagging passions."

The ancient historian goes on to mention multiple vile sexual acts that the Emperor was known to have engaged in with children over the course of his retirement on Capri.  For civility's sake, I will not quote the material here, and I warn anyone who looks it up for themselves: Suetonius pulls no punches, and describes things in this vein that shook me constitutionally when first I read them.

It seems unavoidable that the most powerful man in the world during the Galilean Ministry was a drunken megalomaniacal child abuser.

Thus was the context of power and empire in the days of Jesus Christ.

Why is this pertinent?

One day soon we will find cause to ask the question: "did Jesus respect the authority of the State?"  When we arrive at that question, Jesus' words will inform us best as to what esteem he holds human authority.  Those words will, of course, be particularly informed by the context of human authority during his lifetime.  The "State," to a person living in Palestine during the time of Jesus, was Rome.  The "State" was Augustus and Tiberius.

If Jesus ever said the sentence "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," he very well could have said it at the exact instant that Tiberius Caesar was performing unspeakable sexual torture on one or more pre-pubescent slaves.

Tiberius is the context of power and empire during the ministry of Jesus.

Let's move on to today's Gospel reading.

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Matthew 1:24 through Matthew 1:25

24 When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home. 

25 He had no relations with her until she bore a son, and he named him Jesus.

Recall that Joseph is being informed by an angel in a dream in regards to his wife's mysterious pregnancy.  The angel has assured Joseph that Mary has not become pregnant by a man but by the Holy Spirit.  The angel then mistakenly refers back to the Book of Isaiah to help explain all of this in a Jewish context.  Finally, the angel told Joseph what to name Jesus.

Here in verse 24, we see Joseph's immediate response to the angel.  Whereas they had not yet lived together in v.18, Joseph now brings Mary into his home as his wife.  Of note here is the obedience of Joseph.  Despite what common sense is telling him, he is willing to humble himself and to obey when he believes God is demanding humility and obedience.  This reflex of obedience can be found in many characters in the Bible.

Verse 25 tells us, awkwardly, that Joseph and Mary did not have any sex until she had Jesus.  This seems meant to solidify for the reader that Mary was not only a virgin at the moment of conception, but a virgin at the moment of Christ's birth.  The text does not say specifically whether or not Joseph and Mary ever had sexual relations after the birth of Christ.

These verses are fairly straightforward in explaining this mythical "virgin birth" aspect of Jesus.  Verse 25 is the pinnacle of the birth narrative in Matthew.  You may be asking yourself: "where's the swaddling clothes and the full-up inn and the manger?"  You will have to wait for the Gospel according to Luke for that more detailed account of the birth of Jesus.  It is worth mentioning here that only two of the four Gospels narrate the birth of Christ, and that Luke's is by far the more detailed accounting.

We will take leave of this here.  Next week, if all goes to plan, inspired by today's reading and spurred by a friend, we will spend some time discussing the proliferation of virgin birth myths among ancient peoples around the Mediterranean and the near east, which will place this part of the Jesus story in a different kind of literary context.

Please share this writing.

Love.
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