On Matthew 1:1 through 1:17

Welcome back.

I will try not to fiddle with formatting too much once we get started.

I would like to bring you two entries to this study per week until it is completed.  I will dedicate myself to a minimum of one entry each week, as my writing competes with a full time job and other responsibilities.  I do not yet have an accurate way to guess how long this writing might take.

In each entry we will, at a minimum, discuss a short section of the text at hand, The Gospel of Christ.  Our goal here will be to illuminate the moral teachings of Jesus Christ so that they might be compared directly to the actions and attitudes of modern day so-called "Christians" in America.

In order to accomplish this task of illumination, however, we will need to do much more than simply read the text.  In order to understand the moral teaching of Jesus Christ, we will need to illuminate the world as it existed around him at the time of his ministry.  To whatever extent we can, it will be best for us to try to place our own feet in that ancient dirt, and to try to see the world Christ actually existed in.

We will also need to illuminate some things about the world as it existed before the time of his ministry.  After all, Jesus is known to all Christians to be the continuation of a long tradition of spiritual thought, law and prophecy.

As we uncover aspects of Christ's morality, we will additionally find pause to shine that emerging moral light back across the span of history between us and him.  In this way, we will even need to illuminate the world as it has existed since the time of Christ's transcendent Galilean ministry.

All that said, readers should expect significant amounts of what may seem to be superfluous information over the course of this writing.  Wherever the pertinence of the subject matter is questionable, I will go out of my way to explain how the data at hand relate to the morality of Jesus Christ.

I welcome any and all correction to erroneous historical data, and will respond immediately to it, be it verifiable.  As a warning to the reader, I do not, at the time of this writing, have a professional research assistant or editor, so occasionally I will be mistaken.

I will work diligently to create a social-media outreach network for this writing.  I would ask that all of my interested readers do me the favor of propagating this writing on any and all social networks.  I am writing this so that it might be read and understood broadly.

Now, finally, and without further ado, here is the first entry.

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Matthew 1:1 through Matthew 1:17

Let's start with a broad look at the text in question, The Gospel of Christ, and the book it exists in, The Christian Bible.  (Some of this will be review for some of you.)

The Christian Bible is made up of two major sections.  The first section, The Old Testament, is also known as The Hebrew Bible, and represents a common scripture between the Jewish and Christian people.  The Old Testament makes up approximately three-quarters of the total text of The Christian Bible.  The second section of The Christian Bible is The New Testament.

Jesus Christ's life story appears only in the first four of the twenty-seven books of The New Testament.  Contemporaneous accounts of the life of Jesus Christ cannot be found anywhere in The Old Testament, nor in any of the New Testament books other than the four Gospels.

The first four books of The New Testament are our focus of study.  In order, they are: The Gospel According to Matthew, The Gospel According to Mark, The Gospel According to Luke and The Gospel According to John.  

As we move through these texts, we will take the time to look back at the structure and content of The Old Testament, just as we will take the time to understand the structure and content of the remainder of The New Testament.  For now, you just need to understand that the only books in The Bible directly describing the life of Jesus Christ are the four Gospels.  (There are a few texts outside of The Bible that may offer contemporaneous information about the life of Christ, and we will work to familiarize ourselves with those texts down the road.)

Also, let me refresh you on the chapter-and-verse naming conventions.  When we talk about specific passages in the text, we will identify them by three data: the name of the book, the chapter number and then the verse number.  "Matt 1:5," therefore, indicates the fifth verse in the first chapter of The Gospel According to Matthew.

Today, we'll start at the beginning of Matthew, which is the beginning of The Gospel, which is the beginning of The New Testament.

Warning to those easily bored by a long list of names: you're about to read a long list of names. But take heart - you are only required to remember a few of them.

Jesus' story begins thus:

From The Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 1

1 The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

2 Abraham became the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers.

3 Judah became the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar. Perez became the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram,

4 Ram the father of Amminadab. Amminadab became the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon,

5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab. Boaz became the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth. Obed became the father of Jesse,

6 Jesse the father of David the king. David became the father of Solomon, whose mother had been the wife of Uriah.

7 Solomon became the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asaph.

8 Asaph became the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, Joram the father of Uzziah.

9 Uzziah became the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah.

10 Hezekiah became the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amos, ⁴ Amos the father of Josiah.

11 Josiah became the father of Jechoniah and his brothers at the time of the Babylonian exile.

12 After the Babylonian exile, Jechoniah became the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel,

13 Zerubbabel the father of Abiud. Abiud became the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor,

14 Azor the father of Zadok. Zadok became the father of Achim, Achim the father of Eliud,

15 Eliud the father of Eleazar. Eleazar became the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob,

16 Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus who is called the Messiah.

17 Thus the total number of generations from Abraham to David is fourteen generations; from David to the Babylonian exile, fourteen generations; from the Babylonian exile to the Messiah, fourteen generations. 

I warned you: lots of names.  Trust me though; this list pales in comparison to some of the genealogy of The Old Testament, which sometimes goes on for chapters.

Matthew 1:1 through Matthew 1:17 is, admittedly, a dryish section of text, but there is actually a lot that we can learn from its study.  For one, we can tell immediately that the author is a Jew writing to Jews.  This is apparent as he opens up his whole Jesus narrative by trying to place Jesus exactly into the Jewish tradition.  He does this by portraying Jesus as being genetically in the royal line of Abraham, David and Solomon.  These are the three names I want you to remember from today's reading.  They will become necessary for your sense of context.

Today, then, let's talk about Abraham, David and Solomon briefly.

On Abraham

Abraham was the patriarch of the Jewish faith; the man with whom God was said to have struck his first covenant.  The story of Abraham's life is an interesting one that we will detail repeatedly throughout our studies.  In short, Abraham was the first Jewish man.  

In The Old Testament, Abraham does a number of noteworthy things, including: nearly killing his own beloved son Isaac at God's demand, having sex with and impregnating his wife's slave girl Hagar at the age of eighty-five or eighty-six, and being circumcised at the age of ninety-nine.  (For a particularly brutal mental image you can check out Genesis 17:27 wherein Abraham forces all of his slaves, of which there were several, to also undergo circumcision.)

The story of Abraham is best laid out in Genesis, the first book of The Old Testament.  The most critical thing to know about Abraham at this juncture is that he is considered the patriarch of not only Judaism, but of Christianity and of Islam.  These three religions all revere Abraham in this light, which is why you will often hear them referred to collectively as the "Abrahamic Religions."

On David

The second name you need to recall is David's.  David was one of the very first Kings of Israel and Judah, and is the same David from the "David and Goliath" story you might remember from childhood.  David was made King after the death of Saul, the first King of Israel and Judah, and the death of Saul's son Ishbaal, the second (although somewhat disputed, it seems) King of Israel and Judah.  David was made king by the Jewish elders at the time, as he was not directly in line to succeed Saul upon his death.  This account can be found in the Old Testament book of Samuel.

For some, David is of the utmost importance to the Jesus narrative because he is at the beginning of the "Davidic line," or the regnal line of succession to which some Jews thought their messiah would belong.  Today's reading from Matthew is all about tracing Jesus, who some will call the King of the Jews, back to David, who some might call the original King of the Jews.

On Solomon

The last name we need to remember from today's reading is Solomon.  Solomon was David's son and successor to his reign over the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.  Solomon was known for being extravagantly wealthy and exceptionally wise.

You might recall Solomon from the story wherein he presides over the dispute of two women over a baby.  In that story, Solomon tells the women that, since they can't decide to whom the baby belongs, he will have it cut in half so that they might share it.  The true mother of the baby relents and begs that the baby go to the other woman rather than being killed.  Solomon's ruse to expose the true mother worked, and the baby finally went to the correct woman.

Solomon is important to Jewish history particularly because he is credited with constructing the First Temple in Jerusalem.  He is important to our study of Jesus because of his relevance in Judaism.

Notes and Thoughts

Aside from these three names, another item of note in today's reading is the odd counting that occurs within it.  You can see explicitly in Matt 1:17 that the author wishes to count fourteen generations each in three sections to get from Abraham to Jesus.  But a close accounting of the names given will show that the third group only shows thirteen generations.  It is also odd to realize that the list of kings between David and the Babylonian exile omits some names when compared with other historical and biblical sources.

What do we learn from this?  We learn that there is a messianic tradition predating Jesus, and we learn that the author of The Gospel According to Matthew is willing to bend data in order to shoehorn his man Jesus into this messianic tradition.  This fact, as it strikes us here at the outset, is very significant, and will inform much of our subsequent study.

As we wrap up today, I want you to know that we will constantly double-back to The Old Testament throughout our study.  If you don't know what the Babylonian Exile was, or you want to know what went on in the days before Abraham, rest easy: we will cover it all.  That being said, we will rarely leave a portion of Gospel text feeling as if we have exhausted it, because to exhaust much of it would require investments of time on my part and yours that are simply impossible.  To put a positive spin on that: one never completes such a study, but merely learns to live it indefinitely.

Each week, we will learn a fraction of what we can from our readings, and then move on to new readings.  Thus, we will end today's study here in anticipation of the next reading.

Join me next time when we will explore the first of the two biblical accounts of Jesus Christ's nativity.

Love.
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Introduction

The first time I ever read The Gospel cover to cover, I was in my mid twenties, unemployed, and in the middle of a decade of abandon to hard alcohol and drug use.  That decade saw me, more times than I can count, in the back of a cop car.  I had come to my interest in The Gospel via an unorthodox path.  During the summer in which I first tried LSD, I had been reading Mahatma Gandhi's commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, a significant piece of Hindu literature.  I had become interested in the Bhagavad Gita after hearing of an oft repeated quote of Robert Oppenheimer's.  Oppenheimer, one of the architects of the nuclear bomb, had looked back at the first successful nuclear test and famously recalled the following:

"We knew the world would not be the same.  A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.  I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.  Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Immediately curious about the text from which these intensely powerful words came, I checked out a copy of Gandhi's commentary on the Bhagavad Gita at a local library.  I found the text fascinating and was compelled to learn more about the commentator, Gandhi.  The more I read about Gandhi, the more I liked.  I saw him described in multiple instances as an "anarchist" and a "pacifist," both of which piqued my interest.  Then, while reading about Gandhi's philosophy of non-resistance to evil, I was introduced to one Lev "Leo" Tolstoy, a contemporary of Gandhi's.

At the time, I only knew Tolstoy as a heavyweight of Russian literature.  I learned, however, that Tolstoy was considered something of a philosopher in his later years, and that he had had significant correspondence with Gandhi regarding non-resistance to violence and other spiritual matters.  Gandhi published a letter by Tolstoy in South Africa in 1909 titled "A Letter To a Hindu" in which Tolstoy stated that "love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills, and in it you too have the only method of saving your people from enslavement."  The way Tolstoy wrote about "love" drew at something ancient inside me.

I read some of the correspondence between the two men, and then devoured some of Tolstoy's later works about Christianity, particularly "A Confession," (1879), "What is to Be Done?" (1886), and "The Kingdom of God is Within You," (1893).  Tolstoy's works exposed things in the world and in history that I had been unaware of.  Tolstoy's works exposed things inside of myself that I had been unaware of.

Leo Tolstoy, a man who had been dead for just over 100 years at the time, was my first and best introduction to the philosophy of Jesus Christ.  After reading what Tolstoy had to say about Jesus Christ, I was compelled for the first time to read The Gospel all the way through.  I dug up a Bible my parents had given me for Christmas some years past, neatly bound in leather and with whisper-thin pages, and started at Matthew.  That first time, I didn't stop until I was through John.  I lived in Longmont, Colorado at the time.

I recall one particular thing about that first experience reading The Gospel.  I recall very particularly reading the words of Christ in Luke 23:34.  The context of this saying of Christ is the moment of his Crucifixion.  Executioners have nailed Christ to a cross and suspended him upright to await his slow and painful death.  In the midst of this, Jesus speaks to God in regards to his murderers.

About them, he says:

"Father, forgive them, they know not what they do."

Upon reading these words for the first time, I confess that I did weep.

Upon reading these words I confess that for the very first time the world began to make good sense to me.  In these words of Christ's I saw the only obvious counterpoint to the woe of the world that I'd ever seen.

I tell you in truth that the gravity of Jesus Christ's word's, since the first time I read them for myself, has pulled increasingly at all else in the cosmos of my heart.

So...

I'd like to introduce to you what I am calling "The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ."  This will be nothing short of an exhaustive study of the words of Jesus Christ as he is quoted in The Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  When I say "exhaustive," I mean that we will diligently explore the context and possible meaning of every Christ-saying in the New American Bible.

In preparation for this writing, and in addition to extensive secondary source studies, I have compiled a complete matrix of all of Jesus' biblical sayings, arrayed across over 1,500 distinct keywords and various philosophical concepts.  This constituted many dozens of hours of intensive study and notation.

I would like to see this work published as a book someday, and I suggest that the reader think of this work as a sort of serialized book, as opposed to a blog or a periodical publication.

Before we start, I know that many will ask one question: "why?"  My answer is a personal one.

I am not a pessimist.  I am, however, a person who refuses to not see the ill of the world.

I have known, since the time I was very small, that the society I was raised in was ailing and not built on philosophical bedrock.  America rests on shifting sands, and has no true philosophical backbone.  America is a protection scheme for an exploitative monied minority.  This is the nature of all States.  Any candid look at history will verify this. 

The America I live in today offers her children no true purpose whatsoever beyond the conspicuous consumption of material goods and persistent masturbation of the ego.  This has splintered our society such that we have zero philosophical cohesion, nor even a recognizable morality du jour.  At any given time, America is merely a few hundred million violently fevered egos fighting to maintain their own perceptions of moral and material superiority and personal individuality in a vast cultural waste.

My best friends and huge swaths of my blood family are suffering from life threatening addictions or deep seated psychological malevolences.  I've recently watched suicide after suicide after suicide here in the "Land of the Free."  In fact, I currently witness suicides and death in the ranks of those I consider closest to me.

The society I exist in crumbles, and in the tumult is consumed the flesh of those I love.  The society I exist in crumbles, as well it should.  I do not expect that it will stand much longer, and I would not prop it up, even were it a task easily done.  In fact, by this writing, I mean to advance that day.

The answer to "why" is manifold.

I have commenced this writing to brush the sand away from the bedrock, so that everything built on that sand will be leveled.

I have commenced this writing to bear clear witness to the hypocrisy upon which this so-called "Christian Nation" stands.

I have commenced this writing because I believe that, relatively soon, America will be involved in a world-ending nuclear exchange, in direct contradiction of the prescient moral teachings of Jesus Christ.

This, then, is an Apocalypse.  In lay terms, this is a text of revelation pointing to an impending end-time.

I am astonished and eternally grateful to have found Christ's teachings as an oasis of purpose, here in the desert of purpose.  I pray that we will all soon find our way out of this desert.

Join me next time when we will begin looking at The Gospel According to Matthew and working toward the words of possibly the greatest philosopher of all time, Jesus Christ.

Love.
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