Welcome back to the third installment of The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.
To review, recall last week that we began our study of The Gospel According to Matthew and learned that the first 17 verses of Matthew are a long list of Jewish names supposedly connecting Jesus back to both King David and Abraham, making Jesus out to be Jewish royalty by birth.
Today I'd like to briefly discuss the authorship of The Gospel According to Matthew before we take in a couple more verses of the text.
To begin, it is important to know that in late antiquity, it was assumed that the gospels were written by the evangelist for which they are named. Thus The Gospel According to Matthew was thought to have been written by one of Jesus' apostles, Matthew of Galilee. In late antiquity, then, Christians believed that the Gospel of Matthew would have been written probably very briefly after Christ's death, which occurred in approximately AD 30.
The truth is that the Gospel of Matthew was, like all four gospels, written anonymously. As we continue our reading of the Gospels, you will notice that there is never a "byline" in the texts themselves, and the authors do not ever place themselves within the events they describe. We don't see attribution of the first gospel to the Apostle Matthew until the first half of the second century, decades after its writing between AD 80 and 90.
According to notation in the Revised Edition of The New American Bible, "The ancient tradition that the author was the disciple and apostle of Jesus named Matthew is untenable because the gospel is based, in large part, on the Gospel according to Mark (almost all the verses of that gospel have been utilized in this), and it is hardly likely that a companion of Jesus would have followed so extensively an account that came from one who admittedly never had such an association rather than rely on his own memories."
To reiterate: scholars knew and accepted that Mark was not written by a contemporary of Christ's, and it was obvious (by long sections of verbatim copying) that Mark had been a primary source of data used to construct Matt. Thus Matt cannot have been Christ's contemporary, because one would not copy someone else's telling of a story that they themselves had personally witnessed.
We will continue to call the text's author "Matt" for the sake of simplicity, but it is understood by all serious Biblical scholars that Matthew: A) was not written by a person who knew Jesus personally, and B) was written a generation later than the early Christians thought.
Another thing to recall about this first Gospel is that it is written by a Jew to people who were still culturally Jewish and are experiencing Jesus in the context of their Judaism. Many of the early Christians were something more like "Christian Jews," in the sense that Christianity, for them, was a new sub-group within the overarching cosmology of Jewish belief, not a new religion all together. The fact that Matthew is written by a Jew to other Jews is evidenced by many things, not the least of which is the fact that the text takes for granted the audience's knowledge of uniquely Jewish customs, beliefs and traditions.
Much more can and will be said about the authorship of this and all of the four gospels. For today, I want you to internalize this fact: we do not know who wrote any of the four gospels, and we are certain that none of those gospels was written by a contemporary of Jesus.
Now, let's take a look at the text in question. Continuing from where we left off...
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Matthew 1:18 through Matthew 1:20
18 Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the holy Spirit.
19 Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly.
20 Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her.
I wonder what the audience of late antiquity thought about these verses.
From my position in 21st century America, it is hard not to giggle at this seminal part of the narrative. Can anyone imagine Joseph's shock and utter disappointment to find that his fiancee, with whom he had yet to consummate anything, was pregnant?!
I always love verse 19 wherein Joseph decides that he will divorce Mary, but that he doesn't want to shame her and make a big deal out of her apparent infidelity. I think that Joseph shows more restraint than some of us might in his shoes, and that is endearing.
In verse 20 we are told that an angel quickly visited Joseph in a dream and explained that it was the "holy Spirit," not some random hunk from about town, that had made a cuckold out of him. Either way, these verses expose for us the first miraculous event in the gospels, and give us an opportunity to briefly discuss the miraculous side of the Christ story.
To be concise: I do not believe in miracles of any kind. I believe exclusively in things that can be borne out by science.
I do not believe what we read in today's verses, that Jesus Christ was born from a woman who was still a virgin, somehow impregnated by God or one of God's subordinate forces.
You might be thinking: "if he doesn't believe in miracles, then what is the point of all of this?"
The point is that the philosophy of Jesus Christ, indeed his "moral vision," are not, for me, contingent upon miracles or metaphysical power of any kind. This is why I've called this writing "The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ," not "The Hollywood Super-Hero-Like Magic Qualities of Jesus Christ."
What am implying?
I guess, one of two things. Either Mary was infidelitous, or Joseph and Mary were copulating before they should have been in relation to their impending marriage, and didn't want anyone to know that they had intermingled prior to wedlock.
And that is saying a lot.
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Love.
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