On Matthew 4:3 through Matthew 4:4

Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.  If this is your first time, you may get oriented by the Introduction, here.

As you'll recall, last time, we left Jesus hungry in the desert where he had just fasted for forty days and nights.  He is in the desert "to be tempted by the devil."  Today, before we pick up that narrative, we're going to begin part one of a multi-part study of The Devil, aka Satan.  We'll call this short study "Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity."

First, allow me to reiterate what we learned last time, with a caveat: The Devil does not appear at all in The Pentateuch, and is not given a biography anywhere in the canonical Christian Bible.  The caveat: though we've not discussed it yet, there is some evidence of the devil in certain intertestamental apocrypha which did pre-date Jesus by at least a century.  However, it is not until the writings of the Church Father Origen in the third-century AD that we see the story of Satan as the fallen leader of angels within the Christian cosmology beginning to truly coalesce.  

It would be several centuries later that the pitchfork-jabbing, cartoonish Satan, which many Christians fear today, was fully formed.

Today, we will strive to bolster our understanding with some religious and literary context on devils and demons.  We have miles of ground to cover, so let's get started.

Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity

Part I

Devils before Satan

Today, for millions of Christians, "The Devil" is a supernatural entity that administers a fiery section of the afterlife known as Hell.  This being works constantly against God to incite sin and evil in humanity, so that they will ultimately be damned by God in some fantastical final judgment and forced to spend eternity in Hell as The Devil's subjects and eternal torture victims.

During the course of this study-within-a-study, we will cover several topics.  First, we will look at demons and devils in religion and literature pre-dating Judaism, for historical and literary context.  Second, we will look over the various references to demons, devils and monsters in The Old Testament.  Third, we will look at some particular intertestamental apocrypha.  Fourth, we will look at the New Testament references to The Devil and Satan.  Lastly, we will look at the major leaps that occurred over the centuries since the Apostolic Age to bring us to the modern, cartoonish conception of Satan, and of The Problem of Evil itself.

Today, we'll start basically as far back as we possibly can in history.  We will start in Mesopotamia around 2150 BC, when a story called "Ninurta's Exploits" was written by an author whose name is long since lost to time.

Ninurta's Exploits follows the Sumerian God-King Ninurta on an adventure, the main feature of which is the vanquishing of an epic demon-monster called Asag.  Asag, for the purpose of this study, is analogous to the Christian Satan.  This demon, at the beginning of the epic of Ninurta, is said to be leading successful armies against the cities of Sumeria.  His armies are unstoppable, as they are comprised of creatures made of stone - the result of the sexual union of Asag and the mountains themselves. Asag, as the story goes, runs amok across the Sumerian countryside. Ninurta, the God-King, is warned that:

[Asag] is confident that it can lay hands on the powers received by you in the abzu. Its face is deformed, its location is continually changing; day by day, the Asag adds territories to its domain. 

Ninurta, full of all things good, determines to go to the mountains to fight Asag. As Ninurta approaches the mountains, Asag jumps out to meet him in battle. Immediately subsequent to this comes the following epic description of Asag's might and wickedness:

For a club it uprooted the sky, took it in its hand; like a snake it slid its head along the ground. It was a mad dog attacking to kill the helpless, dripping with sweat on its flanks. Like a wall collapsing, the Asag fell on Ninurta the son of Enlil. Like an accursed storm, it howled in a raucous voice; like a gigantic snake, it roared at the Land. It dried up the waters of the Mountains, dragged away the tamarisks, tore the flesh of the Earth and covered her with painful wounds. It set fire to the reed-beds, bathed the sky in blood, turned it inside out; it dispersed the people there.

The vivid descriptions that we get in this ancient text are just phenomenal.  I particularly love "like a wall collapsing, the Asag fell on Ninurta," as well as "bathed the sky in blood, turned it inside out."  The entire text is relatively awesome like this, although patches of the text are entirely lost to history, making some sections difficult to comprehend at all.

The story of Ninurta vs Asag, which ends with Ninurta's smiting Asag with his talking mace, highlights a good-evil dualism that existed far in advance of the dualism of Greco-Roman Christianity.  Although the original purpose of this text is lost to us, it gives us a good idea of just how old the concept of a powerful supernatural evil force is.  This goes to show that there would have been a plurality of demons and devils in the summation of the middle-eastern pantheon throughout not only the Apostolic era, but the entire Biblical Era, too.

For our second demon of context, let's look at the Gorgons.  Grecophiles will recognize Gorgon as the name of the three creature-sisters from Greek mythology.  The Gorgons were (usually) hideous and (usually) threatening entities that, in the ancient cosmology, sat somewhere beneath the Greek pantheon of gods, but somewhere above humanity.  The most well known of the Gorgons was Medusa, because she was famed as having been killed by Perseus, a demigod, in a particularly memorable story.  The less frequently mentioned two Gorgons were Stheno and Euryale*.

Medusa is a well known figure, even in modern times.  Like her two sisters, Medusa was said to have hair made of snakes or interwoven with snakes, and her visage could turn a person to stone with just a glance.  The Gorgons appear in the work of the ancient poet Homer, as well as in The Aeneid of Virgil.  The word Gorgon is rooted in "gorgos," Greek for "grim or dreadful," and may be related to the Sanksrit "garjana," which meant "growling" and was probably onomatopoeic.

Images of Gorgons were used in ancient Greece to protect buildings and objects, which demonstrates that they were not understood as "purely evil," the way Satan is.  Like Satan, however, Gorgons were understood to be mortally fearsome and dangerous.  We might see Satan's later association with all things lizard-like or serpentine as related to the snakiness of the Gorgon sisters, which may relate to the slithery, snakey description of Asag all the way back in Sumeria.

For our third example of pre-Judaic devils, we will turn to the ancient faith of Zoroastrianism.  Zoroastrianism, an ancient monotheistic religion, was founded by a philosopher name Zoroaster as early as the middle of the second millenium BC.**  Zoroastrianism's one God was known as Ahura Mazda, and, like the Judeo-Christian God, Ahura Mazda was understood to be omnibenevolent.  Ahura Mazda had a rival called Angra Mainyu.  Like Satan, Angra Mainyu serves as the counterpoint to Mazda's omnibenevolence, and is represented as omnimalevolent.

It is thought that Ahura Mazda was one of a pantheon of gods that existed in the ancient middle-east prior to Zoroaster, and that Zoroaster simply elevated Ahura Mazda to a position of "not having been created," or singular Godhood above all others.

Angra Mainyu may be entirely Zoroaster's creation, as we first know of this creature of pure evil from Zoroaster's own writing. In Zoroaster's Gathas, the foundational religious texts of Zoroastrianism, Angra Mainyu is shown as being the originator of lies and of sin, and as being bent on damaging the spiritual well-being of humanity.

Of the three pre-Judaic demons we are looking at today, Angra Mainyu might have the most in common with Satan. Angra Mainyu was a kind of universal scapegoat for suffering and misfortune, or a stand in for any kind of evil, just like Satan is for his believers today. Rather than pray specifically for the end to all the various ailments they faced, Zoroastrians could just pray "for the displacement of Angra Mainyu with his creatures which are likewise evil as he is, for he is filled with death," as the Gathas say. It is in this same fashion that modern Christians might pray generally for protection against Satan and his minions, rather than praying for a long list of specific reliefs or safe-guards.

This whirl-wind tour of three pre-Judaic concepts of demons or devils has, as I mentioned before, all been to expose the historical context of the concept of Satan. Before we approach The Devil in The Bible, it is important to know that devils existed before The Devil. It is important to know that the idea of demons pre-dated Satan, and that the concept of supernatural evil sprang up in multiple thought systems and in multiple locations throughout ancient history. It stands to reason that these demonic concepts pre-date history.

Next time, we'll take a look at some of the references to devils and monsters that exist in The Old Testament, and I'll show you exactly what I mean when I say that Satan does not have a biography in the canonical Jewish scripture.

Now, let's get back to The Gospel.

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Matthew 4:3 through Matthew 4:4

3 The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.” 

4 He said in reply, “It is written:
  ‘One does not live by bread alone,
   but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”

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Here we have Jesus Saying Number 2.  The "tempter" in verse three is obviously Satan.  He approaches Jesus, who we are to understand is near death with hunger from not eating for forty days, and challenges him: "if you are the Son of God, eat some bread that you magically make out of these rocks here!"

In verse four, Shoehorn Matthew*** can be heard echoing in Jesus' reply.  As we have seen over and over again, the text relates directly and constantly back to isolated, out-of-context anecdotes from The Old Testament.  

Since Jesus will say this same thing again in the Luke version of the narrative, it looks like this is also a case of Shoehorn Luke, the less prominent cousin of Shoehorn Matthew.  And, since it's Shoehorns Matthew and Luke, then it very well could have been Shoehorn Q, too.

Oh well. Shoehorn Everybody, I guess.  Except John.  

I digress.

This second saying of Jesus begins what will be a long pattern of him narrowly dodging an awkward accusation or inquiry by quoting something from The Old Testament.  It begins a long pattern of other characters saying that he is, or might be, the Son of God, and him not quite agreeing with them, but not quite disagreeing either.  Jesus offers less moralistic prescription here, and more focused retort.

The saying in verse four relates to Deuteronomy 8:3.  In Deuteronomy 8:3, Moses is conveying God's law to the Jews and expounding upon it.  He tells the reader to remember when they had been hungry and God had nourished them with manna in the desert, "...so you might know that it is not by bread alone that people live, but by all that comes forth from the mouth of the Lord."

If we look for a moral take-away, here, we have to take it from the original Deuteronomical meaning of the saying, which seems to be that possession of material things, even those that are normally considered to be of life-or-death value, is subordinate in importance to matters of spiritual fitness.  This message certainly fits with the Jesus I know.

Join us next time, as the work continues.  Thank you for reading.  Please share.

Love. 

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* Euryale.  Cool name!

** The span of time in which various modern historians contend Zoroaster may have lived is unusually large, with serious parties contending dates from 1500 to 500 BC!

*** I call him Shoehorn Matthew because he's always trying to shoehorn the Jesus story into a Jewish context.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.
For the index of Christ's words, click here.

On Matthew 4:1 through Matthew 4:2

Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.  This will eventually be a years long project that I hope will be called "the most intensive study of The Gospel ever written."  If you are here for your first time, avail yourself of the introductory posting, which can be found here.  It explains broadly what we hope to achieve here.

Please note that I have (finally) gotten around to creating the separate page for the running list of Jesus' sayings.  That page can be found here. There will also always be a link to it at the bottom of each study entry. It looks very simple, but it will allow for precise exploration of Jesus' philosophy later on.  Please familiarize yourself with its parameters.

We have little time to waste, so today we're jumping right into our Gospel reading.

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Matthew 4:1 through Matthew 4:2

1 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. 

2 He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry.

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I don't know if you see what I see, but there is so much here.

We are about to spend a couple of study sessions with this "devil" character, so things may get strange for a while.  

Recall that Jesus has just been baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist, and, immediately, a voice came from the sky with praise for Jesus.  Now, the narrative takes one of its many sideways jerks and Jesus is, straight away, led by the Spirit (of God) out into the middle of the desert specifically "to be tempted by the devil."

What follows is nine verses during the course of which Jesus Christ interacts with and talks exclusively to "The Devil."

To get through these verses with our understanding of Christ intact, we need to work our minds around the Christian conception of The Devil, "Satan," and evil in general.  That will be the work of the next couple of sessions here.  Before we dive resolutely into that dark subject matter, though, let's focus in on Matthew 4:2 for a moment.

Here, The Man is recorded as having fasted for forty days and nights in the desert away from civilization.  This is an amazing feat.  Beyond amazing, this is the kind of feat we could call quintessentially ascetic and shamanistic.  John the Baptist can be imagined doing such a thing.  (Let's concede here that the forty-day figure was an exaggerated one, but that the fasting did last for a significant period of time.)

Fasting as a mechanism of communion with the divine predated Jesus by millenia.  It has been long known that ritual fasting can lead to hallucinations or "visions" or "spiritual experiences," brought on, at least in part, by the brain's reaction to a nutrient-deprived, stressful environment.  Throughout history, mystics from innumerable faiths and world-views have availed themselves of the mind expanding nature of fasting to get closer to their myriad Gods or Nirvanas.

For anyone who doubts the mind altering effects of fasting, I challenge you to - after first consulting with your doctor to see if it is safe for you to do so - fast for just forty-eight hours.  No calories for forty-eight hours.  In my experience, the mind without calories for forty-eight hours is, frankly, not itself.  The mind, in that state, behaves the way it does on various psychoactive compounds.

I focus in on Matthew 4:2 because it says a lot about Jesus, if he actually did this thing.  Jesus would have known that forty days without food were going to make him hallucinate and open his mind up.  So, if he deliberately wandered out there, he did so deliberately to "trip," for lack of a better word.  He went out to seek special knowledge through an altered state, perhaps in the exact way that, for instance, shamans in Peru today seek revelation through altered states induced by entheogenic teas.

Why is it important to consider Jesus' altered state here?

The reader will recall that I work to reconcile the story of Jesus with what the senses tell us about reality.  Given that it is certainly the capacity of the human mind, under duress, to produce demons of hallucination, we can easily see anything "supernatural" occuring to Jesus in the desert as the result of the hunger-and-heat-stroke visions he would have likely endured during a spiritual quest of this nature.  So, where literalists see a literal demon talking to Jesus, I see a self-inflicted hallucination.

You are welcome to see it either way.

The wandering in the desert, a feat of extreme asceticism, occurs in slightly differing forms in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.  It does not occur in The Gospel According to John.  Since the wandering in the desert for forty days is "triple tradition*," we lean towards accepting it as historical.  

Immediately subsequent to the forty days in the desert, in all three Synoptics, is the "Beginning of the Galilean Ministry."  Can we thus look at the forty days as the gestation period for the coming ministry?  Can we see it as a period of revelation for Christ during which his understanding of the world and his philosophy began to coalesce (or finished coalescing) from experience, sense, and self-reflection?

Yes, we can.

Do we have to read the following passages against our senses, believing that an ill-defined figure called "The Devil" is literally visited upon Jesus during his forty day ordeal?

No, we do not.

We will be back over this tricky ground again, of course.  Let's move forward for now, knowing that there are multiple ways to interpret the passages we are shortly going to study.

Today, we need to briefly introduce The Devil, aka Satan, aka Beelzebul, aka The Prince of Darkness.  As I said, we will be with this figure for a few installments, and we will be using those installments to delve deep into its origins and evolutions.  For now, we will start with a very broad aperture look at belief in The Devil.

The word "satan" was a noun before it was a proper-noun. Satan is originally Hebrew, and means "adversary" or "opponent."  The word "devil" comes from the ancient Greek "diábolos," meaning "accuser" or "slanderer.”  Beelzebul is from the Hebrew "ba‘al-z'vúv" meaning "Lord of the Flies."

Modern understanding of Satan comes not from scripture but from the writings of later Christians who were, generally, trying to understand the Problem of Evil in the context of a perfect God.  The Devil does not occur in the five books of The Pentateuch**, and it is arguable that he doesn't occur in The Old Testament at all outside the Books of Job and Zechariah.  Certainly, Satan is not defined in The Old Testament, nor is he given a back-story or biography.  

The New Testament does not help us much in defining or giving biography to this evil figure, either.  He is mentioned there in several books, including those of The Gospel, but knowledge of him is always presupposed in The New Testament, the same way it presupposes the knowledge of Mammon, one of the other demons mentioned in The Gospel.

The near absence of thought in the ancient Jewish scripture about The Devil followed by the numerous mentions of a devil in The New Testament which presuppose common knowledge lead one to believe that something changed in the way Jews understood their cosmology during the Intertestamental Period***.  We will spend time looking at what exactly happened during that period, in regards to cosmological beliefs.

This is all to say, though, that the half (or slightly more than half) of the population of modern America that believe in The Devil cannot have gotten their common concepts about him from scripture.

What's the common concept of The Prince of Darkness, then?

The Devil is frequently portrayed in Christian art and writing as being red or darker in skin-tone, having hairy or animal legs and cloven hooves, having horns on his head, and carrying a pitchfork which he uses to torment the damned in hell.  All of these attributes have multiple precedents in ancient pre-Christian mythologies.

Common tradition sees The Devil as a powerful angel, once favored by God in heaven, who had sinned in pride and was therefore exiled out of heaven to a realm of torture called "hell."  Common tradition says that Satan holds dominion over Earth, and is the source of sin and human folly.  Somehow, Satan balances the power of God on earth, despite the fact that God is understood to be singularly omnipotent.  Common tradition literally believes that this malevolent being called Satan is present in all places and at all times in the earthly realm, and constantly works to cultivate pain and turmoil for all of humanity.  

Responsibility for all evil deeds, evil people and calamities of all sorts may and should, ultimately, according to the common concept of Satan, be attributed to this dark figure.

I must reiterate: this stuff is not in The Bible.  These concepts came either from intertestamental apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, or were among many invented between the dawning of the Imperial Church in the fourth century and the modern era.  The Bible features various demons and devils, but doesn't offer the specificity on this topic that later evolved in Christian thought.  Over the next few sessions, we will study the origins and the evolution of these concepts.

Today, I just want to leave you with this question: if you believe in The Devil, who exactly gave you those beliefs, and where did they get them?

Think it through to the end.

We hope to see you next time, when we will discuss the concept of demons and spirits as they pre-dated even the Jewish thought systems.  Until then, please share this writing.

Love.

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* "Triple Tradition" means "occuring in all three Synoptic Gospels," and is a good sign that a passage contains some historicity.  

** 'The Pentateuch" is the name given to the first five books of The Old Testament.  It includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

*** The period of time between The Old Testament narratives and The New Testament.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.
For the index of Christ's words, click here.

On Matthew 3:16 through Matthew 3:17

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

If you're not familiar with the nature of this study already, you may want to refer to the Introduction to this work, which you can find here.

The impetus for this writing is, of course, the apparent and innumerable contradictions between American Christian ideals (which include, primarily, violence and profit) and the words that Jesus actually spoke.  We work to shine a penetrating light at these contradictions in an effort to save the world from an otherwise inevitable thermonuclear war sparked by American militarism and greed.  The chasm between American Christian Conservatism and the actual Jesus Christ is so wide as to be unspannable by anything but a bridge of lies.  This study of Jesus' words will be the torch with which that epic bridge of lies is unceremoniously burned to the ground.

This is important, so let's get to it.

Last time, when Jesus first spoke, he insisted that John the Baptist baptize him, despite John's assertion that he was unworthy to.  Today, we will experience the moment immediately after the baptism, and the description of a miracle.  Before we go there, however, we need to revisit an old friend.  (I bet you can guess who...)

We mentioned, a couple of installments back, that one Flavius Josephus had some things to say about John the Baptist.  We glossed over that, at the time, but today's the day to reopen Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews.

Antiquities is, to my knowledge, the only text outside of The Gospels that offers a contemporaneous or nearly contemporaneous account of John the Baptist.  Since The Gospels were all written by men who were attempting to proliferate The Jesus Movement, while Josephus had no interest in the spread of The Jesus Movement, the Josephus text can be seen as potentially the least biased and, thereby, most accurate of the accounts.

In Book 18 of Antiquities, near the beginning of Chapter 5, Josephus tells us what he knows about John.  He does so only to explain why Herod's army had suffered a loss at the hands of Aretas, an Arab king.  Josephus says:

Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist: for Herod killed him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing [with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness.  Now when [many] others came in crowds about him, for they were very greatly moved [or pleased] by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion (for they seemed ready to do anything he should advise), thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it would be too late.  Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod's suspicious temper, to Macherus, the fortress I before mentioned, and was there put to death.  Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of his army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God's displeasure to him.

Josephus wrote this in retrospect, from Rome, in around Anno Domini 93.

Josephus writes almost as breathlessly as the evangelists, so there are a lot of data here.  We will definitely be revisiting this text, and its context, over the next several years.  Today, Josephus leads us to three considerations.  Number one: Josephus seems to disagree with Matthew regarding the nature of John's offered baptism.  Number two: Herod, a client king backed up by the might of Rome, was afraid of John the Baptist, and thought that John might, at any moment, become the leader of a full-scale rebellion.  Number three: philosophical innovation and political radicalism were inseparable in first century Palestine.

To the first point, we hone in on Josephus' statement that John's followers were going to him "...not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness."  The wording is tricky enough here that I availed myself of a couple of translations, but all of them that could be found retained the [awkwardness].  Josephus is saying "John baptized people to ritually purify their bodies, not to remit their sin, and believed that the soul could only be purified by right-living."  This stands in stark contrast to what Matthew told us recently: that John baptized for repentance, or the remission of sin.

Remember when we postulated that John the Baptist might have known The Essenes, or been an Essene?  Josephus' account of John fits right in with this theory, exactly because of how Josephus describes the baptism of John.  Again, he describes it as being for "purification of the body."  The Essenes, you will recall, bathed daily to maintain bodily ritual purity, which may not be a coincidence.  Either way, we have at least two different versions of John's baptism to reconcile here: the one in Matthew, that is designed to purify one's soul of imperfections caused by sin, and the one in Josephus, which is designed to purify one's body for the gratification of God.

Second, let's focus in on the statement that "Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion (for they seemed ready to do anything he should advise), thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause..."  

While reading about how afraid Herod was of John, we must highlight the fact that Herod was a very powerful king.  Although known historically as being somewhat paranoid, Herod was in charge of enough territory and people that it would have taken something significant to draw his attention in the way John the Baptist apparently did here.  And, although the Jewish people were known to be prone to rebellion against foreign authority, it would have taken quite a crowd to have gotten the authorities worried about potential rebellion like Josephus says John did.  All this leads one to the understanding that the baptism at the Jordan was not a small thing.  There must have been a lot of folks going out to see this man.  One gets the sense, from the Josephus account, that John's name was well known throughout Palestine at the time.

Is it not fascinating how the actions of a holy ascetic mystic made him the enemy of The State, as if he was some kind of political radical?  This brings us to our third consideration, regarding the intermingling of ancient "church" and State.

The intersection of first-century faith and first-century politics is extremely apparent in Antiquities.  The constant threat of rebellion by religious atypicals (Zealots, Essenes, Sicarii, and others) in the region meant that a tremendous amount of political energy was exhausted trying to guide theological belief.  Public law and religious law were intertwined.  Innovative theological thought or philosophy were seen as threats to political stability.  Neither Jesus nor John would have been surprised at their respective death sentence.  People like John the Baptist and Jesus Christ would have known intuitively that their religious ingenuity would make them political enemies of the varying mechanisms of power and empire.

Here are your take-aways:

1) Josephus contradicts Matthew by saying that John the Baptist was not washing away sin, but bodily impurity, with his baptism.

2) Josephus says that Herod had John killed because he feared a revolution by The Baptist's followers.

3) Religious zeal and ingenuity in the first-century were inherently political and revolutionary.

Let's set Josephus down for today, and pick Matthew back up.

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Matthew 3:16 through Matthew 3:17

16 After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened [for him], and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove [and] coming upon him. 

17 And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

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So Jesus gets dunked.  This is a full submersion in the river Jordan.  According to Matthew, he comes up from the water and, in that moment, the sky cracks open.  The "Spirit of God" descends down upon him.  A voice we can only imagine as thunderous - not specified as that of God - comes from where the sky has cracked open, and tells everyone present that Jesus is its son, and that it is happy with him.

I'll reiterate that I do not personally believe in anything that cannot be borne out by sense.  When I read The Gospel, the "miraculous" parts must be historically discounted in order to reconcile my senses with the narrative.  The application of Christian morality, as we will show here over a series of years, does not require a profession of belief in anything metaphysical or extrasensory.

That said, one might wonder why we bother discussing passages like these.  Why not go the route of Thomas Jefferson, who cut all the miraculous stuff out of his Gospels with scissors?

The most obvious answer is that we want to be thorough.  We have precious little contemporaneous record of this man, Jesus.  No matter how dubious or fantastic, all first-century texts regarding Jesus are inherently valuable, because the body of work is so small.  

Studying the "miraculous" elements of these texts can also tell us a lot about the rapid evolution of Christian theology in the first and second centuries.  

The fantastic elements of The Gospels, despite their being fantastic, help us compare and contrast the literary styles, theological understandings, and narratives of our four evangelists.  We can use today's reading as an example of this.

Matthew 3:17's Marcan analogue, 1:11, reads "And a voice came from the heavens, "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased."  So, the object to whom the voice is addressed changes between these Gospels.  As we mentioned before, the author of Matthew likely had a copy of Mark sitting in front of him while he penned his Gospel.  Why, then, would the evangelist in question choose to make this little change of the phrasing?  The author of Luke, after all, retains the Marcan phrasing in Luke 3:22.

We can postulate a couple of reasons for the disagreement.  The discrepancy could simply have been the result of an anomalous copying error.  Or, perhaps, the author of Matthew strayed from his two synoptic brethren because he had an alternative source for this material.  Perhaps the author just thought "if the voice was coming from the sky, then everyone would have been hearing it.  Let's make that totally clear."  It's a guessing game, at this point in history.

The point to drive, here, is that the four Gospels represent four separate and different accounts of the life of Christ.  Some of the Gospels agree with one another some of the time, but it is, in fact, very rarely that they all agree about a particular thing.  With that said, we will close today with a big, important rhetorical question: "If The Gospels do not tell the same story, which story of Jesus is the true story?"

Gnaw on that until next time, and, please, share this writing.

Love

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 3:13 through Matthew 3:15

Welcome to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, your guidebook to The Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Here, we're studying the moral code of Christ, verse by verse.  Our reasons are manifold.

We are going at a deliberately slow rate, to ensure that the work will be as exacting as possible.  Today, we will take three verses.  Sometimes we might take two.  Sometimes only one.  We'll do no more than three, though, under normal circumstances.  The totality of this study will take us years.  We work this slowly because we want to be as certain as possible in any conclusions we draw from our study.  We work this slow because to work any faster would guarantee our constantly going off half-cocked and unprepared.*

Today is special because today is the first day we will be reading words attributed to Jesus in our study.  Those of you who read the Introduction may recall that we quoted Jesus in passing there, but that does not count.

Soon we will number the sayings of Christ and break them apart into single ideas.  There will be a separate page here at The Moral Vision which you will have access to by a link at the bottom of the text.  The page will contain a running list of the sayings of Jesus by number, along with a few data points i.e. "Does the saying endorse violence?" "Does the saying endorse human authority?" "Does the saying have Jesus claiming he is God?" "Does the saying endorse materialism?"  The list will also cross-reference the saying with its analogues in the opposing three Gospels.  We will attempt to keep that page up-to-date as much as possible, but updating may occur in fits and starts.

Some of you may have noticed that we've mentioned "red letters" a couple of times without taking the time to explain what "red letter" means exactly.  Some of you may know what we mean off-hand, and some may have no idea, but you can purchase Bibles that have the words of Jesus printed in red text, so that it stands out from the rest of the text.  They call them "Red Letter Bibles."  They are helpful.  This study itself will be in red letter.

Ok.  I think we're ready.  Ladies and gentlemen, it's my excited pleasure to introduce to you the subject of our study, Jesus Christ.

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Matthew 3:13 through Matthew 3:15

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. 

14 John tried to prevent him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” 

15 Jesus said to him in reply, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed him.

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Yay!  We're here, finally!

We don't want to get all over-spun, so we'll take this a verse at a time.

Recall that we last left Jesus still a baby in Matthew 2:21.  The narrative jumps from Jesus being a baby, freshly returned from his exile to Egypt (which likely never actually occurred), to Jesus being one of the many adult Jews who are going out to receive John the Baptist's baptism.  The time span between these two points, or Jesus' formative years, we know next to nothing about.  Matthew certainly gives us little clue.  In Matt 3:13, Jesus simply leaves Galilee to get to where John the Baptist is, on the river.

We should take the time to avail ourselves of a map of Palestine the way it was in the first century, which is easily available online.  On a map, we see that Galilee was bordered, for a very short distance along its south-eastern limit, by the Jordan.  This is right where the river flows out of the Sea of Galilee.  The river flows due south where it eventually becomes a tributary of the Dead Sea.  

The wording in Matt 3:13 gives us an indication that Jesus had traveled south far enough that he was no longer in Galilee.  John could have been baptizing, then, anywhere between thirty and seventy miles from Nazareth.  Remember, Nazareth is where we last left Jesus and thereby assume he journeys from.  If Jesus walked, it could have been a two to four day trek out to John.  If Jesus took a camel, the journey would likely have been a day or two at the maximum.  We aren't told how Jesus travelled, but it can be assumed that we meet him at the end of a lengthy journey.

Matt 3:13 explicitly calls out the purpose of Jesus' journey to John the Baptist.  It is the same as that of most of the people crowded around John by the Jordan: he makes the journey to be baptized.

What is John's baptism, again?  A washing away of impurity.  A washing away of sin.  John's baptism is of repentance.  Jesus, who people normally think of as "without sin," nevertheless travels this distance - probably a multiple day ordeal through unforgiving desert heat - explicitly "to be baptized by [John]."

Why would someone who is above sin need a baptism of repentance from it?

Some might say that Jesus is identifying himself with humanity for humanity's sake.  "He is sinless, of course, but has come to humans in the form of a human to have a human experience before their eyes, so he starts it off in this human way: asking for a baptism of remission from sin."  This reads a lot into the text that isn't explicitly there.

Matt 3:14 has John the Baptist experiencing parallel confusion.  He doesn't feel capable of baptizing Jesus, for some reason.  He says "you should wash away my sins, not the other way around."

One interesting thing about Matt 3:14 is that it seems to pre-suppose a relationship between Jesus and John.  John sees Jesus and immediately says "no, you're too good to be baptized by me," as if he is already familiar with the character and nature of Jesus.  This could certainly be seen as evidence that Jesus had spent some of his "formative years" with John the Baptist.  This is interesting because it contradicts the The Gospel According to John, which has John the Baptist claiming that he "did not know [Jesus]."  It also begs one-thousand difficult or unanswerable questions: "where did John and Jesus meet up, prior to the Gospel accounts?"  "What did they do together when they met?"  "Were they students in a common school of thought together, or co-creators of a school?"  Etc...  And, again, these questions are all contingent on the supposition that the two did, indeed, know one another prior to their meeting in Matthew chapter 3.**

We should also recall that this "baptism in the desert" situation was atypical for the Jews.  Their traditions didn't call for an immersion for the cleansing of sins, and, if they had, they would have likely performed such rituals in Jerusalem where all the other traditional rites were performed, not out in the middle of the desert away from civilization and security.  It was not as if you might, as a person from that region, assume that everyone around at the time had gone out, or would go out, to receive John's baptism.  It's likely that many wouldn't have even known John's name.

Since the baptism John offered was a new one that existed outside of existing Jewish law and tradition, we can assume that John's group of followers would have been comprised of people who had been left somehow wanting by the existing law and tradition.  It's safe to assume that most of the people that went out to John sought drastic change in their lives.  More often than not, those seeking drastic change are the poor, the marginalized, and the disaffected.***  It was these that John primarily baptized, with the occasional upper-class elite venturing out "just to see," like we saw The Sadducees and the Pharisaic elites do.

Finally, in Matthew 3:15, we get Christ's response, and his first words, so-to-speak.  When John the Baptist has resisted baptizing Christ, Christ responds “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”  John the Baptist responds with reflexive obedience and baptizes Jesus.

Notation in The New American Bible says "Here... righteousness seems to mean the saving activity of God.  To fulfill all righteousness is to submit to the plan of God for the salvation of the human race."  It would seem as likely that Jesus merely meant "everyone else is out here getting baptized, and it's the normal thing to do among your audience, so just baptize me."

It would seem just as likely, too, that these words didn't actually even get spoken.  You'll notice that they do not occur in any of the other Gospels.  In our effort to find the truest knowable Jesus, we will constantly be checking to see in how many Gospels his sayings are repeated, and if there is any wild variation between the iterations.  Generally, albeit not always, the more times the saying was recorded, the more likely it was to have been historical.  The fact that the dialogue at hand today is unique to The Gospel According to Matthew gives us some cause to be wary as to its historicity.****

These verses are denser than what we were used to, early on.  When Jesus speaks, which is a good percentage of the upcoming text, we will always find this kind of scholastic density, so it works to our advantage that the story is told four times over.  We have plenty of time to unpack everything.

We'll take our leave of it here, today.  Join us next time when a full-on miracle including a "voice from the heavens" will unfold.  

Thank you for reading.

Please share this writing.

Love

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* We will still go off half-cocked, mind you.  Just not as frequently as all that.

** We will learn more about this when we read Luke's portrayal of the life of John the Baptist, which is the most detailed.

*** Why would one want a change if one had no want? 

**** Historicity means "historical authenticity."

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 3:11 through Matthew 3:12

Hello.  You're here, finally, and now we can start.

This is an in-depth study of the morality of Jesus Christ as we can discern it through The Gospels.  If you're new and would like to be completely up-to-date, return to the Introduction first, here.

As I said last time, the post subsequent to this one will introduce the words of Jesus Christ to this work for the first time.  It's been three months of study and we're finally on the cusp of our subject.  I can't tell you how excited I am for this.

I'm almost as excited, though, to be presently spending our time with Jesus' companion and possible teacher, John the Baptist.  With The Baptist seems like the best place to be, as we prepare ourselves for the intricate and years long process of parsing and cross-referencing the recorded words of Joshua.

Last time, I was a little more personal with y'all.  I broke away from our collective "we" for a bit to try to explain anew the reason for this endeavor.  In the end, I feel that I did not pronounce my point very well.  I would like to supplement that writing with a caveat.

I am a person who makes moral compromises all of the time.  I am a person who has, in the past, made tremendous moral compromises that have had devastating results for my life, and the lives of those around me.  I have been in the back of a cop car more times than I can count.  I have had my head picked by more therapists and psychiatrists than I can remember.  I have, at times, fully rejected any moral code, and allowed myself to be taken under by a torrent of alcohol, drugs, and primate instinct.

I mentioned that I knew, for a fact, from experience, that applying aspects of Christian morality would push me closer to being who I prefer to be as a human.  This was a rather vague statement on my part.  It will remain relatively vague, but I would like to augment it some.

Here's the caveat: Christian morality, or the "Christian Program," as I'm seeing it in my head lately, is a list of standards and prescriptions.  That list includes items which vary in difficulty, for me, from super-easy to extremely-difficult.  When I said that I knew that applying aspects of Christian morality in my life would change it for the better based on experience, I should have written "very limited experience."  Because my experience with it is very limited.  Working the Christian Program perfectly at once seems impossible.  It likely is impossible.  I don't claim to be anywhere near that state.  As a percentage, maybe I hit 5% of the program on a good day.  That might be pushing it.

Please keep in mind that I come to you from a place of moral degradation and, if you like, "sin," not from a place of elevation.

The question to me is begged, then: "how do you know that applying the program works, if you haven't done it with totality?"

Because the program works in increments like that, I guess; do none of the program, get none of the results.  Do some of the program, get some of the results.  Do all of the program and...

...no one knows this part, I suspect.  Maybe we'll never know.  Bear in mind that it is an ideal, something I am far, far beneath.

All this is to plead the following, dear reader: please understand that my fervor for The Gospel is about my desperation to save myself from myself, and that I would keep writing this even if I knew that no one else would ever read it.

I hesitate to say it before we've worked hard to define the term, but I say it honestly whenever I pray: "I am a sinner."

I hope that makes sense...

Let's get back to our Gospel.

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Matthew 3:11 through Matthew 3:12

11 I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. 

12 His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

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Remember, from last time, that John the Baptist is out in the desert by the Jordan, baptizing crowds of Jews who are coming out to him from all over the region.  Some Sadducees and Pharisaic elites have appeared, and he is in the middle of a rant directed at them.  He's accused them of being unworthy, and of philosophically hiding from obligation behind their Jewish heritage.

John says he is washing away sin with his baptism of water.  (Recall that baptism comes from the Greek "to immerse" or "to dunk.")  He says to the Pharisees and Sadducees: "I offer a cleansing from sin that is easy, in water.  But there comes another, greater than I, who will immerse you in fire to cleanse your sins."

So what can we say John is anticipating in this one who "is mightier than [him]?"  Verse 11 seems to have him saying "the one who is mightier than me will offer you respite from your sin, as I do, but his mechanism of freeing you from sin, you will find, is much more intense."

It seems within reason that John is still referring, albeit hyperbolically, to a coming Davidic King of the Jews that would usher in Jewish military triumph over the region and return the Jews to a sovereign and elevated state.

It is interesting and relevant that the word we have here translated as "spirit," in the original Greek of Matthew, was "pnevmati," which can be alternatively translated as a "blast of wind" or a "breeze" or a "current of air."  Let's keep that in the back of our mind for a moment.

In verse 12, we have the metaphor of an ancient worker's tool representing, perhaps, the military triumph of the coming King over those who do not stay in line with the law and the prophets.

We can talk more about the metaphor in a moment, but we ought to briefly "geek-out" here on the literal meaning of "winnowing fan."

In grain agriculture, when preparing produce for consumption, one must separate the chaff, or the "hull," of the plant from the kernel or "seed" inside.  The chaff, like the husk of an ear of corn, is not pleasant to eat and provides little nutritional value.  It must be separated from the portion of the plant that is pleasant to eat, and does have good nutritional value.

Today, in developed nations, grain hulling is done primarily by machines.  In ancient times, they had their own mechanisms, which are still used by many people today.

One way to separate chaff from seed on a small scale with only ancient technology is by the use of a "winnowing fan."  After the grain has been "threshed," or beaten in order to loosen the hull around the grains, the winnowing fan is employed.  The tool is nothing but a broad, shallowly concave "fan," made usually of woven plant materials.  Threshed grain is gathered into the fan and then tossed repeatedly into the air in a rhythmic sifting motion.  The wind in the air carries the light, broken, undesirable hull material away with each toss, while the heavier seeds fall back to the fan for easy recovery.

John says that the one who comes after him will separate the wheat from the chaff by a winnowing fan.  One imagines that a Jewish eschatologist at this time could only have been referring to the gathering together of God's chosen people in a wonderful earthly Kingdom of God, and the expulsion of non Jews from said Kingdom.

John's meaning here is not immediately and obviously apparent, and certain people will read into these verses a reference to "hell" and to "eternity."  I do not believe this is what was going on here, but that possibility is floating.

What we can see almost for certain is the Greekness of the author of Matthew shining through.  Verse 11 and 12 are all about the Greek conception of "the elements."  You remember the elements, right?  Earth, wind, fire and water?  We see every one of these ancient elements represented in these two verses.

He mentions "earth" in the "threshing floor."  He mentions "wind" in the "holy spirit" which we saw could be alternatively translated as "holy wind."  He mentions wind again, in the mechanism of the winnowing fan, blowing away the undesirable material.  He mentions fire twice, once in regards to the coming baptism and once in regards to the fate of the chaff.  And, of course, he mentions water when he refers to his own baptism.

These inclusions in the text indicate that the author is writing to an audience that is thoroughly Hellenized, in addition to Jewish, in makeup, and that he understands this well.  The use of these physical elements, now that we've identified it, works to ground the fiery preaching of John.  We can imagine that he is talking about things that will be physically real in the "there and then," not about intangible, metaphysical things.

These verses are mirrored almost exactly in Luke, and they appear in Mark in a reduced form.  The interesting one to read will be Mark's, for comparison, but that is long, long in our future.

These verses are dense, and packed with meaning and possibility.  We will not uncover all of it here and now.  Rest assured that we will have ample opportunity to rehash this.

We'll take our leave of this here, today.  Next time, some of the text we read will be in "red letter."  That is to say that, as we've already repeated, we will be dealing with words that are ascribed directly to Jesus Christ!

I am ready for this.  I hope you are too.  Please share this writing.

Love

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 3:9 through Matthew 3:10

Welcome back to The Moral Vision.

If you're new, you can check out an Introduction to this work in the very first installment, here.

As a reminder to everyone, this study's purpose is to "find philosophical bedrock."  

What do I mean by "philosophical bedrock?"  I mean an understanding of life through human philosophy that is so deep and so strong that it cannot be dug up or dislodged or broken through by any mechanism.  I mean a common philosophy so firm and flat and broad that, upon it, humanity could easily build a temple to encompass all things, and a bridge to the universe beyond our galaxy.

I've looked far and wide, for decades, for philosophical bedrock.  It's a funny thing.  Everyone says they have it, yet none can show it.  

I've searched with a suicidal desperation.  Trudging through human philosophy is like walking through a quicksand of vanity: it all just falls away under the weight of life.  It's mesmerizing to gaze at, but none of it will hold your foot.  

My searching left me not just wanting, but deeply wanting; not just unsatisfied, but deeply unsatisfied.  I searched and searched until, one day, finally, thankfully, an old Russian novelist pointed the bedrock out to me from across history. 

So, why do I study Jesus specifically? 

Because, when Tolstoy pointed out the solid, infinitely massive slab of true philosophical bedrock, I was dumbfounded to find Jesus Christ standing alone, firmly upon it.*  

I have found no more stable ground anywhere in the world than this, under Christ's humble feet.

Frequently, because of the revolutionary nature of the Jesus that we meet in The Gospels, I have written, and will write, about an outward revolution.  Already, several times, we've had cause to compare the image of Jesus and his followers to modern Christianity in a way that should spark revolution inside those not crippled by myopia.  But I want to be very clear here (which I may not have been thus far): the outward revolution is secondary or perhaps even tertiary to my primary purpose.

The purpose here, for me, is to get myself completely out of this blasted philosophical quicksand.  There is a great inward revolution to be fought, before any other.

The outward is subordinate to the inward.  Without an inward revolution, there can be no outward revolution.

I study Jesus today because I need a better way to interact with the world around me.  I study Jesus today because I have verified, in my own life, that when I adopt aspects of his philosophy into my heart, for whatever period of time, my life changes.  I become, in fact, closer to the kind of person that I prefer to be.  

When I am mindful of Christ's program, I become full up of love and creativity and hope.  When I am mindful of Christ's program, the challenges of daily life and of the world at large appear tiny to me, so that bearing them seems effortless.  

I study Jesus to refine my understanding of his philosophical program.  More rigorous application of the program will increase, I believe, the goodness and livability of my life in general terms.  This is the primary purpose here.

I may speak frequently of an outward revolution, but please understand that the inward revolution is the true payoff here.  The revolution is against the self before it is against anyone else.

The payoff is a feeling of grace that leads one to be totally "ok" in one's own skin, or what I call "heaven."

Let's take a reading from The Gospel.

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Matthew 3:9 through Matthew 3:10

9 And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. 

10 Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

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Here we have a continuation of what John the Baptist was saying last time to The Pharisees and Sadducees who have come out to see him.

Today, the eschatology ratchets up a little more.  John the Baptist's message out in the desert is an apocalyptic one, indeed, and it may draw one's mind to the brimstone tent revivals of the old American South.  

In Matthew 3:9, John tells his visitors that, in the coming end-of-times, being Jewish alone won't be enough to save one from calamity.  He tells The Pharisees and Sadducees that they can't just relax in the belief that their salvation and happiness is assured them by God only on account of their lineage.  He says "God could put Jewish blood in these rocks here, if he wanted.  It's not your blood that is precious to him, and so it is not your blood that will earn you relief!  You must produce the fruit!"

The "good fruit" from 3:8 appears again in 3:10.  In 3:8, as you recall, he demands to see the good fruit from The Pharisees and Sadducees.  In 3:10, The Baptist uses trees as a metaphor for humans, and says that whatever tree doesn't produce the "good fruit" will be cut down and thrown into a fire.  As our understanding of first-century Jewish eschatology grows, verse 10 will make more and more sense.  These words, if recorded accurately, probably refer to a coming bloody military triumph of a Jewish King over foreign influences in Jerusalem; the coming of a "Kingdom of God."

Fire and brimstone, from The Baptist.

Tangentially, 3:9 and 3:10 may have come from the "Q" or "Quelle" source.  "Q" is a hypothesized early gospel writing that did not survive to modern times.  "Q-sourced" text is text that we find in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark.  In Biblical scholarship, one major school of thought is that Matthew and Luke were written with a copy of Mark and a copy of the Q-Gospel open in front of the respective authors, for use as source material.

When we get into the actual quoted words of Jesus, we will be taking careful consideration of where we think the words were initially recorded.  Frequently, that place will be the hypothesized "Q."  That said, we will be studying Q in detail frequently over the next few years.  For now, just know that today's reading from Matthew is not reflected in the older Markian Gospel.

We will retire of it here, today, with the first words in The Bible attributed to Jesus Christ just around the corner.  I don't mind telling you that they occur in Matthew 3:15, so we will read them here not next time, but the time after that.  

I hope you are as excited as I am.  Yay, bedrock!

Please share this writing.

Love.

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* Tolstoy was actually kinda smug about it at times, but I don't hold it against the old timer.  I mean, he's dead and all.  Plus he wrote all them fancy novels...

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.