On Matthew 5:4

Hello.  Welcome to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, the most intensive gospel study you will ever read.  If you would like to be introduced to this study properly, start at the beginning with the Introduction.

Last time, if you'll recall, we learned what beatitudes are ("great blessings") and read the first one.  We also considered some of the apocryphal or non-canonical gospels that would have been in circulation in 250 AD.  We are chasing down the truth about the formation of the New Testament canon in response to something a friend of mine said a few weeks back.  I'd asked him if the words of Jesus weren't of prime importance compared to all other New Testament scripture.  He'd answered emphatically "no," because "the whole New Testament was dictated by God and was thus all equally important."

Sadly, with my friend, I have to disagree.

The fact is that The New Testament wasn't a well solidified and widely used set of texts until centuries after Jesus' death.  In the first few centuries, Christians produced an abundance of Christian literature.  Much of that literature is universally accepted as having been forged or written pseudepigraphically.  All of the copy was handwritten copies of handwritten copies.  The scriptures the first Christians used varied from locale to locale, and were far more numerous than the books of the New Testament canon.  The New Testament was selected from a large, varied, and historically dubious pool of texts.

All of the books of the New Testament were written by men, and none of them were written by men who actually knew Jesus Christ personally.

Today, we're going to continue our introductory study of New Testament apocrypha with some significant alternative ancient epistles and acts of the apostles.  We will also read the second Beatitude.  Forgive me if I am brief today.  Work has still been hectic, so my writing time continues to be compromised.

Enjoy.
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What Did Origen Leave Out (If Rufinus Can Be Trusted)

Part II

As we've said already, it is possible that Origen of Alexandria was the first man to ever write down what we know as the 27-book list of the New Testament canon.  Origen had been a Christian scholar since youth, was imprisoned for his faith, and came to be known as a Church Father.  It is rumored through history that Origen had had himself surgically castrated for the sake of holiness.  He was in interesting character.  Much scholarship about early Christianity is owed directly to Origen.

Last time, we reviewed alternative gospels that would have been available to Origen around 250 AD, the approximate year he would have written his 27-book list.  Today, we're going to highlight a few of the alternative epistles and acts of the apostles that would have been available to Origen in his study in Alexandria.

First, the epistles, or "letters."

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Epistles

The Epistle of Barnabas, written between 70 and 132 AD

The Epistle of Barnabas is a letter preserved from ancient times that was often attributed to Barnabas, the travelling companion of Luke.  Modern scholars do not believe that this epistle was written by Luke's Barnabas, the man who accompanied him to Cyprus and elsewhere, but think that it could have been written by another unknown Barnabas.

The text contains a treatise on the Old Testament as harbinger of Christ.  It negates significant swaths of Jewish tradition in its interpretation of the Old Testament through Christian eyes.  Bible scholar Bart D. Ehrman said that the Epistle of Barnabas is "more anti-Jewish than anything that did make it into the New Testament."  The last few chapters of the epistle are an explanation of the "Two-Ways," which was a kind of teaching tool for people who were becoming Christian.  The Two-Ways material lays out Christian behavioral codes, for example:

19:3 Thou shalt not exalt thyself, but shalt be lowly minded in all
things. Thou shalt not assume glory to thyself. Thou shalt not
entertain a wicked design against thy neighbor; thou shalt not admit
boldness into thy soul.

The humility prescribed here is attractive.

The First Epistle of Clement, written in the late 1st century

The First Epistle of Clement is one of the oldest known Christian texts that isn't in the New Testament canon.  It is traditionally attributed to a man named Clement of Rome, whom the Catholic Church claims was a Pope.  Monarchical bishoprics didn't exist at that time yet, though, which makes Clement's Popehood impossible.

The Epistle was written to the church community in Corinth in response to their having recently deposed some of their church elders from their positions of authority.  The letter implores the community to restore the leaders to their positions of power.

This epistle was read aloud in Corinth from time to time for perhaps centuries, but was then lost to history for a period before its rediscovery in the 17th century.

The Epistle to Seneca the Younger, written in the 4th century

The Epistle to Secenca the Younger is a series of correspondence between the Apostle Paul and the ancient Roman stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca.  The body of work, in total, contains eight letters from Seneca and six replies from Paul.  For centuries, they were accepted as legitimate, but today they are universally regarded to be forgeries.

Here is an example of one of the letters that this pseudo-Seneca wrote to this pseudo-Paul:

I know that you are not so much disturbed on your own account by my letter to you on the showing of your letters to Caesar, as by the nature of things, which so calls away the minds of men from all right learning and conduct -so that I am not surprised, for I have learnt this for certain by many examples. Let us then act differently, and if in the past anything has been done carelessly, you will pardon it. I have sent you a book on elegance of expression (store of words). Farewell, dearest Paul.

Modern Bible scholars will point out the relative "poverty of thought and style" in this text, compared to Paul and Seneca's actual writings.  While this one wouldn't have been sitting on Origen's bookshelf in 250 AD, I still thought its mention here necessary, because I like the stoics.

The Letter to the Smyrnaeans*, written c. 107 AD

Unlike the letters between Paul and Seneca, The Letter to the Smyrnaeans very well could have been on Origen's bookshelf.  Written by Ignatius of Antioch, The Letter to the Smyrnaeans is a polemic against docetism, which had apparently crept up in Smyrna.  Remember, docetism is the belief that Christ did not suffer or die in a real physical way.  The docetic Jesus appears to suffer and die, but does neither.

The Letter to the Smyrnaeans is special in that it is the first recorded use of the term "Catholic Church" that historians know of.  Check out the paragraph in question:

See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as you would the apostles; and reverence the deacons, as being the institution of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid.

Also of interest here is the mention of love-feasts, which are also known as agape-feasts, which are just a large communal meal among Christians.  Given its historicity and interesting subject matter, we will certainly be studying The Letter to the Smyrnaeans in more depth at a later date.

The Letter to the Trallians, written in the early 2nd century

The Letter to the Trallians is another letter by Ignatius of Antioch, this time addressed to the church in Tralles, in what is modern Turkey.  Interesting about the letter is that it was written during the last period of Ignatius' life, when he was in custody of the Roman authorities and en route to Rome to be executed by being fed alive to hungry lions.  Interesting about him being fed to the lions is that Ignatius himself had predicted that he would be thrown to the beasts.

The Trallians had sent their bishop to see and comfort Ignatius on his journey to death, and the letter was written back to the community by Ignatius in thanks.

Here, from the letter, Ignatius speaks on his personal humility:

I have great knowledge in God, but I restrain myself, lest, I should perish through boasting. For now it is needful for me to be the more fearful; and not give heed to those that puff me up. For they that speak to me [in the way of commendation] scourge me. For I do indeed desire to suffer, but I know not if I be worthy to do so. For this longing, though it is not manifest to many, all the more vehemently assails me. I therefore have need of meekness, by which the prince of this world is brought to nought.

Acts of the Apostles

Acts of Andrew, written in the mid 2nd century

The Acts of Andrew is the earliest writing we have about the acts and miracles of the Apostle Andrew.  The text is noted for its serene tone, and for its lack of awareness of any kind of heterodoxy within the larger church.

The Acts of Andrew describes incredible, over-the-top miracles being worked, such as the calming of storms, survival amongst hungry predator animals, and defeating entire armies single-handedly.

The Acts of Andrew also contain an amount of moralizing, for instance when Andrew tells a woman that her illegitimate child will be "born dead:"

A woman, Calliopa, married to a murderer, had an illegitimate child and suffered in travail. She told her sister to call on Diana for help; when she did so the devil appeared to her at night and said: 'Why do you trouble me with vain prayers? Go to Andrew in Achaia.' She came, and he accompanied her to Corinth, Lesbius with him. Andrew said to Calliopa: 'You deserve to suffer for your evil life: but believe in Christ, and you will be relieved, but the child will be born dead.' And so it was.

Woah.

While being crucified at the end of the text, Andrew is miraculously still able to give three days worth of sermons from the cross before expiring.

Acts of Paul and Thecla, written in the mid 2nd century

The Acts of Paul and Thecla is noteworthy because of its treatment of women.  In the Acts of Paul and Thecla, a young virgin hears Paul preaching about celibacy and salvation and determines to be celibate.  This upsets her fiance and mother, who conspire to have Paul scourged and kicked out of town, while the girl is to be burned alive.  In the text, God comes down with a storm to save the girl from being burned.

Paul and Thecla escape and travel off together.  Along the way, they meet a man who wants to buy Thecla.  Paul says he doesn't know the girl, and the man tries to take her by force.  She is arrested for assaulting the man, and sentenced to death.  The women of the city protest as Thecla is stripped naked and thrown to the lions.  When the beasts attack, however, a particular lioness defends Thecla, and then a series of miracles see her the rest of the way through the ordeal.  Eventually, the women of the city rescue Thecla and she is returned to Paul.

This text has been derided often over the centuries for its positive take on womanhood.

Acts of Peter, written in the mid 2nd century

The Acts of Peter, regarding the actions and miracles of St. Peter after the time of Jesus, is one of the earliest acts of the apostles texts.

There is a tradition that Peter, when he was crucified in Rome, requested to be crucified upside down, because he did not feel worthy to be crucified the same as Jesus had been.  The executioners are said to have obliged.  The very first mention historians have of this tradition is found here in The Acts of Peter.

The Acts of Peter is also notable for a sort of "miracle contest" between Peter and a man named Simon Magus, described as an "angel of Satan."  Peter and Magus both basically claim that the other is performing magic to trick their respective followers, and they decide on a miracle contest.  At the culmination of the contest, Simon Magus makes himself levitate into the air in the town forum.  Peter appeals to God that the levitation be interrupted.  Sure enough, Magus falls to the ground and breaks his leg in three places.  The crowd is convinced that he is a trickster-magician, and they stone him.

Later on, Magus dies, apparently while undergoing an ancient form of surgery to fix the leg.  We will revisit this text for certain.

Acts of John, written primarily in the 2nd century

The Acts of John is a series of texts, not all of which were originally authored at the same time or by the same person, regarding the actions and miracles of John the Apostle after Jesus' time. Dating is difficult, because most of our extant manuscripts are far older than the originals they were based on.

In the Acts of John, John raises an old man from the dead. The passage is somewhat humorous in that the old man doesn't seem to appreciate having been risen from the dead, on account of his son, who had made his life difficult. Read for yourself:

...he came near to the old man and said: My Lord will not be weak to spread out his kind pity and his condescending mercy even unto thee: rise up therefore and give glory to God for the work that is come to pass at this moment. And the old man said: I arise, Lord. And he rose and sat up and said: I was released from a terrible life and had to bear the insults of my son, dreadful and many, and his want of natural affection, and to what end hast thou called me back, O man of the living God? (And John answered him: If) thou art raised only for the same end, it were better for thee to die; but raise thyself unto better things. And he took him and led him into the city, preaching unto him the grace of God, so that before he entered the gate the old man believed.

"To what end hast thou called me back?" he asks.

Funniest thing to say after being resurrected.

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The list of known New Testament apocrypha is much longer than what we have covered in two brief sessions here.  This accounting of some of the apocrypha has been made with the goal of showing that points-of-view about Jesus, Christian cosmology, and the lives of Jesus' apostles were myriad and varied by the second century, and would have been even more so in 250 AD when the very first 27-book list of the New Testament may have been composed.

Most of the apocrypha is impossible to trace back to its original author, just like most of the canon.

Ultimately, we can know painfully little about why, exactly, some material became canon and some did not.  We do know that all of the books of the New Testament were traditionally attributed to Apostles, so "apostolic origin" is likely one of the criteria that was used.  It is also true that a text would have been more likely to be elected canon if it were widely accepted by various church communities; controversial texts of the time would have been excluded.  The texts that are included are also all very early when compared to even the earliest apocrypha, so ancient textual dating may have also been a criterion.

Not much else is known about the canon criteria.  What we do know for certain is that the canon was selected by humans from texts written by humans.  

For those of us seeking the true Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, all of the ancient texts on Jesus, apocryphal or not, bear some study.  We must, however, remain willing to logically qualify all of these texts, taking nothing for granted as we search for the morality of the historical Jesus.

We will begin to circle back to our original point, which is that the Synoptic Gospels are the most important texts we have about Jesus' life and morality, and take primacy over all other Christian texts.  To get there, we first need to thoroughly understand the fact that early Christian texts, even those found in the New Testament canon, contradict one another in many ways.  Next time, we will showcase some of the more blatant contradictions we find in the New Testament.

For now, let's get back to our gospel reading.

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Matthew 5:4

4 Blessed are they who mourn,

for they will be comforted.

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Recall that last time we read the first Beatitude, of which there are eight.  The Beatitudes are a series of blessings that Jesus offers to his followers at the very outset of his Galilean ministry.

The blessings given here by Jesus are specific.  In the First Beatitude, Jesus blesses the poor.  In blessing the poor, he excludes the wealthy.  The Beatitudes seem sometimes to be Jesus' way of letting the people know which among them are living righteously, and which are living outside of righteousness.

I imagine that perhaps he offers these blessings in response to the nagging questioning of his followers.  Perhaps, convinced of his wisdom or holiness, the people appealed to Jesus: "tell us, sir, who among us is most righteous?"  We certainly see his apostles behaving in a similar way later on.  Perhaps thus, Jesus was prompted to sit down and list these blessings.

He has told the people that the poor are blessed, and he has excluded the wealthy from blessing.  Now, he tells the people that those who mourn are blessed, for they will be comforted.  Those who do not mourn are excluded from this blessing.  The meaning of this blessing is somewhat more elusive than that of the first.

Can one be in constant mourning?  When we consider the mortality rate of babies, mothers, and humans in general in the first century, it is possible that many people did spend most of their lives in constant mourning.  Could it be, then, that when Jesus looked at his followers and saw how many of them were currently bereft of loved ones, he offered them this second beatitude as a situational comfort? 

Perhaps Jesus is blessing the naturally somber ones among humanity, those who carry a sober melancholy with them at all times, as if they are in constant mourning for the world itself.

Like much of the gospel, it is easier here to know what Jesus is not saying than what he is saying.  For now, we'll just count "mourning" in the "positive" column.

We will continue taking these at a slow pace next time.  Until then, happy living to you.  Thank you for reading.

Love 

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* That's fun to say for some reason.  Smyrnaeans.  Smyrnaeans.
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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 5:1 through Matthew 5:3

Welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.

If this is your first time here, you ought to orient yourself by use of the Introduction, which can be found here.

Last week, following the work of Bible scholar Michael J. Kruger, we considered the "Homilies on Joshua," a writing by Origen of Alexandria, a Church Father.  Within the first couple of paragraphs of the Homilies on Joshua, we found what appeared to be a complete list of the 27 books of the New Testament.  We argued that this list constituted the first known reference to the New Testament canon.

It is, in fact, a matter of contention whether the 27-book list we find in Origen's Homilies was actually written by Origen, or rather was an addition by the man who originally translated Origen's works into Latin from Greek, Tyrannius Rufinus.  Theologians and scholars have been suspicious of the fidelity of Rufinus' translations almost since the day they were first published.  He was notorious for adding, redacting or amending material as he translated.  Unfortunately, we have no older copies of much Origen's work than the Latin translations of Rufinus, so much of Origen's work is only known to us through the cloudy lens of Rufinus.

For our purposes, this is all a matter of dating.  Origen might have had the 27-book list first, around 250 AD.  If Rufinus was the actual source of this list, however, then we might look at Athanasius of Alexandria's "39th Festal Letter," written in 367 AD, as our source of the first 27-book list.

The majority of scholars like the 367 AD date for the original conception of the canon.  Kruger argues that we can trust Rufinus in this case.  Assuming Kruger is correct, and Origen composed the first familiar New Testament book list in or around 250, our next question is: "what other Christian texts were in circulation at the time?"  Put another way: "What did Origen leave off of his book list?"

Today, we'll take a whirlwind tour through some, but certainly not all, of the texts that fall into this category.  After that, we'll learn what beatitudes are, and read the first one.

Enjoy.

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What Did Origen Leave Out (If Rufinus Can Be Trusted)
Part I

At the time that Origen of Alexandria wrote his Homilies on Joshua, which contain perhaps the first written list of the books of our New Testament, many many Christian documents were circulating around the mediterranean for liturgical use.  Collections of texts would vary from church to church, such that churches in Rome were reading from a different group of texts than churches in Antioch, which were again using different texts than the churches in Jerusalem.  There was no agreed upon "New Testament canon" yet.

When the canon was set, the texts that did not become part of our New Testament would be relegated to the dustbin of "apocrypha."  They did not disappear instantly, but eventually they faded deep into obscurity as canon and liturgy became universally regimented.

Sadly, Origen left us no way of knowing exactly what criteria he used to separate the canonical texts from the apocrypha.  The only way to discern this in any way is to become familiar with exactly what was left out of the canon, and compare that body of work with what we know today as canon.

Modern American Christians seem to think of the New Testament as a monolithic and infinitely old thing.  They see The Bible as "the word of God," as it were - as if the King James version had fallen from the sky, etched in eternal stone, signed "God."  Most modern American Christians have not considered the implications of the truth that, maybe in 250, or maybe in 367, some human sat down and decided what was "canon," which became the "word" of their God.

Most American Christians haven't considered the implications of the facts that the four gospels were chosen from a longer list of gospels, that the epistles were chosen from a longer list of epistles, or that the Acts of the Apostles was selected from a much larger body of similar such works.

We've had the opportunity to look at some Old Testament Apocrypha, such as The Book of Enoch.  Today, we'll familiarize ourselves with some New Testament Apocrypha.  The following texts would, theoretically, have been available to Origen at the time he composed the Homilies on Joshua.  We will break this into sections across multiple installments.  Today, we'll cover apocryphal gospels.  Let's get started, shall we?

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Gospels

The Infancy Gospel of James, written c. 145 AD

Among the texts that would have been available to Origen in Alexandria in the third century are what are known as Infancy Gospels.  Infancy Gospels are stories of Jesus that extend back in time, focusing on the childhood of Jesus, or, as in this case, the childhood of Mary.

The Infancy Gospel of James is pseudepigraphically written in the name of Jesus' brother James, but scholarly dating of the writing makes this authorship impossible.

The Infancy Gospel of James concerns the miraculous birth of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  According to this text, the birth was miraculous in that Anna, Mary's mother, was infertile when she became pregnant.  The narrative follows Mary up to the birth of Jesus.  It is unique in that few other texts concern themselves so heavily with Mary.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, written c. 100 AD

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas contains various stories about Jesus' childhood years.  The stories strike me as odd and funny.  For instance, in this gospel, we see a boy Jesus using his power to murder other children.  Furthermore, when the parents of one of his victims complain, he strikes them both blind.  The child-Jesus presented in this ancient text does not seem to know, at first, how to reign in his potency.

Later in the narrative, Jesus seems to use his powers for better things, such as reversing his previous murders and blindings.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas shows us how pervasive the Superhero-Jesus paradigm was, even in the earliest forms of Christianity.  It makes some sense that Origen did not include this bizarre accounting in his canon list.

The Gospel of Marcion, written c. 100 - 150 AD

The Gospel of Marcion is basically an alternate version of the Gospel of Luke.  Most scholars think that The Gospel of Marcion was The Gospel of Luke as redacted by Marcion of Sinope during the second century.  A small group of scholars think that The Gospel of Marcion predated, and was actually a source for, Luke.  We will certainly find time to investigate both sides of this argument in detail at a later date.  For our purposes now, The Gospel of Marcion is just another codex on Origen's bookshelf.

The Gospel of Basilides, written c. 140 AD

The Gospel of Basilides was a version of the gospel used by Basilides, a Gnostic Alexandrian who taught in the early second century.  Basilides taught a docetic version of the Passion of Christ, which meant that his version of Jesus didn't suffer and die, although it was made to appear to others as though he had.

Although the text does not survive today, we know from other sources some of what Basilides wrote.  He wrote that at the time of the crucifixion, Jesus supernaturally switched forms with Simon of Cyrene, so that the authorities thought they were executing Jesus, but were actually executing Simon.  Apparently, according to Basilide's gospel, Jesus stood in the crowd looking like Simon and laughing at the ignorance of the authorities.

Why Jesus would stand laughing while someone got executed in his own stead is beyond my conception.  I believe it was also beyond Origen's imagination, who is recorded to have known of and rejected the Gospel of Basilides.

The Gospel of Thomas, written between 50 and 250 AD, depending on who you ask

The Gospel of Thomas is the apocryphal gospel modern American Christians are most likely to have heard of.

The Gospel of Thomas is what is known as a "sayings" gospel.  It is called a "sayings" gospel because it doesn't offer a narrative arc, the way the four canonical gospels do.  Rather, it merely lists things Jesus said, one after another.  There is a single expository sentence:

"These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down."  

Immediately after this, we get our first saying:

"And he said, "Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death." 

The Gospel of Thomas is sometimes argued to have predated Mark, the oldest canonical gospel.  It was certainly composed and in circulation by the time Origen wrote his 27-book list in 250.  We know for a fact that Origen knew of this text, as he mentions it multiple times in other writings.

We will spend substantial time with this text in the future.

The Gospel of Peter, written c. 100 - 150 AD

The Gospel of Peter was an early pseudepigraphical Christian writing that claimed to be written by Simon-Peter, Jesus' companion.  Bible scholar Bart Ehrman dates the Gospel of Peter to the first half of the second century.

The Gospel of Peter is notable in that it fairly explicitly absolves Pontius Pilate of any wrongdoing in the Good Friday affair, and places all the blame for Jesus' death on Herod Antipas, heir to Herod the Great.

The Gospel of Peter is also notable for its treatment of the Resurrection.  In The Gospel according to Peter, after Jesus' death, the scribes and Pharisees become worried that Jesus' disciples will try to steal his body and incite riots.  They ask the authorities for military help in guarding the tomb of Jesus for three days to ensure against this.  With a small centurion guard, the elders, scribes, Pharisees and others go out to watch the tomb.  During the night, two men appear from heaven and approach the tomb.  The stone that sealed the tomb rolls itself away, and the two men enter the depth.

The witnesses are amazed at this and talk amongst themselves.  Suddenly, the two men appear coming out of the tomb, supporting another man.  Behind them follows a cross, which moves on its own.  From heaven comes a question: "“Hast thou preached to them that are sleeping?”

The answer comes not from the third human figure, Jesus, but from the cross itself. "Yea," it replies.

That's right.  A self-propelled talking crucifix.

The talking cross presented in The Gospel of Peter is particularly unique to Christian literature.

The Diatessaron, written c. 160 AD

The Diatessaron is what is known as a "gospel harmony," or a work meant to harmonize multiple gospels (in this case, the canonical Matt, Mark, Luke and John) into one coherent text.  Gospel harmonies have existed basically since the gospels have existed, and people have continued to produce them over the centuries.

The Diatessaron is perhaps the most well known of the ancient gospel harmonies, and was written by a man named Tatian, who was an ascetic Assyrian Christian living in the second century.  Tatian's method for creating The Diatessaron seems to have been pretty simple: if he thought the material repeated itself, he cut it out.  Otherwise, he left it in pretty much without regard for what it would do to the story arc.  In order to fit everything together, the narrative got rearranged significantly.  About 72% of the four gospels remain in the complete Diatessaron.  Scholars debate whether or not Tatian did the original work in his native Syriac or in Greek, as only translations remain.

The Diatessaron, like many of these texts, will be an object of frequent study for us over the next few years.

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This list of apocryphal gospels available in 250 AD is by no means exhaustive.  We know of more.  It is also certain that there were gospels circulating at the time Origen was writing that do not survive.  We understand, then, that there were an abundance of versions of the story of Jesus in 250 when Origen selected four for his list.

Next time, we'll learn that, just as there were other gospels, there were other "Acts of the Apostles" available to third century Alexandrians.  "Acts of the Apostles" was apparently as much a genre as it was a title for any particular text.  We'll see, too, that Epistles abounded in the ancient world in numbers far greater than what we now have in our canon.

For now, let's get back to our gospel reading.

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Matthew 5:1 through Matthew 5:3

1 When he saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him. 

2 He began to teach them, saying:

3“Blessed are the poor in spirit,

   for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

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Remember that last time, Jesus was kicking off his Galilean Ministry with a kind of goodwill miracle tour around the countryside of Galilee.  I'll reiterate that we at The Moral Vision believe that the miracles were exaggerated accounts, and that rather than performing literal miracles, Jesus simply ventured about preaching a message of hope.  He helped people through real-world problems with inspired real-world solutions, and offered solace in the form of deep compassion to the oppressed and the downtrodden.  

If you believe he was actually "healing every kind of disease" by some supernatural power, that's fine too.  I say "that's fine" because, whether or not we believe in miracles, the moral prescriptions of Jesus Christ remain steadfastly the same.  The morality of Jesus is not contingent upon belief in the supernatural.

Today is a landmark day for us, though, because today, after all this time, we reach our first packet of data about Jesus Christ's Moral Vision.  Today, we witness the beginning of "The Sermon on the Mount!"

The Sermon on the Mount is the longest continuous teaching of Jesus in The New Testament.  The Sermon on the Mount is unique to Matthew among the canonical gospels.  Individual teachings from the Sermon on the Mount appear scattered throughout Luke, particularly in Luke's "Sermon on the Plain."  The Sermon on the Mount is probably the richest vein of data we will find for our specific purpose throughout this entire study.  We will ruminate on it over and over again.

At the outset of chapter five, we see that Jesus' ministry is going well.  It's going so well that Jesus witnesses "crowds" and decides to retreat to a mountain.  The crowds follow him.  The exact location of the sermon is not known for certain, but, for centuries now, a mountain just northwest of Capernaum has been venerated as the spot.  It is now known as the Mount of Beatitudes, and is the site of a Franciscan Chapel.

So... what is a "beatitude," you may ask?

The word "beatitude" comes from the Latin "beatus" meaning "blessed."  For our purposes, then, beatitude means "a great blessing."  The Beatitudes are a series of eight "great blessings" that Jesus bestows upon, or reveals to, his followers at the beginning of The Sermon on the Mount.  The Beatitudes begin here in Matthew 5:3, and we are going to take them slowly, as they all constitute critical data for us.

The First Beatitude reads: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

The Beatitudes all take this "blessed is... for..." format.  Jesus is telling us who he esteems as righteous, and what he believes life will yield for those righteous ones.  Here, Jesus starts out telling us that the poor are blessed, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

So, the very first morsel of moral data we get from Jesus in The Bible is that poor people are blessed in spirit, and are the rightful owners of the kingdom of heaven.

Is that not a powerful statement?  Does that not give us some sense of where this Galilean Ministry might be heading?  The very first actionable moral precept to come out of Jesus' mouth in the whole Bible is, basically, "poor people are more worthy of good or reward than their wealthier contemporaries."

Now we're finally in the thick of it.  Hallelujah.

Join us next time for another beatitude, and more New Testament Apocrypha!

Thank you so much for reading.  Please share this writing.

Love.

-------------------------
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 4:23 through Matthew 4:25

Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, your guide to the Gospels of Jesus.  If you'd like to start from the beginning, which is recommended for advanced users, you can find the Introduction here.

For a second time since the outset of this project, I have failed to meet the pacing requirements that I've set for myself here.  I apologize for not posting anything last week.  I worked Saturday and Sunday, making for a thirteen day work week.  I normally get my writing done on the weekend...

... I shouldn't make excuses though.  I'll work to build a buffer system into my posting so that there will be fewer subsequent interruptions.  Again, my apologies.

Anywho...

If you'll recall, last time we considered the fact that many American Christians alive today believe that the whole Bible is the literal word of God.  This led us to three questions regarding the New Testament Canon.  Those questions were:

- Who set the canon, and why was the canon not set until, at the very earliest, two hundred years after the death of Christ? 

- There were numerous other Christian texts in wide circulation at the time, many bearing striking resemblances to the the New Testament we know today.  Did the person who set the canon have some method of categorization that allowed him to determine with certainty which of the early Christian texts were authentically "the word of God" and which were not?  If so, what were the criteria he used?

- Why do God's words in The New Testament contradict one another? 

Today, we'll start out on these questions slowly by simply meeting a man named Origen.

Origen of Alexandria

In 185 or 186 AD was born a boy called Origen, whose father, Leonides of Alexandria, laborored as a professor and a openly devout Christian.  Origen was born in Alexandria, Egypt, which had once been known the Greco-Roman-world over as the premier educational and scholarly center, containing within its bounds the famed Library of Alexandria.  You might recall the events of 48 BC, when Julius Caesar inadvertently set fire to the city of Alexandria as part of a tactic against Ptolemy XIII, in the aftermath of Ptolemy's assassination of Caesar's "friend" Pompey.  The famous ancient historian Livy tells us that this fire destroyed some 40,000 scrolls in the Library of Alexandria.

Since perhaps around the time of Caesar's fires, Alexandria's fame for being the world's intellectual center had waned.  However, at the time of Origen's birth there, the city would still have been host to a relatively rich scholastic community.

We know little for certain about Origen's early life, but scholars find it likely that his father schooled him well in reading, writing, philosophy, and Christian theology as it then existed.  Leonides would make the young Origen memorize lengthy passages of scripture as part of his studies.

In 202, when Origen was about sixteen, the Emperor Septimius Severus ordered the killing of openly practicing Christians, and Origen's father was arrested.  The story goes that Origen wanted to be captured and martyred with his father, and set his mind to do just that.  To prevent him, Origen's mother hid all of his clothes so that he was totally naked with nothing to cover himself.  Origen would not go outside the home naked, and so was not able to join his father in death.

The Roman authorities executed Origen's father by beheading, and confiscated his estate.  Origen was left the patriarch of a destitute family consisting of his eight brothers and sisters and his mother.  Thankfully, Origen was given a job as a catechist at the Catechetical School of Alexandria.  Origen's spiritual life thrived there, as he began to live more ascetically, walking barefoot everywhere and only allowing himself to own one cloak.  He didn't eat meat and didn't drink alcohol, and he would fast for extended periods of time.  He spent his days teaching, studying, and writing.

Eusebius writes that Origen was one of many Christian men at that time who had purposely had himself castrated as a direct result of his reading of Matthew 19:12, wherein Jesus says:

12 "Some are incapable of marriage because they were born so; some, because they were made so by others; some, because they have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Whoever can accept this ought to accept it.”

"Incapable of marriage" is a nicer way of translating from the original Greek, "eunouchoi," which actually means "eunuch."  The gospels Origen was familiar with were almost certainly explicit in their use of the word "eunuch" here.

Although Origen was aware of the practice of self-castration among his early Christian brethren, it seems rather unlikely that the story of him castrating himself is true, especially when we see him railing against the practice from works written in his later life.

After some conflicts with Demetrius, the Bishop of Alexandria, Origen took up a permanent residence in Caesarea in Palestine.  There, he was ordained a priest and taught publicly, much to Demetrius' chagrin.  Origen continued to write prolifically.  At various times, he had to go into hiding, as persecutions of Christians became more common in the Roman Empire.

In 250, the Emperor Decius issued a decree for intense persecution against Christians, believing that they had been the cause of a recent devastating plague.  Origen was not able to find adequate hiding during this period, and was imprisoned and tortured for two years.  Upon his release from prison, he lived another year and then died in 253 AD, presumably weakened by the years of torture.

Origen is considered a "Church Father," putting him in rank among Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, and Ignatius of Antioch.  His writings are among the most important ancient Christian theological texts, and include his "On First Principles," "Contra Celsum," and the ever influential "Hexapla."

According to Professor Michael J. Kruger of the Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, NC, Origen should be credited as perhaps the very first to write down the twenty-seven book list that we now know as The New Testament Canon.  He quotes thusly from a work of Origen's called the "Homilae on Josuam":

But when our Lord Jesus Christ comes, whose arrival that prior son of Nun designated, he sends priests, his apostles, bearing “trumpets hammered thin,” the magnificent and heavenly instruction of proclamation. Matthew first sounded the priestly trumpet in his Gospel; Mark also; Luke and John each played their own priestly trumpets. Even Peter cries out with trumpets in two of his epistles; also James and Jude. In addition, John also sounds the trumpet through his epistles [and Revelation], and Luke, as he describes the Acts of the Apostles. And now that last one comes, the one who said, “I think God displays us apostles last,” and in fourteen of his epistles, thundering with trumpets, he casts down the walls of Jericho and all the devices of idolatry and dogmas of philosophers, all the way to the foundations.

This list, written by Origen perhaps around 250 AD, obviously matches with what we know today as the twenty-seven book canon.

This list in "Homilae on Josuam" is apparently the oldest extant twenty-seven book list.  We can imagine that this list predated Origen's record of it, but since we have no evidence for that, we must say the New Testament Canon did not exist in its modern form before around 250 AD.  For centuries after 250, in fact, we still see many different lists and arrangements of the Christian scripture.  It certainly wouldn't be until much later that the entire Christian world came to a consensus on Origen's list.

Jesus Christ died in 30 or 33 AD.  At the very minimum, it was between two and three centuries before The New Testament Canon began to take its familiar form.

Modern Christians frequently think of the Bible as the literal word of God, and as the salvation of the world.  Modern Christians are, by and large, unaware of Origen, or his apparent contribution as God's editor and compiler.

Next time, now that we've met Origen, we will look at the various Christian texts that would have been available to a man like Origen in those days, giving us a sense not only for what is in the canon, but what was left out.  The modern Christian may be surprised to know about the diversity of literature that existed in the early church.

For now, though, we'll get back to our gospel reading.

------------------------------

Matthew 4:23 through Matthew 4:25

23 He went around all of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and curing every disease and illness among the people. 

24 His fame spread to all of Syria, and they brought to him all who were sick with various diseases and racked with pain, those who were possessed, lunatics, and paralytics, and he cured them. 

25 And great crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, and Judea, and from beyond the Jordan followed him.

------------------------------

There is quite a bit going on here in these three verses.

First, we should pay attention to where Jesus is teaching from here at the outset of his ministry.  He teaches from local synagogues.  Remember: he is worshipping with Jews, preaching to Jews, and considers himself completely Jewish.  Nowhere is this more clear than in the Gospel of Shoehorn Matthew.

While Jesus teaches, he is said to be "curing."  He is capable of curing "every disease and illness among the people."  Since our official stance here at The Moral Vision is that we do not believe in the supernatural, it is our understanding that Christ was not actually curing physical diseases.  He was more likely demonstrating social and philosophical prowess by effectively counseling people with psychological infirmities or situational pains, while generally inspiring a chronically depressed people with his hopeful words about a coming Kingdom of God.

It is imperative to understand that the validity of Jesus' reputation as a literal miracle worker will not have any bearing on his instruction to humanity, which he will very soon lay out for us in his Sermon on the Mount.  The moral vision of Jesus and its applicability to human life are the exact same whether you believe he could give sight to the blind or not.  This point is critical, and we will make it again and again as we move forward.

As this reading finishes itself out, we are told that a following developed behind Jesus immediately, and that the following consisted of a diversity of people.  People from as far away as Syria hear of his abilities and travel to Galilee to avail themselves of his counsel.

Last time, I postulated that we might spend some time looking at other ancient cases of "miracle healing" to give these verses context.  I am going to issue a rain-check on that discussion.  I promise, we will revisit it.  For now, we'll retire of our commentary here in anticipation of next time, when we will continue to learn about the New Testament Canon's formation, and then find ourselves right in the middle of some of Jesus' richest philosophical thought.

I can not wait.

Please share this writing.

Love.

-------------------------
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 4:21 through Matthew 4:22

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

This is a study designed to methodically refine the voluminous extant data about Jesus Christ's teachings found in The Gospels of Christ to a simple and historically reliable moral code.  Here, we believe that to receive the benefit of Jesus' ministry in its truest sense, we must thoroughly understand the truest sense of his ministry.  This means studying, within literary context, all available accounts of Jesus' life, as well as working constantly to better understand the historical, political, religious, and social context of his life.

If you want to start over from the beginning so that you are all caught up, the Introduction can be found here.

Very soon, as I've already mentioned in giddy anticipation, we will be reading the words Jesus was recorded to have said during his "Sermon on the Mount."  The upcoming monologues, if we can find them historically plausible, will allow us to start building a picture of what Jesus really thought and said about the moral fabric of human life.  We will find out what he was really concerned about, insofar as it can be known.

I've encountered some folks who say that, to their Christian faith, the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospel are not of prime importance.  A friend of mine argued the other day that, since they were divinely inspired, the words of Paul are as important as the words of Jesus.  He argued that, since they were divinely inspired, the words of the Book of Revelation are as important as those of Jesus.

This raised all kinds of old and loud questions in my mind.  I don't like picking at people, so I don't ask questions like these in person often, and never without great tact.  I can share those questions freely with you, though.

Some questions that I have for anyone who believes that the whole Christian Bible Canon is "divinely inspired" and "the word of God" are:

- Who set the canon, and why was the canon not set until, at the very earliest, two hundred years after the death of Christ? 

- There were numerous other Christian texts in wide circulation at the time, many bearing striking resemblances to the the New Testament we know today.  Did the person who set the canon have some method of categorization that allowed him to determine with certainty which of the early Christian texts were authentically "the word of God" and which were not?  If so, what were the criteria he used?

- Why do God's words in The New Testament contradict one another? 

Other such questions abound.

I'm going to let these questions marinate for a session.  Next week, we will begin to attack them head-on in some fashion. 

Today, let's focus on our reading.  Cheers.

------------------------------

Matthew 4:21 through Matthew 4:22

21 He walked along from there and saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. He called them, 

22 and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.

------------------------------

Today, as we promised last week, Jesus continues recruiting the first disciples.  Recall that last week he recruited Peter and his brother from their fishing boats as he walked by the Sea of Galilee.  As he continues walking along the sea here in verse 21, he sees the "sons of Zebedee" mending their nets while sitting in a boat.  They are with their father, all three of them fishermen.  One can imagine the boat is very close to the shore here, perhaps not even floating in water.  The family would probably have been chattering away amongst themselves in Aramaic as Jesus, Peter and Andrew approached.

The nets they worked at mending might likely have been made of flaxseed cord or rope.  If the family was very well off, their boat might have been made of sturdy Cedar of Lebanon, the very same kind that held aloft great blocks of Aswan granite in the pyramids of Egypt.  If they were not well off, which is far more likely for a multi-generational group of fishermen, the boat could have been constructed with salvage wood from other boats, low quality local woods, or low quality woods available by trade.  These could have included pine, willow or jujube.  The boat would likely have had a bitumen pitch coating on the bottom to make it watertight.

The men were probably fishing for "musht," a species of tilapia found in the Sea of Galilee.  Alternatively, they could have fished for sardines or carp.  The men might have sold their catches at a local market where the fish would be bought to eat fresh or salted and treated for export.

This would have been their daily grind: pushing out into the lake to drag their nets about, hauling in what they could catch, mending their nets, fixing tiny leaks in their boat, and selling their product in town.

The event in today's reading is also attested in Mark 1:19.  Rather than being independent from Mark's account, Matthew likely got his accounting of the call of the disciples directly from Mark.

Both accounts have Jesus walking along and (presumably) seeing all three men.  In both accounts, however, he only calls to two of them.

The brothers Zebedee leave their father to work for Jesus.  This is perhaps the first in a series of familial abandonments or rejections on the behalf of Jesus mentioned in the Gospel.  As we will see, Jesus himself is said to have rejected his family (Mark 3:33), and to have been rejected by his family (Mark 3:21).

Why did Jesus only call the brothers and not the father?  We cannot know for sure.  I find it likely, if the incident happened at all, that Jesus called to all three of them, and that the elder of the three had insurmountable reservations about following a radical like Jesus, especially when he knew he had to wake up early the next day to fish again.  Early Christians conveying this story by mouth may not have liked the idea that Jesus offered discipleship to someone and was turned down, so they may have reworked the story so that the father Zebedee was never offered discipleship in the first place.

Either way, like Peter and Andrew before them, John and James "immediately" follow Jesus, which seems admirably obedient.

What must Jesus have said to these working men of the sea to inspire them to leave behind career and family without question?

I postulate that Jesus likely had a whole bunch to say to these men.  I postulate that he went to them proclaiming a message almost identical to that of John the Baptist's.  He went to them preaching repentance and a new radical moral philosophy or code.  He may also have carried a message of apocalypse to them, in that he might have approached them speaking about a near-to-come "end of the age."

The Gospel says that Jesus simply called to them, and they followed.  This doesn't seem very human to me.  I think that Jesus had some kind of detailed sales-pitch that isn't recorded here, and I think it must have been an extremely convincing one.

Either way, John and James find Christ's words, be they many or few, amicable, and decide to follow.

Next time, we'll be in Miracle Town, as the narrative of Matthew will show Jesus curing illnesses and diseases of all kinds.  For historical context, we might then look at what the ancient texts have to say about medicine in first-century Palestine.  It might behoove us to see how else people could be eased of their maladies in those days, if Jesus wasn't nearby.  It will behoove us to see that Jesus wasn't the only miracle worker on the block back then.

Tune in next time.  Thanks for reading.  Please share this writing.

Love.

-------------------------
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 4:18 through Matthew 4:20

Hello, friends, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.  This will be the most in depth gospel-study ever written by the time we are through with it.  If you're new here, you can acquaint yourself with this study by reading the Introduction, which can be found here.

Please note that we are developing an index of Christ's sayings as we move forward through the Gospel.  We are collecting certain data along with each saying that will allow us, one day, to peer into Christ's morality with a precision that has been (at least in recent times) unrivaled.  That index of sayings can be found here.

For the last six weeks, we spent a preposterous amount of time and effort to show the invalidity of the cosmology of Satan as a critical component of Jesus' moral teachings.  Going forward, at least for a while, I hope for there to be little more to say about that topic.  I appreciate the patience of those of you who stuck it through with me.

Today, we're going to talk a little more about the authorship of the Gospel, and then continue our reading of The Gospel According to Matthew.

Salud.

---------------------------------------------

A Brief Overview of the Authorships of the Gospels of Christ

When they're growing up, most American Christians today are taught (if they're taught anything about them at all) that the four gospels were written by the persons named in their titles; that The Gospel According to Matthew was written by a guy named Matthew; that The Gospel According to Mark was written by a guy named Mark, etc.  It is factually dishonest to teach people these ancient traditions.  Incorrect information about the nature and origin of the gospels has led to incorrect interpretations of the gospels.  Today, we will work to dispel some of these inaccuracies. 

What did the ancient Christians say about the authorship of these four books?

The ancient tradition holds that The Gospel According to Matthew was written by the Apostle Matthew, an eyewitness to the events of Jesus' life, who is mentioned in The Gospel as one of The Twelve.  The ancient tradition says that The Gospel According to Mark was written by John Mark, a figure occuring in The New Testament and sometimes described as "Peter's Interpreter."  The ancient tradition holds that The Gospel According to Luke was written by a certain Syrian from Antioch named Luke.  Finally, the ancient tradition says that The Gospel According to John was written by none other than John of Zebedee, an eyewitness to the events of Jesus' Galilean Ministry.

I hate to be the burster of bubbles, but none of that is likely correct.

Let's take this one at a time, in search of the actual authors.  Follow me.

The Gospel According to Matthew

Author - Anonymous

The Gospel According to Matthew, as we've mentioned, is anonymous.  There is no byline in the text, and the author of the text does not insert himself into the narrative at any juncture.  He never says "on summer evenings, me and Jesus used to wander out to the edge of town for prayer," or "I saw Jesus as they took him to be crucified."

The Gospel according to Matthew, far from being an original work, can actually be shown to be a combination of at least three different sources that existed prior to it.  Matthew is a combination of The Gospel According to Mark, the "Q-text," and what scholars call "M."  Recall that "Q" stands for the German "Quelle" meaning "Source," and indicates the source of work that Matt and Luke have in common that is not found in Mark.  "M" stands for "Matthew" and indicates written and oral traditions available to the author of Matthew but not reflected in the other two synoptics*.  

Matthew is a compilation, not a firsthand account.  If the author of Matthew had been Matthew of The Twelve, he wouldn't have needed to avail himself so heavily of Mark and Q.

The Gospel According to Mark

Author - Anonymous

The Gospel According to Mark, the oldest extant Gospel, is attributed in the ancient tradition to a gentleman named John Mark.  John Mark makes several appearances in The New Testament as a travelling companion of Paul and Barnabas, and as a subordinate of the Apostle Peter.  John Mark apparently never knew Jesus, but might have known people who knew Jesus.  To reiterate: the ancient tradition holds that Mark was not authored by an eyewitness.

It is not possible to say for sure who wrote Mark, as the text has no byline, so most modern scholars will simply tell you "we don't know who wrote Mark."

The Gospel According to Luke

Author - Anonymous

The Gospel According to Luke, as you may recall, is part-one of a two-part series that modern scholars call "Luke-Acts."  Part-two of Luke-Acts is The Acts of the Apostles, the first text to appear in The New Testament after the four Gospels.  Most scholars concur that the two texts are indeed of a common author.

Luke-Acts was ascribed, in the ancient tradition, to Luke, a physician and travelling companion of Paul.  This travelling companion is mentioned in a few instances in The New Testament, but it is hard to verify the character as an actual doctor, let alone the author of Luke-Acts.

The texts themselves are, in fact, anonymous, and most scholars will tell you "we aren't sure who wrote Luke-Acts."  What scholars will tell you is for sure is that Luke-Acts is not an eyewitness account, as evidenced by the prologue at the beginning of Luke, in which the author speaks of "those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning."  This means that two out of three of The Synoptic Gospels were understood in the ancient church to be non-eyewitness accounts.

The Gospel According to John

Author - Anonymous

The authorship of The Gospel According to John is perhaps one of the most important topics we will ever cover here at The Moral Vision.  There are a number of reasons for this, many of which will only become totally clear sometime in the future when our study has had time to mature.

When reading the Gospel straight through, The Gospel According to John feels like a sucker-punch after the three homogeneous Synoptics.  The tone of the writing, the style of the writing, and the cosmology conveyed by John are all markedly different than its Synoptic brothers.  Even the simple chronology of events is different in John.  In the Synoptic gospels, for instance, Jesus celebrates a Thursday Passover meal the night before his execution on Good Friday.  The Gospel According to John, however, indicates that the execution occurred the day before Passover.

We will write volumes about the incoherency between John and the other Gospels.  Today, as far as authorship is concerned, we will avail ourselves of the notation provided as an introduction to John in The New American Bible, Revised Edition.  The NAB notes the following about John:

Critical analysis makes it difficult to accept the idea that the gospel as it now stands was written by one person.  Chapter 21 seems to have been added after the gospel was completed; it exhibits a Greek style somewhat different from that of the rest of the work.  The prologue apparently contains an independent hymn, subsequently adapted to serve as a preface to the gospel.  Within the gospel itself there are also some inconsistencies, e.g., there are two endings of Jesus' discourse in the upper room (14:31; 18:1).  To solve these problems, scholars have proposed various rearrangements that would produce a smoother order.  However, most have come to the conclusion that the inconsistencies were probably produced by subsequent editing in which homogeneous materials were added to a shorter original. 

Other difficulties for any theory of eyewitness authorship of the gospel in its present form are presented by its highly developed theology and by certain elements of its literary style.

To be clear, this passage constitutes the Roman Catholic Church admitting that John was likely not an eyewitness account.

Ancient tradition said that John was written by John of Zebedee, an eyewitness to - and key figure of - the Galilean Ministry.  Ancient tradition ascribed the Epistles of John and the Book of Revelation to the same author.  There are many American Christians who still hold these ancient views today.  About the authorship of Revelation, the NAB has this to say:

The author of the book calls himself John, who because of his Christian faith has been exiled to the rocky island of Patmos, a Roman penal colony.  Although he never claims to be John the Apostle, whose name is attached to the fourth gospel**, he was so identified by several of the early church Fathers, including Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Hippolytus.  This identification, however, was denied by other Fathers, including Denis of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory Nazianzen, and John Chrysostom.  Indeed, vocabulary, grammar, and style make it doubtful that the book could have been put into its present form by the same person(s) responsible for the fourth gospel.

Scholars generally agree that The Gospel According to John was the last of the Gospels to find its present form, sometime between 90 and 110 AD.

So, what can we say about the Gospel, generally?

Each book of it arrives in its modern form anonymous.  Ancient attributions of these works have turned out to be questionable in every case.  None of the Gospels claim to be an eyewitness accounting of events, and modern scholarship indicates that ancient traditions attributing any of these books to eyewitnesses are incorrect.

So, we have no first-hand account of the life of Jesus Christ.  What we do have is four anonymously composed and compiled texts that sometimes disagree with one another.  Because they sometimes disagree, these texts must bear the maximum amount of literary scrutiny before they can be accepted as truly representing the teachings of Jesus.  And that, friends, is really the whole point of our broader endeavor.  Our study together constitutes this requisite scrutiny.

Now, let's get back to our Gospel.

------------------------------

Matthew 4:18 through Matthew 4:20

18 As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen. 

19 He said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” 

20 At once they left their nets and followed him.

------------------------------

You will tire of me saying "this is one of my favorite parts," but this is one of my favorite parts.

Jesus has just began his Galilean Ministry, and he needs to recruit some help.  He walks down to the shores of the Sea of Galilee and sees our man Peter (a.k.a. Simon, a.k.a. The Rock) fishing with his brother Andrew.  He calls out to them with Jesus Saying #6, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” 

I love the abruptness to this scene.  There's an economy of language to Jesus here that makes him seem powerful.  "Fishers of men" resonates in my head like a bell.  

I love that, without a word, the brothers leave their nets, or their careers, behind.  What could it have been about the personality of this man that other men would just abandon their trades and follow him?  This scene affords us a good opportunity for this kind of reflection.  One thing that is fairly constant throughout the Gospels is Jesus' charisma and ability to captivate others.  I like to imagine what someone would have to say, or how they might have to act, in order to convince me to abandon my nets the way these boys immediately did.  

This personality must have been a force.  Whoever he was, he must always have been the center of attention.  Instantly the most important guy in every room.

I love how obedient Simon and Andrew are here.  "At once" they followed him.  They don't argue or make any excuse, but are so motivated by Christ's personality that they simply obey his words instantly.

Great reading.

Next time, we will see this scene replayed for the recruitment of the brothers Zebedee, neither of which authored The Gospel According to John.  Rapidly, we approach Jesus' "Sermon on the Mount," which contains some of the richest data we have about Jesus' moral code.  Join us again, because we are finally getting to the good stuff!***

Please share this writing.

Love.

-------------------------
* The "Synoptic" Gospels are the first three: Matt, Mark and Luke.  "Synoptic" comes from the Greek "sunopsis" - literally "to see together."  This term is used to describe these Gospels because these Gospels share the same story arc, generally.  The term excludes The Gospel of John, because that Gospel is markedly different than the first three.

** Many Bible scholars call the gospels by their number, since we don't know who wrote any of them.  For them, "Matthew" is "the first gospel."  "Mark" is "the second gospel," and so forth.

*** Who am I kidding?  Ancient history is all good stuff.

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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 4:15 through Matthew 4:17

Hello, friends, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, the most in-depth Gospel study you'll ever read.  If this is your first time here, you might go back to the Introduction and start there.  If you're a repeat reader, I love you.

Today, we will finally finish our six-part series about the origins of the modern "Satan."

It's been a long six weeks, and I'm grateful to all of you for hanging in there with me.

Before we start the last leg of this study-within-a-study, I'd like to recap some of the most important points we've learned over the last few installments.  To review:

1 - Devils, demons, and snakey supernatural creatures of malevolence exist in some of the oldest written human literature known - literature that predates Jewish traditions by a wide margin.

2 - The Jewish scriptures use the word "satan" with an article in front of it - "the" or "a."  The word is not capitalized in the Jewish scripture as a proper-noun would be, because "satan" is not a name in the Jewish scripture.  "Satan," in the Jewish scripture, always means "adversary," "accuser," or, as in Job, "one of a council of divine beings who exist in heaven with God and who have no power or authority outside of God."

3 - We can't find a story in The Old Testament about Satan being a lead angel who was kicked out of heaven for the sin of pride and then forced to administer a torture realm called "hell."  This is because "Satan" and "hell" didn't exist to the Jews of the Biblical era.  The concept of hell, and of an angelic fall from heaven, began to emerge during the Intertestamental Period, especially in The Book of Enoch.

4 - The New Testament features thirty-some references to "the devil" and thirty-some references to a "capital-S" Satan.  The New Testament doesn't describe the creature, but rather assumes the reader's familiarity with this "Satan."  Nowhere in The New Testament are we given any background information about this creature.  Nowhere in The New Testament are we given the story of Satan as a lead angel who was kicked out of heaven for the sin of pride.  Thus we can say unequivocally that The Bible is not where modern Christians get their concept of Satan.

That's it.  Those are your "must-remembers" thus far.  And now, without further ado, Part VI of our study.

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

Part VI

The Development of the Devil since the First-Century

Recently, a friend and I were discussing the issue of suffering in the world in the context of a God that is all knowing, all loving, and all powerful.  In philosophy, this topic is known as "The Problem of Evil."  My friend said something to the effect that "we suffer and get sick and sin and experience the frailties of flesh not because of God, but purely because of Satan.*"  My friend was expressing a view that is prevalent in Americans today.  This prevalent understanding of the universe is intellectually lazy in every sense of the word, and generally served as the impetus for this six-part study.

The blaming of the suffering of the world on an extremely powerful, but not-quite-Godlike, scapegoat called Satan is a clear attempt to have one's cake and eat it, too.  Rather than address The Problem of Evil head on, the modern Christian has eroded his God's power by giving a large share of it to this "Satan," essentially turning his monotheism*** into a bitheism****, with the devil playing the role of God Number Two.

The devil that my friend and the multitudes of American Christians believe in is, according to them, responsible for all discomfort, conflict, illness, and evil in the world.  The Devil that Modern American Christians believe in is omnipresent and omniscient, and can literally ensnare and control humans who do not resist him through a living appeal to God.  

The devil that American Christians believe in is snakey, tailed, horned, and pitch-fork-bearing.  He is frequently thought to be red in color when manifested physically.  Modern artistic depictions of the devil are almost always cartoonish, but Christians still believe that this character is directly responsible for the prevailing winds of cultural history.

Ultimately, Satan has evolved into the modern Christian's excuse for his complete unwillingness to imitate Christ.  People's egos keep them from accepting fault for almost anything, so it is hedonistically soothing to believe that all of one's mistakes and misfortunes come from the supernatural administrator of hell.  

This is the true purpose of the story of Satan: he is an excuse for human weakness.

"The devil made me do it."

Today, to wrap up our study, we will track the short-distance-evolution of the New Testament Satan into the Satan we know in cartoons today.  To this end, we'll first glance at the writings of Origen of Alexandria.  

Origen was a "Church Father," or an ancient theologian writer.  He was the most prolific writer of the early Church Fathers.  Origen was known in his time for preaching that God had created the souls of humanity before he created the universe, and that at the end of time, all souls might be redeemed to God.  Both of these concepts would later be seen by the Church as heretical.  

Origen was also known by a rumor that he had paid a doctor to surgically remove his testicles, either because a phrasing in The Book of Matthew recommends it***** or because Origen wanted to remove any doubt in the Alexandria community about his motivation in tutoring women as well as men in Christian theology.  Some historians speculate that he may have been accused of some impropriety early on in life, which might have spurred this action, if it did in fact occur.

One of Origen's most important and enduring works was On the First Principles, written between 220 and 230 AD, wherein he attempts to lay out his understanding of Christian theology in a very regimented and precise fashion.  Origen speaks of the Devil and human free-will in the preface of this text:

This also is clearly defined in the teaching of the Church, that every rational soul is possessed of free-will and volition; that it has a struggle to maintain with the devil and his angels, and opposing influences, because they strive to burden it with sins; but if we live rightly and wisely, we should endeavour to shake ourselves free of a burden of that kind.

Shortly thereafter, in the same text, Origen continues:

Regarding the devil and his angels, and the opposing influences, the teaching of the Church has laid down that these beings exist indeed; but what they are, or how they exist, it has not explained with sufficient clearness. This opinion, however, is held by most, that the devil was an angel, and that, having become an apostate, he induced as many of the angels as possible to fall away with himself, and these up to the present time are called his angels.

So, one of the most literate and educated Church Fathers of all time himself admits that the Christian Church as he knew it had failed to sufficiently explain the cosmology of Satan.  The question is then begged: if the cosmology of Satan was not sufficiently explained in 225 AD, how can modern Christians be so sure about what they know about Satan today?

Time seems to have been a salve for this uncertainty.

St. John of Damascus, regarded by the Catholic Church as a "Doctor of the Church," wrote a text known as An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith near the turn of the eighth century AD.  An Exact Exposition was a summary of the theological writings of the Church Fathers that had gone before St. John.  Like On the First Principles, it was designed to be a systematic elucidation of the sum of Christian theology.

About Satan, in An Exact Exposition, St. John writes:

...[he] was not made wicked in nature but was good, and made for good ends, and received from his Creator no trace whatever of evil in himself.

He continues, in talking about the dominion of Satan and his angel minions:

Hence they have no power or strength against any one except what God in His dispensation hath conceded to them, as for instance, against Job and those swine that are mentioned in the Gospels.

St. John was both eating and having some delicious cake when he was writing this.  According to him, Satan was made good by God, but of his own volition turned evil.  However, in his evil, Satan has no power except that allotted to him by God.  So evil is all ultimately controlled by God, but, simultaneously, God can wash his hands of all the evil.  The chasm existing in the middle of this logic is mind-bendingly wide.

Unlike Origen, St. John of Damascus appears to find the Church's explanation of Satan at least sufficient, as he is very confident throughout An Exact Exposition about the nature of all things metaphysical.  His confidence is apparent even in the title, by his use of the word "exact."

Moving on, I would call your attention back to the Fourth Lateran Council, which we mentioned previously.  Recall that the text of Lateran Council IV, written in 1215 AD, said the following:

The devil and the other demons were indeed created by God good by nature but they became bad through themselves; man, however, sinned at the suggestion of the devil.

The Fourth Lateran Council was one of the most significant ecumenical councils ever to be held, and the dogma spelled out therein would have been understood by most any Christian during the late middle ages.  By the spread of the dogma of this council, most Christians in the subsequent centuries came to believe that, at the time of the final judgment, all humans "may receive according to their merits, whether good or bad, the latter eternal punishment with the devil, the former eternal glory with Christ."

Moving along in time, we come to the 13th-century Codex Gigas, also known as The Devil's Bible.  This book, a manuscript of The Bible with some additional Christian literature, is known as The Devil's Bible because of its inclusion of a particularly mesmerizing full-page illustration of the devil.  The illustration, which can be found easily on the internet, depicts a devil that has two red horns, a forked or double tongue, a round, green head, sharp, menacing teeth, and four-fingered hands with vicious claws at the ends of their digits.  We mention the Codex here to illustrate the evolution of the visual imagery of Satan.

As we now know, Satan's physical appearance is not described in The Bible.  What you may not know is that we have no record of people visually depicting Satan until the middle ages.  Most of the earliest depictions of Satan in art have him looking a lot like the Greek fertility god Pan: goat-legged, cloven hooved, bearded, pointy-eared and goat-tailed.  Medieval depictions also gave Satan his trident, which was most certainly borrowed from the Greek god Poseidon.  Again we emphasize: any physical description of Satan is extra-scriptural.

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn't take a moment to look at the treatment of the devil towards the end of Dante's Inferno, the indescribably important 14th-century epic poem by Italian writer Dante Alighieri.

In Inferno, Dante is led through the concentric circles of hell, toward its very core, by the spirit of the poet Virgil, who wrote The Aeneid.  At the core of hell, Dante encounters a devil that is gigantic in proportion, and sits frozen in ice up to its chest.  The creature has three evil faces and three sets of bat-like wings.  The flapping of its wings freezes all the other inhabitants of that final inner-circle of hell.  As Dante walks by the frozen victims, he notes the positions they are suspended in.  Some on toes, some turned up on their heads, some bent over like a bow, heads toward their toes.  A creepy scene.

The writing is really too interesting to miss, so here you go - Dante's description of the devil:

          Were he once as beautiful as now he’s ugly
          (And yet he raised his fist against his Maker!)
          Well may all our grief come down from him!

          Oh how much wonder was it for me when
          I saw that on his head he had three faces:
          One in front — and it was fiery red —

           And two others, which joined onto this one
          Above the center of his shoulder blades,
          And all three came together at his crown.

          The right face seemed halfway white and yellow
          While the left one looked the color of the race
          That lives close to the source of the Nile.

          Beneath each face there sprouted two large wings,
          Suitably massive for such a bird of prey:
          I never sighted sails so broad at sea.

          They had no feathers but looked just like a bat’s,
           And he kept flapping these wings up and down
          So that three winds moved out from in around him:

          This was the cause Cocytus was all iced.
          With six eyes he wept, and from his three chins
          Dripped down the teardrops and a bloody froth.

          In each mouth he mashed up a separate sinner
          With his sharp teeth, as if they were a grinder,
          And in this way he put the three through torture.

          For the one in front, the biting was as nothing
          Compared to the clawing, for at times his back
          Remained completely stripped bare of its skin.

          "That soul up there who suffers the worst pain,"
          My master said, "is Judas Iscariot —
          His head within, he kicks his legs outside.

Here we see the ultimate evolution of the monster.  Large enough to fit multiple men in its multiple mouths as he chews at their forms and tears at their skin.  Once divinely beautiful, now unfathomably ugly.  The center of hell.  The great tortured torturer.  These motifs are some of the critical last steps in the evolutionary chain of the modern Satan.

Little about Satan has changed significantly since Dante, except that he had to face off with a chain-smoking Keanu Reeves at some point very recently.

What can we say then, in conclusion, now that we've thoroughly beat this dead horse?

We can say this: Satan is the Christian's intellectually dishonest escape from The Problem of Evil.  Concerns about Satan are not present in the moral teachings of Jesus Christ.  The modern understanding of Satan does not come from The Bible.  There is no reason, in all of history, to believe that Satan is any more real a figure than Zeus or Angra Mainyu or Darth Vader.

There is no reason to believe in the modern Satan, except that humanity requires a scapegoat for its folly, as it is fundamentally incapable of admitting its own fault.

The devil made me do it?

No, no, friend.  I made me do that.

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Matthew 4:15 through Matthew 4:17

15 “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles, 

16 the people who sit in darkness
have seen a great light,
on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death
light has arisen.” 

17 From that time on, Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

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Jesus Saying #5!  And what an important one it is!  The words in Matthew 4:17 mark the beginning of Jesus' ministry.  It is at this moment he declares one of the fundamental tenets of his philosophy: that a "heavenly kingdom" is just around the corner, and that humanity needed repentance before the arrival of that kingdom.

So, to what exactly did Jesus refer here when he said "the kingdom of heaven?"

There are many ways to interpret this phrasing.  We will come across this terminology several times in Matthew, so we will have ample opportunity to discuss all the possibilities.

Being a rationalist, I would like to start with a rationalist reading of Saying #5.  I would like to suggest that the "kingdom of heaven," as spoken about by Jesus in The Gospel According to Matthew, is not the preferable half of a bipolar afterlife, but rather a time of unrivalled peace and bounty that Christ anticipated to be coming (with our hard work) to the physical realm; to the real world.  

We will have plenty of time to discuss alternative readings, and we will have plenty of chances to see that one's interpretation of this saying doesn't have any bearing on Jesus' moral prescriptions.  Those of you who find my rationalist reading preposterous will get yours in coming installments.

So, then, what did Jesus mean when he said "repent?"

In the simplest terms, "repent," in the ancient world, meant "to feel regret about one's misdeeds and to have a desire to live better."  This is certainly how the word is generally used in The Old Testament.  Since we have no reason to stray from this general definition, we can interpret "repent" to simply mean "reform yourselves whole-heartedly!"

"Repent."  This is the first word we read in The Bible that can be considered part of Christ's Ministry.  His first prescription for behavior.  Perhaps the first real clue to his morality, that sweet morsel we pine after.  "Repent," he says.  "Reform."

What does he want reformed?

You'll have to come back to find out.

Thank you so much for reading.  Please share this writing.

Love.

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* Shortly after saying that Satan was the cause for all disease, my friend insisted that "you can't trust scientists," and that "the universe is only a few thousand years old."**

** My friend is a voting man. :-(

*** Belief in the existence of only one God.

**** Belief in the existence of only two Gods.

***** ...which it certainly does....

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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.