On Matthew 2:1 through Matthew 2:3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for this indulgence.  I feel better now.

Onto today's exciting first topic: miracle births!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's dwell for a second there.

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

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

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

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

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

The writers of the Gospels might have known this story.

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

Now, on to the Gospel.

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Matthew 2:1 through Matthew 2:3

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

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

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

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

So who is King Herod?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting Suetonius writing about Tiberius in Life of Tiberius:

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

And then:

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

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

Suetonius tells us more:

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

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

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

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

Why is this pertinent?

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

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

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

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

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Matthew 1:24 through Matthew 1:25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please share this writing.

Love.
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On Matthew 1:21 through 1:23

Welcome back, friend, and thank you for coming.

Today we continue, mid-quote, from where we left off last time, with an angel speaking to Joseph in a dream.  Recall that Joseph and Mary have just found out that she is pregnant, and, in a dream, an angel is speaking to Joseph and has informed him that Mary has become pregnant by the "holy Spirit."

We'll commence immediately with the reading today.

Matthew 1:21 through Matthew 1:23

 21 She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:

23“Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.”

Today's reading presents endless possibilities for discussion, as they likely all will.  To start, we are going to chase down this "behold, the virgin..." prophecy in The Old Testament, in the Book of Isaiah.

To begin to understand this Gospel text, we must look back at The Old Testament.

Remember that The Old Testament constitutes the Hebrew Bible, and is a collection of many different kinds of texts.  It contains histories, songs, lists of genealogy, fantastical stories, and at least two different accounts of the beginning of the world.  One section, known as The Prophetic Books, contains stories about the lives of select people in Jewish history who claimed to be informed about the future by God, and the prophecies that these people spoke.

Keep in mind also that during the Biblical era, there were many prophets among the Semitic peoples.  Many of these prophets never made it into the Old Testament canon for various reasons, not the least of which is that "prophet" was actually a regular position in the king's court, and sometimes a salaried one.

As I mentioned, today's reading points us to one of these "Prophetic Books," Isaiah.  The narrative of the Book of Isaiah takes place during the eighth century BC, before the Babylonian Exile.

Searching for Matthew's "behold, the virgin..." prophecy, in Isaiah 7:14, we find the following:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign; the young woman, pregnant and about to bear a son, shall name him Emmanuel.

The way Matthew has interpreted it, this tradition in Isaiah points prophetically to the birth of Jesus.  Upon reading the chapter in Isaiah in question, however, one will conclude that this is another example of the evangelist's attempting to shoehorn Jesus into the Jewish faith.  It is another effort to make the philosophy of Christ more palatable to Jews, whom the evangelist "Matthew" hoped would convert to the new Jewish sect, Christianity.  The Isaiah text clearly refers to prophecy regarding things in Judah's immediate future, not to a distant first century messiah.

If Isaiah isn't about the arrival of Jesus, then what is Isaiah saying here, then?

Well, Isaiah Chapter 7 sees God speaking to Isaiah and to Ahaz.  In the narrative, Isaiah is a prophet working for Ahaz, who is the King of Judah.  The text shows God advising the two men regarding political matters.  Actually, it shows God threatening destruction of various people and asking that Ahaz not align himself and his state with a certain adjacent city or state.  Like a lot of the Old Testament, the reading is difficult, but it is clearly not in reference to a universal messiah who would be coming some centuries later.  

"Emmanuel," according to notations in the New American Bible, is Hebrew for "with us is God," which begins to explain why early Christians would have taken particular notice of this passage, since many of them came to believe that Jesus had been God incarnate.

The other data that explain early Christian interest in this Old Testament passage lie in a translation problem.

The direct translation of the Hebrew word "almah" is how the NAB arrives at "young woman" in this reading of Isaiah.  However, early translations of the scripture to Greek used the word "parthenos," which means "virgin," but is not a perfect translation of "almah." This means that a person reading the Hebrew Bible in ancient Greek, as our evangelist likely was, would mistakenly read this text in Isaiah as prophesying a virgin birth.  Thus the evangelist has made a mistake in his shoehorning in that the prophecy of Isaiah didn't traditionally refer to a virgin birth.

Isaiah is a long narrative which we will have to revisit together at a later date.  We will be diligent, moving forward, to look over any of the old Hebrew scriptures we have to in order to satisfy our full curiosity about what is going on in the Gospel.

The second thing I'd like to discuss briefly today, especially while we are talking about translation, is the name "Jesus."  The name originates in the Hebrew for Joshua, "Yeshua."  Yeshua, in Greek, is "Iisoús." Iisoús translates into the Latin "Iesus," which evolved into what English speakers pronounce as "Jesus."

That means that if we translated the given name that Jesus' childhood friends called him to English today, we might call him "Joshua Christ." It is only because of the journey through different tongues the name has taken that we call him "Jesus." If you could travel back in time, and saw the man himself, and you called out to him "Jesus," he would not know you were calling to him.

This parallels the situation the author of Matthew faced with "almah" and "parthenos" in his Greek copy of the scriptures. Taken together, this all reminds us that much can be lost in translation. It clearly behooves us to always dig into multiple translations of unfamiliar or particular terms during this study.

We'll take leave of this study here and pick it up again next week.  Please forgive me for missing last week.  I will strive for consistency.

Love.
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On Matthew 1:18 through 1:20

Welcome back to the third installment of The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.

To review, recall last week that we began our study of The Gospel According to Matthew and learned that the first 17 verses of Matthew are a long list of Jewish names supposedly connecting Jesus back to both King David and Abraham, making Jesus out to be Jewish royalty by birth.

Today I'd like to briefly discuss the authorship of The Gospel According to Matthew before we take in a couple more verses of the text.

To begin, it is important to know that in late antiquity, it was assumed that the gospels were written by the evangelist for which they are named.  Thus The Gospel According to Matthew was thought to have been written by one of Jesus' apostles, Matthew of Galilee.  In late antiquity, then, Christians believed that the Gospel of Matthew would have been written probably very briefly after Christ's death, which occurred in approximately AD 30.

The truth is that the Gospel of Matthew was, like all four gospels, written anonymously.  As we continue our reading of the Gospels, you will notice that there is never a "byline" in the texts themselves, and the authors do not ever place themselves within the events they describe.  We don't see attribution of the first gospel to the Apostle Matthew until the first half of the second century, decades after its writing between AD 80 and 90.

According to notation in the Revised Edition of The New American Bible, "The ancient tradition that the author was the disciple and apostle of Jesus named Matthew is untenable because the gospel is based, in large part, on the Gospel according to Mark (almost all the verses of that gospel have been utilized in this), and it is hardly likely that a companion of Jesus would have followed so extensively an account that came from one who admittedly never had such an association rather than rely on his own memories."

To reiterate: scholars knew and accepted that Mark was not written by a contemporary of Christ's, and it was obvious (by long sections of verbatim copying) that Mark had been a primary source of data used to construct Matt.  Thus Matt cannot have been Christ's contemporary, because one would not copy someone else's telling of a story that they themselves had personally witnessed.

We will continue to call the text's author "Matt" for the sake of simplicity, but it is understood by all serious Biblical scholars that Matthew: A) was not written by a person who knew Jesus personally, and B) was written a generation later than the early Christians thought.

Another thing to recall about this first Gospel is that it is written by a Jew to people who were still culturally Jewish and are experiencing Jesus in the context of their Judaism.  Many of the early Christians were something more like "Christian Jews," in the sense that Christianity, for them, was a new sub-group within the overarching cosmology of Jewish belief, not a new religion all together.  The fact that Matthew is written by a Jew to other Jews is evidenced by many things, not the least of which is the fact that the text takes for granted the audience's knowledge of uniquely Jewish customs, beliefs and traditions.

Much more can and will be said about the authorship of this and all of the four gospels.  For today, I want you to internalize this fact: we do not know who wrote any of the four gospels, and we are certain that none of those gospels was written by a contemporary of Jesus.

Now, let's take a look at the text in question.  Continuing from where we left off...

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Matthew 1:18 through Matthew 1:20

18 Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the holy Spirit. 

19 Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. 

20 Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her.

I wonder what the audience of late antiquity thought about these verses.

From my position in 21st century America, it is hard not to giggle at this seminal part of the narrative.  Can anyone imagine Joseph's shock and utter disappointment to find that his fiancee, with whom he had yet to consummate anything, was pregnant?!

I always love verse 19 wherein Joseph decides that he will divorce Mary, but that he doesn't want to shame her and make a big deal out of her apparent infidelity.  I think that Joseph shows more restraint than some of us might in his shoes, and that is endearing.

In verse 20 we are told that an angel quickly visited Joseph in a dream and explained that it was the "holy Spirit," not some random hunk from about town, that had made a cuckold out of him.  Either way, these verses expose for us the first miraculous event in the gospels, and give us an opportunity to briefly discuss the miraculous side of the Christ story.

To be concise: I do not believe in miracles of any kind. I believe exclusively in things that can be borne out by science.

I do not believe what we read in today's verses, that Jesus Christ was born from a woman who was still a virgin, somehow impregnated by God or one of God's subordinate forces.

You might be thinking: "if he doesn't believe in miracles, then what is the point of all of this?"

The point is that the philosophy of Jesus Christ, indeed his "moral vision," are not, for me, contingent upon miracles or metaphysical power of any kind.  This is why I've called this writing "The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ," not "The Hollywood Super-Hero-Like Magic Qualities of Jesus Christ."

What am implying?

I guess, one of two things.  Either Mary was infidelitous, or Joseph and Mary were copulating before they should have been in relation to their impending marriage, and didn't want anyone to know that they had intermingled prior to wedlock.

And that is saying a lot.

Please subscribe to this writing, share it frequently, and follow me closely on social media.  We will see you next week, or sooner.

Love.
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On Matthew 1:1 through 1:17

Welcome back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Matthew 1:1 through Matthew 1:17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus' story begins thus:

From The Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Abraham

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

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

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

On David

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

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

On Solomon

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

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

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

Notes and Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Love.
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Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About them, he says:

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

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

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

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

So...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer to "why" is manifold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love.
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