On Matthew 3:1 through Matthew 3:3

It's early in the morning on Christmas Eve, Anno Domini Two Thousand Eighteen.  I am awake because I'm always awake at a very early hour.  If not for the holiday, I'd be making my lunch and getting ready for work.  The holiday will afford me some extra writing opportunity, and I'm grateful for this.

I cannot wait to get to the part of this study in which we are reading and talking about the actual words of Christ.  I want you to know that the anticipation is killing me.  I derive an increasing amount of joy from my limited knowledge of The Man's words, and feel increasingly compelled to share those words with you.

Part of me wants to just skip to the red-letters, leaving the rest by the way.  That part of me I call "weakness."  Weakness is the bigger part of me, but I will not give in to it, on this single occasion.  All things must come in their due time, and they will come soon enough.

Until then, we will continue dancing around The Man and his delightful words.

You'll recall that, a few weeks ago, we read some of The Book of Acts.  We focused on Acts Chapter 2, wherein we saw "The Birth of the Church," learned of Peter's fiery Pentecost Sermon, and read the first words in the whole Bible that describe what it means to live a Christian life.

Let's reiterate those first words about Christian life from Acts, Chapter 2:

42 They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers. 

43 Awe came upon everyone, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. 

44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 

45 they would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to each one’s need. 

Please note that the first Christians appear to live a Stateless, voluntary-communal life.  Please note that the first Christians do not appear to believe in property.

These are deep and historically rare philosophical and political concepts.

Please note the difference between this philosophy and that of the modern American so-called Christian.

The Book of Acts says more, so today we'll explore it a little more.  My interests have been piqued, as should yours have been.

I would call your attention to Acts, Chapter 4.

32 The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. 

33 With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all. 

34 There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, 

35 and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need. 

Wow.

"The community of believers was of one heart and mind?!"

"There was no needy person among them?!"

"...To each according to need?!"

Are we reading The Bible, or some kind of modern ultra-left political theory?

The narrative continues in Chapter 5 with God killing a husband and wife who conspired to enter the Christian community under false pretenses.  When they sold the land they owned and gave the money to the community, they secretly set some of the money aside for themselves.

God literally just snatches the life right out of the husband and wife for this transgression!

It is truly a wild scene.  Here, from Acts, Chapter 5:

1 A man named Ananias, however, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. 

2 He retained for himself, with his wife’s knowledge, some of the purchase price, took the remainder, and put it at the feet of the apostles. 

3 But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart so that you lied to the holy Spirit and retained part of the price of the land? 

4 While it remained unsold, did it not remain yours? And when it was sold, was it not still under your control? Why did you contrive this deed? You have lied not to human beings, but to God.” 

5 When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last, and great fear came upon all who heard of it. 

6 The young men came and wrapped him up, then carried him out and buried him. 

7 After an interval of about three hours, his wife came in, unaware of what had happened. 

8 Peter said to her, “Tell me, did you sell the land for this amount?” She answered, “Yes, for that amount.” 

9 Then Peter said to her, “Why did you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen, the footsteps of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.” 

10 At once, she fell down at his feet and breathed her last. When the young men entered they found her dead, so they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. 

11 And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things.

You don't want to cross Peter, I guess.  Or, more to the point, you don't want to cross Jesus.

Acts presents even further evidence of the Stateless nature of the very first Christians.  Later in Chapter 5, we see the Apostles locked in jail for preaching in the name of Jesus and for performing "signs and wonders."  They escape from jail and head to The Temple in the morning to keep preaching.  The Sanhedrin - the high court of the Jewish people and client to the might of Rome - round up the apostles and question them sternly.

I love this part.  They tell Peter and the apostles, in Acts Chapter 5, Verse 28:

“We gave you strict orders [did we not?] to stop teaching in that name. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and want to bring this man’s blood upon us.”

Peter and the boys reply simply, in Verse 29:

"We must obey God rather than men."

Boom.  There it is.  "We must obey God rather than men."

By the "rather than" phrasing, we can deduce that obeying God and obeying men are thought to be totally exclusive of one another.  One takes the place of the other.  They cannot exist together.

So...

The very very first Christians, the ones who actually knew Jesus, felt that it was their charge to reject human authority outright, and to replace it with the authority of God, which they had understood through the teachings of their recently executed leader.

Wow.

What are we reading?!

That's right, my friends.  Welcome to The New Testament.

If the modern American so-called Christians knew about this stuff, they'd have to find a new book to swear on.

Now, Matthew, Chapter 3.

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Matthew 3:1 through Matthew 3:3

1 In those days John the Baptist appeared, preaching in the desert of Judea 

2 [and] saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” 

3 It was of him that the prophet Isaiah had spoken when he said:

“A voice of one crying out in the desert,

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make straight his paths.’”

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Perhaps one of my favorite little lines of text from all of the Gospels is this "a voice of one crying out in the desert."  There is a poetry to it that takes me away. I love it, and digress.

Finally, The Baptist appears on the scene.  

Who is this "John the Baptist" guy?  

If you'll recall, this is the guy that some scholars believe was an Essene, the ascetic sect of Jews that had left Jerusalem and rejected the mainstream for a life of celibacy and ritual bathing.

Why do some people believe John the Baptist was an Essene?  Because, like the Essenes, he appears in The Gospel having rejected the mainstream, as we meet him preaching out in the desert.  He offers a baptism (Greek for "dunking"), while the Essenes bathed daily in order to maintain ritual purity.  He lives ascetically, as did the Essenes.  His cosmos center around an eschatology, as did that of the Essenes.

It is safe to say that, of the sects of Judaism existing at the time, John had most in common with The Essenes.  However, it won't prove exceptionally important to nail down John's sectual identity* at the moment.  That's more of a scholarly dalliance, although we will get to it eventually.  

The point we don't want to miss here is that we've just met perhaps the only guy in The Gospel that Jesus gives any deference to.  Jesus will, in fact, be baptized by this man.  If John can bestow blessings upon Jesus in the form of a baptism, then he must be, at least in some sense, more than Jesus.

We want to pay attention to The Baptist.  He preaches.  Crowds gather on the shores of the Jordan to hear him and be baptized by him.  I am giddy with anticipation.

Until next time, my friend.

Love

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* Seven years of this and you are going to get tired of this joke's many variants.  I'm sorry.  I will try to keep it at a minimum.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 2:22 through Matthew 2:23

Hello, friend, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, the most exhaustive Gospel study you'll ever read.  If this is your first time here, please avail yourself of the Introduction, which can be found here.

Today, we approach the final entry to our five-part series, Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus.  You will recall that we've already covered The Pharisees, The Sadducees, The Essenes, and The Zealots.  Our last sect of study is The Christians.

Were I the reader, I might ask: "but sir, Christianity and Judaism are two different things.  What do you mean by calling Christianity a sect of Judaism?!"

Let's shed a little light on that, shall we?

Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus - A Shallow Survey

Number Five: The Christians

It has been about a month now that we've been studying the first-century sects of Judaism.  As we embarked on this study, our purpose was to augment our understanding of the context of the philosophy of Jesus, which will begin emerging for us from Matthew very soon.  I am hoping that we will have accomplished this task adequately by the end of today's study.

We've met four sects so far, and, in meeting them, we have deepened our understanding of the ancient world Jesus existed in.  Things that unify the philosophies of all four of these sects are a belief in the written scriptures and laws of Judaism as represented by The Torah, and a belief that The Jews were God's "chosen people."

Due to critical interpretive discrepancies, all four of these groups were led to believe that their particular way of practicing Judaism was the only right way.  These severe beliefs led to a rise in sectarian violence in the first-centuries BC and AD as Rome pushed its way into Palestine, upending everything it touched.

And so we come to the final sect in our study: The Christians.

Recall that one Flavius Josephus has informed our study of sectarianism more than any other ancient historian.  Flavius Josephus was a Romano-Jewish historian who surrendered to, and eventually worked for, Rome.  He is one of the greatest sources of data we currently have about the era of Jesus Christ.

What does Josephus say about Christianity?  This, it turns out, is quite a loaded question.

If you ask certain scholars what Josephus said about Christians, you might hear them refer to Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 3.  The passage in question is as follows:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

Wow.  Pretty glowing report, especially considering the fact that Josephus was not a proponent of the Jesus Movement.

Other scholars believe that Josephus' words were changed at some point between their writing and now.  Many believe that a passage describing the death of Jesus did exist in Josephus manuscript for Antiquities, but that it would have read something more like the following:

At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following among many Jews and among many of Gentile origin. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians (named after him) had not died out.*

That sounds a little closer to the mark.

Josephus would have written these words around 93 or 94 AD, twenty-four years after he'd personally witnessed Rome's brutal sack of Jerusalem.  Josephus mentions John the Baptist in another text, and "James the brother of Jesus" in yet another, but he says little to nothing about the Jesus Movement as it existed in the immediate wake of Christ's execution.

The best source of information we have on the group is The New Testament.

The Book of Acts shows the very first Christians living in Jerusalem among Jews, praying with Jews, and attending The Temple area everyday with their Jewish brothers and sisters.  The New Testament sees the first members of the Jesus Movement observing a plethora of Jewish holidays, festivals, and feasts.

All that is to say that the first followers of the Jesus Movement considered themselves Jewish first, and this would have remained true for at least a generation.  Most scholars look to 70 AD as the year when Christianity became Christianity, a thing separate and apart from Judaism.  Alternatively, some scholars might point to the 90s AD as the moment Judaism and Christianity finally became distinct.  At that time, Christians began lobbying Rome that they might be recognized as separate from Jews as far as it applied to the collection of the "Fiscus Judaicus," or "Jewish Tax."

As for the sect's beliefs about the afterlife, The Christians of The New Testament do not ever use the word "hell."  The New Testament contains passing references to "Gehenna," and to "Hades," and to the "netherworld," ambiguous terms from the Hellenized Jewish world of its time.  The first Christians were not concerned with getting into heaven or avoiding hell so much as they were concerned with the coming "Kingdom of Heaven."  The coming Kingdom of Heaven refers back to the "world to come" that The Pharisees believed in, and can be seen as a prophesied worldly event of great upheaval, even to the point of being "world-ending."  The Jesus Movement sect was an apocalyptic one in that it foresaw an immediate end to the world, as it currently existed, at the hands of the one true God.

Since the first Christians anticipated an immediate coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, they did not find occasion to write down much or perhaps anything about what Jesus had said or done.  It was a full twenty years after Jesus' death that we see the first Christian documentation.  The first-written book of The Gospel wasn't penned until ten years later still, in 61 AD.  That said, as any Christian will tell you, the Jewish holy scriptures remained forever integral to Christians.  We can say that, as a sect of Judaism, the Jesus Movement believed in the same written tradition as the other Jewish sects of the period, but embraced a new oral tradition unlike that of The Pharisees.

There is much more that could be said, but, in the interest of time, we will draw this to a close.  Before we go over the "must-remembers," please note that there are several other sects of Judaism that existed contemporaneously with Jesus that we will study in the future, outside of the five we've mentioned here.  This study was designed to lay down a shallow contextual framework upon which we can build an understanding of the philosophy of Jesus.  We will meet more of these peoples, and revisit the ones we've just met, again and again throughout the coming years.

Here are your "must-remembers:"

a)  The Jesus Movement believed in the written Jewish scriptures, as well as a brand new apocalyptic oral tradition.

b)  They eventually broke away from Judaism, becoming Christianity and spreading rapidly across the world.

c)  The Jesus Movement didn't seem to be afraid of a "Hell," exactly.  They did speak of a "netherworld," in Greek terms.  They frequently referred to "Hades," the underworld of ancient Greek mythology.  The ambiguously phrased "Kingdom of Heaven" is what they awaited and aspired to.

d)  The Jesus Movement was a popular movement that, at very first, enjoyed favor mostly among the common and marginalized people.  (It is worth noting that Christianity quickly attracted more upper-class adherents as it spread toward Europe.)

Next time: something completely different.

Now, let's get back to our Gospel.

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Matthew 2:22 through Matthew 2:23

22 But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go back there. And because he had been warned in a dream, he departed for the region of Galilee. 

23 He went and dwelt in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He shall be called a Nazorean.”

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

It's not that we should be learning to distrust Matthew...

It's just that we need to keep the name "Shoehorn Matthew" in the forefront of our minds when reading this Gospel.

As the narrative at hand works to get Jesus out of Egypt and into The Galilee on all the right terms, we see yet more angelic dreaming.  Joseph, Mary, and Baby Joshua finally settle in the town of Nazareth.  

Matthew says that they settle in Nazareth so that Jesus will be fulfilling the words of the prophets, who had supposedly said that a messiah would be coming and that he would be called a "Nazorean."

The problem here is that the prophets never mentioned Nazareth.  Of this verse, notation in The New American Bible says the following:

The town of Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, and no such prophecy can be found there.

The notation goes on to try to connect the Matthew text to words that are phonetically similar to "Nazareth" in The Old Testament.  It admits that the similarities are "remote."

These verses have nothing to do with how we will eventually interpret the moral vision of Jesus.  We will retire of them here.

Next time, we begin Chapter 3, and meet one of my favorite Gospel personas: John the Baptist.  I'm very excited for that.  Until then, I bid you happy studies.

Love.
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* This rendition comes to us second hand, originally from John Meier's A Marginal Jew, I believe.  Please correct me if you know better.

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To read what's next, click here.
To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 2:19 through Matthew 2:21

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

If you require orientation, please refer to the first posting of this writing here.

We've no time to waste, today, so we will jump right in to the fourth of our five part series on first-century Jewish sectarianism.  Here we go.

Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus - A Shallow Survey

Number Four: The Zealots

Let's quickly review who we've met so far in our study.  We've met: 1) The Pharisees, the most popular ideological movement within Judaism at the time of Christ.  2) The Sadducees, a movement of the elite priestly class whose power was derived from The Temple.  And...  3) The Essenes, a movement of Jews who practiced asceticism, celibacy, and ritual purity.

Recall that these three constitute the main philosophies of Judaism as it existed around the time of Jesus.  However, the ancient Romano-Jewish historian, Josephus, also spoke of a "fourth philosophy."  That fourth philosophy was adhered to by a group of Jews we call "The Zealots."  

The philosophy of The Zealots was, in a word, "war."

Etymologically, the English word "Zealot" comes from the Greek "zēlos," which means "zeal or jealousy."  It is the most common translation of the Hebrew "kanai," which translates directly as "fanatic."  In a modern context, the word zealot denotes a fanatic of some kind.

The Zealots lived all around Palestine, and their heyday was from 6 to 70 AD.  The Zealots shared a common cosmology with The Pharisees, but differed with non-Zealot Pharisees in that they advocated for war against Rome, which had made a province of Judea in 6 AD.  In the sense that The Zealots were arguing for changes in public policy, i.e. "we should kick Rome out of Judea by military force," they can be looked at as a political movement, as well as a sect.

In the Gospel, Jesus does not interact with Zealots the way he does with Pharisees and Sadducees.  The Gospel is basically silent on The Zealots, except to tell us (in each of The Synoptics) that one of Christ's apostles was a Zealot.  This is most clear in Luke 6:15, where "Simon who was called a Zealot," is listed as one of The Twelve.  Notation in the New American Bible explains that it is not perfectly clear from the Gospel that Simon the Zealot was an actual Zealot.  The language is ambiguous as to whether Simon was zealous, or a Zealot.  We will chase that thread down later when we study the apostles each in detail.  Some scholars also believe that Paul of Tarsus was a Zealot, and that his Zealotry led him to his persecution of early Christians.  Again, we will chase this apostolic thread down later.

Josephus is our best source for information on The Zealots, but we must bear in mind that he was not a proponent of Zealotry.  He held them accountable, in fact, for Jerusalem's eventual ruin.  He felt that the Jewish-Roman War, which led to the destruction of The Second Temple in 70 AD, was caused by The Zealots.  Josephus was of the mind that the Jews ought to have tolerated Rome's dominion over Judea, up to and including participation in the census and payment of taxes.  To the contrary, The Zealots felt that the Jewish people had to be completely free, and were the constant advocates and instigators of confrontation between Jews and the Roman authorities.  Without The Zealots, there would not have been a rebellion, and The Temple might have remained.

The Zealots were so zealous that they did not mind spilling blood in the name of their cause.  The Sicarii, an ancient Jewish assassin's brotherhood (yes, an ancient Jewish assassin's brotherhood) were a sub-group of the Zealot community.  The Sicarii took their name from the small daggers they would use for targeted political killings.  These killings were designed to demoralize Roman sympathizers and embolden Jewish nationalists, and went on throughout the first-century AD.  The Sicarii terrorized and killed Jew and Gentile alike in the name of a liberated Jewish people.

The Zealot movement died out in the aftermath of year 70, as the Jewish people resigned themselves to their new reality.  Rome had had the final word.  

As for us, we can say that, of the four sects we have studied thus far, this sect had the least bearing on Jesus' philosophy.  Some modern pop-scholarship portrays Jesus as being a Zealot or a proto-Zealot.  It will become necessary to confront these ideas in detail some day, but I can tell you now that Jesus' philosophy was not compatible with that of The Zealots.

Here are your "must-remembers:"

a)  As far as scriptural validity, The Zealots believed whatever The Pharisees believed (which was that the oral traditions of their community were valid and supplementary to the Torah.)

b)  The Zealot movement died out when Rome took complete control of Judea around 70 AD.

c)  When it came to the afterlife, The Zealots again followed The Pharisees, believing in a coming resurrection of the faithful dead into a beautiful "world to come."  It is arguable whether or not they believed in a "hell."

d)  They were a nascent movement around 6 AD, and gained power steadily among the Jews until 70 AD.  Zealots had little to no sway over Temple affairs at any juncture.

The Zealots are another one of the many divisions of Jewish culture that existed during the Ministry of Jesus Christ.  The Zealots, and their presumably awesome cloak-and-dagger assassin's brotherhood, The Sicarii, are critical context for our understanding of Jesus' message.

Next time, our final first-century Jewish sect: The Christians.  (You read it right.)

Now, let's get back to our Gospel.

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Matthew 2:19 through Matthew 2:21

19 When Herod had died, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt  

20 and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” 

21 He rose, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel.

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

And, just like that, Herod was unceremoniously dead.  Here, the angel of the Lord appears to Joseph in the fourth dream of divine data thus far, letting Joseph know that Herod is dead.  "It's safe to make your journey out of Egypt," he says.  So, Baby Jesus and his family went out of Egypt, in a kind of literary homage to the time their Israelite ancestors had been led out of Egypt by Moses, according to their traditions.

Again, this Flight to Egypt and subsequent Flight Out of Egypt likely never occurred, not least of all because Herod likely never ordered a massacre of babies.  And, again, the text points to the author's desire to emphasize Jesus' congruence with Judaism.  What better way to accomplish this than to show Jesus taking a course that is parallel with that of Moses, the great Jewish patriarch?

While Herod's death narrative in Matthew spans only three words, Herod's death narrative in Josephus' War of the Jews is quite lengthy.  It seems Josephus had a flare for this gruesome stuff.  It seems that he revelled in it.  About the illness that led to Herod's death, he says the following:

After this, the destemper seized upon his whole body, and greatly disordered all its parts with various symptoms; for there was a gentle fever upon him, and an intolerable itching over all the surface of his body, and continual pains in his colon, and dropsical tumours about his feet, and an inflammation of the abdomen, and a putrefaction of his privy member, that produced worms.

Oh man that's gross!  Did you see that?  I mean, it was all pretty gnarly, but, "a putrefaction of his privy member, that produced worms?!"  You know you're having a bad day when putrefied worms are crawling out of your privy member.

You do not want that!

Josephus continues on to describe what Herod wanted once he was resigned to his death. Apparently, Herod had the idea that, in order to increase and prolong the amount of mourning in the land after his death, he would gather "the most illustrious men of the whole Jewish nation, out of every village, into a place called the Hippodrome, and there shut them in." He gave instructions to subordinates to "send soldiers to encompass these men that are now in custody, and slay them immediately upon my death, and then all Judea, and every family of them, will weep at it whether they will or no."

Woah.  He wants to kill a bunch of the most important Jewish men in the land at the time of his death so that there will be true universal mourning.

Woah.

Herod deserves far more study.  I promise a multi-part, in-depth study of Herod at some point in the future.

As for Shoehorn Matthew, we'll have to retire of him here.

Join us next time.  Please share this writing.

Love

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 2:16 through Matthew 2:18

Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, the most exhaustive gospel study you'll ever read.  If this is your first time, consider going back to the first installment.  You can find that introductory post here.

Before we start today, allow me a few words on purpose and direction:

I want you to know that with this writing, there is a fire growing inside of me.  My mind is increasingly occupied these days with the life and times of Jesus Christ, and, moreso, his moral philosophy.

I am hoping that you will see this study through with me, as we painstakingly explore every detail we can about Christ's ideas.  My hope is that, as we uncover his beautiful and undeniably true moral principles, we (you and I) will be compelled together to moral action based on those principles.  My expectation is that whatever moral action we undertake together at that juncture will save the human race from the hell it has created for itself.  This is grandiose, I know.  This is my purpose.  This is our purpose.

This will be years in the making.  The Gospel contains some 89 chapters.  This study, at over 15,000 words thus far, has spanned not even two chapters in as many months.  If we keep this pace, we will complete the most critical portion of our study somewhere around Anno Domini 2025, at a word count that will rival the entire Bible.  (My hope is that I can speed that up a little by giving more and more of my time to this as we move forward.)

No matter how long it takes, though, I promise to see this through.  To quote a modern rap artist: "I put in hour after hour, let's be crystal clear: I'm gonna get there if it takes a day or fifty years."

I pray for you to see this through with me.

Now, onto the good stuff.

Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus - A Shallow Survey

Number Three: The Essenes

I had the opportunity to put my eyes on select fragments of the "Dead Sea Scrolls" a few months back.  The scrolls were on exhibit at a museum in Denver, which is luckily not far from me.  It was easily one of the most amazing experiences of my life.  The exhibit featured fragments of the scrolls, period pottery, sacred altars, ancient arrowheads and even a stone block that had fallen from the Second Temple as Rome sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD.  (The block of the Temple was displayed such that visitors could touch it with their hands.  I did touch it.  I was moved by this.)

I mention my luck in having seen fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls as a springboard into the third sect of Judaism that we will study here in our survey: "The Essenes."  You see, the Dead Sea Scrolls, according to many scholars, were written by, or at least collected and studied by, none other than this oft elusive sect of Jews who existed for at least a few hundred years right around the time of Jesus.

As you will recall, we've already learned about two Jewish sects: The Pharisees and The Sadducees.  Our old friend Josephus explicitly says in his Antiquities of the Jews that there were three main sects of Judaism around the turn of the first-century.  The Essenes complete Josephus' sectual triad.*

Like The Pharisees and The Sadducees, there is much to know about The Essenes.  Unlike The Pharisees and The Sadducees, The Essenes are not explicitly mentioned in The Gospel, and we are left to question for ourselves whether or not Jesus ever interacted with Essenes.  To hear some tell it, though, Jesus Christ himself was an Essenic Jew.

So what did The Essenes believe?  Well, to start, we can easily say that The Essenes were the most ascetic of the three main sects.  In his Naturalis Historia, the first-century Roman historian Pliny the Elder records the asceticism of The Essenes thus:

Lying on the west of Asphaltites, and sufficiently distant to escape its noxious exhalations, are the Esseni, a people that live apart from the world, and marvellous beyond all others throughout the whole earth, for they have no women among them; to sexual desire they are strangers; money they have none; the palm-trees are their only companions.

A sect of first-century men who live without women or money?  A group of men who are total strangers to sexual desire?  Ascetic indeed!

In his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus says the following of Essenic beliefs:

They teach the immortality of souls: and esteem that the rewards of righteousness are to be earnestly striven for.

So, where The Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife, The Essenes apparently did.  Furthermore, they believed in some reward that could be earned in the afterlife by righteous action in this life.

Josephus says that The Essenes are unlike any other humans that were ever known to him, Greek or Barbarian.  He elaborates thus:

This is demonstrated by that institution of theirs, which will not suffer any thing to hinder them from having all things in common: so that a rich man enjoys no more of his own wealth, than he who hath nothing at all.

So, like our earliest first-century Christian community, The Essenes held their goods in common.  No individual Essene owned any personal property or wealth.  This stands in stark contrast with The Pharisees and especially The Sadducees.  Josephus tells us more:

There are about four thousand men that live in this way: and neither marry wives, nor are desirous to keep servants: as thinking the latter tempts men to be unjust; and the former gives the handle to domestic quarrels.

Josephus and Pliny's accounts of The Essenes seem congruent.  These were indeed an ascetic and spiritual people.

The New American Bible's "Bible Dictionary" (a scholarly supplement at the end of the printing) says that The Essenes ranked in importance with The Pharisees and The Sadducees, but agrees with Josephus (perhaps because Josephus was their source) that there were only 4,000 Essenes alive at their height.  It also mentions Qumran as "their most important center."  Qumran was an Essenic monastery (to use a term loosely).

Qumran was the human settlement nearest the famed Qumran Caves, wherein the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.  The proximity of the caves to the Essene community in Qumran has led scholars to believe that the caves, which sat about a mile away from Qumran proper, served as a holy library of sorts.  At the time of The Essenes, Rome was making steady incursion into Palestine, and it is postulated that the community at Qumran hid all their most important scriptures in the caves a mile outside of town so that, if Roman forces were to come knocking, they would not have the opportunity to destroy or steal the library.  One cannot study the Dead Sea Scrolls without studying The Essenes.

It is understood that The Essenes were very serious about cleanliness, and scholars believe that Essenes bathed themselves ritually every morning to maintain purity, and would have taken painstaking steps to maintain the ritual purity of their water, wine and food.  The Essenes were so obsessed with purity that they may not have been allowed to defecate on their Sabbath day.  (My prurient interests show through again.  Apologies to those weak of stomach.)

You see, The Essenes would have strictly followed the scripture in Deuteronomy 23, which says that latrines should be well outside of the town one lives in.  The Essenes would have also, however, strictly followed rules about travel on the Sabbath, which specifically limited the distance a person could walk from their town.  The Essenes did the math, and came to believe that scripture forbade them walking far enough outside of town to use the latrine on the Sabbath.

Can you imagine living a life of piety to the extent that you couldn't use the restroom for a twenty-four hour period every week?

Like I said: The Essenes were the most ascetic of the Jewish people at the turn of the first-century.

We will retire of The Essenes for now, but I promise that we will revisit them in the context of Jesus and of John the Baptist later.  As with the prior two sects, I want to leave you with a few "must-remembers:"

a) Where The Sadducees had only their literal readings of Torah, and The Pharisees had the Torah supplemented by oral traditions, The Essenes had the Torah supplemented by exegesis, meaning that they didn't believe in the oral traditions the Pharisees had, but they also believed there was more to be extrapolated from Torah than was immediately apparent by its words.

b) As Rome came warring through Palestine in the second half of the first-century, The Essenes either died out along with The Sadducees, or dispersed to the extent that they diffused completely into the larger diaspora.

c) The Essenes believed in an afterlife and an eternal soul.  They believed there was a reward to be had in the afterlife for the righteous.  They may not have believed in free will, however, meaning that all human lives were totally predestined in their cosmology.

d) They were a relatively small sect, and held little to no sway over Judaism at large or The Temple, both of which they appeared to shun because of perceived impiety on the part of The Pharisees and, especially, The Sadducees.

Josephus said there were three main sects, so you might expect our survey to end here.  To the contrary: we have at least two more rounds to go with first-century Jewish sectarianism.

Next time: The Zealots.

Now, let's get back to our Gospel.

 ------------------------------

Matthew 2:16 through Matthew 2:18

16 When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the magi, he became furious. He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi. 

17 Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah the prophet: 

18 “A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loud lamentation;
Rachel weeping for her children,
and she would not be consoled,
since they were no more.”

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

So, for the first time in our Gospel, we see some bloodshed.  We've seen Herod's fear about the Baby Jesus rising now for a couple of weeks, and today we see the levee break.  He realizes the magi did a number on him, and, in his rage, he decides he's going to do a number on the countryside.

All the baby boys two years old and under are to be killed.

Woah.  Just... woah.

This narrative only occurs in Matthew.  When we read Mark, we will not find a massacre of infants.  When we read Luke, we will not find a massacre of infants.  When we read John, we really won't find a massacre of infants.

Historians who study Herod, and even many Biblical scholars, agree that this massacre never happened.  My personal understanding of Herod is that he was a very paranoid man, constantly wary about the loss of his power.  While Matthew shows Herod's paranoid hand-wringing as the cause of the massacre, I see it as the proof that it didn't happen.  What faster way could there possibly be for a monarch to undermine his own power than to go out to his constituency and kill their baby boys by the hundreds or thousands?  The move is nonsensical from the point of view of someone trying desperately to maintain political power.  Herod might have had an anger problem, but he was generally liked by his people and generally made very rational decisions throughout his political career.  Thus I concur with the scholars who think that the massacre is an invention.

Why invent such a thing?  We cannot say for sure, but verses seventeen and eighteen shed light on one possibility that we've already encountered.  Perhaps the evangelist has made this up simply so that he can create yet another in his growing series of links between Old Testament scriptures and the messianic ministry of Jesus.  In other words: more shoe-horning.

I might call him "Shoehorn Matthew" by the time this is all said and done.

Verse eighteen refers to Jeremiah 31:15.  Jeremiah was another prophet.  Matthew has thus far referred to prophets that were contemporary to King Ahaz (eighth-century BC), but Jeremiah lived a little later, having been born around 650 BC.  We will find further cause later to discuss Jeremiah, so we will leave the study here for today.  

Your take-away: Matthew (or the guy that wrote what was later ascribed to Matthew) made up the massacre of the infants.  This was done at least partially so that Matthew (or the guy that wrote what was later ascribed to Matthew) could continue his established pattern of referring the Gospel reader constantly back to Jewish prophecy.

Please join us next time, and please share this writing.

Love.

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* I do not want to be crass... but that was the funniest sentence of this study thus far.  And you know this.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 2:13 through Matthew 2:15

Hello, and welcome back!  Or, if this is your first time, just "welcome!"

If this is your first time here, I recommend going back to the first post, which served as a bit of an Introduction to the nature of this study.  You can find that post here.

Please keep in mind that this endeavor is pointedly not for profit.  I will never attempt to protect these words legally for my benefit, nor will I ever attempt to make money by their sale or by advertising associated with their publication.

Before we begin today, let me briefly remind you where we're at.  Last time, we introduced a new short series of studies within our broader study.  The title of that series is Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus - A Shallow Survey.  In the first installment of that survey, we learned about The Pharisees, or the "separated ones," who believed in an oral Jewish tradition as well as the written tradition.  The Pharisees were a popular movement in Jerusalem, and they contrast in some way with the group we will discuss today: The Sadducees.

Without further ado, then, I give you the second installment of the survey.

Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus - A Shallow Survey

Number Two: The Sadducees

The Sadducees are the second sect of two sects of Judaism that figure prominently in the Gospels of Jesus Christ.  At the time of Christ's ministry, The Sadducees and The Pharisees were the two main groups rivalling one another for the hearts and minds of the Jews in Jerusalem.  Jesus encounters thinkers from both groups throughout the narrative of the Gospels.

The etymology of "Sadducee" probably comes from the Hebrew for "descendant of Zadok," which became "Saddoukaios" in Greek.  The person referred to there, Zadok, was a high priest* way way back in the days of David and Solomon (circa 1000 BC.)  Zadok can be found in several of the books of the Old Testament.  

When Jerusalem was Hellenized following Alexander the Great's conquest of Palestine in 332 BC, The Temple waned a little in its preeminence over Jewish life.  The Temple's preeminence had been the unifier of the Jewish people, and at its waning, sectarianism began.  The Sadducees were of the more conservative sects that emerged.  Sadducees believed strictly in what had been recorded for them in their scriptures, not in the oral traditions to which The Pharisees adhered.  

The Sadducees consisted of elite members of the priestly class living in Jerusalem.  As priests, they were supposed to have been descendants of Aaron, Moses' brother, and they passed their jobs down to their first-born sons.  They were responsible for the ritualistic animal sacrifices that went on each day at The Temple.  They held charge over many of the most important aspects of Jewish religious and social life in Jerusalem.

Between Hellenization and Jesus' time, questions among the people of Jerusalem had arisen regarding the legitimacy of The Temple, the priesthood, and the Sadducees, who many felt were corrupted by Medizing influences.

It's easy to contrast The Pharisees, a popular movement, with The Sadducees, a sect of economic and political elites who controlled The Temple based on birthright.  Disagreements about whether or not oral traditions were valid yielded major ideological discrepancies, particularly regarding the afterlife.  The Sadducees believed resolutely, as recounted in the Gospel and by our friend Josephus, that there was no afterlife at all.  They did not believe in a coming resurrection of the faithful dead.  They did not believe in an eternal soul.

By the time of Jesus' birth, the inhabitants of Jerusalem saw The Temple completely controlled by The Sadducees.

When The Second Temple was destroyed in 70 AD by Rome, everything changed for the Jews.  Being that The Sadducees derived all of their power and status from the management of The Temple through priestly positions, their power among their own people was obliterated by Rome's incursion into Palestine.  Traditions of ritual sacrifice ceased, and Rabbis (or "teachers") replaced priests in primacy over Jewish religious life.  The Sadducees died out immediately as the diaspora began in full and Jews faced the harsh reality of having to worship their God from synagogues, rather than from their beloved Temple.

The Sadducees died out while their main opponents, The Pharisees, continued on.

Remember these key points about The Sadducees:

a)  They believed exclusively in written tradition, or Torah, not in the oral traditions that The Pharisees promoted.

b)  They ceased to exist as a sect when The Second Temple ceased to exist, in 70 AD.

c)  They didn't believe in an afterlife, nor an eternal soul, because they said these things did not exist in their scriptures.

d)  They were an authoritative minority in Jerusalem who were suspected by some as being corrupted by Persia.

As we continue on learning about pre-Christian Judaism, we will no longer be able to see it as a monolith.  To the contrary, the picture should be emerging of a people divided by economic, social, geological and philosophical differences.  

The picture is emerging of a Jerusalem alive with vibrant debate about the nature of God's will for humanity, and humanity's place in the universe.

The religious and philosophical context of Jesus' ministry is this vibrant debate.

Next time: The Essenes.

Now, let's get back to our Gospel.

 ------------------------------

Matthew 2:13 through Matthew 2:15

13 When they had departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt,and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.” 

14 Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed for Egypt. 

15 He stayed there until the death of Herod, that what the Lord had said through the prophet might be fulfilled, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

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

So the Magi have just come to see Baby Jesus and do him homage.  They were supposed to go back and report to Herod, but instead have chosen to go a different way.  Now, right after they leave, an angel appears in a dream (again) to Joseph.  The angel says "Joe, you need to get down to Egypt where Herod can't get the baby, because he wants to kill this specific baby quite badly!"  Joseph, without question, takes Mary and Jesus to Egypt.

Verse fifteen tells us that Joseph stayed in Egypt with his family until the death of Herod, and then returned to Palestine.  The most interesting thing we have going on here, of course, is the reference to old scripture.  Verse fifteen says that the entire Herod vs Baby Jesus scenario is occurring so that Jesus can be exiled to Egypt and then brought back to Palestine, fulfilling a prophecy of old.  Verse fifteen says that God had said "out of Egypt I called my son."

The New American Bible points us back to the Book of Hosea to find the source for this prophetic material.  Hosea, as the Book of Hosea tells its reader immediately, was another prophet living around the time of Ahaz.  That means that Hosea would have been contemporary or nearly contemporary to both Isaiah and Micah, two prophets we've already discussed.

Hosea is interesting for a number of reasons.  The narrative moves about wildly, and changes between direct subjects without warning.  According to notation in The New American Bible, Hosea is notoriously hard to translate, possibly because the text was either corrupted by poor literary practices over time, or because the Hebrew it was originally written in was "nonstandard" somehow.  

The first chapter of Hosea may be of note to those of prurient interest.  In the first chapter, the first thing we see God saying to Hosea is that he must "Go, get for yourself a woman of prostitution, and children of prostitution."  

A "woman of prostitution," God recommends?  Hosea finds his prostitute woman in Gomer**, whom he marries and with whom he has three children.

Throughout Hosea, it seems as though everything is a metaphor for the people of Israel.  God commands Hosea to love his wife, despite her adulterousness, the same way God loves Israel, despite Israel's being religiously adulterous at the time.  God condemns Hosea's children at first, and then uplifts them, which represents condemnation and subsequent redemption for Israel.

The verse referenced in Matthew 2:15 is Hosea 11:1.  Leading up to 11:1, the Lord is speaking through Hosea, saying that the people of Israel have stopped putting their faith in God and had come to be faithful only in their own military might.  The Lord says that because of their faith in their military, which should have been placed in Him instead, they will experience resounding military defeats.  "All your fortresses shall be ravaged," He says in Hosea 10:14.

Chapter 11, subtitled in The New American Bible as "The Disappointment of a Parent," shows the Lord in lamentation.  He laments that even though He was a perfect father to His "son" Israel, Israel still betrayed Him.  Hosea 11:1 begins that lamentation thus:

"When Israel was a child I loved him,
Out of Egypt I called my son."

It is only too clear, upon reading Hosea, that the author of Matthew is taking the words of Hosea (or of God, if you like) out of context.  As we've seen before, the verse selected by the evangelist here as prophetic of Jesus can actually only be seen as such if taken out of context.  Hosea is not talking about Jesus being briefly exiled to Egypt seven-hundred years in the future.  Hosea is talking about Israel's liberation from Egypt at the time of Moses, some seven-hundred years prior.

It is as if I can see the evangelist in my mind, writing the Gospel, and flipping back through the Old Testament thinking "I know I can make Jesus' story fit with the old scriptures so that it sounds like it's all one continuous divine narrative."  Then he comes across this "out of Egypt, I called my Son" phrasing and thinks "ah, this could work...."

Here's the broken record clause: the evangelist is trying to make the story of Jesus Christ palatable to Jews by writing the story of Jesus entirely in a Jewish context.  The evangelist is a Jew living amongst and preaching to Jews.

Jesus' exile to Egypt occurs only in the Book of Matthew.  We do not take the flight to Egypt as historical, but we will discuss its historicity again later.

I recommend that the reader open up their Bible to Hosea sometime, if only to witness the book's eccentric linguistic qualities.

That will have to suffice for today.  Join us next time, and please share this writing.

Love.

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

* The high priesthood was, very roughly, the "Papacy" of Judaism.  It was inherited, and lasted one's entire lifespan in normal circumstances. The high priest was the only one allowed to enter the most sacred part of The Temple.  

** What a name for a girl, huh?

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To read what came prior to this, click here.
To read what's next, click here.

On Matthew 2:10 through Matthew 2:12

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

I had a day off the other day, which means I have time to bring you another installment of this study in quicker succession than normal.  This elates me.  I wish I had more time to work on this than I do, but I promise to occupy my free time with this as much as possible.

I want to take a moment to say thank you to anyone who is reading this.  Whether it is your first time here or you are a repeat visitor: thank you for taking the time.  It means a lot to me.

Last time, we went forward in time from the Gospels (just slightly) to the Book of Acts, where we witnessed the "Birth of the Church."  We talked about the way the first Christians lived, and discussed the cultural and ethnic diversity of that first community.  Then we followed the "Herod vs Baby Jesus" narrative down a little further in Matthew.

I know my rhetorical approach here thus far has been relatively scatter-gun, and I am sensitive to the needs of some readers for more focus.  So, today, I'm going to introduce a multi-part series within The Moral Vision.  Let's call this: Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus - A Shallow Survey.  This will provide a temporary sense of increased focus, and will last a few weeks at least.

As I have promised from the beginning, we will be working hard to understand the historical context for Jesus' Galilean Ministry.  I currently argue that the biggest edifice within the realm of Christ's historical context is the Second Temple.  That is to say that the most important thing we can learn about Jesus, in order to understand his teaching, is the nature of his Jewishness.

So, let's not waste any more time.  Here we go.

Sects of Judaism Existing in Palestine at or Immediately Prior to the Time of Jesus - A Shallow Survey

Number One: The Pharisees

For a long time, I thought of Judaism as a monolith.  Growing up outside of an ecosystem of thought, it is hard to recognize the variation and diversity represented within that ecosystem.  Because of this myopia, things we aren't immediately concerned with tend to coalesce and become monolithic in the mind.

For Christians, I think, there is a tendency to think of ancient Judaism only as it existed in the Biblical Era, hundreds of years before Christ.  For our interests here at The Moral Vision, we want to know as much about the Judaism(s) that existed in the year 4 BC as we do about the Judaism of Moses' time.  Jesus' relays his teachings primarily to Jews, and explains his morality in part by constantly referencing known Jewish teachings and customs.  If we don't have a thorough historical understanding of the references, how can we really get his meaning?  Simply put, the answer is that we absolutely cannot.

Any veteran of the Gospels will recognize the first sect in our shallow survey immediately.  "The Pharisees" appear prominently and frequently in the Gospels as some of Jesus' primary philosophical sparring opponents.  He encounters The Pharisees and another group, "The Sadducees," over and over again, and he debates various points with them over and over again.  The two come up so frequently that, again, I think the tendency for many Christians is to begin to think of the two groups as more singular than they are.  However, The Pharisees had a unique tradition that it behooves us to understand.

Let's start with some easy stuff.  The word "pharisee" comes from the Aramaic "prīšayyā," meaning "the separated ones."  We see it in Ancient Greek as "Pharisaios."  We actually first learn of The Pharisees by name from The Gospels, and second from the famous first century Romano-Jewish historian, Josephus, who you will remember has already helped us out before.

We should think of The Pharisees as a popular separatist movement existing concurrently with several other exclusive movements in Jewish thought.  The Pharisees arose out of traditions that began at the time of the Babylonian exile, when the First Temple had just been destroyed.  The Pharisees exist in contrast to the elite priestly sect, eventually called The Sadducees, who derived their power from their direct management of the ongoings at the Temple.

During the Babylonian exile, when there was no Temple from which the elite could derive authority, their power waned.  For many Jews, oral traditions and small religious services put on by scribes and sages in homes or synagogues became more important than the whims of an elite priestly class.

In 540 BC, on his way toward the history books, Persian leader Cyrus the Great eventually freed the Jews from Babylon (thus the "Great" in his name,) and they were allowed to return to Israel to build another Temple.  While Cyrus allowed their return to Jerusalem, and allowed the construction of a Second Temple (the one Herod would eventually add on to,) the Jews were not allowed to re-establish their own monarchy.  The elite priestly group that were empowered at that time in Cyrus' Jerusalem were seen by some as lackeys beholden to external nations, because their power could now be seen as being derived from Persia.

The Pharisees differed from the priests in many ways, but the biggest difference was that The Pharisees believed in the aforementioned "oral traditions," while the priests believed only in the Torah.  Without a Jewish monarchy, these competing ideas were allowed to grow in opposition to one another, and religious homogeneity slipped away.

The priests favored much stricter readings, generally, of the scriptures.  For example, where the scripture recommends "an eye for an eye," The Pharisees saw a prescription for indemnity, while the priests saw a prescription for literally scooping someone's eye out as punishment.

The Pharisaic tradition is the tradition that evolved into what we call "Rabbinic Judaism," or modern, mainstream Judaism.

The Pharisees were likely not concerned about a "hell" to be avoided in the afterlife, but, rather, were concerned about their acceptance into the "world to come," commonly understood as a time here on Earth when things would be ideal for those who had followed God's laws.  Many Pharisees likely believed that, at God's institution of the "world to come," good law abiding Jews would be resurrected from the dead to share in God's bounty on Earth.  Thus heaven, for The Pharisees, would have been a secure, independent Jewish monarchy instituted by God himself over a prosperous Jewish people in the area of Jerusalem.

As it turns out, there was significant ambiguity about the concept of the afterlife within Pharisaic thought.  That ambiguity has lasted up until the present day, but we can say for sure that the "Doctrine of Hell" was not something that was fleshed out and accepted by the Pharisees at the time of Jesus.

So, here are the points I'd like you to remember about The Pharisees at this time:

a)  They believed in an Oral Tradition that was supplemental to the Torah.  That Oral Tradition eventually became what we call the Mishnah.

b)  They are the sect of Judaism that evolved into what we know of today as mainstream Rabbinic Judaism.

c)  By and large, they didn't technically believe in Heaven and Hell, but many of them did likely believe in a coming resurrection of the faithful dead into a glorious "world to come."

d)  They were growing in popularity among the common people in Jerusalem at the time of Christ's Galilean Ministry.

As I admitted, this is shallow.  Given the vast amount of time we have before us, I am certain that we will revisit The Pharisees as a topic of discussion over and over again, but this should suffice as introduction, for now.

Next time: The Sadducees.

Now let's get back to our Gospel.

 ------------------------------

Matthew 2:10 through Matthew 2:12

10 They were overjoyed at seeing the star, 

11 and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. They prostrated themselves and did him homage. Then they opened their treasures and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 

12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed for their country by another way.

 ------------------------------ 

Recall that Herod has sent the magi in his employ out to find Baby Jesus, under the lie that he wishes to "do him homage."  They follow their guiding star to the house where Jesus is with his mother, and they prostrate themselves before him, give him gifts, and generally do him homage.

We know that Herod is up to no good, since we already learned that he is "troubled" by the word of Christ's birth.  Here, the magi learn that Herod is up to no good through a dream, and they make the choice to abandon their mission for Herod.

There is plenty going on here in these verses, but little of it is anything but apparent, so I'll just leave you with two quick things that come to mind with this reading.

First, I'd like the reader to take note of how much data God seems to transmit to people via dreams throughout the Gospel.  I will try to be diligent about studying dreams in the context of the Gospels at some point in the future.  I think we might derive meaning by studying which data are relayed via dreams versus which data are relayed by other means.

Second, I'd call attention to this particular action of "prostration" by the magi.  It is of a personal note, and probably not relevant, but I prefer to pray in a prostrate position, with my belly and forehead or lips touching the ground, the way these magi are said to have greeted Jesus.  It is the most humbling position in which to put the body, to my mind, and seems to aid in focused prayer.  I'd love to know if anyone else out there ever finds occasion to prostrate themselves.

Alas, now your brain is reeling, like: "why would the guy who says he doesn't believe in supernatural phenomena of any kind spend any amount of time praying?"

This question will be answered in full at a later date.  For now: my prayers to y'all, whoever you are.  I hope to see you next time.

Love.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 2:7 through Matthew 2:9

Happy thanksgiving.

To help you celebrate, please note that there is a built in navigation system for this text now, which appears at the bottom of each post.  From the end of any given post, you can travel either to the prior post or the subsequent post.  I'm aware that this is redundant with the navigation clumsily provided by the digital platform, but I sometimes find the navigation provided by the platform to be counterintuitive or easy to miss.  So there it is: my thanksgiving gift to you.

Now, let's take a look at some learnin'.

Before we get to the Gospel this week, I'd like to jump past the Gospels just slightly.  (Not too far.)  Today, on thanksgiving, we're going to take a look at Acts, Chapter 2.  In Acts 2, we witness what some call "The Birth of the Church," and learn a little about what the very first Christians were living like.

Part of my broad philosophical thesis is that, if we decide to call ourselves Christian, we should ensure that our ideals align well with the ideals that the actual living-Christ espoused.  This means that we want to go back to the oldest possible sources of data regarding Christ and his teachings.  If we are looking for a model of Christian life, and we have more than one to choose from, we ought to always choose the oldest known reliably documented model.

Why would we be after the oldest model?  Obviously, the oldest model is the one most informed by the actual living-Christ.  In that sense, the oldest model is the most purely Christian.  We see the very oldest model of Christianity described in the Book of Acts, the fifth book in the New Testament.

Acts 2 shows Peter, Jesus' Apostle, giving his "Pentecost Sermon."  This is the first time that one of the Apostles is recorded as speaking to the public in Jerusalem, or anywhere else, subsequent to the grisly execution of Christ.

The context: Peter's friend and leader has just been executed publicly, and everyone in town is talking about it.  Peter and the boys get together there in Jerusalem and are overcome by the "holy Spirit," the result of which is that they all start speaking in tongues.  A big crowd gathers.  Jerusalem being an international city, the crowd that gathers are not just Jews from the area, but Jews and Gentiles alike from all over the world.  As the Apostles speak about the acts of God, the Egyptians in the crowd hear the words in their native tongue.  The Medes in the crowd hear the words in their native tongue.  The Cretans and Arabs and the travelers from Rome all hear the words the Apostles speak in their respective native tongues.  The crowd marvels at this, and some of them say "these Galileans are just drunk!"

Peter stands up before the huge crowd of thousands that has gathered and says, approximately, "nah, nah, we ain't just drunk!  And I have some choice words for y'all"  Remember: this is the first time an Apostle addresses the masses after Christ's death.  They've just killed his friend and leader.  Don't be surprised by the fact that he just lets them have it.  He says that he believes that God has made Jesus Lord and Messiah of the Jews, and he seems furious at his fellow Jews who went along with the execution of said Messiah.

Peter's speech goes so well that three-thousand people are converted to the cause of Christ that day from the crowd.  (Please note that this crowd of what we can call the first "Christians" was extremely diverse, as we just mentioned.  It would have contained Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs and others, in addition to Jews.)

Immediately subsequent to this Pentecost Sermon and the "Birth of the Church," which coincides with the moment when the three-thousand convert, the Book of Acts tells us how these very first Christians lived.  It shows them living in accordance with what they are taught by their leaders, the Apostles, who had received their teaching directly from Jesus Christ.

From Acts, Chapter 2:

42 They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers. 

43 Awe came upon everyone, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. 

44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 

45 they would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to each one’s need. 

46 Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple area and to breaking bread in their homes. They ate their meals with exultation and sincerity of heart,

47 praising God and enjoying favor with all the people. And every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Interesting.  These words are the first in the Bible to describe the earliest Christians.

Recall that, somewhere near the recent inception of this writing, I said that part of my goal here is to compare and contrast the ideals of Christ with the ideals of the modern Americans who call themselves "Christians."

I'd like the American reader to think about the self-proclaimed Christians they know.

Then, I'd like the reader to think about the very first Christians, and their description in Acts Chapter 2.

"They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life."

Is there a difference?

"All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to each one’s need."

Is there a difference?

The constant refrain from the Christian-Conservative movement in America, as I've ascertained it over thirty-four years, is that unchecked capitalism is the ideal for human societies.

How is it, then, that we find the very first Christians, who were closest to Jesus himself and thus most capable of following his exact teachings, living in a way that seems to completely contradict this modern ideal?

If we admit that there is a difference between the living model of the first Christians and the living model of modern American Christians, then when did this difference begin to take shape?  At what point did Jesus' message, as it is interpreted by his followers, change?  Why would Jesus' teachings evolve over time?

These questions burn in my heart.  We will be following them all, all the way down.  For today, I want to just leave you with those questions, as we open up to Matthew again.

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Matthew 2:7 through Matthew 2:9

7 Then Herod called the magi secretly and ascertained from them the time of the star’s appearance. 

8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search diligently for the child. When you have found him, bring me word, that I too may go and do him homage.” 

9 After their audience with the king they set out. And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.

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Recall that Herod has just become suspicious that Jesus is going to become the King of the Jews and displace him in power as the current King of the Jews.  He asked his priests and scribes where the coming King was to be born, and they said "Bethlehem."  He now gets the time frame of Christ's birth from some magi.  (The magi were Persian sorcerers of a sort.)  Herod then sends the magi out to find Jesus.  As they depart on their trip, they see the same star they'd seen on their way into Jerusalem.  The star leads them to Jesus.

This story may be old news to many of you.  As we've discussed a little before, for our purposes, the miraculous or outlandish aspects of the narrative of Christ will prove to work as story structure for us, but we will not accept them as historical.  We will work to de-couple Christ's moral philosophy from the mythologies that surround his life, a task that proves easier than it sounds at first.

Whether or not we believe we are reading something that is historical or not, all the stories about Jesus in the Gospels serve as critical context for his real-world philosophy, which I assure you, does shine through.

We will leave our study here today.  I hope you have a wonderful thanksgiving.  I hope you've taken some questions away from this writing.  I hope you share this and I hope you come back soon.

Love.

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