The Deification of Jesus: Matthew Part 3

These series of posts are a non-literalist Christian's exploration of images of Jesus as Divine in Christianity and the New Testament. I am examining where these images came from and the reasons they were created. This is also an investigation of these image's meanings to those who created them and what meaning they may hold for myself and others today.

After exploring the Gospel of Mark, I began an investigation of the Gospel of Matthew for the images this community used to express who Jesus had become to them and to explore whether any of them portrayed Jesus as in any sense Divine, or more than human.

At this point, I would like to back up and take a look at who scholars believe the community of Matthew were and the characteristics of the book they assembled.  The consensus is that the Gospel was composed between 80 and 90 AD, 40 to 50 years after Jesus' death, with a possible wider range of between 70 and 110 AD.  The Gospel is a collection of stories and sayings from three main sources, the Gospel of Mark, the hypothetical collection of sayings known as the Q source also used by the Gospel of Luke, and unique material called "Special Matthew", or the M source. The presentation of this material includes familiarity with technical legal aspects of scripture debated at this time and a number of references to the Jewish Scriptures.

It is speculated that this community were Greek speaking Jewish Christians located in Syria because Antioch, the largest city in Roman Syria and the third-largest in the empire, is often mentioned.  If this book was assembled in the last half of the first century, then this community were second generation Christians, for whom the defining event was the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE in the course of the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE). This community, like many 1st century Christians, were still part of the larger Jewish community: hence the designation Jewish Christian to describe them.  There would have been conflict between this and other Jewish groups. The main source of disagreement would have been this community's belief in Jesus as the Messiah and authoritative interpreter of the law, as one risen from the dead and uniquely endowed with divine authority.  (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Matthew)

It has been suggested that this community had a larger Jewish component than those who created the other Gospels. There are many more references to the Jewish Scriptures and, unlike the Gospel of Mark, Jewish customs are not explained.  However, curiously enough, they are sometimes incorrect either through misinformation, or due to a deliberate modification to make a better metaphorical statement.  An example is the identification of the "Last Supper" as a Seder meal and the placement of Jesus death during Passover.  The Jewish community would never allow executions to take place during Passover, but telling the story in this manner makes a powerful metaphorical statement comparing Jesus' death to an atoning sacrifice.  This highlights the fact that this book, assembled by second generation Christians 40 to 50 years after Jesus' death, was never meant to be an objective, "just the facts Ma'am", report of literal events.  This was a retelling of stories and sayings in a way that highlighted what was important to this community using the literary styles and devices common to the time including metaphor, hyperbole, and myth. 

So, now let us return to the exploration of the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,[f] 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 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”[g] (which means “God with us”).

As I explored in the previous post, it would make no sense for the community to have taken this part of the story, about Jesus being conceived by God and not Joseph, literally. The first seventeen verses of the opening were just spent listing Jesus' genealogy back to Abraham through Joseph in order to prove Jesus' eligibility as the Messiah, God's chosen king for Israel. To cast doubt on Jesus' parentage from a recognized Jewish father in any literal sense would be to also brand him a Mamzer and deny him any right to a voice in the public congregations of Israel.

However, the Jewish mind of the time would have found no contradiction here between the claim of Jesus' eligibility as Messiah by being the issue of Joseph and the statement that Jesus had been conceived by the Holy Spirit.  They would have immediately recognized the latter statement as myth and metaphorical language like that which they were accustomed to finding in other rabbinic literature and teaching of the time.

The source is the myth of demigods from other cultures the most obvious being the Greek and Roman ones which would have been quite familiar to this Greek speaking thoroughly Hellenized community.  There is really no precedence for this concept in Jewish Scripture, or culture.  Heroes created by generation of a god with a mortal include Ion by Apollo and Creusa, Romulus by Mars and Aemila, Asclepius by Apollo and Coronis, and Helen by Zeus and Leda.  Alexander, the Ptolemies, and the Caesars were said by some scholars to have been "virgin born". Alexander the Great, " journeyed to the Oasis of Amen in order that he might be recognized as the god’s son and thus become a legitimate and recognized king of Egypt. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miraculous_births)

 

 

Now, one might point to the reference cited from Isaiah 7:14 in the passage as evidence that the writers were being serious and literal in this claim and that there is precedence or prophecy for this in the Jewish Scripture.

14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you[a] a sign: The virgin[b] will conceive and give birth to a son, and[c] will call him Immanuel.[d]  (Isaiah 7:14New International Version (NIV))b. Isaiah 7:14 Or young womand. Isaiah 7:14 Immanuel means God with us.

As footnoted in the New International Version above, the word translated as virgin is actually almah (עַלְמָה 5959  noun feminine young woman).  To say that all young women are virgins is like saying that all fruit are apples.  As well, the context of this verse from Isaiah chapter seven could hardly be seen as a foretelling of Jesus.

The story in chapter seven of Isaiah is about the threat of invasion of Judah by the kings of Ephraim and Aram who had formed an alliance.  God in this story tells the king of Judah, Ahaz, not to fear because Ephraim will come to ruin and will never invade. In sixty-five years they will be too shattered to even be a people. The sign given that this message comes from God is that by the time that a child conceived at the time of the message becomes a boy who, "knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste." (Isaiah 7:16)  This is a sign for a specific event, the destruction of the kingdoms of Ephraim and Aram, which was to begin by the time a child reaches the age of moral reason and be completed within sixty-five years.  There is no implication that the mother would be a virgin, or that the child was anything special other than a gauge of the passing of time and for having been given the name Immanuel, "God with us".  If the prophet intended to claim that this young woman was a virgin when she conceived the child, I would think that he would have included some further discussion on that point, or that someone in the generations of Jewish commentators before the book of Matthew would have taken notice of this.  Otherwise, we would also have to ask what became of the demigod produced in Isaiah's time and why he was never mentioned again.  Of course, I'm making the point that interpreting the description of the woman in Isaiah as being a virgin rather than just a young woman and taking the passage which refers to this in Matthew literally, is ridiculous.

However, some literalists, trying to invent what is not there, claim a, "second layer of prophesy", where Isaiah was not only foretelling the obvious immediate events specified, but, using the same words, was also predicting a second far off event as part of a secret code God has implanted for faithful modern readers in what he planned would be today's Bible.  Some of these same literalists who demand such a convoluted interpretation here also insist that passages like the one we are looking at from Matthew should be read, "plainly", without reference to context, literary style or device.  They instead view translations in authorized, God inspired and ordained, versions of the Bible to have been dictated directly by God to speak to the modern average reader.

If God meant to provide evidence of Jesus' literal Divine conception through signs and predictions in the Jewish Scriptures, one would think there would be more than this one dubious reference only drawn through a complicated interpretation forced on the text. The only foretelling or allusions that could be applied to Jesus in this chapter of Isaiah is the title Immanuel, and the promise in verse seventeen for Judah that, "The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah".

So why did the community of Mathew include this reference from Jewish Scripture in their allusion of Jesus being like one of the Greek and Roman demigods and describe it as a foretelling? Let's back up a moment and ask why they made this allusion to demigods in the first place.  I would imagine that they were saying that Jesus was so intimate with God that it was as if God conceived him like in these Gentile demigod myths.  Stressing Jesus' familiarity with God would have been important to this community since, with Jesus having no credentials or recognition from the Jewish Religious Authorities and Tradition, his authority and legitimacy and this community's credibility as a legitimate sect of Judaism, rested on Jesus' perceived intimacy and favor with God.
 

 

If bolstering their credibility among the wider Jewish community as a legitimate Jewish faction was a driver to the story, then reinforcing this pagan allusion with a reference from the Jewish Scriptures seems reasonable.  We have already looked at how using this reference from Isaiah as a foretelling that Jesus would have a literal Divine birth does not seem reasonable.  However, is this the aspect of their story that they were trying to reinforce with this reference?  The word in the original Greek in the Gospel that they use as their translation of the Hebrew describing the woman in the quote from Isaiah is, παρθένος, (Strong's Greek 3933) which although primarily used in the Greek to refer to a virgin, is also used historically to refer to either a marriageable maiden, or a young (married) woman.  So maybe the virgin interpretation of this word is not the aspect of the reference from Isaiah that they were meaning to apply and they were instead pointing to other parallels in their story with the one in Isaiah.  Perhaps the focus was on the name of the child, Immanuel, "God with us".  Might they be saying that, like the child in Isaiah, Jesus demonstrates that God is with us and this was foreshadowed by the prophet?  Or maybe this is a more general reference to special births as a portent and sign of God's future action.  Like the child born at the time of Isaiah's message to Ahaz is a marker of God's promise that Ahaz's enemies will be defeated and Judah will experience a special blessed period within the lifetime of this child, the birth of Jesus is the marker of God's promise of the Messianic Era that will come into play as Jesus comes into adulthood.