September 8th, 2021
I finished reading the Gospel of Matthew and I wanted to do a review of the book. For starters, the Gospel of Matthew definitely doesn’t read like Matthew wrote it nor does it suggest that it is his eyewitness testimony (or anyones eyewitness testimony for that matter). There is no autograph saying that Matthew wrote the gospel or a statement along the lines of “I witnessed…” in the text. From what I can understand, later Christian writers attributed the gospel to Matthew, but I don’t put much stock into that. I’ll get into that a little later in this review, but I don’t think it is wise to believe something simply because it is the traditional view. If someone were to convince me that the Gospel of Matthew is the eyewitness testimony of Matthew, they would have to present strong evidence to show that to be the case and not rely on appeals to tradition. And even if it was an eyewitness account, I would have a healthy dose of skepticism as to the claims made, which I will also discuss later.
I have developed a “standard”, I suppose you could call it, for thinking about ancient texts which is based on my read-through of The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. The opening lines of the work state clearly who the author was:
“Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war fought between Athens and Sparta, beginning the account at the very outbreak of the war, in the belief that it was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past.”
History of the Peloponnesian War, I.1
This is an unambiguous statement that requires no inference. Thucydides is the one who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War with the belief that it was going to be a great war. Thucydides also makes clear the purpose of his work:
“My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever”
History of the Peloponnesian War, I.22
Thucydides was an Athenian general and as soon as the war began in 431 BCE, he perceived that it would be a conflict on a scale without precedent, and resolved to become its historian. I can say this with certainty because there is an autograph in the text and he states in the first person why he decided to write his history. Comparing this to the Gospel of Matthew, nowhere in the work does an autograph or statement of purpose appear. One would have to make assumptions to get to any conclusions. There is still scholarly debate as to the authorship and purpose of the gospel which I will likely write about at a later date. To get back to the topic of eyewitness testimony though and the claim that the Gospel of Matthew is such, I turn again to Thucydides who, on the topic of eyewitness testimony, says the following:
“… with regard to my factual reporting of the events of the war I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions; either I was present myself at the events which I have described or else I heard them from eye-witnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eye-witnesses gave different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories”.
History of the Peloponnesian War, I.22
Again, this is unambiguous. Thucydides clearly states that he wrote down what he himself witnessed or what others witnessed. Even then, though, he states that he did not always trust what he heard from the eyewitness testimony of others, but made a point of corroborating their stories with as much thoroughness as possible. Nothing like this appears in the Gospel of Matthew; one would have to make inferences, assumptions, and speculations to come to any sort of conclusion about the claim that the Gospel is the eye-witness testimony of Matthew. If this is the word of God, why is it ambiguous? I can’t speak on the later gospels, but so far it doesn’t appear that the author of this gospel is Matthew let alone a witness to the events described.
I had mentioned my lack of faith in tradition earlier and I wanted to elaborate on that now. The reason I don’t put much stock into tradition is primarily because of the Homeric Question. The Homeric question concerns itself with the doubt and debate as to the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Odyssey and The Iliad, and the historicity of the man and the stories. Homer is the traditional author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but that is not a concrete fact and has been the subject of much academic study and debate. Like Matthew, there is no autograph, statement of purpose, or appeals to eyewitness testimony in The Iliad or The Odyssey. I hold to the notion that we don’t know who the author of these poems is and I hold to the same notion about Matthew and the authorship of the gospel attributed to him. I don’t think a person can confidently say that Matthew is the definitive author of the gospel of Matthew, much like one cannot confidently say that Homer is the definitive author of the Iliad and The Odyssey. I definitely think there should be discussions about the authorship and reliability of the content, but those discussions should not be hijacked by those whose conviction outweighs a rational analysis of the subject. The following article seems to go into this much more and while I don’t have time to read and respond to it at the moment, I would like to save it for a later review: Why Scholars Doubt the Traditional Authors of the Gospels (2017). One thing I wanted to mention from skimming the article though was that the article author uses Tacitus to compare with the authors of the gospels. I have not read nor did I have a plan to read Tacitus, but I will now plan on reading his works at some point.
I want to now turn my attention to some of the content of the Gospel of Matthew and discuss some of my own personal opinions. To start with, the first two chapters seem fictionalized. I won’t speak to the genealogy in Chapter 1, except to say that it lists 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the Exile, and 14 from the Exile to Jesus which, to me, seems like a literary trope. The miraculous birth story also seems literary as well and is used (as with most other prophecies) to tie Jesus to the Hebrew Bible (I will have more to say about this later). The lynchpin of the story of Jesus’ birth in the Gospel of Matthew is the direct quotation of Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew 1:23. My NLT version has the following from Isaiah:
All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin* will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God Is With Us’).
Isaiah 7:14, NLT
The verse in Matthew reads the following:
Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God Is With Us’).
Matthew 1:23, NLT
The first thing I’ll mention is the word virgin in the Isaiah passage. From what I can gather, the author of Matthew quoted the Greek Translation of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Septuagint, which translates the Hebrew word, almah, (meaning “young woman”) to the Greek parthenos (which means “virgin”) in the Isaiah passage. If the Isaiah 7:14 verse used the word bethulah instead (which means virgin in Hebrew) then there would be no ambiguity. I think it would be worth exploring in further detail all the instances of how almah and bethulah are translated into Greek to really get a full picture. This is but one issue that I saw with this particular verse though. Another is that nowhere in the New Testament outside of Matthew 1:22-23 is Jesus called Immanuel. If he will be called Immanuel, why is his name Jesus and not Immanuel? I can see how it could be argued from this passage that Jesus is “God with us”, but the author of Matthew doesn’t mention the notion of Jesus as God incarnate. The main issue that I found, though, is that Isaiah 7:14, has nothing to do with a prophecy about the Jewish messiah. Reading Isaiah Chapter 7, one finds the following description: Syria and Israel are going to invade Judah for which King Ahaz is terrified. Isaiah says that this invasion will not take place and that a sign will be given to confirm this. The sign is that an almah/young woman will give birth to a son and call him Immanuel. Before this boy is old enough to choose what is right and reject what is wrong (roughly 7 years), the land of Syria and Israel will be laid to waste (Isaiah 7:1-16). This doesn’t appear to have anything to do with a messiah that will come later. King Ahaz is being comforted by God to not worry about the imminent invasion. It doesn’t make sense in the context of the passage for the birth to happen 800 years later. The quoting of Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew is what I consider to be an example of retroactively reading a messianic prophecy into the text where there were none to begin with. The author of Matthew, who portrays Jesus as the Jewish messiah, and who believed that Jesus was born of a virgin, is the one who quoted the supposed messianic virgin birth prophecy from the Hebrew Bible to prove it, but the Hebrew Bible never says that the messiah will be born of a virgin. He cites a passage that mentions a “virgin birth” thinking that it is a prophecy about his messiah, but he is really just reading what he thinks he knows about his messiah into that passage. He was influenced by the Hebrew Bible in what he decided to say about Jesus, but his views of Jesus affected how he read the Hebrew Bible. I’m sure that this is the case with some of the other prophecies in Matthew as well. My thinking is that in this instance, the author of Matthew tailored his telling of the birth of Jesus in such a way as to make it seem like Jesus fulfilled a prophecy that the author wanted him to fulfill, namely the Isaiah 7:14 prophecy. The author wanted to prove that Jesus was the Messiah who had been promised in the Hebrew Bible and he used what prophecies he could find to do so even if they were non-messianic. These prophecies are sprinkled throughout the Gospel of Matthew and I‘d be interested in reviewing them to understand their original context to see whether or not they fit the bill of messianic prophecy. This discussion of prophecy, however, reminded me of Poseidon’s prophecy for Aeneas from The Iliad:
Truly my grief is great for high-souled Aeneas, who soon indeed shall go down to Hades’ halls, killed by Achilles for heeding the word of far-working Apollo – childish fool that he was! For Apollo will not keep sad death from him for a moment, But why should that innocent man suffer woes that belong to others, he who has always given such pleasing gifts to the sky-ruling gods? So come, let us save him from death, for Zeus himself will be angry if now Achilles cuts the man down. It is surely already decreed that Aeneas shall outlive the war, so that Dardanus’ seed may not die and his line disappear, since Zeus adored Dardanus more than he did any other child he had by a mortal woman. For now Cronos’ son has come to despise the house of Priam, and surely the mighty Aeneas shall soon rule the Trojans, and after him the sons of his sons, great princes yet to be born.
The Iliad, Book XX.324-341
The basic gist of this passage is that Apollo urged Aeneas to challenge Achilles and to fight with him in single combat. Aeneas was almost killed, but Poseidon rescued him because it was prophesied that Aeneas would outlive the war and have sons and the sons of his sons would be great princes. From what I understand, Vergil used this prophecy to claim that Romulus and Augustus were descendants of Aeneas in the Aeneid. I have not read the Aeneid yet, so I can’t speak more to this, but it will be interesting to see how this prophecy plays out in Vergil’s narrative. I will say the following about this though, if people claimed that The Iliad and The Aeneid were infallible and inerrant and used this prophecy to justify that, I would be just as skeptical and critical of it as I am of the Bible when people claim that it’s infallible and inerrant, but like with most ancient literature, it contains some truth and some fiction.
Moving on to Chapter 2, I have some issues with this one as well. I won’t quote it all here, but you can read it elsewhere. To start, I definitely don’t think the author was an eye-witness to any of the conversations or events held between Herod, his advisors, and the wisemen, nor do I think that he was necessarily able to rely on the eyewitness testimony of anyone involved. Even if the author did, I find it hard to believe that the conversations were accurately recorded if they were recorded at all. I’ve had this thought a couple of times while reading the Gospel of Matthew and I’ll touch on those instances when I get to those sections. One interesting thing to mention in this section is that the wise men (or magi in Greek) were in fact Zoroastrian priests. I find this fascinating and something that I would like to explore later as I learn more about Zoroastrianism.
Moving to Chapter 3, there starts to be included what I consider legitimate historical details especially Matthew 3:1, 4-6:
In those days John the Baptist came to the Judean wilderness and began preaching…
Matthew 3:1, NLT
John’s clothes were woven from coarse camel hair, and he wore a leather belt around his waist. For food he ate locusts and wild honey. People from Jerusalem and from all of Judea and all over the Jordan Valley went out to see John. And when they confessed their sins, he baptized them in the Jordan River.
Matthew 3:4-6, NLT
These passages that start to describe John the Baptist, to me, don’t seem like they need to be made up. However, while these perceived historical details are in the chapter, the chapter still seems overly literary, especially considering the fact that there is a quote in the chapter for which the witnesses are suspect. For example, Matthew 3:7-12:
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming to watch him baptize, he denounced them. “You brood of snakes!” he exclaimed. “Who warned you to flee the coming wrath? Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God. Don’t just say to each other, ‘We’re safe, for we are descendants of Abraham.’ that means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones. Even now the ax of God’s judgment is poised, ready to sever the roots of the trees. Yes, every tree that does not produce good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into the fire. I baptize with water those who repent of their sins and turn to God. But someone who is coming soon who is greater than I am – so much greater that I’m not worthy even to be his slave and carry his sandal. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. He is ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. Then he will clean up the threshing area, gathering the wheat into his barn but burning the chaff with never-ending fire.”
Matthew 3:7-12, NLT
I find it hard to believe that there was a witness to this speech by John the Baptist to the Pharisees and Sadducees who then reported it to the author of Matthew. While it seems that the details about John the Baptist mentioned earlier would have been somewhat common knowledge among his followers and thus recorded accurately, I find it hard to believe that this speech was recorded accurately and not simply fabricated to flesh out the character of John the Baptist. Also, I wonder if the last five sentences in the quote above (which represents Matthew 3:11-12) are interpreted in a way to suggest hell. Similarly, I wonder if the winnowing fork seems to be where the idea of the devil’s pitchfork comes from. Getting away from this though, one thing that is of interest to me is where the idea of Baptism comes from. With it being so common in most Christian denominations, I never wondered about its origins thinking that it came from the New Testament, but the gospel of Matthew doesn’t go into detail about its origins. This left me scratching my head as to where the idea for baptism came from and how it became central to Christianity. I don’t know if the other Gospels or New Testament Books will have anything to say about this, but I will leave it at that for now.
Chapter 4 is interesting as it is the first time in the New Testament (and the only time in the gospel of Matthew) that the devil (or more accurately, the tempter) is a part of the story. This interaction certainly seems fictionalized and seems to serve a specific purpose in the narrative. I think this would be worth diving into at some point as I’m sure there is a lot to unpack with this, namely this notion that I’ve heard that the idea of an evil entity opposed to the good that is Jesus/God is in fact a Zoroastrian idea. I would very much like to read the Zoroastrian texts as I think they might shed some light on this. I will leave it at that for now. The second half of Chapter 4 seems to get closer to actual historic events in the life of Jesus, although I still have skepticism about conversations being accurately recorded. It is worth noting that Matthew has not been introduced into the narrative yet (I will touch on this later).
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 cover Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. There were some things that I found interesting in the Sermon that I would like to discuss. To start with, I recognized 6:9-13 as the Lord’s Prayer which is recited in the Methodist churches that I’ve gone to:
Our father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us today the food we need, and forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us. And don’t let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.
Matthew 6:9-13
I found reading these verses weird to read mostly because I’ve always heard it a certain way and it has been committed to memory. This is how I learned it:
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespassed against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.
To me, this just flows better. From my experience reciting this every Sunday in Church growing up and having it memorized from a young age, I would not be surprised if the verses quoted above were accurate to what was said by Jesus. Mantras like this one are certainly easy to remember and I imagine that there would not have been much variation between the time that they were said and the time they were written down.
When reading Matthew 7:7-11 I got the sense that these verses were related to the idea of the prosperity gospel. The verses go like this:
“Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. You parents – if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead? Or if they ask for a fish, do you give them a snake? Of course not! So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.”
Matthew 7:7-11
I don’t know the full details about the intersection of the prosperity gospel with scripture, but what I do know is that the basic thing that is taught is that if you give a small amount of money to the church that you will receive a large amount of money from God because of your faith. The execution is pretty sinister though. There are certain preachers, mostly televangelists, that prey on people’s desire to increase their wealth and offering a faith-based way to do so. The result is that people give money to these pastors, who then buy mansions and jets, and claim that their faith in God is what allowed them to prosper. This is then used as proof to show that faith in God really makes someone prosper. I don’t know what is worse, the fact that these pastors are deceiving their parishioners or that the parishioners don’t see past the deception. John Oliver does a good video on this subject. I expect I’ll revisit the prosperity gospel at some point, but I’ll leave it for a later date.
I now want to turn my attention to the Sermon on the Mount as a whole. I consider the sermon to be a speech in the Greek literature sense of the word and I’d like to analyze it as such. Thucydides used speeches to provide context for some of the decisions that were made by the various actors in his narrative of the Peloponnesian War, some of which he would have been in attendance for. On speeches he says the following:
“I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speaker say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.”
History of the Peloponnesian War, I.22
Thucydides makes it clear that he had a difficult time remembering the speeches that were given by the various people in his work and that, in a sense, he crafted his speeches around what he thought his speakers would have said, therefore it is safe to assume that the actual words written were not the actual words spoken. I see no reason to think that the Sermon on the Mount is any different. Even if there were eyewitnesses to the sermon, I think it can be safely assumed that they would likely not have remembered the exact wording of the sermon, only the main points. I want to highlight Pericles Funeral Oration, which is a famous speech recorded in Thucydides’ History. This speech takes place at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War and the purpose is to honor those who had fallen in the previous year of the war. The thing that makes it noteworthy is that the speech not only honors the men that died, but also glorifies the city for which they died (Athens). There are some parallels that can be drawn to American democracy, which I will touch on later, but to start with, I wanted to quote a passage that I found poignant from Pericles speech:
“Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day to day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands deep respect. We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break.”
History of the Peloponnesian War, II.37
This no doubt resonates with most Americans today. Abraham Lincoln struck a similar chord in his Gettysburg Address during the Civil War. I can’t help but feel a pang of patriotism and pride in the U.S. for the ideals on which it was founded and I’m sure Thucydides felt the same patriotism for his country as he fought for it, but this speech may very well be a fabrication of Thucydides. Although he records the speech in the first person as if it were a word-for-word record of what Pericles said, there can be little doubt that he edited the speech at the very least. As was pointed to earlier, Thucydides says that the speeches presented in his record are not verbatim transcripts, but represent the main ideas of what was said. While it is safe to assume that Pericles delivered this speech at the end of the first year of the war there is no consensus as to the accuracy of Thucydides’ record of it. I bring this up to make the point that I don’t consider the Sermon on the Mount to be a word-for-word transcription of what Jesus actually said. For starters, the supposed author, Matthew, was not following Jesus at this time and would not have been present for this sermon which does not lend credibility to the idea that this gospel was written by an eyewitness of the events described. One may be able to argue that the author, not being Matthew, may have been present for the sermon, but there is still the issue of eyewitness testimony not being reliable. If someone were to hold that Matthew is the eyewitness and author of this gospel though, they would have to agree that he definitely wasn’t there for the Sermon on the Mount to bear witness to it, which means that it’s hearsay at best and a fabrication at worst. The author says that Matthew starts following Jesus later in the narrative (Matthew 9:9 to be exact) and I find it hard to believe that if Jesus gave a sermon on the mount, the exact words used would be the same, plus, from what I understand, Jesus spoke in Aramaic/Hebrew and yet the gospels were written in Greek and so the words in the Greek manuscripts are not the actual words that were spoken but would have been translated to Greek. I found a paper that discusses some of the nuances of this translation issue and I found it worthy to include in this discussion. The main analysis of the paper revolves around the meaning of Matthew 6:22-23 quoted below:
“Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!”
Matthew 6:22-23, NLT
At a first glance, it is not clear to me what this verse means, but the author of the paper makes the point that the good eye and bad eye are referring to generosity and greed, respectively. This makes sense especially since the preceding verses (6:19-6:21) and following verses (6:24-34) are discussing money and possessions. The author makes the point that this is an example where it makes sense to translate it to Hebrew/Aramaic (the original being Greek) to get the meaning of what might have actually been intended. I won’t get too in the weeds with this, but you can read the paper to understand it better. That’s all I think I want to say about the sermon on the mount.
Chapters 8-25 detail Jesus’ ministry and recounts the various parables that he taught, miracles he performed, and interactions with religious leaders that he had. One thing I found interesting was when Jesus mentioned taking up one’s cross:
“If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine.”
Matthew 10:38, NLT
I found it interesting that Jesus mentions taking up one’s cross. I’ve always thought of a person taking up their cross as being metaphorically equated to Jesus taking up his literal cross, but the cross has no significance in the narrative until Jesus’ crucifixion which means that, if this is something that Jesus said in his lifetime, his disciples wouldn’t have understood it until after his death. This one passage definitely makes it seem like the meaning behind this verse and its inclusion only really makes sense after Jesus is actually crucified. A person reading this gospel, who was familiar with the life of Jesus and his death on the cross, would be familiar with this allusion.
Another thing I noted was that Matthew 14:1-2 doesn’t make sense as an eyewitness account:
When Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, heard about Jesus, he said to his advisors, “This must be John the Baptist raised from the dead! That is why he can do such miracles”.
Matthew 14:1-2, NLT
My main question is how does the author of Matthew know that Herod said this? Did he interview Herod Antipas and/or his advisors to know what the exact words used in this verse were? These are the kinds of questions that I keep having while reading the gospel of Matthew. I think the most logical position one can take with this specific passage (but it certainly applies to other passages as well) is that the author of Matthew made up this situation and what Herod said.
Matthew 15:19-20 caught my attention as well because it is making claims about how evil thoughts come from the heart. The verses are the following:
“But the words you speak come from the heart – that’s what defiles you. For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, all sexual immorality, theft, lying, and slander.”
Matthew 15:19-20, NLT
This to me just does not make sense. I didn’t understand why the word heart is used here. I mean the heart is used colloquially to mean a person’s emotions, but that’s not an accurate description of what is physically going on. I did a bit of research and found the following article: The Heart and The Mind – What the Biblical Word “Heart” Means. It says that the word “heart” refers in ancient cultures refers to the whole of the innermost part of a person and not just the emotions. I would prefer a more accurate and straightforward description of what was going on inside a person if it was coming from God though. This passage in particular makes me wonder why the Bible is written in a way that makes immediate sense only to the culture in which it was written. If a different culture wanted to understand the supposed “Word of God” they would have to study the culture in which the “Word of God” was revealed.
In Verse 15:21-28 there is a description of how Jesus heals a womans daughter, but he say the following:
Then Jesus left Galilee and went north to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A gentile woman who lived there came to him, pleading, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, son of David! For my daughter is possessed by a demon that torments her severely.” But Jesus gave her no reply, not even a word. Then his disciples urged him to send her away. “Tell her to go away” they said. “She is bothering us with all her begging.” Then Jesus said to the woman, “I was sent only to help God’s lost sheep – the people of Israel.” But she came and worshipped him, pleading again, “Lord, help me!” Jesus responded, “It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs.” She replied, “That’s true Lord, but even dogs are allowed to eat the scraps that fall beneath their master’s table.” “Dear Woman,” Jesus said to her “Your faith is great. Your request is granted.” And her daughter was instantly healed.
Matthew 15:21-28, NLT
This was perplexing to me. I found it strange that Jesus said that he was only sent for the lost sheep of Israel and not non-Jews. I think the author is trying to say that Jesus came for the Jews, but if a non-Jew has faith in him, Jesus will grant their request. What makes this more interesting is that the word “Gentiles” has a note that says that the word in the manuscripts is “Canaanites”. This would have had tremendous implications for the Israelites, as Canaan is depicted in the Hebrew Bible as sinful and worthy of being destroyed. I’m not sure I know the full story with this passage, but I will leave it here for now.
Chapters 26-28 discuss the end of Jesus’ life, the plot to kill him, and his death and resurrection. There were a couple of interesting passages in this section, but I will save those for a later date. Suffice it to say though, Chapters 8-28 as a whole seem less fabricated than some of the earlier chapters, but I still have some skepticism, which I will turn to now.
As I stated earlier, I find it hard to take everything in the gospel of Matthew to be actual facts about the life of Jesus. It seems that some of the stories and potentially some of the words put into his mouth may have been created after his death. I would not be surprised if the collective memory of Jesus’ followers had changed by the time the gospels were written. I read the first volume of a book called A History of Religious Ideas by Mircea Eliade and it had some interesting things to say with regards to this notion. Although the discussion revolved around the founder of the Zoroastrian religion, Zarathustra/Zoroaster, I think it still applies to conversations about Jesus. The author noted how it was normal for the historical personage of Zoroaster to be transformed into a paradigmatic model for believers. To quote Mircea Eliade:
“After a few generations the collective memory can no longer preserve the authentic biography of an eminent personage; he ends by becoming an archetype, that is, he expresses only the virtues of his vocation, illustrated by paradigmatic events typical of the model he incarnates.”
A History of Religious Ideas: Volume 1 (page 303)
What Mircea is saying is that for any person who is important to a given society, and whose stories are circulated among the group, the more likely they will become less historical and more legendary. I contend that this is likely the case with most of the characters in the Bible including Jesus. It seems that this even happened with George Washington and the myth of the cherry tree. When George Washington died in 1799 there was a great demand to learn more about him. Mason Locke Weems, a minister no less, wrote a book about Washington a year after his death in 1800 and by the 5th edition in 1806 the legend of the cherry tree first appeared. Being a minister, he wanted to show that the public greatness of Washington was due to his private virtues. He says that he got the story from an elderly woman who was a friend of the family, but that source is anonymous, so it cannot be seen as reliable. If, within 7 years of Washington’s death, a fabricated story starts to circulate about him, who’s to say that some of the stories about Jesus, which weren’t written down for at least 35 to 40 years, were not fabricated. Given enough time, any historical figure can become legendary, and the longer it takes for details to be written down, the more likely this will be the case. I can certainly understand that most Christians may have an issue with this, but I think that it is possible and probable especially after reading the Gospel of Matthew. To those that think the gospel of Matthew (and other books of the Bible) are infallible and inerrant, it just doesn’t appear to be the case. However, I would need to analyze the evidence of that assertion to truly form an opinion and I think it wise for me to explore that at a later date. I turn back to Thucydides to make my last point on this:
“Investigating past history, and in forming the conclusions which I have formed, it must be admitted that one cannot rely on every detail which has come down to us by way of tradition.”
History of the Peloponnesian War, I.20
He later goes on to say that:
“Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.”
History of the Peloponnesian War, I.20
What he is saying is that stories that have been told by way of tradition are not always reliable, but that most people will accept them without taking the time to determine their validity. I feel this to be representative of the vast majority of people around the world, be they religious or not. I certainly fall victim to this from time to time. And speaking to accepting the first story that is told, I have decided to quote Herodotus’ The Histories as he mentions something I found relevant to this discussion:
“For if anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst the nations in the world the beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably, after careful consideration of their relative merits, choose those of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things.
The Histories, III.38
What he is saying is that a person is more likely to believe the religion that they were raised in over another religion. A person born in America is more likely to believe in Christianity, a person born in India is more likely to believe in Hinduism, a person born in Saudi Arabia is more likely to believe in Islam. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that everyone without exception believes his native customs and religion, but by and large, you believe what you were raised to believe. I would wager that, for the overly religious in particular, the religious stories that are held as truth are among the first stories that are heard when they were growing up.
I think this wraps up my review of Matthew as well as some of the thoughts that I’ve had surrounding it.