The Invention of Christianity: The First 500 Years by Tom Lee

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Catholica Special Series: The Invention of Christianity: The First 500 Years by Tom Lee

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Tom Lee...

Looking at some of the detail in the Gospel of Matthew

When anyone writes a book today we have the advantage of listening to interviews with the author on radio or television — or reading interviews in magazines — which give us some insight into the person who wrote what they wrote and why. We don't have that advantage with many of the authors of our Sacred texts. In many cases the real authors are completely anonymous to us. Today we publish the continuation of Tom Lee's mammoth personal endeavour where he set out to try and understand what he believes and why by examining the origins of Christianity. His focus today is on the writers of the Gospel of St Matthew.

Which Gospels to Choose? Part 8.4
by Tom Lee

The Gospel of Matthew…

Out of the situation caused by the destruction of Jerusalem, the Gospel of Matthew was born as an apologia with a Jewish caste. It nevertheless co-opted much of Paul's Christology, attributing it to Peter, and recognizing Christian separation from mainstream Judaism.

The Matthew author presupposed the rejection of the Jewish nation as having been accomplished as a sign of the approaching end. Christianity had miscarried as a Jewish sect, but succeeded as a new ecumenical religion, and Greek language and culture were the media in which this increasingly Gentile Christianity took shape and burst the Jewish matrix — before it broke into separate sects of its own.

The introductory verses of the Gospel of Matthew are, "A genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham," a bold declaration of the Hebraic origin of Jesus in striking contrast to the Markan Gospel that had portrayed the disciples as never advancing beyond recognition of their master as the Jewish Messiah, it being left to a Roman to comprehend him as Son of God.

Some see Matthew's Gospel as an invitation to the wavering Jews, trying to convince them, with purportedly prophetic passages in the Torah and Jesus' interpretation of Jewish scripture, that he was the longed-for Messiah. His claim in the Sermon on the Mount that he came "not to abolish the Torah and the prophets ... but to fulfill them" is the key to this gospel.

Icon of Matthew the Evangelist. by André Prevost

Jesus — someone by whom God was revealed
not simply someone to whom God was revealed…

Matthew depicts the disciples as being the first of men to apprehend the Divine Sonship and it is Peter who proclaims it in the fullest form: "You are the Christ the Son of the living God". Jesus replies: "it is not flesh and blood that revealed this to you but my Father in heaven". No counter-claim to Pauline revelation could be clearer. Paul's Christology is claimed as originally being perceived by Peter, the supreme apostle of Jewish Christianity. Pauline teaching has been assimilated but is not attributed to him. Obliquely the early Pauline heresy became orthodox dogma. Implicit in the title Son of God was a response of faith that saw Jesus as someone by whom God was revealed, not simply someone to whom God was revealed.

Only the Matthew author describes the magi, Zoroastrian priests from Persia, coming to worship baby Jesus. This echo of Isaiah, "Nations will come to your light, kings to the brightness of your dawn..." is to show that Jesus came not just for the Chosen People but for all people. The magi didn't change their religion, for, God was working in and through their religious traditions. The whole episode is rejected by most modern commentators as a pious myth.

In Matthew's Gospel Peter is the first called in the list of Apostles and the magnification of Peter's position and authority reaches its climax when, to Peter's recognition of Jesus' role is added the extraordinary statement from Jesus:

"You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church. And the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven: whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven."

Upon this interpretation of the passage the theory of the Papacy was built…

The rabbis used the terms binding and loosing to describe decisions made by men of authority in matters of the Law. Jesus' use of Torah language would indicate to Jews that he was making Peter the chief rabbi in the new Israel. Later this is extended to the other apostles, but only Peter receives the mysterious keys. In Isaiah keys symbolize a king's authority. Upon this interpretation of the passage the theory of the Papacy was built.

Zeus was the supreme god in the Greek pantheon, later equated by the Romans with their god Capitoline Jove, or Jupiter. As the supreme god it was in Zeus' hands that the power lay of binding or absolving a person from their sins. Those guilty of great sacrilege turned to him for release from the Furies that pursued them as a consequence of their crimes. Inasmuch as Zeus could only be approached through his priests, it was to these that the guilty turned for absolution. This pagan idea passed into Christianity in the notion that the Pope and his bishops in exercising their offices actually became the dispensers of divine blessing or approbation.

As the Roman high priest had been Pontifex Maximus, the bridge-maker or mediator between men and gods, so the new style Pope became the representative of the Son of God, holding the keys which gave him the ability to bless or curse, to bind or loose a man from his sins.

However, a Gospel which records Jesus saying: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel" and "Do not turn your steps to pagan territory," and which gives the warning: "In your prayers do not babble as the pagans do, for they think that by using many words they will make themselves heard," and with reference to the Gentiles says: "Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls in front of pigs" — such a Gospel cannot be regarded as designed to conciliate Gentile Christians.

The Gospel also holds up as a worthy ideal a well-instructed Scribe and counsels its readers to give respect and obedience to the Scribes and Pharisees, who had in fact, at that time, taken control of the Jewish faith. The Matthew author still has his foot in the door. Yet Matthew's Church seems to be one into which Gentiles were entering in numbers, so that part of the Gospel's purpose was to explain the correct attitude to this phenomenon.

Gentiles to be carefully scrutinized and instructed in the Law…

Matthew adds to the Parable of the Wedding Feast the strange story of the guest who comes without a Wedding Garment. To the writer the Jews were the rightful Guests and had enjoyed the proper preparation of the Law; but this was not so with the Gentiles. They had been unexpectedly called from the highways of heathenism; therefore they must be carefully scrutinized and instructed in the Law, thus being provided with the necessary Wedding Garment, before they could be safely admitted into the fold of the Church.

The Catholic scripture scholar Raymond Brown, writing of Matthew 27:25 "His blood be on us and on our children," explains that the people are accepting responsibility for Jesus' condemnation. However, "They are not being blood-thirsty or callous; for they are persuaded that Jesus is a blasphemer, as the Sanhedrin judged him." But "Matthew did not intend to curse the Jews, or to provide fuel for anti-Semitism, or to suggest that each generation would pay with blood."

The most vivid indicator of the locality of Matthew's origin is to be found at the beginning of the Gospel in the story of the Flight into Egypt. This is the only Gospel to record that the Messiah found refuge in Egypt from the menace of the hated Herod — a tradition easily accepted and treasured by those Christians who had also found sanctuary in the land of the Nile. But there is no historical evidence that Herod the Great, or his son Herod Antipas, ever initiated a slaughter of innocent babies, though the elder Herod's murderous ruthlessness with his own sons made the accusation plausible.

Mary and Joseph — the parents of Jesus…

St Joseph became a favorite of the Egyptian Coptic Church, which mapped a detailed itinerary for him reaching as far north as Dimyana, near the Mediterranean, and south far past the pyramids, down to Deir al-Muharraq. The Coptic History of Joseph the Carpenter provided one of the first descriptions of his death, at age 111, attended by Mary and an 18-year-old Jesus. The entire story is almost certainly apocryphal.

The various imaginative documents were the source for much religious art and the miracle plays that were Europe's precursors of modern theater. But doctrinally, they were a dead end in the Western Church. Their creativity was a liability. St Jerome scornfully called them "deliria". Yet he doubly secured Mary's virginity by proposing that Joseph too was a virgin and that Jesus' siblings were merely cousins, a notion still favored by many blinkered Catholic theologians, tied to the myth of Mary's perpetual virginity.

The Gospel references to thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas display the writer's ignorance of the coinage-in use at Jerusalem in Jesus' time. The author is instead quoting from Zechariah, whom he has confused with Jeremiah. Zech. 11:12-13: "And they weighed out my wages: thirty shekels of silver. But Yahweh told me, 'Throw it into the treasury, this princely sum at which they have valued me.' Taking the thirty shekels of silver, I threw them into the temple of Yahweh, into the treasury."

As Pinchas Lapide has pointed out:

"In Jesus' day there were gold and silver denarii, the double as (a Roman coin), three-as pieces, minai, lepta, selas, drachmas, and double-drachmas — but no coin or currency known as 'pieces of silver'. These had gone out of circulation around 300 years before. Equally anachronistic is the 'weighed out'. This was customary in Zechariah's time, but by Jesus' day had long been replaced by minted coins."

In Matthew is the earliest mention of the Virgin Birth, a concept well known in Egyptian religion, although most textual scholars believe that the chapters in Matthew's Gospel that contain the miraculous birth are a later addition not in the earliest manuscripts; an addition that is discredited by the opening genealogical table which seeks to prove that Jesus was descended from David through his father, Joseph. Many biblical scholars believe the Virgin Birth story has no more veracity than the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. As Nathaniel Hawthorne stated in the preface to his first novel, he built his fiction on the "territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other." It is safe to say the gospel writer, however sincere, was doing something similar.

“Out of the situation caused by the destruction of Jerusalem, the Gospel of Matthew was born as an apologia with a Jewish caste. It nevertheless co-opted much of Paul's Christology, attributing it to Peter, and recognizing Christian separation from mainstream Judaism.” …Tom Lee

PHOTO CREDIT: The image used in the headline has been sourced from the OnLine Sacred Gallery of the British Library: www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/sacred/downloads.html

Tom Lee is an Australian, now semi-retired in Phoenix, Arizona, who has had an illustrious international career as an actor, writer, and broadcast commentator. He does not claim to be a professional theologian, nor an historian, but he undertook this study because, like many of the people who are attracted to what we're doing here at Catholica Australia, he was simply inquisitive about the history of Christianity and trying to better understand what he had been brought up to believe. In a sense, his book is a one-man journey seeking to better understand who Jesus was and what his own faith was about.

What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum.

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