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Question:
I am a member of a group of (progressive) Christians and Jews who have been studying the New Testament. We began with Mark and are now into Matthew and have been guided along the way by several of your books, including Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. Our question is this: why do you claim that Matthew’s gospel, in particular, is a nightmare for literalists? Why Matthew more than the others? Thank you, and thank you for making me believe I am a Christian after all.
Answer:
Dear Vicky,
I don’t recall the particular quote to which you refer about Matthew, but I am happy to tell you why I regard him as a nightmare for literalism. In the opening chapter of Matthew, he gives a genealogy of Jesus. He turns this genealogy into three groups of 14 generations; the first from Abraham to David which would be about 800 years or 40 generations; the second from David to the Exile, which would be about 400 years or 20 generations and the third from the Exile to Jesus which would be close to 600 years or 30 generations. Matthew says that these three epochs in Jewish history constituted fourteen generations each. In order to keep this symmetrical scheme in tact Matthew goes so far as to leave out some kings mentioned in the Bible itself, pretending, I suppose, that they must not have existed. That is rather difficult for the literalists.
Next Matthew moves to the birth story of Jesus and he quotes a text from the Hebrew Scriptures to justify each episode in his narrative. None of those quoted texts, however, is even remotely related to the situation for which Matthew was using it. He is like a country preacher who applies a text whether it fits or not. Literalists must go crazy trying to make sense out of this. For example, Isaiah 7:14, which he quotes about a virgin conceiving, has nothing to do with the story of the Virgin Birth. Indeed, the word virgin does not appear in that text in Hebrew. It rather refers to a woman who “is with child.” Such a woman can hardly claim a virgin’s status! Then he quotes Micah 5:2 as if it predicts a Bethlehem birth place for the messiah, but Matthew was making a reference to the birthplace of King David and if the idea that the messiah must be a direct descendent of King David is to be part of the Jesus claim then he must have his place of birth transferred from Nazareth, where he was surely born or else he would not have been known as “Jesus of Nazareth,” to Bethlehem, “the City of David.”
In the story of King Herod slaughtering the male babies in Bethlehem he quotes the prophet Jeremiah, who wrote about “Rachel weeping for her children who were not.” This text, however, was about the fall of the Northern kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians in 721 BCE. Rachel was thought to be the ancestral mother of the Jews of the Northern Kingdom who thought of themselves as the children of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, who were the sons of Joseph, whose mother was Rachel, it has nothing to do with the apocryphal story of the murder of the infants by King Herod. The Herod story was in fact a Moses story being retold about Jesus.
He then quotes a text out of Hosea “Out of Egypt have I called my son” to show that the flight of Joseph, Mary and the Christ Child to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod was the fulfillment of this Hosea text. Hosea was, however, referring to the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt under Moses’ leadership some 1250 years earlier. It had nothing to do with the flight of Jesus, Mary and Joseph to Egypt.
Finally, Matthew asserted that the settling of the family of Jesus in the town of Nazareth was done to fulfill another prophetic saying, but does not tell us his source. The fact is that Jesus was probably born in Nazareth and he certainly grew up there.
That is just for starters. Literalism is something we impose on the gospels, but Matthew, as an inveterate quoter of scripture, encourages literalism with his quotations and almost universally they represent a bad and distorted use of texts. The Bible itself refutes his claims...
This is part of the substance that makes me think that Matthew is a “nightmare for literalists.”
~Bishop John Shelby Spong
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