[Dialogue] 5/13/10, Spong: Origins of the New Testament, Part XXIII: Matthew and the Liturgical Year of the Synagogue

[elliestock at aol.com]

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Bishop Spong will be on the faculty of the Pacific School of Religion (formerly the Graduate Theological Union) in Berkeley California from Monday, July 26 - Friday, July 30. The class will meet from 9:00 am until 1:00 pm (with a coffee break from 10:45 - 11:15) for each of the five days and is open to clergy, seminarians (for credit), lay people and the general public. The class is entitled: Can a Person Living in the 21st Century Still Believe in Life after Death with Integrity. 
Anyone interested in registering for this class may do so by going to www.psr.edu/summer.





Thursday May 13, 2010 

Origins of the New Testament
Part XXIII: Matthew and the Liturgical Year of the Synagogue

In one of my earlier columns on the gospel of Mark, I sought to demonstrate that it was the liturgical life of the synagogue that formed the organizing principle in the first gospel to be written. What Mark had done was to provide Jesus stories appropriate to the synagogue celebrations from Rosh Hashanah (the John the Baptist story) to Passover (the crucifixion story). Rosh Hashanah, however, comes in the mid fall of the year and Passover comes in the early spring, so the gospel of Mark only covered six and a half months of the twelve month year, leaving out the five and a half months that separate Passover from Rosh Hashanah. There was, therefore, a desire after Mark's gospel appeared to fill in that blank space with additional Jesus material, which soon became an imperative need. Within ab out a decade, Matthew wrote the first expansion of Mark and aimed his story at the disciples of Jesus who worshipped in rather traditional Jewish synagogues. Luke wrote the second expansion of Mark and he aimed his story at the community of Jesus' disciples who worshipped at synagogues that were made up of dispersed Jews and those Gentile proselytes, who were beginning to be drawn into the synagogue community. Recall once again that the split between the church and the synagogue would not occur until near the end of the ninth decade, so when Mark and Matthew were written, and maybe even Luke, Christians were still synagogue worshipers calling themselves "the followers of the Way." If one has ever wondered why Mark is so much shorter than the other two shortest of the gospels, the answer is quite simply that he wrote a Jesus narrative to provide material only from Rosh Hashanah (in October) to Passover (in April), or for just six and a half months of the calendar year. Ma tthew and Luke were longer because they both stretched Mark to cover a full year. 
When Matthew, like Mark, correlates the crucifixion with the Passover (Matt. 26-27), he signals that the core of Mark will remain intact in his gospel. Like Mark, Matthew has also correlated the transfiguration with the festival of Dedication (Matt. 17:1-8), the harvest stories, including the Parable of the Sower, with the festival of Sukkoth or Tabernacles (Matt. 13), and Jesus' teaching on fasting, cleansing demons and curing sicknesses with Yom Kippur (Matthew 12). When, however, Matthew comes to Mark's correlation of John the Baptist with Rosh Hashanah, he has a problem. The baptism of Jesus by John was the first event in Jesus' ministry according to Mark, but Matthew must cover five and a half months of Jesus' story before he comes to Rosh Hashanah. In Mark the baptism of Jesus had inaugurated his ministry, but Matthew could not save that story for five and a half months. How Matthew managed this dilemma is fascinating. 
Matthew follows Mark by having the baptism of Jesus come as the first event in Jesus' adult life so he uses this material early in his story. He begins his gospel with a genealogy and the story of Jesus' miraculous birth, which fills chapters one and two. Then he uses the John the Baptist story in chapter three, which means it had to come long before the seventh Jewish month of Tishri, where Rosh Hashanah is celebrated on Tishri 1. So when he gets to Rosh Hashanah in late September or early October, the baptism narrative material that Mark used as his Rosh Hashanah story has already been related. So what does he do? He uses a trick that has been frequently employed by the motion picture industry (think of Cecil B. DeMille!) and employs a "flashback." 
In chapter 11 of his gospel, at the time when Rosh Hashanah rolls around, Matthew reintroduces John the Baptist, who is now in prison, by having him send a messenger to Jesus. "Are you the one who is to come (that is the messiah) or do we look for another?" the messenger inquires. Jesus does not answer directly, but refers him to a passage in Isaiah 35, a passage regularly used in the synagogue at the observance of Rosh Hashanah. "How will we know when the Kingdom of God is about to dawn?" the prophet is asked. To this query, Isaiah responds: The signs will be that the blind will see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing. To this litany of signs Jesus adds other things that demonstrate his messianic claims: "the lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them." It is the Jewish Rosh Hashanah, or New Year theme. Then Jesus moves on to speak about John the Baptist in glowing terms. It is a perfect Jesus story to be use d in the observance of Rosh Hashanah. 
There is one other Jewish festival that Mark, with his truncated six and a half month format, had simply ignored. Fifty days after the Passover, the Jews celebrated Shavuot or Pentecost, as they called it, a name that simply means "fifty days." On this day, which would usually fall each year in late May or early June, the Jews celebrated the moment in their history at which time God gave the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. Shavuot was normally observed with a 24-hour vigil. The longest psalm in the Psalter, Psalm 119, was written to be used at this vigil. It is both a hymn to the beauty and power of the law and it is long enough to provide material for the entire vigil. Psalm 119 opens with an eight verse introduction, the first two verses of which begin with the word "Blessed." Then there are eight segments of three stanzas each, designed for use at each of the eight three-hour sections of the 24-hour vigil. To provide an appropriate Jesus story that demonstrates the t heme of Shavuot was the agenda that Matthew faced. Look now at how he did it. 
At exactly the right time in the year, assuming that Matthew was stretching Mark's six and a half months out to twelve, we find in Matthew's gospel three chapters, 5, 6 and 7, what we call "The Sermon on the Mount." Here, Matthew portrays Jesus as the new Moses going up to a new mountain to deliver a new interpretation of the Torah. Matthew patterns this sermon after the Shavuot Psalm 119. He opens with an eight-verse introduction in which each verse, not just the first two, begin with the word "blessed." We now call these eight "blesseds" the Beatitudes. Then in the rest of the sermon, Matthew provides a commentary on each of these beatitudes, in reverse order from eight to one, which in effect supplies the Christian content for the eight three-hour segments of this 24-houor vigil. It is a perfect fit. 
In the body of the sermon the contrast is between Moses and Jesus with the Ten Commandments a major part of the focus. "You have heard that it was said by men of old — You shall not kill." Jesus is quoting Moses since this is the sixth commandment. Then, to set the contrast, he says, "But I say unto you" and sets himself as the interpreter of Moses by driving the law from external behavior to internal motivation. Murder finds its genesis in human anger and human insults, he says, so to stop murder one has to deal with the anger that precedes it. Jesus does the same thing with commandment number seven. Adultery, he says, starts in the lust of desire that grows out of our insecurity, and until that is addressed, adultery is all but inevitable. Jesus then takes the summary of the law, which commands us to love our neighbor and he drives it so deeply into life by defining our neighbor as including even our enemies. Matthew constructs the Sermon on the Mount in such a way as to drive the Torah to a new level of inward motivation. When the Sermon on the Mount was over (7:22-23), Matthew said "the crowds were astonished at his teaching." His authority was confirmed. It was authentic, that is it was not the secondary type of authority that came by quoting the scriptures, which was the method employed by the Scribes. 
Covering Shavuot also completed the last festival of the synagogue year. To provide Jesus material to carry the worshippers from Passover, where Mark had told the story of the crucifixion, to Rosh Hashanah, where he had told the story of Jesus' baptism, Matthew had to front end load Mark. Look again at exactly how he did it. Matthew added the genealogy and the birth story to fill up chapters one and two. He used the story of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus to introduce Jesus to the public as Mark has done, but he has expanded that story by including some of the content of John's preaching. In chapter four, he has taken Mark's two verse account of the temptations in the wilderness and included in it the content and full descriptions of the three temptations and indeed of exactly how Jesus responded to each. Then he adds the Sermon on the Mount in chapter 5-7. When Matthew gets to chapter 13, he has finally caught up with where Mark was in chapter 4. From that point on , the two gospels track very closely together. 
Matthew has expanded Mark's content to give the worshipping disciples a sufficient supply of Jesus stories to enable them to cover the entire year. Now when we read it closely, we begin to discern another Matthean interpretive tool. He has woven his Jesus story around the biography of Moses, the greatest hero in the Jewish world view and clearly Matthew's model. Next we will pull the analogy of Moses out of Matthew's text and raise to our consciousness his editorial genius. From the story of the wicked king who tried to destroy the great deliverer at birth to likening the crucifixion of Jesus to a new exodus not from physical slavery, but to the slavery to sin, Moses is clearly in the background of Matthew's Jesus story. The New Testament is quite exciting as soon as you dismiss a literal meaning and begin to discover the interpretive meaning that each gospel writer sought to convey. 


– John Shelby Spong
 








Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Taylor Chambers, via the Internet, writes: 
I believe there is a human need to worship. Christians believe in the divinity of Christ and can, therefore, worship him. But, if Christ is not divine, was not physically incarnated, did not perform the miracles attributed to him, then what or whom do we worship? Since to Christians, the relationship of Christ to God is so close (the Trinity), does not denying Christ's divinity also deny the reality of God? Personally, I can still enjoy a choral communion in the Episcopal Church, but I am connecting with and worshiping a force and reality that I do not truly understand and upon which I cannot place a name. Does your approach to Christianity supply that name?
Taylor Chambers, via the Internet, writes: 
I believe there is a human need to worship. Christians believe in the divinity of Christ and can, therefore, worship him. But, if Christ is not divine, was not physically incarnated, did not perform the miracles attributed to him, then what or whom do we worship? Since to Christians, the relationship of Christ to God is so close (the Trinity), does not denying Christ's divinity also deny the reality of God? Personally, I can still enjoy a choral communion in the Episcopal Church, but I am connecting with and worshiping a force and reality that I do not truly understand and upon which I cannot place a name. Does your approach to Christianity supply that name?



Dear Taylor, 
It is not a denial of divinity in Jesus, the account of his being the incarnation of God or even the miracles attributed to him that is my agenda. My task is to find a way to communicate what the biblical writers meant by divinity, what the early church leaders understood when they made incarnation a doctrine and what they were saying when they attributed miracles to Jesus. None of those things are inside the experience of the people of my generation. 
I attempted to do just that in my book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, which is still one of my favorites of all the books I have written. I particularly enjoyed when I was writing that book working on the miracles that are introduced as part of the Jesus story according to the Synoptic gospels, that is, Mark, Matthew, and Luke. I find it fascinating that I can find no evidence of Jesus being thought of as a miracle worker prior to the 8th decade of the Christian era. There are no miracles that appear in the writings of Paul (50-6), the "Q" document or the book now known as the Gospel of Thomas. These are the only documents that any scholar suggests might be earlier than Mark. I personally do not believe that either "Q" or Thomas is that early, but others whom I greatly respect do and so I include them in this analysis. This means that from approximately 30 CE to 70 CE, the story of Jesus circulated without miracles. What was the Jesus story like then? Why were miracles added? Those are the questions I believe we must address. 
As for the Incarnation as the way to explain the divine nature of Christ, that is a 4th century CE doctrine established primarily at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. So Jesus had to have been understood differently in the first, second and third centuries. I do not believe that Paul, for example, was a Trinitarian. What was the early understanding of Jesus? I cannot address that in a question and answer format. It is far too complex for that. Once again I refer you to Jesus for the Non-Religious where I specifically addressed that question. 
What I want you to hear is that there are more ways than one to communicate the God presence experienced in Jesus of Nazareth. So, far from the theological debate about Jesus serving to deny the reality of God in him, for me the effect is exactly the opposite. 
Thanks for struggling with important issues. 

– John Shelby Spong










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