Question about Matthew for Christians

Great Debates
1

As an atheist, I’m reminded around Christmastime about how little many Christians know about the Bible. The Christmas displays almost always seem to conflate the contradictory nativity tales of Matthew and Luke, with the Magi bringing their gifts to Jesus in the manger, surrounded by barnyard animals, instead of just going to Joseph’s house in Bethlehem (a straightforward reading of Matthew is that Joseph always lived in Bethlehem until Jesus was born, and moved to Nazareth only after returning from his flight to Egypt).

But that’s been discussed many times, although I’ve never heard a satisfactory reconciliation of Matthew and Luke — either Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt for fear of Herod, and were warned by God to stay out of Judea as long as Archelaus ruled there (so the ten years of his rule, plus however many years before that it took Herod to die), OR they publicly presented the seven-week-old Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem, about half a mile from Herod’s palace, and had various holy people publicly proclaim him the Messiah, after which they went home to Nazareth, completely unhindered, and returned to Jerusalem every year for Passover – the same years they were supposedly cowering in Egypt and/or staying out of Judea.

But I’d like to ask Christians a different question, one that I rarely see discussed.

In Matthew 10:8, fairly early in his ministry, Jesus sends his disciples out to perform miracles. He tells them (KJV), “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.”

My question is, if his disciples could raise the dead, why didn’t they go to the tomb and raise Jesus, instead of moping around after he died, and instead of disbelieving that he had risen, even after being told so by their closest friends? Matthew 28:17 (among others) says some doubted even after allegedly seeing him. And remember, this was after (Matthew says) that all the Jewish saints had come out of their tombs and strolled around Jerusalem.

I realize that the disciples weren’t very bright, since they had no clue how to feed 4000 people with a few loaves and fishes in Matthew 15, after they had just fed 5000 people with a few loaves and fishes in Matthew 14, but could they really so dumb that they couldn’t think of an application for their raise-the-dead powers after Jesus died?

2

Something the late Harold Camping often emphasized: the crucifixion was a shameful death, a great public humiliation, just about the most shameful possible death. (Camping compared it to the death ordinary souls will receive when judged wanting on the Day of Judgement. He was an annihilationist, and held that we won’t burn in hell; we’ll just be publicly shamed before God’s presence, then burned away to nothing.)

Camping might have said that the disciples would not have brought Jesus back, even if they could, because the manner of his death rendered him unworthy.

I don’t know Jewish rules well enough to say, but there might also be an element of uncleanliness regarding an executed man.

3

Matthew is noted for his dramatic flourishes; angels, heavenly choirs, miraculous stars, slaughter of the innocents curtain of the temple rent in two, dead arose and walked in the streets of Jerusalem, etc, etc, which usually have no parallel in the other gospels. This is very much in that pattern. Mark simply records (Mk 3:14) that he sent the twelve out to preach “and have authority to cast out demons”; Matthew’s elaboration of this claim is characteristic.

This is a literary device, obviously. Only a biblical literalist would find the question you pose to be troubling.

4

Jesus also later condemns the towns that apparently saw these miracles and did not repent. If the apostles were dumb for doubting and getting depressed about Jesus’ death, those towns must have been really dumb to not repent after seeing some apostles come in and raise people from the dead. Or it’s a literary device like UDS said.

5

So, just to be clear, your question is not for Christians, but for Christian Literalists. Right? 'Cause this MB is not even in the top 1,000,000 locations on the internet to find Christian Literalists.

6

Matthew appears to have been an author who was probably a highly educated Jew and used that knowledge in an attempt to fit Jesus into Jewish tradition and law. The example of the flight into Egypt, for example, seems like Matthew trying to force a reference to Hosea 11:1. Matthew did similar things with Isaiah and Jeremiah.

I suspect only the literalists would be bothered by such examples (the Luke/Matthew discrepancy for instance), assuming they actually know enough of the Bible to even know that such a difference exists in the text. They often seem to be the Christian equivalent of The Onion’s “Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution to Be.”

7

I guess. Or to be more precise, if someone simultaneously claims that his (and my) immortal soul depends on believing what is written in a certain book, and also that he doesn’t much care whether the authors of that book made shit up, then I’m not very interested in his opinion. On anything.

8

This early harmony of the Gospels didn’t see any particular difficulty harmonizing the visit to the temple and the flight into Egypt. Jesus’ parents took him to Jerusalem eight days after birth, they had the episode with Simeon and Anna, then they went home, met the Magi, and only after that did they flee into Egypt.

Maybe they made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem every year they were in Egypt, or maybe just some years, or maybe they didn’t go at all until he was twelve. Regardless, it’s not central to the narrative in Luke that they went ‘every year’.

9

That’s a little raw. Modern Christianity doesn’t regard inspired metaphors to be “made up shit.”

Now, yeah, sure, many of us atheists consider it so, but modern Christians can still accept “divine inspiration” without depending on absolute literalism. It’s unfair to try to force this into a false dichotomy of that variety. It’s a rough equivalence of Pascal’s Wager or C.S. Lewis’ “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.” Denying nuance is too “straw mannish” to be useful.

10

And yet you opened this thread, to ask a question which, you now confirm, was addressed to biblical literalists. Why are you asking about something that you’re not very interested in?

As Trinopus has pointed out, writings are not divided into the simple binary of “literal reportage” and “made up shit”, except perhaps in the opinion of biblical literalists (and their surprisingly numerous counterparts among atheists). Generally speaking the question Christians are more interested in in relation to biblical texts is not so much “did this actually happen precisely as described?” but “what does this mean and why does it matter?” Matthew embellishes his account because he wants to draw attention to it, and/or to highlight for the slower reader what he considers to be signficant parallels between what he is relating and earlier texts which his intended readership already accepts as authorative or inspired. That account may not appeal to literalists (theist or atheist) but it is the answer to the OP.

11

I don’t accept that I’m excluding the middle. I’m willing to accept metaphors, but there has to be a limit. If a verse says, “They traveled the length and breadth of Israel, preaching the Gospel,” then fine, I don’t insist they actually had to go from the very border to the very border. But if it says, “They traveled the length and breadth of Israel, preaching the Gospel and raising the dead,” then they had better raise some dead.

I understand that the Gospels are not a strict biography as we understand modern biographies; they are essentially press releases for Jesus. But that only makes it worse. If you’re claiming someone is divine, and you then make up miracles that he or his disciples performed, you lose all credibility. If he’s the Son of God, his acts shouldn’t need embellishment, let alone whole-cloth invention.

If I wrote a biography of Obama, and called him the Abraham Lincoln of the 21st century, then sure, that’s a metaphor. But if I said he won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam, that’s not a metaphor for his political courage, that’s a fucking lie.

And finally, the context of the example makes the “metaphor” argument extremely hard to swallow. It’s not Matthew setting the stage, it’s allegedly a direct quote from Jesus, giving orders to his disciples. That’s the last place you should expect flowery language.

12

Again, Tony, you’re just taking contemporary literary conventions and retrospectively applying them to text produced in a different time and a different culture. Sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew might be the last place you would expect flowery language, but you have no reason to assume that either Matthew or his intended readership would share your expectations in this matter. Why should they? They were not moderns. Similarly the assumption that if Matthew’s addenda are not journalism then they must be metaphor is not one they would have shared. Widening the range of possible genres from “literal reportage” and “made up shit” to “literal reportage”, “made up shit” and “metaphor” isn’t really enough to escape from the constraints imposed by assuming a modern mindset on the part of the author and his readers.

Matthew is writing probably 50 years or so after the death of Jesus. His intended audience is perfectly aware that Matthew is not in a position to give verbatim records of either Jesus’s conversations or his sermons. Plus, certainly Matthew and probably his audience already have Mark, a much less flowery text covering the basically the same ground. Matthew has his reasons for reworking the material, and his readership knows this, but Matthew is certainly not going to pretend (and if he did pretend his readership would certainly not accept) that his reasons include offering a more verbatim account of what Jesus said.

Matthew is not about accuracy; it’s about signficance. Matthew is more educated than Mark; he writes better Greek, and he knows a good deal more about Judaism. Sometimes he does improve on Mark when it comes to factual matters - his accounts of the movements of Jesus suggest that he had a much better grasp of the geography of the district than Mark had - but mostly when he adds to Mark it is to draw attention to things he regards as important, or to links he things Mark does not bring out sufficiently or at all, or to include material that he has from another source (“Q”) which Mark did not have. (We don’t think his dramatic flourishes come from Q, though.) We have no reason to think that his dramatic embellishments were understood by his readers as anything other than drama - drama included for a purpose, certaintly, but the purpose was not greater journalistic accuracy.

13

My guess is that the disciples’ powers were temporary, for that mission only, and that when Jesus was crucified, their powers had long since “expired.”

14

You’re making the mistake of assuming that miracles work by allowing the person doing them to control what happens. That’s how it works for Jesus, because he’s God. But everyone else has to do what God wants, not what they want.

The disciples are also shown to have a hard, hard time believing (or possibly understanding) what Jesus tells them. He tells them multiple times he’s going to come back to life. He tells them God will provide, but they freak out about food. He tells them they don’t have to worry, but they freak out when their boat is in a storm.

At no point in the story of the Gospels do they raise the dead. They clearly don’t think they can do it. Heck, a lot of them show doubts that Jesus is who he says he is when he dies.

You have not found a plothole in the Gospels, whether you treat it literally or like a story.

15

Oh, good heavens. The “readership” you’re talking about undoubtedly exists, but it comprises maybe 1% of all the Christians who ever lived. The vast majority of Christians, for most of the last 2000 years, absolutely believed that Matthew was giving verbatim records of Jesus’s sayings, which is why they put them in red letters in their Bibles. The vast majority of Christians, for most of the last 2000 years, absolutely believed that whatever was in the Bible (which they depended on the priests to tell them, since they couldn’t have read it for themselves even if it had been allowed to be published in their own language) was literally true (excluding only the most obvious metaphors, but not excluding the miracles of Jesus, or the Exodus, or the Flood, or the Six-Day Creation).

The Dope is an exception, but most of my conversations with “average” Christians (including tons with actively witnessing Christians on college campuses, over several decades) show that they are not nearly as sophisticated in their knowledge of Biblical nuance as some responses here have claimed. They are indeed not bothered by the contradictions, both inter- and intra-Gospel, but not because of any reasoned analysis of Matthew’s motives and sources; it’s because they simply never noticed them. They read Matthew, and they read Luke, and they happily buy a creche with the Magi in the stable. They never realized that they are two completely different stories. It never occurred to them to wonder why the Magi had to ask which town Jesus was in, when the Star could (and did) lead them right to the very house (not barn) where the baby Jesus was. They never noticed that Mary and Joseph were simultaneously happily visiting, and desperately avoiding, Judea.

I would guess that nearly half of the professing Christians (all college students) I asked about the zombie invasion of Jerusalem thought I was joking. They must have read that verse, just as they must have read the contradictory nativity stories (because another empirical finding is that the Nativity and the Passion are just about the only things most Christians have read in the New Testament), but it just slid right out of their consciousness.

I even tried it another way — I started asking what miracles occurred when Jesus died, and there they were much better! Most knew about the earthquake and darkness. Probably a third knew about the veil tearing. But I’d say less than 10% knew about the zombies. It was ridiculous, even to them, so they just ignored it and forgot about it, even though it’s in the same passage.

16

Thanks for the link, but it was clearly written by an idiot. He didn’t have any particular difficulty harmonizing Matthew and Luke because he didn’t seem to notice that he has Mary and Joseph going home to Nazareth before the Magi were sent to Bethlehem. I guess it could have been the Star of Nazareth instead of the Star of Bethlehem that led the Magi to Jesus, but you still have to explain why, after leaving Egypt, Joseph was going to return to Judea instead of Galilee, until God warned him not to. And why the super-paranoid Herod did nothing about all the commotion of the Messiah being publicly proclaimed by the holiest people in the Temple (which had to be full of his spies), practically under his nose, but then ordered the Slaughter of the Innocents when some foreign strangers reported a horoscope, and never even returned to confirm it.

As for your second paragraph, everything in it contradicts Luke. Harmonization by ignoring the text is quick and efficient, but not very convincing.

17

Well, you seem to know a lot about how miracles work and what the disciples thought, but I have to tell you, it doesn’t help the Christian case to point out that the people who allegedly saw and heard everything Jesus did and said — all the alleged miracles, all the alleged brilliance — still didn’t believe what he said. Since they were hand-picked by Jesus himself, I have to think that they are great role models, and that I shouldn’t believe anything people tell me about miracles, at least until I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

As for the plot hole, there’s a gaping one outlined in the second paragraph of my OP. See if you can do better than Hector to resolve it.

18

I’ve been to many churches in my lifetime-Nazarene, Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopal and a few free range ministries-and I don’t recall any of them setting aside the the stories in Matthew as being more metaphorical then historical. Never was I taught to take those stories with a grain of salt, or to regard the words Jesus spoke in that book as any less accurate then the words he spoke in any of the other books. Have major denominations actually changed what they teach about Matthew since I was a kid, or did I just happen to hit a whole bunch of them that were going against their own official positions at the time?

19

Not according to Matthew.

17:20 - And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

This is the one with faith being able to dictate what they want, not just praying “God, do what you want.”

And in 21:22 - And all things, whatsoever you shall ask in prayer, believing, you shall receive.

Again, this is about the prayer having a wish of their own, being specific, not just praying for God’s will to be done.

20

Jenna Lind made it sexy, though.