Bible scholars have recently challenged the “supercessionist” idea that Jesus intended to replace Judaism with Christianity, or that the New Testament replaces Jews with (Christian) Gentiles as the people of God. A key battleground text for this question is the Gospel of Matthew, and a key assumption in the way I will interpret it is that different parts of the Bible don’t always agree with one another.

I’ll pursue the idea that Matthew’s church believed that the Jews were still the people of God, and that Gentiles, though welcome to join in following Christ, had in no sense inherited the faith from the Jews as a whole.

Here are four key texts for the issue. The first is from the Sermon on the Mount, where this particular passage represents Jesus’ fundamental teaching about the law (Matt 5:17-19):

Don’t suppose that I came to overthrow the law or the prophets; I didn’t come to overthrow but to fulfill. Truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one iota or one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all things have happened. Therefore, whoever rejects one of the least of these commandments, and teaches the same to other people, will be called least in the heavens’ kingdom. But whoever does and teaches them will be called great in the heavens’ kingdom.

In a second text, Jesus remarks on the faith of a Roman Centurion (Matt 8:10-12):

Truly I say to you, I haven’t found such faith from anyone in Israel. I tell you, many from the east and west will come and recline at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the heavens’ kingdom, but the sons of the kingdom will be cast into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

In a third passage Jesus responds to Pharisees and scribes who ask why his disciples don’t follow the tradition of ritually washing their hands before eating. A key point of his response is Matt 15:11, 17-20:

What enters the mouth does not make a person unclean; but what comes out of the mouth, that is what makes a person unclean…Don’t you know that everything that enters the mouth moves to the stomach and then is expelled into the toilet? But the things that come out of the mouth come out of the heart, and these make someone unclean; for out of the heart come disagreements, wicked deeds, murders, adulteries, thefts, false testimonies, and blasphemy. These are the things that make a person unclean, but eating with unwashed hands doesn’t make a person unclean.

Finally, at the crucifixion of Jesus, there is an important exchange between Pilate and the people of Jerusalem (Matt 27:24-25):

Now when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but that it was becoming a riot, he took water and washed off his hands in the presence of the crowd and said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood––see for yourself.”

And the whole people answered, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”

TWO INTERPRETATIONS:

One traditional Christian understanding of Matthew runs something like this:

  • Jesus “fulfills” the law by spiritualizing it, so that Christians simply love God and one another in place of the Jewish law. Jesus’ encounter with the Roman centurion provides the occasion for him to prophecy that the Jews, who lacked faith in Jesus, would be replaced by Gentile Christians as the people of God. Jesus’ teaching about what enters and exits the mouth is his proclamation that Jewish purity laws no longer pertain to Christians. And the crowd’s statement, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children,” represents the Jews (as a whole) rejecting Jesus and accepting guilt for his death.

In contrast to this is an alternate reading, proposed in recent years by scholars who feel that Matthew’s gospel is too Jewish to intend such an anti-Jewish message. This interpretation runs as follows:

  • Jesus “fulfills” the law by showing Jewish Christians how to observe Torah by intensifying it in a particular heart-felt way rather than with the (also heart-felt) Pharisaic practice using strict oral traditions to be sure of observing Torah. Jesus’ encounter with the Roman centurion leads him to issue a standard prophetic warning, much like those in the OT prophets, that God would punish Israel if they did not repent of their sins. Jesus’ teaching about what enters and exits the mouth only rejects the Pharisaic practice of hand-washing, not the entire system of Jewish purity laws. And the crowd at the crucifixion represents not the Jews as a race or religion, but the people of Jerusalem as a generation that rejected Jesus; Matthew sees the punishment for Jesus’ blood as coming back against the people of Jerusalem and their children (i.e., the next generation) when Jerusalem is destroyed by Rome 40 years later.

SOME OBSERVATIONS

I lean toward the latter reading. Here are a few points supporting it:

  • In Matthew 5 Jesus never gets rid of any laws––whether for Jews or Gentiles––and indeed he explicitly criticizes those who would.
  • Jesus never breaks the Jewish law in Matthew. When accused of breaking the Sabbath (Matt 12:2), he only claims that his work is a justified exception in the same way as an emergency rescue or priestly work in the Temple.
  • In Mark’s story about hand-washing, Mark does claim that Jesus was declaring all food clean (Mk 7:19). However, Matthew eliminates that line from the story, and then he adds Jesus’ statement only against handwashing (a tradition of the Pharisees, not a biblical law). It seems here that Matthew disagrees with Mark about what Jesus means: he was only saying that handwashing was unnecessary for purity, not that all food were clean.
  • The Hebrew prophets say many awful things about the Israelites/Jews, but the assumption is always that the Jews remain the people of God. To use Jesus’ harsh words against Jews as evidence that God was rejecting the Jews as God’s people is to misunderstand Jesus’ role as a prophet.

IMPLICATIONS

It is no surprise that Matthew is often read as supercessionistic by Christians: Matthew claimed that Jesus had the only true interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, open also to Gentiles. As time passed, and more Gentiles than Jews became Christians, Matthew’s words seemed to have a different meaning. However, at the first, all of Jesus’ followers were Jews, and the earliest Palestinian churches were Jewish. If we hypothesize that Matthew wrote for one of these Jewish communities, the Gospel of Matthew would fit that context very well.

If there were NT Jewish Christians who could follow Jesus and still observe Torah, it should discourage us from too easily championing “Christian faith” against “Jewish legalism.” In Matthew’s opinion, Jesus did not reject Judaism, but rather called Jews (and ultimately Gentiles) to a particular form of Judaism.

Perhaps most important, the fault for Jesus’ crucifixion does not fall on “the Jews” in any broad sense. All of the heroes at the crucifixion were Jews, and the villains were a mixture of Jews and Gentiles. Matthew seems to think that one generation of Jerusalem residents, led by a wicked High Priest, rejected Jesus and were almost immediately punished for it. To suggest that blood remains on the heads of Jews today would not only be dangerous and possibly hateful, but it would miss the point made my Matthew.

My reading distinguishes between what we believe and the implications of what we believe. For Christians, it is still difficult to escape the conclusion (based on Matthew, at least) that non-Christian Jews are outside of the people of God. Though the idea is obviously offensive to Jews and many Christians as well, the Christian confession “Jesus is Lord” leaves little room for equivocation, at least on the question of where one’s loyalty must lie. But scholarly readings of Matthew that challenge us to shift our perspective can help us see that whatever our present faith, our Scriptures probably looked very different to those who wrote them.

Most of my ideas here are based on reading Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community, by Anthony J. Saldarini. For a shorter and less technical study of Matthew that somewhat disagrees but deals with similar issues, see the The Theology of the Gospel of Matthew (from Cambridge University Press’s New Testament Theology series), by Ulrich Luz.

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