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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.” TWO INTERPRETATIONS: One traditional Christian understanding of Matthew runs something like this:
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:
SOME OBSERVATIONS I lean toward the latter reading. Here are a few points supporting it:
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. |
November 21st, 2008 at 8:07 am
First of all, I consider myself the inspiration for this post. So all you who read it and learn something, you are welcome.
I’m still not convinced the gospel or the community is as Jewish as you make it out to be. It seems to me more likely that the community is mixed Jew/Gentile and the Gospel was written to explain why Jews and Gentiles might follow the same person. The author seems to set up the whole of the text as an ongoing undermining of the idea that Jesus was just sent for the Jews. After the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus undermines the Pharisaic purity laws with the inwardization of the law, Jesus first heals a Jew (a leper) who he tells to go “offer the gift that Moses commanded” and then a Gentile (a centurion’s servant) who he tells “in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness.” Don’t you think a Jewish community would reject publishing Matthew until passages like that came out?
And then a few chapters later, Jesus sends out the twelve and says “go nowhere among the gentiles,” which again seems to support your point. But after sending them, we get the quote from Isaiah that “in his name the Gentiles will hope” and then Jesus’ rejection at Nazareth (due to the people’s unbelief) and then the big kicker, the Canaanite woman. When she cries out to him, at first, Jesus doesn’t answer. But she persists and Jesus tells her “I was sent only to the lost sheep of thee house of Israel. . . It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she responds “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” So Jesus tells her “Great is your faith! Let it bee done for you as you wish.”
It’s hard in my mind to make the case that Matthew was written for Jews as a Jewish text in light of passages like this. I think it was written for Jews and Gentiles alike to explain what FAITH is and what power it has. Now, faith was offered first to the Jews, through the law, but many reject it, just as many (not all) Jews reject Jesus. So Jesus in the story brings salvation through faith first to the Jews and then the Gentiles.
It’s the same message that Paul gives us again and again. Salvation through faith is true righteousness, for Jews and Gentiles alike. On this hangs the law and the prophets.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:19 am
One major problem with your argument is that the word “faith” never shows up in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’ fulfillment of the law means more rigorous ways to practice the Law, not replacing the law with faith.
Certainly faith is important, but in Matthew faith is usually associated with Jesus’ miracles, or with accepting Jesus’ (or John the Baptist’s) teaching. This is somewhat different than Paul’s emphasis on faith in the resurrection of the dead or in God’s promises through Abraham.
To put it another way, in Paul righteousness is a status that the Christian receives through believing in God’s promises and the resurrection of Christ, and one’s holy conduct is a natural outgrowth of that righteousness. In Matthew, righteousness means more that we live according to the teachings of Jesus, especially those in the Sermon on the Mount (see Matt 5:20).
The ideas aren’t incompatible, and indeed the best Christian theology reflects a harmonization of the two. But that doesn’t mean they’re actually saying the same thing, at least not using the same words. There’s a strong argument to be made that Matthew is simply doing something different than Paul, so using Paul’s language to explain Matthew just clouds Matthew, at least for a careful exegetical reading.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:22 am
One reason to consider this reading of Matthew is precisely because Paul (and also Acts) push so hard the idea that Jews rejected the gospel, so the apostles turned to the Gentiles. The texts are easy to harmonize, which is why Christians have practically always harmonized them. But careful exegesis has to consider other possibilities.
The argument here is that Matthew’s church was a group of Jews who had accepted the gospel and who hadn’t bought into Paul’s idea that the Torah was done away with. This would have put them in good company with Peter and James in the middle of the first century, so why should we assume that some Christians with these beliefs wouldn’t have remained 30 or 40 years later?
As to the centurion and the Canaanite woman, they obviously had faith, and Jesus was willing to heal them. But neither of them becomes a disciple, and it’s entirely consistent with the teachings within Matthew that they would have been expected to observe the Jewish law if they wanted to become disciples.
It’s true that Matthew is unclear so we can’t be certain, but still the strongest reason to reject this conclusion seems to be the assumption that Matthew must agree with Paul.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:29 am
Also, it’s important to distinguish between the Pharisees’ purity laws and the law. Not everyone agreed with the Pharisees before Jesus, and the traditions he rejected (at least in Matthew) were not in the law at all. So I don’t read the Sermon on the Mount as rejecting anything about the law itself. The argument of people like Saldarini (see the bottom of my post for his book) is that practically all of Jesus’ teachings could have been taken up by other Jewish groups of his day, and they all still would have considered one another Jewish.
The big hang-up was the Christian teaching that Jesus was Son of God, Lord of heaven and earth, and Savior of the people from their sins. But as huge as these points are, none of them would affect whether a Christian Jew could observe the Torah and consider himself Jewish.
December 9th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
i cant state where it is or isnt anti-jewish. this will be a fun topic for me to study into over the next few weeks. but i like to comment so here it is…
“that Gentiles, though welcome to join in following Christ, had in no sense inherited the faith from the Jews as a whole.”
we recently finished galatians which will provide a nice amount of background conflict between matthew and paul. considering a good portion of galatians is directed at old vs new law and its implications.