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The BibleTexts.com Bible Commentary Copyright 1996-2005 Robert Nguyen Cramer THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW |
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Willoughby C. Allen (The International Critical Commentary: The Gospel according to St. Matthew, Third Edition, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, no date, page 9) writes:]
According to Jewish law, a betrothed woman was already the wife of her betrothed husband;... Mary's condition seemed to make the fulfilment of their contract of marriage impossible for a religious man... On the other hand, he [Joseph] did not wish to expose her to shame... Appeal to the courts for a divorce would expose Mary to public ignominy, and make her liable to severe penalties. Refusal to carry out the contract of marriage would leave her and her child in disgrace in the house of her parents. The latter seemed the more merciful course, and Joseph determined, therefore, to repudiate her by private arrangement.
To explore "Divorce as understood by Jesus and the earliest Christians, browse http://www.bibletexts.com/terms/divorce.htm.
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The story of the mysterious magi, which overturns the traditional motif of the superiority of Jewish hero to foreign wise man, continues the theme of David kingship. Jesus is born in Bethlehem, where David was brought up and anointed, and Mic 5:1,3, which is here quoted as fulfilled in Jesus, is, in its original context, about a promised Davidic king. The central theme, however, is the homage of Gentiles. The magi, whose country of origin is unspecified -- Persia, Babylon, and Arabia are the usual guesses -- represent the best wisdom of the Gentile world, its spiritual elite. Perhaps Isa 60:3-6 is in the background. Num 23:7 LXX [Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament], according to which Balaam is 'from the east', almost certainly is. Jewish tradition made Balaam a magus and the father of magi; and according to the OT, when the Evil king Balak tried to enlist Balaam in the cause against Israel, the seer instead prophesied the nation's future greatness and the coming of a great ruler. This is close to Matthew, where the cruel Herod, attempting to destroy Israel's king, employs foreign magi who in the event bring only honour to the king's rival. Matthew's magi are Balaam's successor.
The 'star' goes before the magi and comes to rest 'over the place where the child' is. This is no ordinary star, and attempts to identify it with a planetary conjunction, comet, or supernova are futile... Matters become clear when we recall that the ancients generally believed stars to be animate beings, and Jews in particular identified them with angels (cf. Job 38:7). The Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, 7, and Theophylact must be right in identifying the magi's star with an angel, and one may compare the angelic guide of the Exodus (Ex 23:20,23; 32:34)...
Dale C. Allison, Jr., in The Oxford Bible Commentary (edited by John Barton and John Muddimen, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001, page 850) comments in part:
The quotation of Hos 11:1 in v. 15 evokes thought of the Exodus, for in its original context 'Out of Egypt I have called my son' concerns Israel. Our text accordingly offers a typological interprettion of Jesus' story. By going down to Egypt and then returning to the land of Israel Jesus recapitulates the experience of Israel. But there is, more particularly, a Moses typology here...
The Most difficult verse in the passage is the very last, v. 23. 'He will be called a Nazorean' does not appear in the OT. Yet Matthew refers to 'the prophets' being fufilled... Matthew contains an involved wordplay. The LXX interchanges 'holy one of God' -- an early Christian title for Jesus (Mk 1:24; Lk 4:34; Jn 6:69) -- and 'nazarite' (cf. Judg 13:7; 16:17). This matters because if we make that substitution in Isa 4:3 MT ('will be called holy'), the result is very near v. 23. Further, in Acts 24:5 Christians are 'the sect of the Nazarenes'... It is likely that members of the Matthean community referred to themselfves not as 'Christians' (a term missing from this gospel) but as 'Nazoreans'. Certainly that would have given v. 23 an even greater impact: Jesus followers bear the name that he bore.
It should be noted that The Oxford Bible Commentary is a "First choice" recommendation on the BibleTexts.com "Recommended Bible Study Books & Resources." If you do not already have this book, it would make an outstanding addition to your biblical resources.
Historians are unable to find any evidence of the murder of the children.
The slaughter of infants two years old or less in a town of the size of Bethlehem (population ca. 300) at this time would not only have been a comparatively minor incident, and so probably unknown to Josephus, but also completely in line with Herod's known character. The evangelist sees the episode as yet another facet of Israel's whole spiritual experience, summed up in Jesus, and seen against the context of Jer xxxi.
The murder of the babies and the flight to Egypt represent the persecution of a potential royal rival by a reigning king. This is a constant feature in hellenistic biographies of heroes and in tales of royal succession the world over: a king attempts to kill or exile successors to protect his own position. Matthew's story is borrowed specifically from the account of Moses' birth in Exodus (1:1-2:10): the Pharaoh orders the midwives to destroy all male children born to Hebrew women because the Hebrews are multiplying and thriving; when the midwives fail to heed the Pharaoh's order, he commands that all male babies be thrown into the Nile and drowned. Once again, Matthew's story is designed to go with the prophetic text, in this case one from Jeremiah.
Although Herod the Great was capable of slaughtering babies wholesale (he had three of his own sons put to death and he wanted his soldiers to execute notable political prisoners at the time of his death to make sure that everyone mourned his passing), the incident Matthew relates is undoubtedly a fiction.
Herod acts in character; the story may not be historical but possesses verisimilitude and is reminiscent of Pharaoh's command to kill the male offspring of the Israelites (Exod 1:16), a classic example of genocidal abuse of power. If the incident is historical, the number of children killed need not have exceeded 20.
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NAB - 47 (Someone told him, "Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, asking to speak with you.")
The sentence, which seems to be necessary for the sense of the following verses, apparently was accidentally omitted because of homoeoteleuton (lalesai ... lalesai). In view, however, of the age and weight of the diverse text-types [including Aleph and B] that omit the words, the Committee enclosed the words within square brackets in order to indicate a certain amount of doubt concerning their right to stand in the text.
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Trained scholar. This saying has probably been composed by Matthew as the conclusion to his collection of parables. For Matthew, scholars schooled in Heaven's imperial rule will understand the parables in much the same way that the disciples respond in this exchange. The toastmaster at a banquet produces both mature and young wine from a large cellar (drawing images and stories, old and new, from a large repertoire and then explaining what they mean for those present). This is the way Jesus tells and explains parables, according to Matthew.
[51] Matthew's conclusion is instructive. Everything depends on "understanding"... [52] Matthew obviously sees the disciples as prototypes of the teacher of the Law who becomes a disciple in the Kingdom of heaven... According to Ecclesiasticus 39:3, the teacher of the Law is one who "explores the hidden meaning of cryptic discourses and occupies himself with the riddles of parables." Perhaps Matthew means that "therefore" -- because you have understood -- there can now be teachers of the Law like that.
By means of a metaphor he emphasizes what concerned him in 5:17-48. The true teacher of the Law has learned from Jesus to see both the old and the new together (cf. Wisd. 8.8) -- God's Law, and its new interpretation proclaimed by Jesus and realized in all that he does. Or is Matthew thinking of Jesus' own teaching, and its new interpretation in the "learned" decisions of the community of disciples (16:19; 18:18)? In either case, it is clear that for Matthew the whole collection of parables is a didactic discourse on the Kingdom of God. Such a teacher of the Law is of course no longer a "rabbi," i.e. a "great one," but rather a "disciple" in the Kingdom of heaven, i.e. one who remains a "learner" (the same word in Greek [as disciple]) throughout his life (cf. 23:10).
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{Newman and Nida, A Translator's Handbook on the Acts of the Apostles, NY: United Bible Societies, 1972, page 122, write:
In biblical terminology "evil spirits" and "unclean spirits" are essentially synonymous. There are, however, serious difficulties encountered in employing an adjective such as "unclean," for this can turn out to be simply "dirty." Quite naturally the emphasis in the Bible is on the fact that these spirits caused people to become unclean in a religious sense, that is, they defiled them, so that they could not worship God."
The next episode in the Marcan source is the Syrophoenician woman. Again, Matthew introduces a number of changes. The woman is now a Canaanite. The actual healing of the woman’s daughter is reduced to a brief statement of the fact (v. 28c; cf. Mark 7:30). Thus, the emphasis is thrown upon Jesus’ dialogues. First, there is a new preliminary dialogue between Jesus and his disciples (Matt. 15:23-24). Jesus is made to represent the earlier, strict Jewish Christian point of view that the mission was confined to the (lost) sheep of the house of Israel. Matthew assures his Jewish Christians that the difference between Jew and Gentile must be taken very seriously. (Matthew is no starry-eyed dreamer who thinks that human differences do not matter.) It is only the redeeming work of Christ and the human response of faith that can overcome that barrier. But the barrier can be overcome. That is something Matthew’s Jewish Christians must now realize.
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Mat 19:29 - omit KJV wording: or <2228> wife <1135> - (based on a needed correction of the KJV's Greek text)
Note: Not only was "or wife" not in the original texts of Mat 19:29, but also the KJV's (and Textus Receptus') teaching to 'leave wife' to follow Jesus, is clearly a misrepresentation of Jesus' genuine teachings as found in the gospels and as witnessed in Paul's letter to the Corinthians (1 Co 7:10-16).
The Greek words translated "or wife" were in the Textus Receptus Greek text that the KJV translators used in their 1611 translation of the Bible; however, these words ("or wife") were added to the Greek texts of Mar 10:29 and Mat 19:28 by a later copiest. This is further attested by the fact that these words "or wife" do not appear in similar passages in the Gospel According to Thomas (Thomas 55:1,2, and Thomas 101:1-3. Though the Gospel According to Thomas is not part of the generally accepted canonical writings of Christians, it does provide another very early witness to some of Jesus' sayings.) "Or wife" has so little manuscript support in Mar 10:29 that it is not even mentioned in the extensive footnotes of the United Bible Society's definitive Greek New Testament, Fourth Revised Edition (1994) or in Bruce Metzger's A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition (1993). Regarding Mat 19:29, Metzger comments (TCGNT p. 40): {C}
The presence of gunaika [wife] in many witnesses seems to be the result of scribal assimilation to the Lukan parallel (Lk 18:29).
According to Mat 19:27, Mar 10:28, and Luk 18:28, Peter "left all" to follow Christ Jesus. By implication, "all" would include those houses and people listed in Mat 19:28, Mar 10:29, and Luk 18:29. According to the synoptic gospels (Mat 8:14; Mar 1:30; Luk 4:38) and according Paul (1Co 9:5), Peter continued to be married and to take his wife with him when he traveled, so "wife" clearly was not included in the "all" that Christians were expected to leave behind in their spiritual (or human) journey.
To further explore many topics regarding "marriage," browse http://www.bibletexts.com/topics/marriage.htm.
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8-10. These are words of a Christian prophet or teacher. The title rabbi, by which Jesus was sometimes addressed, is reserved for that teacher (i.e., Christ) alone. Though there must be teachers in the church (16:19; 18:18), you are all brethren and there can be no external distinction of rank. Elisha addressed Elijah as father (II Kings 2:12; cf. also II Kings 6:21). In N.T. times the term usually refered to the patriarchs (e.g., Rom. 9:5). It may also have been applied to distinguished scribes of the past, for one tractate of the Mishnah is called Aboth ("The Father"). This would have been very natural. The word "abbot" is derived from the Aramaic 'abba, "father," and in the last century it has become customary in English-speaking lands to address not only monks but all priests as "father." Matthew deplores all insignia of rank; only God is Father and only Christ is master, i.e., "teacher" or "professor." If one takes this command literally, the titles "doctor" and "professor," as well as "rabbi" and "father," are forgbidden to Christians in addressing their leaders.
[9] And call no man your father is not a prohibition against using the noun of address of one's biological father; rather the injunction is against using it as an honorific in addressing someone of superior rank. See the NJB footnote, which points out that in this context father is "another title of honour." One may then translate "Do not give anyone on earth the honorary title of 'Father.' The only one worthy of this title is your Father in heaven."
[10] Some scholars maintain that this verse is either a second form of the saying contained in verse 8 or else a commentary which developed on that saying. If this judgment is corrext, then verse 10 is paralell to verse 8 therefore anticlimactic. But the verse may be understood as a logical development in the total argument of verses 8-12: just as there is only one heavenly Father (verse 9), so there is only one who has the authority to represent him absolutely, and that one is the Messiah. Master translates a noun which is found only here in the New Testament. Its root meaning is "interpreter," which explains the renderings "teacher" (NJB, NEB, NAB) and "Leader" (TEV). Neither be called masters may have a similar structure to verse 8, possibly "Don't let anyone call you 'Leader'" or "Don't call each other "Teacher.'"
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Mat 27:16,17 - Gr: [epi tous huious tes appeitheias] - See TCGNT p. 56 {C}
NAB - 16 And
at that time they had a notorious prisoner called (Jesus) Barabbas.
17 So when they had assembled, Pilate said to them, "Which
one do you want me to release to you, (Jesus) Barabbas, or Jesus
called Messiah?"
Bruce Metzger (TCGNT p. 56) writes:
The reading preserved today in several Greek manuscripts and early versions was known to Origen [180-255 A.D.], who declares in his commentary on the passage, "In many copies it is not stated that Barabbas was also called Jesus, and perhaps [the omission is] right." (Origen discloses in what follows his reason for disapproving of the reading Jesus Barabbas; it cannot be right, he implies, because "in the whole range of scripture we know that no one who is a sinner [is called] Jesus.")...
A majority of the Committee was of the opinion that the original text of Matthew had the double name in both verses and that Iesoun [Jesus] was deliberately suppressed in most witnesses for reverential considerations. In view of the relatively slender external support for Iesoun [Jesus], however, it was deemed fitting to enclose the word within square brackets.
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See also Daniel N. Schowalter's article on "Trinity" in The Oxford Companion to the Bible (edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993, pages 782-783), which includes the following:
Trinity. Because the Trinity is such an important part of later Christian doctrine, it is striking that the term does not appear in the New Testament. Likewise, the developed concept of three coequal partners in the Godhead found in later creedal formulations cannot be clearly detected within the confines of the canon [i.e., the canonical New Testament].
Later believers systematized the diverse references to God, Jesus, and the Spirit found in the New Testament in order to fight agains heretical tendencies of how the three are related. Elaboration on the concept of a Trinity also serves to defend the church against charges of di- or tritheism. Since the Christians have come to worship Jesus as a god (Pliny, Epistles 96:7), how can they claim to be continuing the monotheistic tradition of the God of Israel? Various answers are suggested, debated, and rejected as heretical, but the idea of a Trinity -- one God subsisting in three persons and one substance -- ultimately prevails.
While the New Testament writers say a great deal about God, Jesus, and the Spirit of each, no New Testament writer expounds on the relationshiop among the three in the detail that later Christian writers do...
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