I’ve written a few things lately about the ways the New Testament and other parts of the Christian tradition work to try to connect Jesus and his movement to the history of Israel. There are surprisingly few arguments that are shared across the entirety of the New Testament; what’s central to one part (say, Jesus’ high divinity in John) is absent or very different elsewhere (Mark), and what’s really important in one place (Jesus as miracle worker in the gospels) is mostly ignored in other places (Paul almost never mentions Jesus’ actions or deeds). But there are a couple of arguments that play out across most or all of the New Testament. One is the lordship of Jesus; in most parts of the New Testament, Jesus is thought of as “Lord,” even if that title changes in meaning and use from place to place. The other really big and consistent argument that comes to mind for me is that Jesus is an outgrowth and expression of Israelite tradition. This argument shows up differently in different places, but it shows up in one way or another in the gospels, in Paul, and in other places like Hebrews.
This week’s lectionary passage from Matthew is making this argument, strenuously, as part of the story of Jesus’ birth. This is a story that really, really wants its readers to make connections between Jesus and the texts and stories of ancient Israel. Three times, in verses 15, 17, and 23, the text explicitly cites as quotation from texts of Israel to describe Jesus. These are called “fulfillment citations” in Matthew, and Matthew is famous for them. Fulfillment citations are so characteristic of that gospel that if you see a passage that has some version of “this was done in order to fulfill,” you can bet that you’re reading Matthew, without even having to check. The gospel goes on to make explicit connections between events of Jesus’ life and texts of ancient Israel dozens of times, each one meant to lead the reader to the conclusion that Jesus is a natural outgrowth of the story of Israel.
The other thing this passage is doing, though, is borrowing the shape of stories from the Hebrew Bible and using them as a mold for telling the story of Jesus’ life. Matthew does this across the whole gospel too. In Matthew, the story of Jesus’ life is told as a riff on the story of Moses, with lots of parallels and reflections between the two lives. Matthew tells the story of Jesus’ grandest sermon differently than Luke, to give just one example, because it’s important for Matthew to match it up to a story from the life of Moses. Where Luke tells about Jesus giving a sermon on the plain (“on a level place”), Matthew puts that same sermon on a hill or a mountain, giving us the “Sermon on the Mount,” because Moses ascended the mountain to receive God’s law. Matthew, in the story of Jesus reinterpreting that same law, has Jesus do so on a mountain.
So, Matthew plays around with narrative details to manufacture these parallels with
Moses. This is very visible in this passage from Matthew 2. After the birth, Joseph receives word that he should move the family to Egypt. Why? No other gospels report this story, or even any association between Jesus and Egypt. The answer is that Moses was in Egypt, and went out of Egypt in the Exodus, and so Matthew needed Jesus to both go into and come out of Egypt too. This angelic visitation exists to set that up. The same is true for the story of the slaughter of the innocents; Matthew includes this as a parallel to the life of Moses, when Pharoah ordered children killed in order to take out the infant Moses. Herod does the same here, and it leads to a fulfillment citation to boot.
I’ve written about this a few times already, so I won’t belabor the point, but we shouldn’t think of these narrative strategies as intellectually dishonest or wrong. Yes, Matthew is inventing aspects of the story of Jesus to suit his own storytelling needs, but we have to remember that Matthew was writing a theological project, not an historical one. Matthew was not trying to be a meticulous historian; Matthew was trying to tell a compelling story about Jesus. And more than that, he was trying to root that story in ancient Israel, as part of a grand argument about the connections between Jesus and Israel’s past and present. Matthew understood Jesus’ story as a story about the fulfillment of prophetic promise, and so he told the story that way.
Thank you - I learn something new every time I read one of these.