BEMA 84: Matthew — Mumzer
Transcription Status
13 Jun 23 — Initial public release
5 Dec 22 — Transcript approved for release
Matthew — Mumzer
Brent Billings: This is The BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host, Brent Billings. Today, we look at the record of Matthew, attempting to understand his unique agenda as he presents the life and ministry of his rabbi Jesus.
Marty Solomon: Finally diving into some Text this week. We’ve been doing a lot of context up to this point. We’ve been doing a lot of Hellenism, looking at the five responses to Hellenism, asking some personal reflection questions, setting up the context of gospel narrative. Finally, get back to some biblical Text. It feels good, doesn’t it?
Brent: Absolutely.
Marty: It’s what we do. We’re going to get back—
Brent: It feels good until you make me read what I’m about to read.
Marty: [laughs] Brent gets to read a genealogy today, full of a bunch of names that we don’t know how to say. It’s fantastic. Oh, it’ll be a good exercise. Yes, last time, we said we weren’t going to do what with our Gospels, Brent? What was the one thing we weren’t going to do?
Brent: We’re not going to harmonize them.
Marty: We’re not going to harmonize them. We want to hear every Gospel voice and its distinct Gospel voice, because every one of those voices has a what, Brent?
Brent: They have their own agenda.
Marty: They have their own agenda. They have a message that they want to communicate, all four of them, as far as what we have—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All four of them are going to use the life of Christ to communicate their agenda, and communicate their message, but every one of them has a unique message. We’re going to start today with Matthew, and we’re going to look at Matthew’s agenda.
Brent: I hear a lot about the synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It’s like, “Oh, they’re all the same thing, basically.”
Marty: Exactly.
Brent: They’re all written for very different reasons.
Marty: Absolutely. Even that, just that alone, the synoptics, “Well, they’re covering the same material.” That’s why we want to harmonize them. John, I was taught in college, John was kind of written to help at the end, to help fill in the gaps, to catch all those stories that weren’t in the synoptics. That’s possible, or maybe there’s a better question. Maybe that is, who is—now we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What kind of questions would we ask? I was just on the brink of that. We’re going to ask questions like who is the author? Who is the one writing the Gospel?
I’m not going to get hung up in the debate about “Did the actual Gospel writer write the Gospel?” It’s a good debate. It’s not where we’re going to sink our podcasts. That’s not the point of what we’re trying to wrestle with. I believe Matthew wrote Matthew. I believe Mark wrote Mark. I believe Luke wrote Luke. I believe John wrote John. There’s good debate around all of that, and I’m not planting my flag, or hanging my hat solely on—nothing’s going to hinge on the authorship, but we’re not going to spend any of our time trying to do that.
We’re not going to spend any of our time trying to date the Gospels, even though I’ll probably throw out a few comments even today about some things here and there. We’re not going to try to really dive into who wrote what Gospel, who was the actual author, who wrote it first. We’re just going to stay away from that. We’re going to try to hear each Gospel, whenever it was written, in its unique context.
We want to ask who’s the author. Not in a critical sense, but just who is John? Who is Matthew? Who is Mark? Who is Luke? We need to ask that question. Who does the author work with? Who is the audience? “Who does the author minister to” is what I meant by “who do they work with.” John’s going to have a really unique position that’s going to influence his Gospel. Who is the audience? That’s going to be a huge, huge issue. We’re going to see that today. Matthew’s audience is going to be unique, different from Mark in a big, big way, different from John in a big way. The audience is going to be a big deal. These are the questions that we want to ask. Let’s answer some of those.
In short, Matthew is a Jewish author who happens to be writing to a Jewish audience. That will come back later at the very end of our podcast, I think. Matthew is a Jewish author who happens to be writing to a Jewish audience. I do have some opinions that aren’t necessarily popular, shocker there. But they’re not popular in the scholastic world either. Usually, my opinions, I try to take from popular academic opinion, and I believe Matthew is written first. That won’t be a popular opinion. Not that it matters. It will be significant to the larger historical view, but it won’t be significant to what we’re going to do in our podcast. I do believe that Matthew was written first.
I also believe that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew. I picked that up from my teacher, Ray. I don’t know if he’d appreciate me telling that on a public forum that that was his opinion, but it was and I happen to agree. The more I study Matthew, I think there are some internal hints in the text. That is not a popular opinion. We have no external evidence to suggest that Matthew is written in Hebrew. I’ve never found a copy of Matthew in Hebrew, a shred of parchment of Matthew in Hebrew, and yet I feel like the language, the Greek that we have, there are a few issues in the Greek that would lead me to believe that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew.
I know the major arguments against that as the quotations are perfectly verbatim out of the Greek Septuagint. There’d be a few ways to explain that. Neither here nor there for our podcast, but I believe Matthew was the first one to write. I believe Matthew originally wrote in Hebrew. For any Bible nerds out there that are really big into the academic, so the context, I don’t at all dispute, the presence of what a lot of scholars call Q. There’s source material that they call Q. Matthew and Mark are so similar in some of their quotations, that everybody has said, “Well, there has to have been a source. There has to be a source material that they’re drawing from.”
Even though we don’t have it preserved as a piece of biblical writing, there has to have been, even when we find things like the Didache. [DID-uh-Kay] The Didache—maybe you can find a Wikipedia link for the Didache. D-I-D-A-C-H-E. Didache. D-I-D-A-C-H-E. We’ll put that in the show notes. Didache is an early church teaching. Some would even say that when the Bible refers to the teaching of the apostles, that they’re effectively referring to the Didache.
Brent: Or the Didache [DID-ahhch-ee] as I’ve always read it.
Marty: The Didache. Yes. [chuckles]
Brent: I had no idea.
Marty: There you go. Yes, the Didache, it seems to reference similar material. A lot of scholars, in fact, the mass opinion of scholarship is that there has to be some material out there, whether it was oral, written, there was something and they just call it Q, Q material. I don’t dispute that at all. I totally see, as I read the scholars’ work and read the Gospels myself, I’m totally okay that there was Q material out there that they’re drawing from. Not a problem at all—to me anyway.
In order to understand the agenda that Matthew has when he writes his Gospel, I don’t think we have to look any further than the very first chapter, as in the very first part of the very first chapter. I think in order to understand Matthew’s agenda, we can look at the opening verses, which are nothing more than a really fun genealogy. Brent has it pulled up and I’ve asked him if he would read it as he’s already voiced. He’s probably really happy about that.
Brent: I’m more or less going to read these names as we do in English just to save myself from too much trouble and also to help aid the listener.
Marty: All right, excellent.
Brent: This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.
David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife. Solomon the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam, the father of Abijah, Abijah, the father of Asa, Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram, Jehoram the father of Uzziah, Uzziah the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amon, Amon the father Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon.
After the exile to Babylon: Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel the father of Abihud, Abihud the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor, Azor the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Akim, Akim the father of Elihud, Elihud the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah.
Thus, there were 14 generations in all from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the exile to Babylon, and 14 from the exile to the Messiah.
Marty: All right, now, just in passing, a lot of people here will write me emails and different questions about 14, 14, 14. Like Matthew goes to the extent of pointing out that there’s 14 generations and then 14 generations and then 14 generations. There’s some really obvious observations to make about that. In some sense, he’s trying to say, “Listen, this is right in line with the next era of history.” There’s even deeper stuff, you can read all that online. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. There’s some great, amazing theories that come around the 14, 14.
If Matthew, as a Jewish author writing to a Jewish audience—if Matthew points anything out on the surface, that’s not his point. If we’ve learned anything about Jewish readers, and a Jewish writer, it’s going to be that they bury truth as treasures hidden in the text. If he’s pointing something out, it’s actually to lead to somewhere else.
Brent: We’ve talked about numbers before, but we never mentioned 14. Is there any significance to that number on its own, or would we have to break it down?
Marty: Yes, I think that’s the most common question I get. I don’t necessarily have something. I don’t have a good answer to that. My best guess on that’s going to be at seven and seven, it’s two sevens, but why two sevens? Why not three? Two sevens? I don’t have any good answer to that. There is a lot of good stuff written out there. You can spend some time on Google about the 14 generations, 14 generations, 14 generations.
It is worth noting that Matthew actually has to do some gymnastics to make that work. It’s 14 generations in the first section, it’s 14 generations in the second, but Matthew actually has to skip—it’s either Jesus’s, obviously non-biological, grandfather or great grandfather, I can’t remember which—but he actually skips a generation in order to make it 14, which again, in the Eastern mind, he can do that. He wants to do that, and no reader, no Eastern Jewish reader of his is going to throw up a panic flag or say that he can’t do that. They’re going to understand he’s trying to accomplish something.
Brent: Hopefully, that guy would have passed away though, because it may sting just a little bit to hear the one guy that skipped.
Marty: No kidding. I don’t want to rest there. I want to ask more Jewish questions—Jewish author to a Jewish audience. Now I remember when I was in college, in fact, I have a big notebook that we created about Matthew and a lot of things that I really think we got right and we nailed and that was awesome. One of the cases that was made was that Jesus was trying to prove, excuse me, Matthew was trying to prove to a Jewish audience that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.
That was one of the things I was taught. One of the agendas of Matthew is that he’s trying to prove to a Jewish audience that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. It’s at this point in the genealogy, and I don’t know how many of our listeners are like, “Gosh, genealogies, why are they even in the Bible?” We’ve already looked at a little bit, but this will be a great example of why genealogies are in the Bible.
Brent: It seems like this very first verse tells us everything we need to know. Jesus the Messiah, the Son of David, the son of Abraham, you got all the major characters.
Marty: Exactly, right? It would seem to follow what my Bible college professors taught me, which was, he says in the first statement, “I’m writing this genealogy so that you know that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of Abraham, the son of David,” all that wonderful stuff. Okay, great. The problem is, is Matthew writes what could be the worst Jewish genealogy we have on record. [laughs] We’ve looked at genealogies before, Brent, and we even know that we’re having to go all the way back to Session 1 to pull some of this stuff out of our minds, out of our memories. Session 1, one of our favorites, was it not?
Brent: Absolutely.
Marty: Absolutely. What are some of the things we remembered about genealogies? Go all the way, what was the first genealogy you remember looking at?
Brent: Oh, let’s see, that would have been Noah.
Marty: Noah, we definitely did some work there. We asked some questions, never made a whole bunch of conclusions or spent a ton of time there, but we definitely looked at that.
Brent: Probably the biggest one I looked at was Abraham.
Marty: Abraham. Let’s go back to that just to remind ourselves that this isn’t something new. Let’s go back to Session 1. Abraham, we said that the oral tradition taught us that Abraham did what?
Brent: Oh, what did the oral traditions speak of?
Marty: Who were the ladies in the genealogy?
Brent: We had Sarai.
Marty: Sarai, Iscah…
Brent: Iscah, that’s right.
Marty: … and Milcah.
Brent: Milcah.
Marty: Right? You had these women in the genealogy and we’re told in the Bible that Abraham marries who?
Brent: Sarai.
Marty: Sarai, but the oral tradition says he married?
Brent: Iscah.
Marty: Iscah. The whole conversation came about why, Brent? Why would we even examine the genealogy in the first place?
Brent: Well, first of all, it’s weird that the women are in the genealogy at all.
Marty: Absolutely.
Brent: Then it says that Sarai is barren.
Marty: Right. There were all these wacky details, which made us go, “Wait a minute, there’s something going on in the genealogy.” Because you don’t mention what, Brent?
Brent: You don’t mention women.
Marty: That’s not—again, it’s an ancient patriarchal culture, definitely different. We would have lots of minor critiques for that and in a good way, but in their world, it’s a paternal lineage. You don’t include any matriarchal details unless they’re absolutely essential to the genealogy, right? If we keep that in mind, we go—look, like Matthew is writing the worst—notice this. Go ahead and find those, either start from the beginning or… Go and start from the beginning, Brent, let’s find it.
Brent: Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. His brothers don’t seem like a major detail. Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar.
Marty: Okay, so right there we hear Tamar. Now, tell me about Tamar, Brent. What’s going on here?
Brent: Well, we don’t really need to have her there.
Marty: Absolutely unnecessary to the genealogy.
Brent: Because it says, “Judah is the father of Perez,” you cut off the rest of the line. We don’t need to know about Zerah either.
Marty: Don’t need to know about Zerah.
Brent: “Judah is the father Perez.” Next line, “Perez the father of Hezron.”
Marty: Absolutely. If I’m a Jew writing a Jewish genealogy, that’s all I need. Is there even more that grabs your attention about that?
Brent: Well, the story of Tamar is not exactly a high point in their history. [chuckles]
Marty: The point of Jewish genealogy is to prove, like I was taught in Bible college, to prove my pedigree, to prove the purity of my line, to prove my Jewishness. It’s to preserve the glory of my story. Matthew is purposely—realize this—purposely going out of his way to acknowledge Terah, which if you remember the Terah story, or not Terah, excuse me, Zerah. Perez and Zerah. Tamar is the name of the mother. If you remember that story, that’s a story with Judah. What did he do, Brent?
Brent: Oh, that’s the one where he went to the town and the shrine prostitute was out front.
Marty: She dressed up like a…?
Brent: She dressed up like a shrine prostitute. He slept with her, she took his cord and staff as a whatever, and then he sent the stuff and he’s like, “Oh, well, whatever.”
Marty: “She’s more righteous than I.” Session 1, we’ve got that lesson in Session 1. This is a story about incestuous relationships. It’s a story about injustice. It’s a story about Judah taking advantage of women. It’s a story about whatever you want to do with that story. It’s a dark part of the story. Right? Okay. Maybe Matthew just lost his mind for a moment. Maybe he just forgot what a Jewish genealogy is supposed to do. Go and keep reading.
Brent: “Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram.”
Marty: Who was Ram’s mother?
Brent: Hmm.
Marty: Well, we’re not told because Matthew doesn’t tell us. That’s just not what you do. Okay, go ahead.
Brent: “Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.”
Marty: Okay, stop. We got another lady here. Now Rahab, talk to me about Rahab. Does he need to include Rahab in this genealogy?
Brent: No.
Marty: Absolutely not. He could go right from Boaz to?
Brent: Obed
Marty: Obed. He doesn’t, he stops. “Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.” Now Rahab is… well, who was she?
Brent: She is a prostitute, right?
Marty: Prostitute and…?
Brent: And a Moabite?
Marty: Well, not a Moabite, but…
Brent: No.
Marty: She was a Canaanite.
Brent: Canaanite.
Marty: In Jericho. Right?
Brent: Yes.
Marty: This is not helping your Jewish pedigree genealogy. Again, Matthew goes out of his way to mention somebody who’s not a Jew in the lineage, a woman who doesn’t even need to be mentioned, and a particular kind of story that I probably don’t necessarily want to bring up, but he’s going out of his way to do it. Okay, what’s the next line?
Brent: “Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth.”
Marty: Okay. We did a whole thing on the beautiful story of Ruth, right? What was the problem with Ruth?
Brent: Ruth was—she didn’t belong for some reason.
Marty: She was—this is the one you wanted. She is a…?
Brent: She’s a Moabite.
Marty: She is a Moabite, that’s right. She is this Moabite woman, not allowed into the assembly of the Lord for ten generations. Now again, the story of Ruth is beautiful. Go back and listen to that podcast, it was this wonderful story, but if I’m doing a Jewish genealogy, this is not the—I don’t go out of my way to mention the Moabites because that hurts the whole purpose of the genealogy. Matthew is going out of his way. If you keep walking through the genealogy, he’s going to talk about Uriah’s wife. I’m telling you, it is so consistent that I can guarantee you, Matthew is doing this on purpose.
Matthew is purposely going throughout the genealogy and pointing out the women in the story that we would typically like to push out or avoid, that have these dark stories. Matthew is going out of his way to say those dark stories are a part of God’s story. When we talk about the agenda of Matthew, one of the things that I will call it is, I’ll call his agenda the mumzer. Now mumzer or oftentimes, if you want to search for it online, you need to look for mamzer. I say mumzer. It’s the way it was handed to me. It’s the way it was taught to me. We already have a habit here on The BEMA Podcast of saying things funny and spelling things funny. Why stop now, right, Brent?
Brent: That’s right.
Marty: That’s right.
Brent: Embrace the funny.
Marty: Embrace the mumzer, okay? M-U-M-Z-E-R, but you’ll probably want to Google it or search for it as M-A-M-Z-E-R. You’ll notice in the show notes we have a Wikipedia article.
Brent: Mamzer.
Marty: Mamzer. Mamzer is a word that comes out of the Torah. And it means, in English, we might think “bastard.” It doesn’t have the same stigma, but it means a child of illegitimate, unapproved-by-Torah-observance birth. In Torah observance, a woman was not allowed to marry a Greek and have a child by that—or not a Greek, should I say, that’d be New Testament—a Gentile. She’s not allowed to marry a pagan and have a child by a pagan—the patriarchal world lets the man have a child by a pagan woman, but doesn’t let—anyway, nevertheless, neither here nor there for now.
A mumzer literally, practically, is somebody who is born of an illegitimate birth. I use the term in my teaching often poetically, not literally. When I use the term mamzer or mumzer, I don’t typically mean the literal illegitimate birth. Oftentimes, that will be the case. We’ll look at one of the most famous mumzers, which will be Timothy in the New Testament. We’ll look at him later in Session 4. When I use it, I mean it more poetically, as in just outsider, outcast.
Matthew’s agenda for his Gospel, starting from the opening verses of his genealogy, is the outsider. What I will call the mumzer. Why does this matter for Matthew? Who was Matthew, Brent?
Brent: He was a tax collector.
Marty: Listen, this agenda for Matthew comes straight out of his own story. Matthew knew what it was like to be an outsider. Matthew was a tax collector. At some point, Matthew in his life cashed in his chips. We don’t know the backstory. I have no idea. I can’t wait to find out someday if we ever get the chance in whatever heaven looks like, I’d love to know Matthew’s backstory, but something happened in Matthew’s life, and Matthew said, “You know what? I don’t have anything in this Jewish narrative left for me. I’m going to go work for the Romans.”
You are hated as a tax collector, so at some point, Matthew, on some level, we can assume sold his soul in a sense to this Roman agenda and just said, “My call within the Jewish narrative is done.” This Jesus one day came walking along on the beach and looked at this guy sitting at this tax collector booth. This is the guy that taxes Peter, James, John, Philip, Andrew. He’s the enemy. He’s the opposite. Jesus comes by his tax collector booth and he says, “Come follow me.” It makes sense that when Matthew writes a Gospel, what do we call that in the Greek, Brent?
Brent: A euangélion.
Marty: When Matthew comes saying, “Listen, I’ve got an announcement about a new King and a new Kingdom.” It makes total autobiographical sense that for Matthew, that Kingdom means that there are no outsiders. This Kingdom, this new King, and this new Kingdom is open and available to anybody who wants to participate in the thing that God is doing. Every time you turn the page in Matthew, do you know what stories you’re going to hear? You’re going to hear stories of all these people who aren’t supposed to belong, finding belonging. You’re going to have people that shouldn’t have any faith, and Jesus is going to say, “I haven’t seen faith like this in all of Israel.”
Every time you walk into a village or a place that has—they have the Text, they live surrounded by synagogue. They know the way of God. They’re devoted to obedience. Jesus is going to say, “That’s not the obedience that God is looking for.” We’re going to hear that they don’t have the kind of faith for Jesus to do miracles. Everything’s going to be backwards. With all the people that are supposed to have it, they don’t have it. For all the people that aren’t supposed to have it, Jesus is going to say they have it. For all the people that are supposed to be in, Jesus is going to warn them they’re out. For all the people that are supposed to be out, Jesus is going to proclaim that they’re in.
This will be Matthew’s agenda with almost every single story and every single page that you will turn in his Gospel. This is going to be the agenda of Matthew. There’s a new King; there’s a new Kingdom. For Matthew, this Kingdom means there are no mumzers in Jesus, and this is going to be his pronouncement. When you realize who he’s writing to, he was a what, Brent?
Brent: He was a Jew.
Marty: Writing to?
Brent: Jews.
Marty: Jews. He’s a Jew writing to Jews. This agenda makes all the sense in the world, because Matthew is going to write to the religious people that think they have it figured out, and his agenda is you’re missing it. “You’re missing it, and you’re going to miss the Kingdom of God.” It’s a very confrontational Gospel for his audience, because every time they turn the page, Matthew’s going to be saying, “God’s Kingdom is different than you think that it is. It’s different than you think that it is, and I know that because I got a second chance and a third chance and a fourth chance, and that’s what this God is like.”
This is the Gospel that when we get into the life and ministry of Jesus, this is the Gospel that I’m going to want to go to. I’m going to use the Gospel of Matthew to walk through the life and ministry of Jesus, partially because I think Matthew is the most chronological, but the other part is because I think this is the message that we want to hear—excuse me, not want to hear—I think this is a message that we need to hear. I think we live in a Christian world that believes that we understand it. I think the evangelical world thinks that we got it.
I think of all the four Gospels, the one that we need to hear the most is the Gospel of Matthew, which says, “You think that you’re in, but you are in the greatest danger of missing out on the whole thing.” That’s why I want to use the Gospel of Matthew because I think its message, Matthew’s agenda, is the most relevant and most challenging for us who are going to be predominantly American evangelical Christian listeners on some level. That’s why we’re going to use that Gospel. That’s his agenda.
Brent: Last episode, we discussed the idea of Matthew having a particular agenda and a particular audience, and why he would use the term Kingdom of Heaven when referring to this Gospel that he’s talking about, versus the other Gospels usually referring to it as the Kingdom of God. What is it about Matthew that makes him use this term? Is it any different on a wide scale? Is it any different than what Luke and Mark are talking about?
Marty: Right. Matthew will only use Kingdom of God one time in his Gospel. Every other instance and reference is going to be Kingdom of Heaven. That question is, I wouldn’t say it’s easiest and we should know it, but it’s easy to answer by looking at his audience. In the first century, in the Jewish world, you did not use the word “God.” To do that would’ve been a huge offense, and so you had code names for God. Like today, Jews still won’t say the name of God, they’ll say Hashem, which just means “the Name,” or sometimes they’ll say “Adonai.” You’ll hear me say “Adonai,” which would refer to the name of God, but they won’t go around saying, God, they would not say “Kingdom of God.”
One of the ways that you say God in the first century, in Jesus’s day, one of the code names you would use is just to talk about “heaven.” God dwells in heaven, so rather than say God, you just say “heaven.” Think about the story of the prodigal son in the Gospel of Luke. He comes and he says, “Father, I sinned against heaven and against you.” What is he saying? He’s not saying I’ve sinned against the sky or heaven. He’s saying, “I’ve sinned against God. I’ve sinned against God and I’ve sinned against you,” but he’s Jewish and so he doesn’t say “I’ve sinned against God.” He says “I’ve sinned against heaven.” When Matthew, a Jewish author writing to what kind of audience, Brent?
Brent: A Jewish audience.
Marty: Jewish audience, he doesn’t use the term, God, he uses heaven. Whenever you read Kingdom of Heaven, you need to hear it interchangeably as the exact same thing as the Kingdom of God. Even though we won’t harmonize, when you use those parallel passages, some of them being really obvious it’s the exact same story between Matthew and Mark. You’ll notice that in the other Gospels, Jesus uses the term Kingdom of God. Those terms need to be seen as interchangeable and the reason why he doesn’t use it is because he’s sensitive to his Jewish audience as a Jewish author, knowing that they don’t say God.
It’s the same thing with “temple,” by the way. A Jew will never say “temple,” they’ll say “the house,” oikos in the Greek, just the house, because they will never say “Temple.” The word is too holy. They don’t want to defame the name or the house of God, so they just call it “the House.” They just call it “the Name.” They just call it “heaven.” They just call whatever it is they’re going to call it, but they don’t use the actual name itself. Does that make sense?
Brent: Sounds good. This idea of Matthew’s audience will come up quite a bit, I think, in our podcast.
Marty: Yes, because we’re going to use Matthew to walk through—I’ll try to pull in the other Gospels when they’re relevant or when we need to, but I’m going to use Matthew as my core text, and so we should, if what I just said is the case, we should see one of the most dominant themes. Again, the reason why I’m going to use that is I think it’s relevant for us. One of the most dominant themes is all those people that aren’t supposed to be in are in. That should come up over and over and over again. Almost every single story that we look at should be that theme of you think they’re out, but they’re not out, they’re in. Your mission is to go bring them in and give them a place to belong.
Brent: It happens immediately after the genealogy. Joseph is pledged to be married to Mary, and turns out she’s pregnant and they’re not married yet, and that’s not cool.
Marty: That’s going to be a huge problem in the Christmas story, and we’re going to have this huge wrestling match with, are they accepted when they go back to Bethlehem? We’ll talk more about that, absolutely. It’s going to come right every single time you turn the page, it’s going to be a Roman centurion. Then it’s going to be Jesus denouncing the religious triangle, the place where the Jews have settled, followed by a Syrophoenician woman, followed by Caesarea Philippi, followed by a demoniac from the Decapolis.
It’s always going to be “Insider? No. Insider? No. Insider? No. Outsider? Yes. Insider? No. Insider? No. Insider? No. Outsider? Yes.” You’re going to see this all throughout. Again, if we learned how to ask a new set of questions, we can now appreciate what Matthew’s doing. I don’t know if our listeners will get this. I hope you understand why if you’re trying to harmonize the Gospels, you just missed that. You just missed Matthew’s whole point, because you were trying to make, “What was it, two donkeys or one donkey? Was it two demoniacs or one demoniac?” We just missed the whole point.
When Matthew told the demoniac story, he had a point about the demoniac, but when Mark tells the demoniac story, he has another point. When Luke tells it, he has a different point. If we harmonize it, we actually miss the agendas that the Gospel writers are trying to speak to us. Just to get us used to asking those kinds of questions, for Matthew’s Gospel, for him, there’s a new King and a new Kingdom. That means that the mumzers are no longer mumzers.
Brent: Sounds great. I think as we get farther into Session 3, we are probably going to be bringing up a lot of questions that probably most of us are very familiar with. As Christians, we typically study the New Testament far more than we do the Old Testament. All of our Old Testament stuff has been really cool and interesting. It’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know that before.” Now we’re getting to stuff where we thought we knew what was going on and we’re opening up a different window into the Text.
The most important thing is to get in community with other people and wrestle through this because this is not an easy conversation. I’ve been doing it for years. Marty has been doing it for many years beyond that. This is not something that you’re going to get overnight, and we need support.
Marty: Absolutely.
Brent: Go to bemadiscipleship.com, find a discussion group in your area. If you want to start one, get in touch with us, we can help you do that. You can just get on the Facebook page, or contact us on Twitter. We’d love to have those conversations with you and get through this together because we’re not here to ruin everything for you. We’re trying to open up a new perspective and help you see what Jesus was trying to accomplish.
Marty: Absolutely.
Brent: Thanks for joining us on The BEMA Podcast. We will talk to you again soon.