A Christmas Message From Matthew

What was the gospel writer trying to tell us about Jesus in his opening chapters?
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Think about an ancient gospel written with all-capital letters, minimalpunctuation, no

space between words or sentences (why waste preciouspapyrus?), and no verse numbers
or chapter headings to help yourreading. You would be very glad to have a prologue--a
kind of overture to give you the whole story in upfront in summary. This is why each of
the four gospels begins with such an overture.

Mark's

overture tells the story of John the Baptist's mission and arrest as overture to that of
Jesus.

John's

overture is a magnificent hymn to the Logos of God, Word made Flesh.

Matthew

and

Luke

, however, both chose a birth story as overture to their own stories of Jesus. Let's
examine Matthew's overture to see what he was trying to say about Jesus with his birth
story. For Matthew, Jesus is the Messiah, long-awaited by his people, but a Messiah who
came as a New Moses. You and I, by the way, understand new rather differently from the
way that Matthew did. We think of "new" as "better" and therefore replacing the obsolete
old. But for the ancients, the old was good and the new was always suspect--except as the
old renewed, transfigured, and fulfilled. That is why, for example, Matthew started his
story of Jesus-as-Adult atop a (re)new(ed) Mount Sinai, giving a (re)new(ed) Torah, and
proclaiming "you have heard of old, but I tell you now" in Matthew 5-7. Torah-renewal,
in other words, not Torah-replacement. That is why Matthew has Jesus explicitly warn,
"not to think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to
abolish but to fulfill."

In composing his birth-as-overture, therefore, Matthew had to write aprologue about

Jesus the Messiah, the New Moses of Jews and Gentiles alike. And here was the most
difficult part. He also had to foreshadow danger and deliverance, lethal human
opposition but eventual divine vindication. He had to hint about crucifixion and
resurrection in creating his parable about the newborn Jesus. Finally, he had to do all
that in the short space of those two initial chapters.

You can debate whether Matthew's birth story is history or parable. In my own view, it is
clearly a deliberate and very powerful parable. But what does it mean? And there is an
even more important question which still presses, whether you take it literally as history
or metaphorically as parable. It is also the only question Matthew would have thought
worthy of debate: Who is your King and what is your Rule? Is it the violent power of a
Herod or the non-violent power of a Jesus?
Back, then, to Matthew's birth story. His obvious strategy was to describe the birth of Jesus in
parallel with the birth of Moses in Exodus 2. In that story, Pharaoh of Egypt tried to destroy the
Israelites by killing all their male infants--but the bravery of the Hebrew midwives, the strategy of
his mother Jochebed, and the decency of Pharaoh's own daughter (all females, you will notice)
saved the child in his papyrus basket among the reeds of the Nile.
Think of Moses' birth-story as a drama in three acts. The first act is the King's Decree. That
created a problem for any reader: Was it not just too coincidental that infanticide was ordered at
the very moment Moses happened to be born? The next act is the Parental Crisis. That created
another narrative problem. Why did the Hebrew parents continue having children and thereby
allow even the possibility of male-baby infanticide? The third act is the Child's Escape. Here the
narrative problem was rather different. The baby in the basket was powerfully dramatic for
Moses but Matthew could hardly have Jesus saved in a basket among the Jordan's bulrushes by a
Herodian princess.
Fortunately, however, there were available several versions of that Moses story which retold the
Hebrew original from Exodus 1-2 in Aramaic translations and commentaries. They not only
retold it, but they also expanded upon it and improved its narrative coherence on precisely the
first two problems--the King's Decree and the Parental Crisis. They never, of course, tried to add,
subtract, or change the Child's Escape--any storyteller would recognize the difficulty of improving
on that section!
First, the expanded version of the King's Decree is given in the Jewishhistorian Josephus' Jewish
Antiquities 2.205-206: "While they were in this plight, a further incident had the effect of
stimulating the Egyptians yet more to exterminate our race. One of the sacred scribes--persons
with considerable skill in accurately predicting thefuture--announced to the king that there
would be born to the Israelites at that time one who would abase the sovereignty of the Egyptians
and exalt the Israelites, were he reared to manhood, and would surpass all men in virtue and win
everlasting renown. Alarmed thereat, the king, on this sage's advice, ordered that every male
child born to the Israelites should be destroyed by being cast into the river."
In this version there is no coincidence. The infanticide is focusedprecisely on killing Moses lest he
become the future liberator of hispeople. That expansion allowed Matthew to put Herod in place
of Pharaoh. The general male-baby infanticide or "slaughter of the innocents" was precisely to kill
Jesus as it had been to kill Moses. Further, since Matthew's Jesus was the New Moses of both
Jews and Gentiles, he added in a special element of his own. The Magi, the Gentile wisdom of the
East, came to worship Jesus at his birth. Notice, of course, how the "sacred scribes" had
interpreted events for Pharaoh, just as "the chief priests and scribes of the people" interpreted for
Herod in Matthew 2:4.

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