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Matthew 2:1-23
00:30:13
This week Dr. Tim Gray and Dr. Michael Barber continue their study of the Gospel of Matthew by diving into chapter 2.
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, I'm Tim Gray, and I want to welcome you to join me and Dr. Michael Barber for our Bible study on the Gospel of Matthew. Last week we started with the first episode, which you could find and always go back and watch on the forum platform. And today we're going to start off at the end of chapter one of Matthew, where Joseph and Mary and the angel comes to Joseph and tells Joseph in a dream, not to worry, to take Mary as a wife. And of course, we're going to get a very important title for Jesus that will be very important for Matthew's gospel. Last time we talked about the genealogy of Jesus, and Matthew gives us this great story of Jesus genealogy being rooted in the story of Israel going back all the way through David to Abraham. And we saw that this whole story is a kind of a new Genesis, a new beginning for Israel and for the world. And that's one of the things we love about this gospel, is that it is about a new Genesis in Jesus. Now I want to dive in because there's so much to cover. I want to dive in to kind of catch us up to speed. So far we are. We left off with Joseph. And of course, the angel comes to Joseph and says, don't worry about taking Mary, your betrothed, because she's conceived by the Holy Spirit. And so, you know, that's pretty big news for Joseph. And then the angel says, you know, Joseph, son of David. So Joseph is of the lineage of David. That'll be important in the story. And then we're told that this is all done to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah. In Isaiah, chapter 7, verse 14. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Immanuel. Now, that name is very important for Matthew. He gives it as an important title. Here we already have the title Jesus the Christ. And Michael last time talked about Christ as a title, not as a surname. And it's the Christos, the Messiah. And here we get the next big title. And it's an important title, Emmanuel, which means God with us. Now, Matthew is going to highlight that in the end of his story of Matthew, isn't he? So there's a literary method here called inclusio, and that's simply the word inclusion with the n taken off the end
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makes it sound more scholarly.
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Yes, we scholars like to mutilate words or use ancient words to impress people and get sabbaticals, but really it's a very simple word. And inclusion in other words, oftentimes as a literary Device in the ancient world, you would kind of take your thesis or your theme, and you would begin it at the beginning of a section of a book or at the beginning of the entire book. And then you bring it back in a parallel way at the end with that same theme being highlighted. And that was a way of bracketing and kind of holding together the work under a certain theme. Think about it as picking up your sandwich. You know, if you have onions and a burger and mustard and relish, you pick it up by the buns. And so an inclusio is like the buns. It helps you pick up. What's the. What's the. How do you hold the theme of this book?
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How do you get a handle on it?
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How do you get a handle on it? So the handle here relates to the end of Matthew. You want to talk about what this inclusio is, right?
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B
Well, certainly at the beginning of the book, we see that Jesus is identified as Emmanuel, God with us. At the end of the book in chapter 28, what we see is Jesus tell the disciples, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. So here we have an emphasis on the fact that in Christ we have not just the Messiah, not just the King of Israel, but we have God present with his people. It's a very important aspect of Matthew's gospel. And we're going to see, as we move through the narrative, how. How the disciples begin to question who is this man who's able to do all of these amazing things? And this sort of climaxes at the Mount of Transfiguration, where the veil is in a sense, pulled back. But one other thing that we would really want to do, well, to highlight is in this story of the birth of Jesus here, Joseph not only is the one who is selected to be Jesus foster father, he, Joseph, is the one who defines what it means for the Messiah to come. He gives Jesus his name. That's a really big deal. And his name is Jesus. And of course, Matthew is aware of the Hebrew etymology of that, that he is God saves. Right? The Lord saves. So Jesus name is summing up the whole story of salvation history. The Lord saves his people, and from what? What is it that we need to be saved from? It's not just some foreign domination. It's not just from Roman oppression, it's from sin.
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A
Yeah, that's exactly right, Michael. And I think, you know, that name Jesus really comes from the Greek form that we get, but the Hebrew form is Joshua. So everyone knows the name Joshua, but that's Actually, Jesus name in Hebrew is Joshua Yahshua, which means Yahweh saves. And so I think that's a key point here. And of course, Matthew's giving us this great fulfillment because he's going to show that Jesus is fulfilling all these great promises in the Old Testament. He's fulfilling the whole story of Israel, but he's also fulfilling the promises God makes. And one of those promises God makes is to the Davidic house, the dynasty of David, that a virgin shall conceive and bear a son. And that's going to show you that'll be the sign that God is going to rescue the house of David from all the political schemes and dangers of the nations roundabout. God's going to intervene and save the house of David. And that saving the house of David will be crucial because it will be through the house of David that the Messiah will come to save Israel. And so you have this great idea now, just as a small apologetics aside, here if you look up on, for example, anything on the Internet, but typically even Wikipedia, and it'll mention that this Isaiah 7:14, that in the Hebrew the word is Alma. And you can translate alma, young maiden. Or you could translate it as virgin. And of course, in the Jewish tradition that's more recent to the time of Jesus, when they translated the Hebrew into Greek in the Septuagint, they chose Parthenos, which means virgin. So they translated that young woman as a virgin. Now, Alma typically was a virgin. It was a young unmarried gal who could be married, but she was of the age to be married. And she was always in that culture, if you weren't married, you were supposed to be a virgin. So the idea of that being a virgin is true. Now, what you're going to get in something like Wikipedia says it had nothing to do with being a virgin, which is pushing it way too far. We know it could, you could translate it as young maiden. You could also translate it as the Septuagint did, as virgin. And so those two meanings aren't opposed. But the important thing is a lot of people like to say, well, the Christians changed the word and made it into a prophecy. Well, it was a prophecy. Even the Jews understood this in the time of the Septuagint as a sign that they were looking for. That would be a great sign, would be a virgin birth for the house of David. And of course, Joseph then recognizes now by the intervention of the angel that now he sees, okay, Mary is a virgin and her virgin birth is the fullness of the fulfillment of what Isaiah 7:14 promised. And so for. And it's interesting that that angel comes and gives that word to Joseph who's of the house of David. And originally the prophecy in Isaiah 7 is Isaiah giving it to Ahaz, who's a son of David. Right. Who dynasty. So in a sense you have a nice bookends with it's to the line of David that you get that prophecy for. And it's really a beautiful fulfillment here in Matthew chapter one.
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B
Right. And if people want to go deeper into this, I really recommend they take a look at Brief Jesus and the Jewish roots of Mary, where he actually shows how Isaiah 7:14 was interpreted as an eschatological future prophecy and other Jewish works. So even in the Old Testament. So that's fascinating. But I think what we really want to focus on is before we move on here is the idea then is that what's going to come in the Messianic age is going to far surpass anyone's wildest expectations. And that is what happens with the coming of Jesus. We see not just the coming of a king, as you read about in the genealogy prior Jesus, he transcends Old Testament hopes and we're going to see how he does that again and again in the narrative of Matthew.
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A
You're right. And now as we move to chapter two, just to summarize, you know, Matthew's inclusio for this whole book of Matthew's Gospel with, you know, behold, the child shall be called Emmanuel, God with us. And the last thing that Jesus says is behold, I will be with you to the end of the ages. So you have that framing the whole story of Matthew. In other words, Matthew saying, the good news is that God is with us and Jesus brings God's presence with us. And that is good news indeed. And now we're going to see that good news unfolding in Bethlehem.
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Now God is with us in the house of bread. Yes, that's literally what Bethlehem means. And I think that's rather significant because a lot of people, we come to these gospels, we almost become inoculated to their power because we've heard them proclaimed so often. One of the things that recent scholarship has underscored is that the Gospels were likely written to belong to, to be read as ancient Greco biography, ancient Greco Roman biography. And one of the things we know about ancient biographies and is that they were typically read in dinner settings. Right. So we know that you would need something to be read after dinner. Today we have dinner and a movie. Right. Likewise, in the ancient world you would have dinner and you needed a story.
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Everyone loves stories. And so this idea that the events and the amazing good news of Jesus is told as a story, as a bias, as a biography.
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That's right.
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Makes perfect sense. And people would understand that genre in that time.
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Right. And it would be read typically at a dinner setting.
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Right.
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So if the Gospels reflect Greco Roman biography. Dennis Farkas Falvi, a late great Catholic scholar, many others have pointed out the Eucharist makes perfect sense as a context for the Gospels. Where else are they? People aren't going down to the local Barnes and Nobles to pick up the Gospel of Matthew. They're hearing it read in the liturgy. So to hear they're hearing it read when the gathered is celebrate the Eucharist, it seems.
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Well, now we transition to Bethlehem. And I want to say I love Bethlehem. Whenever I think of Bethlehem, I love to go to the Holy Land. And I got the great opportunity to study Hebrew for a while at Hebrew University for a summer in Jerusalem back in the early 90s. And most years since this will be the first year, thanks to Covid, that I won't be going to Israel. It's been a long time since I haven't. So I miss being there, but I make a couple trips. I love to lead pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and. And I love going to Bethlehem. And you go to the ancient church there in Bethlehem, the Church of Nativity. And it was really, that church was founded by St Helena. So one of the early, first pilgrims who comes there in the 320s, and she builds this church to honor Jesus Nativity over the caves in Bethlehem because it had already become an established Christian tradition by the time of St. Helena, that in those caves in Bethlehem, that's where Jesus was born. And she builds this church over it. And then it gets remodeled and enlarged by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. And you can see the remnant of that church. That church is still there to this day. And in fact, they just finished a major kind of restoration of that church. And it's beautiful. You can see some of the artwork, you can see some of the mosaic floors underneath. It's really quite astonishing. You can go down and be in that cave where our Lord was, and there's an altar down there, and there's a golden star under the altar at the place, the traditional place where Jesus was born. But the fascinating thing is that, you know, this church, unlike many others, wasn't destroyed when the Persians came through. And that relates to what we're about to talk about. And that is the Magi the Persians were at war with the Byzantium Christian empire at that time. And in 614 they swept through the Holy Land and they destroyed almost all the churches but this one. And the reason they didn't destroy this church, it's a beautiful idea, it's a beautiful story, is that when they got to the church of Nativity, they saw in a mosaic over the church, a mosaic of the Magi following the star to come to honor the Christ child that was born there. And the Persians recognized these Magi who were adorned and looked just like them from the east. And so they said, well, these are our ancestors and so we'll honor this place that honors our ancestors. And so they did not destroy the church in the Nativity, it was spared. And so I think it's a remarkable story of God's providence. And it leads us to the Magi who are following the star. Michael, why don't you talk about this Magi? Because a lot of people think, well, this sounds, you know, completely unhistorical, the idea of Magi coming from the east because they see a star. I mean, is this rational? Is this believable?
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It is funny because you mentioned the Persians. I didn't tell you I was going to. I didn't know we were going to go in this particular direction. But, you know, there's a debate about whether they were from Persia or from Babylon. I actually think they're from Babylon, but that's for another time. But either way, we know if you read the Book of Daniel, that there are in the court of the king, magicians, as they're often called, or sometimes they're understood as wise men. Right? That's what we see here. The Greek is actually magi. Magi. It's where we get the word, you know, magic, something like that. And so what we see here with the magwai coming, the Magi coming, is that now we have not just Israelites involved in the story of Jesus, but also Gentiles. It's actually funny if you read stories of the Caesars, if you even read stories of Moses birth, you'll see episodes involving Magi at the birth of significant figures. So this actually fits well within an ancient context.
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And it goes back to what we talked about before, about the women who were part of Jesus genealogy being Gentiles. Now we've got Gentiles coming. And I can't help but mention a good friend of mine in Israel, Gabriel Khanna, who runs a tour company called Guiding Star. And he was one of the first Christian Palestinians to start a Tour company over 50 years ago, and he called it Guiding Star because he wanted to take the Gentiles, the people coming from all over the world, and guide them to the places where Christ was and to Bethlehem on their first day, but to guide them. And so he called this company Guiding Star. And he's Gabriel's now in his mid-90s, and he's just a great soul, a wonderful man. And I know he watches this oftentimes, so I hope he's watching this episode.
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I got to meet him when I went there.
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That's right, you did get him.
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He was so generous with all the pilgrims. He had little gifts for everybody. It was really quite touching. You can see how much he resonates with this story. And, you know, Guiding Star. What a. I didn't make the connection with the Magi story of his pilgrimage organization. But what's amazing is it is the star that guides the Magi. What's going on here with this star? It might raise questions in your mind. Is this just astrology? Is there some way we could figure out what star that is Today? You always get some people who want to try to identify what constellation it was or something like that. This is a miraculous star because we see that it actually settles over the house that Jesus is born in. You normally can't pick out a house, but, you know, when I asked for directions for your house, the first time I came to your house, you didn't say, well, it's under this particular star. How do you do that? It doesn't work well, you know, but here in the narrative, we get the sense that the star is moving and it's guiding these men along. So what's going on here? Well, as many people have pointed out, it seems to be an allusion to a prophecy in the Old Testament. In numbers, chapter 24, we have Balaam's prophecy of a star that is rising. This was a very significant prophecy. We know in Jesus Day we have the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are fragments from books that were written in the first century, and copies of the biblical books in the first century. That prophecy of Balaam is very important there interpreted in messianic terms as referring to the coming of the Messiah. And if you go back, you'll see what he says is clearly pointing towards some kind of king. He says, I see him, but not now. I behold him, but not near. A star shall come out of Jacob and a scepter shall rise out of Israel. And then he goes on to say, it will crush the forehead of Moab Break down all the sons of Seth and Edom shall be dispossessed. Now, that's really interesting because we're going to go on to read in the story about how Herod does not respond well to the news of this king who's been born, who has somehow been summoned or somehow been made known to the wise men by this star. What you need to know about Herod is Herod actually wasn't from the line of Jacob. He was from the line of Jacob's brother Esau, who was the father of the Edomites. So in numbers 24, what does it say? A star will rise, the scepter will be given. Okay, Edom will be dispossessed.
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So when Herod gathers the Magi and he hears that they're following the star, and he hears the scribes open up the prophecies, and he hears numbers 24:17 following, he isn't going to be happy.
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He's not. Because it doesn't. It doesn't bode well for him. And we read that not only was Herod troubled by this, we read that the whole city was troubled. Why? Well, because when Herod isn't happy, look out. Right.
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Anyway, yeah, no, it's an amazing prophecy. And I can't help but think about Balaam as a wise man from the east and who was a gentile. And so you have a nice counterpart in the Old Testament to the Magi and the New with Balaam and his prophecy. And of course, the idea of Balaam giving a prophecy, being from the east and the Magi in the east, you know, where there's large Jewish communities who would keep that story alive, these Magi would definitely be aware of Balaam's story, you know, if they're searching for a Jewish king. So I think that there's interesting connections there. So let's just follow this line here. So the Magi, they first come to Jerusalem. So they're following a star which is the son of a king, and they go to Jerusalem. So first off, nature leads them to the idea that there's a Jewish king and nature leads them to Israel. Then reason probably takes them to the capital, because they probably are thinking, well, where else is the king going to be born but the capital? So reason leads them to the capital. That kind of almost is a mis turn. They kind of get misdirected there and you kind of get saying recalculating, right? And then they open up the scribes gathered with Herod and they open up the Scriptures and then they read from the Prophet Micah. And Micah is going to recalculate their journey and lead them to Bethlehem. So in a sense, you have nature, you have reason, and now you have Scripture. And the one weak link is almost reason that gets them to the capitol. But they. They survived that.
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Bring them to the scribes. It lets them know what the Scripture
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says, and Torah is going to re. Guide them.
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B
And I will say, one thing that's always stood out to me about that prophecy is there's an implicit, I think, critique in all of this. There's a recent book written by Patrick Schreiner on the Gospel of Matthew. It's a really helpful book for anyone who's interested in just going deeper into Matthew. One thing he highlights is at the end of that prophecy, this figure is going to come, right? The Christ will be born. Who will shepherd my people? Well, wait a minute. Don't they already have shepherds? Well, clearly the people who are their leaders are not shepherding them. Well, and so already at the beginning of the narrative here, we get sort of an implicit recognition that the leaders of Jerusalem, the leaders of the people, are part of the problem. And God needs to send someone who's going to set things right.
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Absolutely. And of course, that's going to be a threat of Jesus as a good shepherd later on.
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Yes.
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And I think of Matthew chapter 10 as a good example of that in the end of Matthew 9. But then after Herod hears them, he says, go find the child and come back and tell me so I can give him homage. Right. And not that he is interested, Herod, in giving homage. And then the magi go out and we'll talk about the magi. But then, of course, then we'll have, well, why don't we talk about the magi coming to Bethlehem and the gifts that they give? And then we'll come back to the terrible act that Herod's going to do of killing the innocent children and what that signifies. So let's start with the magi and their gifts.
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B
Well, yes, of course. They come into the house and we read that they fell down and worshiped him. We should come back to that later in the narrative, because in Matthew chapter four, that idea of worship is going to become very important. But this, they come and they worship him and they bring gold, frankincense and myrrh. Okay, what's frankincense? That's sort of a foreign concept. Frankincense is just incense, Right? So it's frankincense. It's honest incense. No, I'm just kidding. But it's just frankly, yeah, that's all it is. No, it's gold, frankincense and myrrh. And throughout the history of the Church, there have been different explanations of this. Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, which is two volumes, incredibly profound, highly recommend it. He suggests that first there was a practical reason. They gave them gold, frankincense, and they came in, they saw how poor they were, and they realized they needed gold. They smelled the house and there was a putrid odor, and so they gave them frankincense. And myrrh would also be something that would help them with with the smell, but also something that was costly that would be helpful to them. But throughout the history of the Church, this has been looked at in a more spiritual sense. The gold can be taken as a reference to Jesus royal identity and also a reference to his divinity. Right. The holy of holies is especially associated with God's presence and associated with gold. Frankincense is associated with worship. And so here we have the idea of Jesus being not just as a king, but maybe also as a priest. And then myrrh would seem to point to Jesus burial, which is also used in turing bodies in the first century. So there are lots of different explanations that have been given down through the ages. Do you have a particular favorite? No.
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I mean, I love that threefold meaning that Thomas mentions. And. And then of course, we see the great fulfillment in Isaiah chapter 60. You have the idea of a light shall arise. People from the east shall come to give homage and bring gifts to Israel. And they'll bring gifts of. And this is where you actually get the camels. They're riding camels. And so you always have camels in all your nativity sets. And when you read Matthew, you're like, wait, it doesn't mention camels. Well, how did camels end up in my nativity set? But it ended up because they're in Isaiah chapter 60. So the early Christians saw Isaiah 60 as being fulfilled here by the Magi.
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B
And also Psalm 72. How did they become kings? Three kings. They're never called kings in the Gospel of Matthew. They're only called wise men. But the early Christians saw in this a fulfillment of Psalm 72. And in Psalm 72 it specifically says that the kings of Tarshish would will come. They will render the Son of David tribute, and they will fall down before him. And so the early Christians extrapolated, well, if this is being fulfilled, then perhaps these wise men were something more than just Magi. But perhaps they had a royal identity. And scholars like Schreiner suggest maybe we could see here the idea of a king, philosopher or something like that.
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And so you not only have a fulfillment of prophecies, but you also have a pragmatic need met here. Because they're going to. The holy family is going to have to make a flight to Egypt because Herod is going to search for the child Jesus to kill him. And so it's going to help because Joseph isn't going to be able to be employed. He's going to have to flee down to Egypt. They have to, you know, that's going to be a month long journey or so, at least of a couple weeks. And then they have to sojourn down there for several years. So these gifts will sustain the holy family on their sojourn in their exile. And so I think that there's a pragmatic here where God is providing for the holy family in some interesting ways. You know, when I go to the Holy Land, one of the places I like to stop by and visit on the way to Bethlehem is the Herodian, which was a palace fortress built by King Herod. And it's the Herodian from which these soldiers would have gone out to kill the innocent children of, of Bethlehem. And so, you know, and of course a lot of people will say, well, there's not a historical record of this. Well, Herod controlled the media. And guess what? When tyrants who control the media do tyrannical acts and murder, you don't find news clippings like if you could search all the Chinese papers. And you're not going to find anything about Tiananme Square and the massacre that happened there. Right. You're not going to find it in the Chinese libraries. Doesn't mean it didn't happen. Right. In fact, usually there's a cover up. And what we do know historically about Herod is that he was a megalomaniac who was paranoid. He killed his favorite son, two sons. He killed his favorite wife. So the idea that he would.
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B
He kept kosher though.
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A
Yeah, he kept kosher because he wanted to legitimize his kingship to the Jews. So the idea that Herod would wipe out innocent children fits perfectly the historical record that we get in Josephus and other sources. And so even Caesar quipped that it was safer to be Herod's pig than to be his son, because the name for pig and son in Greek are very similar. So it was a nice pun in the Greek that Caesar Augustus made. But the Idea is clear. Herod was known for being ruthless and violent and any threat to his authority, whether he suspected a wife, whether he suspected his favorite sons, they died. So the idea that he would kill these children of Bethlehem and to make sure that he killed the child born of the line of David, there is no doubt that that fits historically. And so Matthew I think is giving us an accurate picture.
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B
It also resonates with Jesus identity as a new Moses in the Gospel. Right. So in fact, we know that when Moses was born, there was a tyrannical king who wanted to kill all the Hebrew male children. Sounds a lot like what happens with Jesus in the Old Testament. Moses finds safety in Egypt. Jesus finds safety in Egypt. And the parallels will continue throughout the story. In fact, in ancient Jewish records or retellings of the Exodus, we also have the idea of Magi being associated with Moses birth. So lots of parallels there.
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Yeah, so some echoes and allusions that are preparing us to see Jesus as a new Moses, which we'll see growing as we get into Matthew's story more and more. And of course they're going to depart, they're going to go to Egypt. And then after the death of Herod, the great word goes back to Joseph again through the angel, rise, take your child and go back. The one who sought his life is now dead. So it's safe to return. And we're going to get the return of Joseph and that's going to fulfill Hosea 11:1 out of Egypt I have called my son. So you have the prophet Hosea speaking about this prophecy which echoes back to the Exodus story. So exactly what Michael just said about Moses. And it echoes back to out of Egypt I've called my son. So Israel as a nation is called God's firstborn son in the Exodus in the time of Moses. And we're going to see this idea that Jesus is the new Israel, not just the new Moses, not just the new David, not just the new Solomon, but he's also the new Israel as a nation. So we're going to see that as a, as a growing image in this story. Well, there's so much richness to this story. There's so much to the story of Jesus. And we know that we're skipping all kinds of wonderful little things and we feel guilty about it, but we want to keep driving on. We could do our whole Bible study on the first two chapters and spend months and months just on these first few things. But we hope that you are able to join us with your Bibles if you're interested in the Augustan Bible, you can get it at Catholic Market. And so that's where we have the esv. So I know a lot of you want to know which Bible translation we're using. It's the esvce. So I want to let you know that you can get it at Catholic Market. If you want to join us with the Augustan Bible, always have your Bible with us when you open up with us and mark it up. We want people and we want Catholics to be known for living and loving their Bibles and the Word of God. Thank you for joining us. Thank all of you who are part of our mission circle and supporting us. May the Lord bless you.