Mining the Scriptures For
Jesus
A Simple Example With Huge
Implications for Literalists
It is not inspiration for Matthew to
copy 90+% of Mark and Luke well over 50%. That's just
copying.
A short reminder here that the Four
Gospels were written AFTER the Apostle Paul had lived, written his views of
Jesus and died. For Paul, Jesus was just a Jew, born of a woman.
(Romans 1:3) There was no glorious birth story around yet for Paul to draw
on or care about. The Jesus of Paul was hallucinatory. He never met nor
does he quote any living Jesus and for Paul, Jesus was more the Cosmic Christ in
his head than any living human being. But Paul wrote first, so the first
Jesus was not of this earth and did not really live a life worth telling about
on earth.
THEN come the Gospels AFTER Paul.
So to have a better view of how it really was, it would at least have been nice
to realize that Paul wrote first, then the Gospels and finally Revelation.
The current order of things gives the opposite impression of reality in the
first century. To Paul, Jesus was Cosmic and in the heavens and then was
made human by the Gospels. But with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John first, it
gives the impression of first an earthly Jeusus and THEN the Theological and
Cosmic Christ of Paul. Wrong, Wrong.
At any rate, I'd like to show by a
major blunder made by the writer of Matthew, that to reach back into the Old
Testament and mine the scriptures, parts of them, phrases or whatever it took,
was how the story of Jesus was cobbled together. These men had no clue about
Jesus real birth, so they simply made it up and in doing so didn't even read
each other's stories to "all speak the same thing."
First, be reminded that in Matthew, he
tells the story of Jesus with his mining the OT for helpful stories that I call
the , "And thus it was fulfilled,"s. Every time Matthew tells us a detail
which we take as fact about Jesus birth, he gets it from the Old
Testament. This is WHY the story of Jesus birth SEEMS so prophetic.
The truth is the story was written to fit the Old Testament scriptures (and
badly so I will show), and not prophetic at all.
Here are three classic examples from
Matthew.
"1. The virgin birth (Isaiah 7:14)
This verse is part of a prophecy that Isaiah relates to King Ahaz regarding the fate of the two kings threatening Judah at that time and the fate of Judah itself. In the original Hebrew, the verse says that a "young woman" will give birth, not a "virgin" which is an entirely different Hebrew word. The young woman became a virgin only when the Hebrew word was mistranslated into Greek.
This passage obviously has nothing to do with Jesus (who, if this prophecy did apply to him, should have been named Immanuel instead of Jesus).
(I might also add that Immanuel means "God IS with us" as in will be on our side against the Assyrians, so don't fret, and NOT "God with us" as if Jesus was God with us in the flesh--Dennis)
2. The "slaughter of the innocents" (Jeremiah 31:15)
Matthew says that Herod, in an attempt to kill the newborn Messiah, had all the male children two years old and under put to death in Bethlehem and its environs, and that this was in fulfillment of prophecy.
This is a pure invention on Matthew's part. Herod was guilty of many monstrous crimes, including the murder of several members of his own family. However, ancient historians such as Josephus, who delighted in listing Herod's crimes, do not mention what would have been Herod's greatest crime by far. It simply didn't happen.
The context of Jeremiah 31:15 makes it clear that the weeping is for the Israelites about to be taken into exile in Babylon, and has nothing to do with slaughtered children hundreds of years later.
3. Called out of Egypt (Hosea 11:1)
Matthew has Mary, Joseph and Jesus fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod, and says that the return of Jesus from Egypt was in fulfillment of prophecy (Matthew 2:15). However, Matthew quotes only the second half of Hosea 11:1. The first half of the verse makes it very clear that the verse refers to God calling the Israelites out of Egypt in the exodus led by Moses, and has nothing to do with Jesus.
As further proof that the slaughter of the innocents and the flight into Egypt never happened, one need only compare the Matthew and Luke accounts of what happened between the time of Jesus' birth and the family's arrival in Nazareth. According to Luke, forty days (the purification period) after Jesus was born, his parents brought him to the temple, made the prescribed sacrifice, and returned to Nazareth. Into this same time period Matthew somehow manages to squeeze: the visit of the Magi to Herod, the slaughter of the innocents and the flight into Egypt, the sojourn in Egypt, and the return from Egypt. All of this action must occur in the forty day period because Matthew has the Magi visit Jesus in Bethlehem before the slaughter of the innocents."
(New Testament Contradictions: Paul Carlson)
This is commonly understood misuse and misapplication by Matthew. It is a writing style called Midrash where you reach into the past to find scripture to tell the story of the present, but it is not meant to be taken literally.
But now comes the proof that Matthew was doing just that and was mining the Old Testament for stories to tell about Jesus, when in fact he knew precious little about him in the flesh.
"Since the prophecies mentioned above do not, in their original context, refer to Jesus, why did Matthew include them in his gospel? There are two possibilities:
1. The church says that the words had a hidden future context as well as the original context, ie, God was keeping very important secrets from His chosen people.
2. Matthew, in his zeal to prove that Jesus was the Messiah, searched the Old Testament for passages (sometimes just phrases) that could be construed as messianic prophecies and then created or modified events in Jesus' life to fulfill those "prophecies."
Fortunately for those who really want to know the truth, Matthew made a colossal blunder later in his gospel which leaves no doubt at all as to which of the above possibilities is true.
His blunder involves what is known as Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem riding on a donkey (if you believe Mark, Luke or John) or riding on two donkeys (if you believe Matthew). In Matthew 21:1-7, two animals are mentioned in three of the verses, so this cannot be explained away as a copying error. And Matthew has Jesus riding on both animals at the same time, for verse 7 literally says, "on them he sat."
Why does Matthew have Jesus riding on two donkeys at the same time? Because he MISREAD (emphasis mine) Zechariah 9:9 which reads in part, "mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey."Anyone familiar with Old Testament Hebrew would know that the word translated "and" in this passage does not indicate another animal but is used in the sense of "even" (which is used in many translations) for emphasis. The Old Testament often uses parallel phrases which refer to the same thing for emphasis, but Matthew was evidently not familiar with this usage. Although the result is rather humorous, it is also very revealing. It demonstrates conclusively that MATTHEW CREATED EVENTS (emphasis mine) in Jesus' life to fulfill Old Testament prophecies, even if it meant creating an absurd event. Matthew's gospel is full of fulfilled prophecies. Working the way Matthew did, and believing as the church does in "future contexts," any phrase in the Bible could be turned into a fulfilled prophecy!"
(New Testament Contradictions, Paul Carlson)
I just thought it would be fun and enlightening to share this.
Why is it important?
Because the leading Guru's of the COG's do the same thing and reach into the Old Testament, even seeing themselves in it, and make it mean Sabbath after Sabbath what it does not mean and cannot mean but will make shipwreck of their followers faith and lives in a very short time.
Making the Bible mean what it never meant is a very old way of telling a story. But it is nonetheless a story.
Maybe we should let it go as "An earthly story with a heavenly meaning," before many more sincere folk get burned.
5 comments:
Sometimes, in their zeal to ridicule scripture, critics loose their grip on reason.
Does Paul Carson seriously think that Mathew was so demented that he actually is saying that Jesus rode both animals at the same time? It’s Paul Carson that is losing touch with reality here.
Mathew is using the Zechariah quote in the same way as it was written, ‘mounted on a donkey, EVEN on a colt, the foal of a donkey’.
All Mathew is doing is giving the additional detail to emphasize that this was fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy. By specifically mentioning the colt’s mother he was in effect saying that they knew the ‘family history’ of the colt, and that the colt fulfilled the conditions of the prophecy.
In relating the story, Mathew also shows that the disciples actually brought the colt’s mother along with them too - a sensible thing to do, the colt was going to be much more willing to travel with them if accompanied by its mother, which clearly it hadn’t yet been separated from at that point of its life.
That the other writers didn’t mention this detail is not a contradiction. Obviously they didn’t feel it relevant to their telling of the incident, as they were not specifically linking it back to the Zechariah prophecy.
That is writer’s choice, not a contradiction.
The point is that "Matthew" misread the Old Testament account or misunderstood it and wrote his story to fit his misunderstanding of it. This and scores of other scriptures in Matthew shows that he cobbled together his story of Jesus from the Old Testament and not from any real interaction with Jesus.
The apologetic of the Donkey and her foal is well understood. Matthew somehow knew there were really two and the other Gospel writers just did not note that. That's speculation and the fact is that the OT story only means and speaks of one animal which is reflected in the other three accounts accurately.
Three of the writers wrote their story of jesus correctly to the OT Text, Matthew did not.
Also, the OT text, in fact, has nothing to do with Jesus in the future and just as it can be said the story really had two animals in it, it can be argued that Jesus as did others before him, patterned their Messianic behaviors after the OT stories which would appear to be prophecy fulfilled.
All of Matthew's "and thus it was fulfilled" tales of Jesus were taken out of the OT and written into a story of Jesus which no one actually knew of in reality. Famous people are given amazing childhoods after they are famous, not before.
And it would be rather silly for Matthew to include the idea that even if there was a Mother and Foal, anyone would ride both.
This is not a one many opinion. This is a very common example of Gospel writers using the OT correctly or incorrectly to write the story of Jesus because the actual writers are not eye witnesses to any of this so were forced to write birth and death narratives based not on fact or because they were actually there, but from OT writings.
Of course, literalists go to great lengths to explain contradictions and misteps as not existing and this can be done just as it can be undone.
All that to say that the only reason Matthew claims there were two animals in the first place is because he misread the prophecy. The original verse from Zechariah describes the promised king as riding upon one animal, not two. This mistake was not made by the other Gospel writers.
I used to eat, sleep, and breathe these types of conflicts. It was all part of my "wall".
Later in life, I found that all of the alleged conflicts in the world can't undo the basic spiritual soundness of the Sermon on the Mount, Beatitudes, Royal Law of Love, Two Great Commandments of the Lord, or the salvation process.
It's good to be aware of conflicts, but if we take them too far, what can we find as a replacement that is better than the teachings of Jesus?
I don't believe that most of humanity would pay any more attention to a perfect book filled with perfect characters than it does to the venerable Holy Bible that, like life, is a warts and all proposition.
BB
Dennis you say ‘the only reason Matthew claims there were two animals in the first place is because he misread the prophecy’
This might be the case if we care to assume, as you and Paul Carlson both do, that the gospel writers were just writing works of fiction to fit their particular agenda.
The key verse has been translated:-
‘And brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon.’
Both you and I know this key sentence can be translated in a number of ways. It can be ‘and put on IT their clothes’, the phrase ‘they set him thereon’ can equally apply setting him on the clothes that were laid on the donkey. Such is the ambiguity of translating.
We also both know why Paul Carlson chooses the most stupid interpretation of this account, the idea of Jesus riding two animals at once – because Paul Carlson has his particular agenda – he is writing a work titled ‘New Testament Contradictions’, so of course he will take the most apt translation for his agenda.
On the other hand, if these are accounts of real events, then the gospel accounts become what you would expect from different writers recording what they considered important. The emphasis will vary according to the writer’s perception.
On one extreme Mathew gives a more complete background, details that others considered not to be essential. On the other hand John just refers to Jesus actions in one sentence ‘And Jesus, when he had found a young ass, sat thereon’.
The thing is if you think the gospel writers will basically say anything to get a certain message across, it gets pointless for someone to present to you a reasonable scenario of what actually would fit the details of the various accounts, which I did in my first post, because ‘that’s speculation’.
Of course, just maybe, considering the gospel writers as abject liars might also be speculation?
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