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Matthew 1:24-25, so simple, yet so controversial
After being comforted by an angel in his sleep, Joseph woke and did as he was instructed, taking Mary as his wife and naming her child Jesus. This seems like a straightforward summary of what happened, but verse 25 has ended up in the center of a major controversy.
In this verse, we’re told that Joseph refrained from having marital relations with Mary until after the birth of Jesus.
Protestant readers may not be aware of why this is controversial, so allow me to explain the problem. In Catholic and Orthodox Tradition, it’s believed that Mary never lost her virginity. The Perpetual Virginity of Mary is a doctrine that, in so many words, claims that she maintained her virginity before, during, and after the birth of Christ.
The problem here is that various verses, especially Matthew 1:25, seem to argue otherwise. Understandably then, people have put forth some explanations for why these verses don’t contradict their doctrine about Mary.
The first of these regards certain translations of this verse. In these translations, Jesus is referred to as Mary’s firstborn son, and some people see this as evidence that she had other children after Jesus. The counterpoint to that claim is that even an only child is the family’s firstborn, so the term does not always imply that a family has multiple children. Jesus’ words on the cross (John 19:26) also appear to reflect the idea that Mary had no other children.
The second counterargument is that in the Greek and Semitic languages, the word “until” does not automatically imply a negation of a quality. Thus, the author of Matthew is simply stressing that Mary was a virgin prior to Christ’s birth, and says nothing about what happened afterward.
A third, and significantly less common, point about this passage is that there’s no real evidence that the author was in a position to know what was going on between Joseph and Mary. It’s not like people do the deed in the city streets or something, and unlike today, nobody was openly talking about those aspects of their relationship on social media.
On a different note, there’s a small discrepancy between Luke 2:21 and Matthew 1:25. Luke does not state who names the child, while Matthew posits that Joseph names the babe. This is believed to be a move by the author of Matthew to further stress Jesus’ status as Joseph’s son, and thus heir to the throne of King David.
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Still more thoughts on Isaiah 7:14
This is now the third entry I’ve made about this verse, which is quoted in Matthew 1:22-23. So far, I’ve covered two difference opinions about this passage: one that explains how Matthew’s use of the Septuagint may have weakened his argument, and one that discusses possible mistranslations of this passage. There’s still another viewpoint that needs addressed, and it’s taken me almost twenty days to work out how to approach it.
In the interim, I did discover something that explains one of the translation oddities I mentioned in the previous post. The “They/She shall call him Immanuel” change can be observed in manuscripts of Isaiah 7:14. In particular, the Dead Sea Scrolls have this verse using the word “they”. Exactly how and when this change occurred, I don’t know.
The third issue with applying Isaiah’s prophecy to the Messiah comes in the form of a single question: is this a Messianic prophecy to begin with?
According to modern Judaism, the answer is no; this passage is not about the Messiah. It’s strictly a prophecy regarding the situation facing Israel at the time the prophecy was made, and while there is disagreement on which child Isaiah was talking about, this does seem to make sense.
After all, Isaiah was talking about the current situation here: before this prophesied child would know right from wrong, the two nations that threatened Judah would be no more. In fact, this seems to come to pass in Isaiah 8, where a child is born and God explains that before this boy learns to say “mother” or “father”, Assyria will have crushed Judah’s enemies.
But it’s not quite that simple (it never is). If the child of Isaiah 7 and 8 are one in the same, then what follows should be the same result. If you read on, it’s clear that this second child signals a harsh judgement on Israel (8:6-8), not their salvation (7:15). Also, the child in Isaiah 8 isn’t born of anyone special, which was part of the child’s description in 7:14.
There is also a second problem, and I’m not equipped to delve into it very deeply at the moment. Basically, it seems that Judaism has changed its views on what the Messiah is expected to do or who they will be several times over the course of history. This has also likely affected their views on which verses describe the Messiah. While Jesus fell far short of their current expectations, there have been at least two people in recorded history who were much better candidates for the Messiah, so the debate is clearly ongoing. I’m bringing this up now, as it may be relevant to how Isaiah’s prophecy was viewed way back when; I can’t say for sure just yet.
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Continuing Isaiah 7:14
In Matthew 1:22-23, the author of the Gospel According to Matthew cited a prophecy from Isaiah, drawing a connection between the prophet’s words and Jesus Christ. However, this connection has been disputed by the Jewish people for at least 1800 years, so I feel it’s worth looking at their views on the situation.
In a previous entry, I explained how the Gospel According to Matthew used the Septuagint's Greek translation of the passage, and how this can be viewed as an issue. For a quick recap, the Jews do not view translations as inspired or flawless, and thus the use of the translation, rather than the original Hebrew, effectively weakens the entire argument.
In this post, I’m going to go further down this rabbit hole, examining one of the core reasons that the Septuagint’s translation is considered erroneous by modern Jews. Or, to be more specific, I’m going to showcase two places where the citation in Matthew could be mistranslated in such a way that it would possibly change the meaning of the text.
The first evidence that this citation is being misused comes from the pronoun used in the second half of Matthew 1:23:
According to Matthew, “THEY shall call him Emmanuel.”
According to Isaiah, “SHE shall call him Emmanuel.”
This is odd, because the text from Isaiah is pretty clear that it’s the mother, and the mother only, who gives the child this name. Matthew changes it so that multiple people are involved. I have no explanation for this difference; I only discovered that it exists.
That said, Matthew’s version has certainly come to pass, as Christians the world over have come to consider Emmanuel as one of Jesus’ many titles.
The other problematic translation in this verse lies not with Matthew, but with Isaiah. When the Book of Isaiah was translated into Greek, one of the words was replaced with a word that has a more fixed meaning. The Hebrew word “almah” can mean either a young woman or a virgin. In this verse, it was translated into Greek as “parthenos”, which usually means virgin.
The argument here is that Isaiah wasn’t talking about a miraculous pregnancy or a virgin birth, so claiming that Mary is the almah Isaiah was talking about is twisting Isaiah’s words. Further, when the Bible is explicitly referring to virginity, it used the word “betulah”, not “almah”, so the claim states that the Greek translation was wrong to begin with.
Now, the word almah does not appear very often in the Bible, so we can narrow down possible meanings fairly easily. Excluding Isaiah 7:14, we have the following:
Prior to their meeting and eventual marriage, Isaac’s wife Rebecca is identified as an almah.
Miriam, the young woman who watched over Moses, is an almah.
Some of the Psalms mention music played by “alamot”, which may be an instrument or (more likely) a girl’s choir. The latter suggestion is strengthened by the next point, where alamot is used as the plural of almah.
Song of Songs includes a remark that a man was adored by all of the alamot. It also mentions a girl who was better than queens, concubines, and countless alamot.
Proverbs 30:19 is a special case: the original Hebrew and the Septuagint don’t match. This passage is talking about unpredictable things, like the movement of birds, paths of ships on the sea, etc. The Hebrew version ends with “and the way of a man with an almah”, while the Septuagint ends with “and the way of a man in his youth”. Both suggest that a young man can easily get into trouble, though the Hebrew is a bit more specific on what sort of trouble he’ll get into.
As you can see, every use the word “almah” in the Bible can be understood to mean a virgin. After all, young unmarried women were expected to be virgins; a fact that is reinforced by verses like Deuteronomy 22:17. Meanwhile, the word “betulah” can be found describing widows (Joel 1:8) and concubines (Esther 2:17-19), neither of whom are virgins. This suggests that almah is less ambiguous than betulah. In turn, that suggests that Isaiah is talking about something very unusual happening. While people may want to argue that he wasn’t talking about a miraculous birth, the fact remains that he was talking about a sign from God. Since people get pregnant all the time, something would need to be different about this pregnancy.
There is another point that needs to be brought up regarding the Septuagint’s rendering of Isaiah 7:14.
As the story goes, the Septuagint was compiled by 72 Jewish elders (6 elders from each Tribe), who asked for God to guide their translation. This work was completed over 120 years before Mary was born, and it was considered to be a viable translation of the scriptures until around 200 AD (ie, once Christianity started getting popular). After 200 AD, new translations gained favor, and a popular correction in the translations was the rendering of Isaiah’s “almah” as “young woman” rather than “virgin”. Today, a large number of Bible translations have followed suit, correcting Isaiah 7:14 to say “young woman” instead, making this verse something of a quality check for many Christians.
But here’s my problem with this viewpoint. God does not lie, nor does he deceive us. Lies and deception are creations of the Enemy. While people are not perfect and mistakes get made, something just doesn’t feel right with saying that God intentionally misled several generations of his people by encouraging their elders to produce a botched work. If their translation effort was really blessed as it was originally believed, then the sudden decision to reject it is quite suspect.
Of course, there is yet another angle that needs to be addressed regarding Matthew 1:22-23, and there’s a lot more to be said about the Jewish beliefs regarding what they expect from their Messiah, but those discussions can wait for another day.
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I started this sideblog as a way to help myself through my spiritual journey, but everyone’s invited to come along for the ride!
If the main purpose of your blog is to promote Christ Jesus, reblog.
Let the Christians of Tumblr unite!
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A detour into Isaiah
In Matthew 1:22-23, a prophecy is quoted verbatim from a Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14. As mentioned before, I’d like to examine the various prophecies that appear in the Scripture, so I’ll be taking a short break from Matthew to look at this passage and the responses to it.
Judaism rejects the claim that Jesus is the Messiah, and the reasoning behind this rejection generally falls into two camps: one claims that Jesus left prophecies unfulfilled, while the other claims that the so-called prophecies are misattributions of various verses. That’s an oversimplification, but it explains where I’m about to go next -- Matthew’s use of Isaiah here is sometimes said to be an example of the latter.
After looking around the internet, I’ve found several claims about this passage. These claims can be neatly separated into three broad groups, so I’m going to share my thoughts on them in multiple posts. In this post, I’ll handle the claims regarding why using a Greek translation of Isaiah might not have been the best idea.
When Matthew was written, the most commonly accepted Greek translation of the Old Testament was the Septuagint (abbreviated as LXX). There are some oddballs who claim that this translation was created by Christians as an attempt to convert the Jewish people, but this is demonstrably false. Any scholar worth their salt will tell you that the Pentateuch was translated into Greek around 250 BC, while the remainder of the Old Testament was translated and incorporated into the Septuagint around 150 BC. This makes it impossible for the Septuagint to have been created by Christians (for any purpose), as the Septuagint predates Christianity by over 100 years.
Now, the author of Matthew clearly quoted the Septuagint’s version of Isaiah 7:14, so we know that they were working from a translation.
This is the source of our current problem: the Jewish people did not and do not share our beliefs regarding scripture. Most Christians today believe that the Bible, regardless of translation, is a divinely inspired work. However, to the Jewish people, only the original Hebrew version of their Scripture is considered to be divinely influenced. Any translation, including the Septuagint, is considered to be inferior to the original.
Thus, even though most of the Jewish population was no longer able to read or write in Hebrew, they still considered the Greek translation to be a flawed copy. By using a translation instead of the source, Matthew’s author may have weakened their argument.
You see, one of the words in Isaiah 7:14 has multiple possible meanings. The people behind the Septuagint selected one of them, and used a Greek word that only means that one thing. This is like replacing phrase “a few” with a fixed number like two or three; you’ve removed ambiguity, but it’s not certain that you understood the author correctly, and selecting the wrong number might have implications you didn’t intend.
Even though this gave ammunition to people opposed to Christianity, the author of the Book of Matthew referenced the material that their audience would immediately recognize. It’s the version that they would be familiar with, and thus it’s the version they’d be likely to respond to. It’s no secret that this Gospel was intended to convert people, so from that standpoint, this was a reasonable, if possibly risky, decision.
In the next post on the subject, I’ll go into more detail about the key word in this passage and how the Greek translation may have gotten it wrong.
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Matthew 1:18-21 - Joseph is comforted
After laying out the genealogy of Jesus, Matthew presents Joseph’s viewpoint of the events leading up to Jesus’ birth.
At this time, Joseph was already engaged to Mary. This made her sudden pregnancy rather shameful, as it implied she had been unfaithful during their engagement. It also meant that Joseph had a difficult choice to make.
Verse 19 suggests that he considered breaking off the engagement, an act that would effectively be a form of divorce. Now, there were two main ways for a couple to divorce due to infidelity. Either the couple could take the matter to the public courts, creating a spectacle that would seriously harm the reputation of the adulterous party, or they could prevent their evidence to two select witnesses, who could then certify the divorce.
Since Joseph was a righteous man, he wanted to handle things quietly, implying that he was thinking of choosing the latter option or even looking for a way to keep the matter entirely private (after all, they weren’t married yet, only engaged). But, before he could make any choice, an angel came to him in a dream where they explained everything, and instructed him to name the child Jesus, a name that means “Salvation”.
On a side note, there is an alternate interpretation of Matthew 1:19 which states that Joseph was a righteous man because he already knew and understood why Mary was pregnant. Personally, I find this hard to accept, as it doesn’t fit the context of the surrounding verses. If he understood the situation, why would he be debating over separating from Mary? And why would the angel need to explain anything?
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Matthew 1:1-17 - The Genealogy of Jesus Christ
Since the author of Matthew wanted to prove that Jesus was the promised Messiah, they needed to make several things clear immediately. The first hurdle was Jesus’ lineage, as one’s heritage was (and likely still is) extremely important to the Jewish people. For example, in ancient Israel, your bloodline determined where you lived, and whether or not you had the right to be a priest. There were similar requirements for the Messiah, and if these were not proven, then it really didn’t matter what the other arguments were going to be.
Thus, the Book of Matthew opens by tracing the lineage of Jesus from Abraham to Jesus’ adoptive father, Joseph. This provides the necessary evidence that Jesus was a child of Abraham and a member of David’s royal bloodline.
The author also takes special care to note that Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father, but the husband of His mother. This wording appears to have been carefully chosen so it wouldn’t conflict with the account of the Virgin Birth.
Like the rest of Matthew, this list is strictly structured. As verse 17 summaries, the genealogy is presented as three groups of fourteen, for a total of 42 generations.
As neat and concise as this listing is, there’s one glaring problem with it. The Book of Luke also provides the genealogy of Jesus Christ, and the two lists are very, very different! They both agree on the bloodline from Abraham to David, but after that, it’s a conflicting mess.
This difference has been a serious problem since at least the third century. It seems that either people didn’t catch the difference earlier than that, or they knew something about the passages that we’ve since lost to time. Either way, this is an issue that we need to resolve.
There are several theories that try to answer this problem. Unfortunately, as they all rely on some level of guesswork, none of them are entirely satisfactory. Which one you prefer -- or if you even care -- is entirely up to you.
One answer is that the authors of Matthew and Luke simply traced the bloodline through different grandparents. Everyone has two grandfathers, so one genealogy follows the paternal line, while the other follows the maternal line.
Another suggestion is that one of these genealogies is Mary’s, not Joseph’s. If this is the case, then the genealogy in Luke must be Mary’s, as Matthew’s ends with her husband. But this doesn’t entirely fit our evidence either, as it says Mary married a man with the same name as her father. According to other evidence and Tradition, Mary’s father’s name is Joachim, not Joseph.
A third suggestion involves levirate marriage. According to this theory, Joseph’s biological father was Jacob, son of Matthan, as Matthew lists. But Jacob’s brother Eli died childless, and so Jacob married his brother’s window to continue the family line (a levirate marriage). This would mean that legally, Joseph was the son of Eli, as Luke’s genealogy states.
Of course, a fourth suggestion back by scholars like Marus Borg and John Crossan is that both genealogies are simply fabrications that attempt to led Jesus’ Messianic claims some credibility. I have trouble accepting this one, as it’s just too easy. It feels like giving up at the starting line; even the best hoaxes fall apart under examination, so the fact that these genealogies didn’t instantly result in the end of the early Christian movement makes me think that there’s something credible in there.
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About the Book of Matthew
Each Book in the Bible was written with a specific audience and purpose in mind. The Gospel According to Matthew is no different; even though there’s debate over the identity of its author, most of the other details about the work are universally agreed upon.
The primary focus of this Gospel is the claim that Jesus is the Messiah that the Jews were told to expect. Likewise, it was primarily aimed at a Jewish audience, and therefore it expects the reader to have some idea about the customs it mentions. The author was also careful to avoid using the Name, often referring to things by another term (eg, Kingdom of Heaven rather than the Kingdom of God).
In order to emphasize that Jesus is the Messiah, Matthew puts the focus on elements that a Jewish audience would find important, such as Jesus’ heritage and the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. Now, I’m aware that Judaism rejects these claims for various reasons. For example, there are several cases where they believe that Jesus failed to fulfilled a specific prophecy, and sometimes there’s disagreement on whether or not a verse was even prophetic to begin with. I’m interested in that viewpoint, so I’ll be looking into these verses when I come across them.
There is something else worth noting about the way this Book discusses the Jewish people: prior to Christ’s crucifixion, the author always refers to them as Israelites. This is an honorific title, pointing to their status as God’s chosen people. However, after the crucifixion, they are only addressed as Jews; the honorific title is gone. I’ve seen it proposed that this change reflects a belief that they have lost their birthright due to their rejection of Jesus, but I think that’s reading a bit too much into things.
Moving on, the Book of Matthew is believed to have been written sometime between 80 and 90 AD -- some 50+ years after the events it describes. Part of the reasoning for this date is that Matthew borrowed from Mark, which itself was dated to around 70 AD. Matthew also reflects some societal changes that occurred after 80 AD, such as the separation of the early church from the synagogue.
Lastly, Matthew is the only one of the four Gospels to follow a very strict pattern. It contains both a prologue and epilogue, and five groups of narrative / discourse pairs. Each pair also ends with the same closing statement: “When Jesus had finished saying these things...”.
That said, it’s not clear if this structure was intended to mimic the Pentateuch, provide a plan for weekly study, or just make the work easier to understand. According to Papias of Hierapolis, the Apostle Matthew wanted to put his writings into an easily understandable order while Mark just wanted to be accurate, so the latter is most likely the correct answer.
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About the Author of Matthew
When you are reading Scripture, it’s important to understand that each manuscript was written for a specific audience by a specific person. Among other things, this helps us understand what’s being discussed or even why it needed to be discussed at all.
To begin this study of the Gospel of Matthew, let’s first look at the author of this Book. Tradition has held that Matthew the Apostle, also known as Levi, wrote the Book that bears his name. There are several reasons for this, the most prominent of them being that Papias of Hierapolis, an early church father who was alive when this Gospel was made, had written about Matthew creating his book with the assistance of Mark.
We can also tell a number of things about an author by how they write and what details they give special attention in their works. Matthew is the only one of the four Gospels that puts an emphasis on money and currency, often using more precise and detailed terms than the others. It also humanizes the Apostle Matthew more than the others; for example, he is referred to as “a man” rather than as “a tax collector”.
But, an analysis of the text is also what sheds doubt over Matthew’s authorship. Whomever wrote it was extremely familiar with the Scriptures and religious discussions of the time. Tax collectors, by virtue of their closer relationship to the Roman state, were alienated from the Jewish religious community and would have neither the skill with writing nor the understanding of the Jewish religion required to author this Gospel.
There is also another issue: Matthew was an eyewitness to the events that unfolded during Jesus Christ’s ministry, but John Mark was not. Yet, the Gospel According to Matthew borrows a significant amount of material from Mark’s work. While the idea of them working together from a now lost document isn’t out of the question, the differences between Matthew and Mark don’t appear to be corrections made by an eyewitness. Instead, it seems like Mark occasionally misunderstood the Jewish point of view and Matthew corrected these details like a proofreader.
Finally, there is a point to be made about the attributions themselves. Many older works were traditionally cited using the author’s name and then the name of the text. This would be like saying Tolkien: The Hobbit . None of the Gospels are referenced like this, instead being stated as the Gospel according to Somebody. This separates the text from the author, as if it was a second-hand account.
Additionally, while most older texts name their author in their opening paragraphs (we’ll see examples of this in several of the Epistles), none of the Gospels credit their authors.
Ultimately, we can all agree that the author of the Gospel According to Matthew was a Jewish man who was very familiar with the religious climate of his time. Whether this man was actually Matthew, as Tradition states, or some anonymous person is up for you to decide.
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How to grow in three steps
1. Acknowledge that you don’t know everything.
Even humanity’s greatest minds knew there that there were things they didn’t understand and that there was a real possibility that they could be wrong. If you reject the idea that you could be wrong, you also close off any chance of learning anything new.
2. Be willing to search out answers to your questions
Similarly, if you know your knowledge of a topic is incomplete and you want to change that, then you must be willing to ask questions and look for answers. To do otherwise is to say “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
On a side note, you have the right to ask questions. That’s how we learn. If there are questions you’re not allowed to ask, then something is very wrong. This is also a warning sign that you may be involved with a cult, as they heavily restrict what information their members are allowed to share.
3. Be willing to accept the answers you find
The biggest downside to asking questions is that the answers might not be what we want to hear. We don’t want to be told we’re wrong about something, or that something we enjoy is bad for us, but the truth is impartial. It doesn’t matter what we feel; the truth will always win out, and we must be ready to accept that.
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