MATTHEW and LUKE (bookin’ through the bible 6)
Gospels of Matthew and Luke
An amazed witness to the birth of Mithras
You are a scribbler living somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean—maybe Antioch, maybe Alexandria—a devoted follower of a scattered and struggling Jewish sect that worships Yeshua, a rabbi who died in Jerusalem fifty years earlier. Your language is Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the known world in the last quarter of the first century.
Your parents raised you on tales of Yeshua, as they themselves had been raised on them. Dozens of accounts of the life of the rabbi had been written down by others, including a book of the sayings of Yeshua, a.k.a. Jesus.
One in particular has caught the popular attention. It would eventually be known as the Gospel of Mark, though it was no more the work of John Mark than your soon-to-be-contribution was the work of the apostle Matthew. That’s right: you’re about to write a gospel.
“Mark’s” story lacked a certain something. A beginning, for example, and an end. Also missing were the details of the teachings of Jesus that had come down to you through oral tradition. You decide to write your own version using a popular technique of the time, the merging of elements from many traditions into a single new narrative. “Mark” will do fine for a framework, so you start out with your 517 favorite verses from Mark and call it a day. Your Gospel is half done.
Eager to bring the message of Jesus to life, you draw on four other sources: the aforementioned book of sayings, which would later be called the “Q” source; the prophecies of the old Law (OT); the stories you heard at your mother’s knee; and the hands-down coolest religious superhero yet conceived: the Persian god Mithras. Or perhaps more to the point, oral tradition had already merged these threads. Your gospel will simply record the story of Jesus as it emerged from three generations of oral improvement.
Mithraism was already 1500 years old by the time of Christ, but recently it had begun spreading like wildfire into the Roman Empire. And the Mithraic narrative should, to put it mildly, ring a bell for modern readers.
Born on December 25th, son of the sky god, his birth witnessed only by shepherds, Mithras was called the Way, the Truth, the Word, the Light, the Son of God, and the Good Shepherd. His followers celebrated his birth each year with hymns and the giving of gifts, as well as a sacrament involving bread and water. At the end of his life, goes the story, Mithras was laid in a tomb of rock for three days, after which he rose from the dead and appeared before his twelve disciples before ascending into the sky to join his father.
Luke, which many scholars consider the likely work of a woman, would shortly follow.
I’ve always had a love of compelling mythology, so Matthew and Luke have always appealed to me. When I heard many years later that nearly all of the details of Jesus’ birth narrative were borrowed from the Mithraic religion of Persia, it only enhanced my affection for these gospels.
Like most of my generation, my first direct contact with the Gospels was through Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas:
Luke 2:8-11 is pure loveliness, especially in the KJV. I have to shake myself out of the fog of familiarity to really hear it, to imagine myself as an ancient shepherd standing in country-darkness, then being enveloped in heavenly light. Just like Bellerophon riding Pegasus to the gates of Olympus or Brunnhilde plunging through the world-fire to return the Rhinegold to the riverbed, this is a mythic scene I saw vividly in my mind’s eye as a child.
If you know the history of the Jews during the time the gospels were written, the elation at the idea of an arriving Deliverer becomes all the more believable. Messiah refers to a political savior, not a spiritual one. The destruction of the Jewish nation and the dispersal of its people was nearly complete. Jerusalem was in ruins. The final rebellion (bar Kohkba, 132 CE) was just around the corner. Three years after that, the Romans would obliterate the last remnant of Jewish nationhood. It would take over 1800 years and another Jewish Holocaust before such a thing would rise again.
I can easily see what the Messiah concept would have meant to Jews at the time, and how the alleged arrival of a savior could have spawned a new religion.
Matthew also gives the best view of the actual teachings of Jesus. Many seem obvious and commonplace now, but at the time the suggestion in the Beatitudes that wealth and power were illusory and that the poor and meek might inherit the earth and God’s grace represented an absolutely radical inversion of the social system. It’s nothing less than revolutionary proto-Marxism, and I’m behind it 94 percent of the way.
Once I began to see the harm done by biblical literalism and the powerlessness of liberal religion to address that harm, the synoptic gospels also came to my aid in combating literalism. I pointed out Mark 7:9-10 last time, in which Jesus admonishes the Pharisees for ignoring the Old Testament requirement to kill disobedient children. In Matthew and Luke, we hear an even more precise endorsement of the continuing relevance of every last bit of the Mosaic Law (Old Testament):
Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished. (Mt 5:17-18)
But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tittle of the law to fall. (Luke 16:17)
This should be the end of the argument that the Old Testament was bad but was intended to be superseded by the New. Jesus begs to differ. So they both rise or fall together.
There is so much more to say, from petty geographic and historical errors (Luke 2 has the reigns of Quirinius in Syria and Herod in Judea overlapping at the birth of Jesus, though Quirinius didn’t begin his rule in Syria until ten years after Herod’s death) to the newly created resurrection narrative. But again, I run long, so I’ll close with three thoughts.
1. The Gnostic Compass
One of the greatest questions in gospel scholarship is why these four won the lottery. Among the gospels that fell off the table were several childhood gospels (Jesus turns his playmates into goats and is scolded for it) and the riveting Gnostic gospels, in which Jesus
was a new god trying to free the world from the domination of the old god Yahweh, who was in reality only a sub-creator called the Demiurge, the architect of the flawed material world, a world of illusion and death. Jesus did not really get crucified; he sent a double to take his place and transcended the physical world. (Callahan, Secret Origins of the Bible, 363)
2. The Blood Curse
In the synoptic gospels are the powerful seeds of 2000 years of anti-Semitism. To ensure the survival of their struggling sect, the gospel writers were keen to avoid antagonizing Rome. Hence Pilate’s washed hands and other extravagant attempts to lay the Christ-killing squarely at the foot of the Jews. Clearest of all is Matthew 27:24-26, the so-called Blood Curse:
So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”
The last clause would merely rank among the least probable and most ridiculously Pythonesque pieces of crowd dialogue in the Bible if not for the tragedy and hatred it has wrought through the centuries since it was written.
3. “[do not devote yourselves] to myths and endless genealogies…” (1 Timothy 1:4)
The last is something that has fascinated me for several reasons, but I bring it up here as the single most useful example of biblical errancy in the whole damn book: the conflicting genealogies of Matthew 1:1 and Luke 3:23.
It was very important for the fulfillment of prophecy that the eventual Messiah be descended from the House of David, so both Matthew and Luke provide long genealogies to establish Jesus’ lineage. Several things immediately strike even a casual reader:
-
(1) that aside from David and Joseph, they share nothing in common—not even Joseph’s father;
(2) that Luke records 42 generations from David to Joseph, while Matthew records 26; and
(3) that Joseph’s genealogy is irrelevant anyway, since he was not related to Jesus.
Many gymnastics have been tried to resolve the genealogies, including the suggestion that one is actually Mary’s lineage. This explanation works only if “Mary” is a six-letter word starting with J.
Such inconsistencies are not a problem for those who’ve grasped the folkloric nature of the bible, of course — but the majority of Americans are still literalists, as the following postscript makes clear.
Postscript
It’s not hard to see why the message of the gospel (literally “Good News”) resonates with humanity. The Jews of the 1st century turned their own dream of rescue from political oppression into a claim that death itself, the greatest oppressor of all, had been conquered. No wonder literal belief persists.
George Barna recently completed one of his periodic polls regarding literal belief. As I noted in a comment on the Gospel of Mark post last week, The Barna Group is the one evangelical source I trust. Barna’s stated goal is to tell the church what it needs to hear, not just what it wants to hear. He uses scientific and transparent methodology to keep his finger on the pulse of American Christianity.
The Barna researchers asked a sample of 1005 adults whether they considered six key bible stories to be literally true or to be narratives that were not factually accurate but were designed to teach principles. Three of the six were in Matthew and Luke.
75 percent of respondents said that they believe Jesus Christ was literally born to a virgin.
69 percent embraced the story of Jesus turning water into wine as literally true.
68 percent view the story of the loaves and fishes as factually accurate.
____________________________
RECOMMENDED READING
Barnstone, Willis. The Other Bible. Includes ancient scriptures that did not make it into the canonical bible, including fascinating alternative gospels, even alternative creation stories.
Helms, Randel McCraw. Who Wrote the Gospels?
Callahan, Tim. Secret Origins of the Bible. Ridiculous name, terrific book. Details parallels of biblical stories and elements in earlier religious traditions.
[forward to the GOSPEL of JOHN]
____________________________
NEXT WEEK: The Gospel of John