The Origin of Satan (16 page)

Palestine, perhaps in Antioch, the capital of Syria; he wrote as if

he had been part of that thriving Jewish community, which, like

all Jewish communities, had experienced intense upheaval

following the war.16

In Jerusalem the Temple lay in ruins, and Vespasian had

stationed a permanent Roman garrison there. Roman troops and

civilians had built a settlement that included pagan shrines along

with Roman baths, shops, and other amenities of Roman life.

Vespasian also penalized Jews throughout the empire for the war

by appropriating for the Roman treasury the tax that Jews had

previously paid to support their own Temple. With the Temple's

destruction the high priest, formerly the chief spokesman for the

Jewish people, lost his position, along with all his priesdy allies.

The Sanhedrin, formerly the supreme Jewish council, also lost

its power.

The war permanently changed the nature of Jewish leadership

in Jerusalem and in Jewish communities everywhere. Yet even

during the war, some Jews and Romans had already begun

preparing alternative leadership to replace the priests and the

Sanhedrin after the war. When the Romans besieged the Temple

in March, 68 C.E., the Jewish teacher Johanan ben Zakkai fled

Jerusalem and took refuge in a Roman camp. There, anticipating

the Roman victory, he asked Vespasian for permission to found

an academy for Jewish teachers in Jamnia, a town the Romans

had already recovered. Vespasian and his advisers, apparendy

expecting that Jews would resume internal self-government

after the war, granted permission to Johanan to establish this

school as a legitimate Jewish authority. According to the

historian Mary Smallwood,

Rabbi Johanan’s escape, technically an act of treachery, was the

Jews’ spiritual salvation when the rabbinic school which he

founded took the place of the Sanhedrin . . . and its president,

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the Nasi, or patriarch, replaced the high priest as the Jews’

leader and spokesman, both religious and political.17

The high-priestly dynasty and its aristocratic allies in the San-

hedrin, along with the Sadducean scribes associated with the

former Temple, were now swept aside. A growing group of

teachers, mostly Pharisees, many of them self-supporting

tradesmen (like Paul, a tentmaker, who had been a Pharisee),

now took over leadership roles, expanding their authority

throughout Judea, and eventually in Jewish communities

throughout the world. Thus began the rabbinic movement,

which would become increasingly dominant in Jewish

community life.18

Matthew, proclaiming the message of Jesus the Messiah c. 80

C.E., found himself in competition primarily with these Pharisaic

teachers and rabbis, who were successfully establishing

themselves throughout the Jewish world as authoritative

interpreters of the Torah. The Pharisees wanted to place the

Torah at the center of Jewish life as a replacement for the ruined

Temple. Their aim was to teach a practical interpretation of

Jewish law that would preserve Jewish groups throughout the

world as a separate and holy people. Matthew saw the Pharisees

as the chief rivals to his own teachings about Jesus19 and decided

to present Jesus and his message in terms comprehensible to the

Pharisees and their large following—not only as God’s Messiah,

but also as the one whose teaching embodies and fulfills the true

righteousness previously taught in “the law and the prophets.”

As we shall see, Matthew insists that Jesus offers a

universalizing interpretation of Torah (“Love God and your

neighbor”; “Do unto others what you would have them do unto

you”) without giving up “a jot or a tittle” of divine law. But

because Matthew’s Jesus interprets the Torah so that Gentiles

can fulfill it as well as Jews, Matthew in effect encourages people

to abandon traditional ethnic identification with Israel. This was

a radical position that most Jews found—and declared—

anathema. In Matthew, Jesus repeatedly attacks the Pharisees as

“hypocrites” obsessed with petty regulations while ignoring

“justice and

MATTHEW’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE PHARISEES / 77

mercy and faith”—attacks that caricature the rabbis’ concern to

preserve Israel’s integrity through observant behavior. Thus

Matthew takes part in a bitter controversy central to Jewish—

and what will become Christian—identity.20

In writing his gospel, Matthew was concerned to refute

damaging rumors about Jesus—for example, that his birth was

illegitimate, which would disgrace and disqualify him as a

suitable candidate for Israel’s Messiah. Furthermore, Jesus was

known to have come from Nazareth in Galilee, and from a

common family—not from the royal, Davidic dynasty

established in Bethlehem, as would befit a king of Israel. Even

more serious, perhaps, was the charge that Jesus, according to

Mark, neglected or even violated observance of Sabbath and

kosher laws.

Matthew, like his predecessors in the Christian movement,

was troubled by such criticisms. But as he searched through the

Scriptures, he was repeatedly struck by biblical passages,

especially among the prophets’ writings and among the psalms,

that he believed illuminated the events surrounding Jesus’ life.

For example, in opposition to the rumor that Jesus was born

illegitimate, Matthew and his predecessors found vindication for

their faith in Jesus in Isaiah 7:14. There the Lord promises to

give Israel a “sign” of the coming of God's salvation. Apparently

Matthew knew the Hebrew Bible in its Greek translation, where

he would have read the following:

“The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall

conceive and bear a son; and shall call his name Immanuel—

God with us” (Isaiah 7:14).

In the original Hebrew, the passage had read “young woman”

(
almah
), apparendy describing an ordinary birth. But the

translation of
almah
into the Greek
parthenos
(“virgin”), as many

of Jesus’ followers read the passage, confirmed their conviction

that Jesus’ birth, which unbelievers derided as sordid, actually

was a miraculous “sign.”21 Thus Matthew revises Mark’s story by

saying that the spirit descended upon Jesus not at his baptism

but at the moment of his conception. So, Matthew says, Jesus’

mother

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“was discovered to have a child in her womb through the holy

spirit” (1:18); and God's angel explains to Joseph that the child

“was conceived through the holy spirit.” Jesus’ birth was no

scandal, Matthew says, but a miracle—one that precisely fulfills

Isaiah’s ancient prophecy.

To prove that Jesus, despite his humble birth, possessed

messianic credentials, Matthew works out a royal genealogy for

Jesus, tracing his ancestry back to Abraham by way of King

David (Luke does the same, apparently working independendy,

since Luke’s genealogy differs from Matthew’s; compare

Matthew 1:1-17 with Luke 3:23-38).

Matthew tells an elaborate story to explain why Jesus, the

descendant of kings, was thought to belong to an obscure family

in the town of Nazareth in Galilee, and not to a royal dynasty

based in Bethlehem. Matthew insists that Jesus’ miraculous

birth shook Jerusalem's ruling powers, both secular and

religious. When King Herod, whom the Romans supported as a

client king of the Jews, heard that a new star had appeared,

which portends a royal birth, Matthew says, “he was troubled,

and all Jerusalem with him” (2:3). Frustrated in his first attempt

to find and destroy Jesus, Herod “was in a furious rage, and he

sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem, and in all that

region who were two years old and under” (2:16). Jesus’ father,

warned by an angel, took the child and his mother and fled into

Egypt. After Herod’s death they returned, Matthew says, but

Jesus’ father, knowing that Herod’s son still ruled Judea, chose to

protect Jesus by taking his family to live incognito in the village

of Nazareth. Thus Matthew explains how Jesus came to be

associated with this obscure Galilean town, instead of with

Bethlehem, which was his actual birthplace, according to

Matthew.

Since no historical record mentions a mass slaughter of infants

among Herod’s crimes, many New Testament scholars regard the

story of the “slaughter of the innocents,” like the “flight into

Egypt,” as reflecting Matthew’s programmatic conviction that

Jesus’ life must recapitulate the whole history of Israel.

According to these scholars, Matthew is less concerned to give

biographical information than to show a connection between

Jesus,

MATTHEW’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE PHARISEES / 79

Moses, and Israel’s exodus from Egypt. Like Moses, who, as a

newborn, escaped the furious wrath of the Egyptian Pharaoh,

who had ordered a mass slaughter of Hebrew male infants, so

Jesus, Matthew says, escaped the wrath of King Herod. And as

God once delivered Israel from Egypt, so now, Matthew claims,

he has delivered Jesus. Matthew does here what he does

throughout his gospel; he takes words from the prophetic

writings (here words from the prophet Hosea), generally

understood to apply to the nation of Israel (“Out of Egypt I have

called my son”), and applies them to Jesus of Nazareth, whom he

sees as the culmination of Israel’s history.22

Many scholars have noted these parallels between Jesus,

Moses, and Israel. But no one, so far as I know, has observed that

Matthew
reverses
the traditional roles, casting the Jewish king,

Herod, in the villain’s role traditionally reserved for Pharaoh.

Through this device he turns the alien enemies of Israel’s

antiquity into the intimate enemies, as Matthew perceives them.

Matthew includes among Jesus’ enemies the chief priests and

scribes as well as all the other inhabitants of Jerusalem, for

Matthew says that not only was Herod “troubled” to hear of

Jesus’ birth, but so was “all Jerusalem with him” (2:3). Matthew

intends, no doubt, to contrast Herod, Idumean by background,

and so from a suspect dynasty, with Jesus, whose legitimately

Davidic (and so royal) lineage Matthew proclaims. Now it is

Herod, not Pharaoh, who ruthlessly orders the mass slaughter of

Jewish male infants. According to Matthew, no sooner was Jesus

born than the “chief priests and the scribes of the people”

assembled, apparently united behind Herod’s attempt to “search

for the child and kill him” (2:13). Matthew’s account of Jesus’

birth is no Christmas-card idyll, but foreshadows the terrible

events of the crucifixion.

While assigning to Herod Pharaoh’s traditional role, Matthew

simultaneously reverses Israel’s symbolic geography. Egypt,

traditionally the land of slavery, now becomes a sanctuary for

Jesus and his family—a place of refuge and deliverance from the

slaughter ordered by the
Jewish
king. This reversal of imagery is

nearly as shocking as that in the book of Revelation, which refers

80 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

to Jerusalem as the place “allegorically called Sodom and Egypt,

where our Lord was crucified” (11:8). Later Matthew will have

Jesus favorably compare Tyre and Sidon, and even Sodom, with

the local towns of Bethsaida, Chorazin, and Capernaum (11:20-

24).

Throughout his gospel, Matthew sustains this reversal of alien

and intimate enemies. Directly following his Sermon on the

Mount, Jesus heals a leper outcast from Israel, and then performs

a healing for a Roman centurion who recognizes Jesus’ divine

power and appeals to him to use it on his behalf. Astonished to

hear a Roman officer express faith “greater than any” he has

found in Israel, Jesus immediately declares, “I tell you, many-

shall come from east and west and sit down with Abraham and

Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of God, while the sons of the

kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness; there people will

weep and gnash their teeth” (8:11-12).

From the beginning of his gospel to its end, Matthew indicts

Israel’s present leaders while he campaigns in favor of Jesus—

Israel’s Messiah—and those the new King himself appoints. Not

only was Herod an Idumean, his family lived in a notoriously

Gentile way, despite their religious professions. John the Baptist

had been beheaded for proclaiming openly that Herod had

married his former sister-in-law and so lived in open violation of

Jewish law. Matthew wants to show not only that Jesus was

Israel’s legitimate king, rather than such unworthy usurpers as

Herod, but also that he was God’s designated teacher of

righteousness, destined, so Matthew claims, to replace the

Pharisees, who held that role in the eyes of many of his

contemporaries. Matthew, who, along with his fellow

Christians, opposes the rival party of Pharisees, casts his gospel