Wednesday Night Bible Study: Matthew 4-5.5
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Whoops, meant to post this yesterday, but got carried away reading my old journal instead. So Bible study tonight instead, and on Wednesdays from here on out!
ETA: I wrote this while on some cold medicine. I just went back through and edited it a bit, because, wow, it definitely sounds like I was on cold medicine when I wrote it (I even wrote “here” instead of “hear”, and I hardly ever do that without catching it before I publish, or at least within 5 minutes). With some lingering effects, this may be a post that has more entertainment value when it comes to my current mental state than any intellectual value. My apologies! Hopefully, I’ll get better soon and back to normal writing, whatever that means!
Edited Again: For a more intellectual take on this passage, check out Ian’s comment. Well done!
Last week, I discussed Matthew 1-3, so on to chapters 4-6 this week. Note: this is Bible study is a bit irreverent, so my apologies to my Christian readers. Probably the value in it for you will be to see how the Bible looks to people on the outside (though as I’ve studied it as a Christian before, it is a bit skewed. I am not a first time reader.)
I love the Bricktestament, don't you?
Matthew 4: The Temptation of Jesus
I LOVE the opening lines, full of wisdom and truth. I have to admit, some things in the Bible are very true and this is one of them. It says: “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.” (Mathew 4:1-2).
No, really? Hungry after 40 days? Amazing how the Bible seems to know what would happen to humans if they didn’t eat for forty days. Maybe there is some truth in this Bible thing after all.
I gotta say. The Holy Spirit wants Jesus to be tempted so he takes him to the desert? Really? The red light district is apparently for sissies; no indeed, Jesus might actually want to eat! I wonder how come nobody has gotten from this passage that it is a sin to eat, since that is how the devil tempted him? I say, after 40 days wandering in the desert, you’re probably going to see anything out there. How does that lend to your credibility? He saw God and Satan when he was out in the desert and hadn’t eaten anything for 40 days. Yeah. Me, too, and I’m an atheist!
Blah, blah, blah, so Satan gets Jesus to try to eat something, which is pretty bad. Reminds me of a song by the W’s called, The Devil is Bad. (You should really watch that video. It explains all about the devil, going so far as to use such high tech props as felt storyboards. They also sing the story I’m telling you and explain how to make the devil go away. Much more amusing!)
So when that doesn’t work and Jesus decides anorexia is the best way to worship God, Satan takes Jesus to Jerusalem (which I got from the footnotes. For some reason, they couldn’t just say “Jerusalem”, they had to say “holy city” and refer back to Nehemiah.) He basically tells Jesus to jump off a cliff. Well, really the highest point on the temple. I don’t how tall that is, but a cliff would have been much more cliche. At least the devil knew that much. When that doesn’t work, Satan takes him to a mountain (how many days does it take an emaciated Jesus to go from the desert to the temple to climbing a very tall mountain?). I think he could have saved a trip and just taken Jesus to the top of the mountain to begin with, telling him to fling himself down and THEN telling him he would give Jesus everything if he would just worship him.
At this point, I fail to see how this is tempting for Jesus. Maybe at this point Jesus doesn’t know he’s the Son of God? Because if he does, then how does Satan think that is tempting at ALL, if Jesus knew he was getting the whole damn universe in a few years? At this point, methinks he must think he is mortal. But then, what do you do about the story in some other book about how Jesus wandered away and talked about doing his father’s business? Something doesn’t add up here. I would love to hear some theories!
So Jesus finally gets pissed, tells Satan to shove it, and angels come and attend to him. He goes to Capernaum, apparently to fulfill another prophecy taken out of context. At least, in the English version, it talks about it in present tense, not future tense. “The people have seen” not “will see.” Any insights into the Greek (or Hebrew from back in the OT) on this one?
Jesus starts gathering disciples, starting with Simon called Peter (so why call him Simon to start with?) and Andrew, and they just drop their nets and follow. I think an interesting experiment in authority could be done with this.
He starts healing sick people, then (Chapter 5) preaches about the beatitudes, which is a long list of pretty sounding things that will happen to good people. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy, etc, etc. Also where you get some of the crazies talking about how everyone persecutes them. See, in this passage you WANT to be persecuted, because all kinds of good things will happen to you. Real persecution and martyrdom has happened and does happen, but lying about your kid getting suspended over a religious drawing doesn’t count.
So since we’re so hung up on persecution, it seems people forget about the whole salt and light of the world. “In the same way let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your father in heaven.” Are you listening, fundies who are too busy butting into other people’s lives to remember what you came to the party for?
Then Jesus says some really confusing stuff about fulfilling the law, not abolishing it. I never really understood it, despite having a few people explain it to me. This is the passage that means the Old Testament isn’t irrelevant, because Jesus came to fulfill the law. Fulfill the law? What does that mean? How does one fulfill the law? Oh, well, he says:
“Until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven . . .for I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Uh-oh. Well, that’s a far cry from calling the Pharisees a “brood of vipers” for following the law later on! This is bad news for Christians who ignore parts of the law, like not wearing a head covering. Or eating beef with cheese. Did you know God doesn’t love you as much because you ate that McDonald’s cheeseburger when you were 12? Everyone is pretty much screwed. Pharisees eat kosher. Christians do not. (And I hate to tell you, the passage you usually use that negates a kosher diet has nothing to do with food and everything to do with whether or not Jews and Gentiles can be friends!)
Anyways, that’s only through half of chapter 5, but we’ll pick back up with murder next week and see how far we get in under 1500 words.
Thoughts, comments, suggestions, answers to the questions I posted, respectful debate, all welcome!
Tags: Beatitudes, Bible, Bible study, fulfill the law, Matthew, secular Bible study, The Devil is Bad, The W's
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December 17th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Eating beef? Did you mean pork?
December 17th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
haha, nice catch. I meant a cheeseburger, since it combines the dairy and beef, but wow. Note to self: no more writing or posting while taking cold meds!
December 17th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I think you would have a made a great comedian. You have a gift!
December 17th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
The fishermen abandoning their nets raises an interesting question.
You may remember the Heaven’s Gate group and their extra corporeal journey tot he mother ship? When that happened I remembered them from something else.
In the late 1970’s I was stationed in Germany, and Applewhyte and his group made a short ‘target return” on the national scene, I don’t remember what. But anyway, there was a brief mention of him and his group in the Stars & Stripes newspaper, which must have meant that news was pretty slow.
But one of the officers saw it, too, and said, “Oh…THAT guy…” and had a somewhat odd look on his face.
He said that he’d been in college when Applewhyte and his bunch showed up, and he went to a meeting that this guy had to explain his group and recruit.
He said that after about the second sentence it was all he could do to laugh out loud. At the end of the talk he had heard what he knew to be the most absurd, bizzare bullshit he’d heard in his life, and that the guy needed an acquaintance with Mister Lithium, maybe.
But he had to literally force himself to leave the hall because every fiber of his being wanted to with this group. Even though he knew intellectually that it did for imbecility what the Sears Tower did for steel and concrete, he wanted to be part of it. He said it took him almost two weeks to shake that off.
Wonder what it was? It was real, though.
December 17th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
I like how the scorpion is almost as big as Jesus. It’s the Jesus scorpion!
**At this point, I fail to see how this is tempting for Jesus. Maybe at this point Jesus doesn’t know he’s the Son of God? Because if he does, then how does Satan think that is tempting at ALL, if Jesus knew he was getting the whole damn universe in a few years?**
Can Jesus even want to sin in the first place? Because I thought God couldn’t even want to sin, and so if Jesus is God, how could he want to sin? Not only that, but what kind of temptation is this? If someone tries to tempt me with overcooked green beans, they are using something to entice me, yes. But nothing in me wants to eat those green beans, and so I’m not tempted. If someone tempts me with a chocolate bar, then there will be something in me that wants to eat the chocolate bare, and so I am tempted. Is it the former or the latter?
December 17th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Frankly, I’d never noticed what big a joke the gospels were. I’m feeling particularly stupid for having never noticed that the devil supposedly took a starving Jesus from the temple all the way to the top of the mountain. What a bunch of B.S. huh?
Thank you for the great post!
December 17th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Sarge- I’ve studied psych of religion and charisma a bit. It’s really fascinating how people get sucked into these kinds of things. I don’t know enough about this aspect of it to comment much, but I bet it’s something you could ask a psychologist who would know more about it than my measly undergrad degree does.
OneSmallStep: And the random duck! I love the totally random duck!
I’ve kind of wondered the same things. And how eating rocks was somehow the best temptation Satan could come up with to tempt God.
Lorena, I never noticed it, either. I never noticed most of what I’ve written in my Bible posts. I didn’t mean for either of them to be mocking or humorous in any way, but that’s just what comes out. I don’t have to even investigate online sources or commentaries to see the glaring holes in the stories. That is something that has surprised me. I vaguely remember asking someone at some point why it was such a big deal to eat or turn stones into bread, and I got some kind of wishy washy answer about using the power of God for selfish purposes. It’s really interesting what a new perspective does, isn’t it?
December 17th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
And I just reread the post again, and found a bunch more errors. My goodness, I had no idea I was that bad. I am fixing the spelling errors, changing the “hamburger” to “cheeseburger,” and deleting an incomplete sentence (and I have no idea what I was thinking or else I would just complete it). Just so you know if some things look different! My apologies for this craaaazy post!
December 18th, 2009 at 1:27 am
I’ve re-read posts from years ago and found the most embarrassing mistakes, like “hunted” for “haunted.”
Chappie is got to be the only nearly perfect writer I’ve seen around. I am so happy to have my ESL excuse to fall back on, but I still feel shame.
December 18th, 2009 at 1:37 am
Normally, I am a grammar nazi, but for the last 24 hours, I have made the worst mistakes. Hopefully, it was a 24 hour curse that is gone now. Praise FSM.
And if you have an ESL excuse, well, pshh. You should never feel shame. In case you haven’t noticed, MANY native speakers can’t spell worth anything. I would have never guessed English wasn’t your first language from your writing.
December 18th, 2009 at 6:53 am
Lorena Says…”I’m feeling particularly stupid for having never noticed that the devil supposedly took a starving Jesus from the temple all the way to the top of the mountain. What a bunch of B.S. huh?”
Oh Lorena havent you heard faith can move mountains
December 18th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Remember that Jesus’ fate was death. He was going to die on the cross to provide salvation for those who would accept it. Satan didn’t want this to happen, so basically his temptation was, “Don’t go through what will be the most cruel and painful death ever for a bunch of ungrateful *censored*s. Instead, take over this planet. It is my kingdom and I will give it to you if you just bow down.”
If Jesus had done that, pain and suffering would be perpetual into forever (or as long as the human race existed). But Jesus knew his death would accomplish one great thing: the permanent removal of pain and suffering.
As a father, my desire is for my children to live happily in peace. If you were a parent, you’d feel the same way. So, given the option to live and forever watch your children suffer in misery (Satan’s plan) or die and give them eternal life of peace in paradise (God’s plan), Jesus chose the latter. And thank God for that.
December 18th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Very interesting insights, Sonsou. Thanks for sharing them! That makes more sense. Though I still don’t understand why the whole bread thing.
December 19th, 2009 at 8:53 am
40 days didn’t necessarily mean 40 days. It was a common way to express “a long time.” Fasting didn’t necessarily mean to go without any food at all. Fasting is abstaining. A common fast is to abstain from meat, dairy and oil. So we don’t really know exactly how long the fast was or what Jesus ate or didn’t eat. Basically, Jesus withdrew from everyday life for a time of comtemplation and deprivation prior to beginning his ministry.
Christians believe that Jesus was both divine and human. The first tempation was to “cheat” and use divine powers to satisfy his human, physical needs.
The second tempation occurred at the Temple where there would be a lot of witnesses who then could testify to the event. It was a temptation to prove who Jesus really was, instead of living a life of poverty and humiliation.
The third temptation was as Sonsou describes. The temptation to have it all without the cost of the cross.
#1 – physical desire, lust
#2 – pride
#3 – power
So, in a nutshell, Jesus prevails over the temptations common to all.
December 19th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Just found your site, and two hours later and about a months worth of pathos later. Thanks for sharing your story. You are pretty incredible, boy-who-broke-your-heart notwithstanding!
Anyway, on Matthew 4, Dana and Sansou’s post-hoc rationalizations nicely take a culturally alien text and make it appear to be a rational text fitting an evangelical theology. Unfortunately it isn’t that simple.
Scholars (by which I mean the global community of biblical scholars, not theologians teaching at Baptist seminaries) look at the temptation story in Matt as part of Matthew’s overall story introducing Jesus. Matt is writing for Christian Jews scattered in the wake of the Roman assault on Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. These Christian Jews find themselves in scattered Jewish communities, which are gravitating towards town-synagogues (up to this point the synagogue is a ‘community hall’ not a sacred building). The Pharisees, a relatively powerless sect in Jesus’ time, are gaining political traction in these diaspora communities, because the previous ruling faction (Sadducees) had their power base tied to the temple. The Pharisees are all about recapturing a mythic prehistory of purity around the law of Moses. Clearly they don’t like this newfangled Jesus cult.
Matthew spends most of his gospel putting these highly anachronistic anti-Pharisee diatribes in Jesus’ mouth for that reason. But that’s another story.
So Matthew’s aim is to present Jesus as a thoroughly Jewish messiah to make him a legitimate heir to the religious loyalties of the Jewish nation. He ladens his prose with pretty poor quotations from the Hebrew scriptures (you point out tense problems, there are lots of these, he also quotes passages that are very different if you look them up and quotes some passages we have no clue where they came from). And he structures it in a very symbolic way.
He has the geneology, to show Jesus has the right ancestry. Then tells a birth narrative that puts Jesus in David’s city Bethlehem (again to fulfil a messianic expectation – even though everyone knew he was from Nazareth, as we see elsewhere). Then he starts with a whole series of Jesus=Moses stories. He has Jesus flee into Egypt, he has the murder of the first born children. He sends Jesus into the desert for 40 days and nights. And then he has him go up a mountain and teach the people with a new message from God (the sermon on the mount, upcoming in your series)!
Very few mainstream biblical scholars would argue that most of this has any historical basis, although it is thought that some of the details are likely to be authentic (e.g. some of the teachings are likely to be historic, Jesus’s baptism by John is largely uncontested).
The temptation narrative grows from a skeleton in Mark (the first gospel) into a highly sophisticated theological war of wits with satan in Matthew (who read Mark) and Luke (who read Mark and either read Matthew’s gospel or read some of Matthew’s source material).
But the story is clearly fantastical. The the style of the story, its origins in pre-gospel Jesus tradition, and its connections with other biblical literature are pretty fascinating, and there’s some really juicy unsolved problems in there too. But it gets pretty technical pretty quickly, unfortunately.
Sorry for the long post.
December 20th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Fascinating, Ian. I appreciate the insights. A long post is certainly fine when you convey so much useful information!
December 20th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Laura, have you ever read “Jesus, Interrupted” by Bart Ehrman? I think you would like it. It talks about all the contradictions in the New Testament, and in the doctrines of the early Church, and how the current biblical canon came to be called the “right” one.
December 20th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Yes, I have! I actually read it back in my Christian days. I remember I knew a good portion of the information that was in it from my religious classes at college (it’s amazing what ministers know but don’t preach about!), and I found fascinating what I didn’t know. By that time, I was a moderate/liberal Christian, though still stuck in conservative Baptist ministry. That phase of my life didn’t last long! I read it the summer before I separated from my ex husband. It was really interesting! I recommend it, too!
December 20th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Thankye
Bart Ehrman is a genius in my book. He’s done more for popular understanding of the bible in the last 10 years than everyone else in the previous 50, I think.
On your last point, Laura, I’ve enjoyed Luke’s review of “The Dishonest Church” over at Common Sense Atheism, don’t know if you’ve seen that. He seems to be talking about the same thing – that any seminary graduate knows a ton of stuff that they’d never in a million years share with their church. Its sad. Sad, sad.
December 20th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
It was a big issue in my circle of ministry major friends at school. The dilemma was tell the truth and get fired vs. just pretend the truth doesn’t exist and keep your job. I think anymore that many seminaries/colleges gloss over it, if they teach it at all. My school was not very popular in Baptist world just for teaching it. They were often criticized by the ABSC (Ark. Baptist State Convention) for being too liberal. But all they did was share the information. Somehow, the professors (and most students) managed to not believe it.
I’ll check out Common Sense Atheism. Haven’t seen that. Thanks for the tip!
December 20th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Part 1: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=4669
Part 2: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=4674
December 20th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
“The dilemma was tell the truth and get fired vs. just pretend the truth doesn’t exist and keep your job. ”
A good friend of mine is a pastor who has the same struggles. He doesn’t believe what his church requires him to preach.
Its in interesting that it was an active topic in your group of friends. Were they open about their doubts about orthodoxy? I kind of assumed that there’d be a pressure among students to pretend even to one another. Its some kind of weird good sign that there wasn’t mutual stigma associated with biblical criticism…. I think… But maybe you just had a bunch of heretical friends
December 21st, 2009 at 1:02 am
Yeah, pretty much. It was a big thing to debate this or that. Mostly, they seemed to like to debate Calvinism vs. Arminianism, but they did discuss anything and everything. It changed me from fundamentalist to conservative, then more moderate after about 3-4 years. Some of them, I am not really sure why they stuck with their conservative beliefs. I’d like to ask, but I didn’t really keep in touch. I didn’t have a TON of friends, but being married to a ministry student, I did get to hear about the debates that went on in class and out of class. My ex husband now claims to be a liberal Christian. I THINK his brother is going to seminary (he was planning on it at the time we were divorced), but has really turned to the Tony Campolo style of Christianity, which I don’t read much of in the atheist or even mainstream Christian blogosphere. Probably just not looking in the right places. I loved Campolo, btw, and was really happy with my Christianity when I read and listened to him a lot.
Steve, who was a ministry minor and took many of the same classes, is an atheist. I know of one who is kind of riding the fence, another who really wants to seek out the truth, but has couched his beliefs in enough academic jargon that it SOUNDS like they make sense even though they are just a fancified version of what you find anywhere else. I have hope for him! The rest, I guess they did the same as the latter guy and stopped looking for the truth, assuming they had it? I’m not sure since I was was every bit as convinced and conservative as they were. That’s my guess, though.
I did hear several discussions regarding how much to share with the congregation. All of them decided to keep their job, but maybe share a few “safe” things here and there.
December 21st, 2009 at 1:06 am
I guess to put it another way, it was okay to debate the orthodoxy amongst your friends. But to actually have doubts was another thing entirely. One guy questioned his faith after taking a philosophy class and I heard him ridiculed from the time I started as a freshman to the time I graduated. The interesting thing is he graduated my sophomore year. (I think. Maybe it was my junior.) So maybe the peer pressure kept them going in their conservativism. I know it made me feel embarrassed when I started having doubts and I didn’t feel like I could admit it to anyone.
December 21st, 2009 at 8:14 am
“One guy questioned his faith after taking a philosophy class and I heard him ridiculed from the time I started as a freshman to the time I graduated.”
That fits my stereotype more, but very interesting to hear your story and the subtle distinctions between okay and heresy.
My sense is that a lot of ministers abandon the Sunday-school notion of inerrancy of the bible pretty quickly in seminary. But they go into churches where that is an article of faith. So they do some mental gymnastics where they reinterpret ‘inerrant’ in some other way (e.g. the underlying message is inerrant, even if the text itself isn’t), so they can sign up. Then they play this game, knowing that when a congregant talks about the authority of the bible they mean one thing, and when they reply they mean another. Pretty quickly that duplicity becomes so internalized that neither party notices. But that’s just my sense.
Tony Campolo – a very interesting guy, yes. I (as an atheist) agree with a good chunk of what he says too. But your observation seems right to me: he’s not having a huge impact on the face of Christianity at the moment.
December 21st, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Yeah, I think they usually do the mental gymnastics before they get out of seminary/college, though. I think one on one, they may admit their struggles more openly, but the basic rule for group discussion, anyway, is: great to debate, but serious doubt will earn mockery. Actually, so would just about anything else. The upper level ministry class I took consisted of all ministry majors except myself, and it was the meanest class I ever saw above the high school level. Ever. Including the freshman/sophomore level classes I took at a state university.
December 21st, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Fascinating stuff, thanks. I’ve often wondered how these ‘unsafe’ topics work in a seminary context, all my work has been in secular schools.
The pettiness is interesting too. That’s often (like high-school) a really good sign that people are insecure or feel threatened. (In my ‘I-did-psych-101-and-now-I’m-a-psychotherapist’ opinion).
It was pretty common (and a bit of a sick joke) to see Christian undergraduates come in every year and half of them lose their faith in the first couple of semesters. I guess in a seminary the increase in behaviors leading to peer conformity is a guard against that.
Anyway, I’ve maybe turned comments for this thread into too much of a two-way convo…
You’re installed on my RSS now.
December 22nd, 2009 at 3:58 am
Yeah, probably, though I never went to seminary, just Baptist college.
I’m not too picky about comment threads. Conversation goes where it goes, and if anyone else wants to jump in, they’re more than welcome! I’d rather people feel free to say what they want in reply as long as it’s respectful. For future reference anyways.
Thanks for the add!
February 27th, 2010 at 11:08 pm
Laura Says: “Sarge- I’ve studied psych of religion and charisma a bit. It’s really fascinating how people get sucked into these kinds of things. I don’t know enough about this aspect of it to comment much, but I bet it’s something you could ask a psychologist who would know more about it than my measly undergrad degree does.”
The gospels are such turgid prose (to me at least) that I keep wondering if, when the gospels were read aloud in Greek, they acted like neuro linguistic programming. We may miss huge chunks of the effect of them when read in English and in our time and society. There’s got to be some reason why they are as they are.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Jeffries for more on NLP and Speed Seduction.
Of course there’s also the claim that they are liturgy and that they echo Jewish liturgy. I’m not convinced by that claim!