Hebraic-Roots of the New Testament as expressed in the Book of Matthew

 

The Gospel of Matthew (Mattityahu) was directed to the Pharisee readers who had extensive knowledge of the collective Jewish religious laws/teachings, customs and traditions at that time.  Having an understanding of the Jewish roots of this important Gospel is critical in appreciating what meaning it has for to us today.  Unfortunately, the richness of this Gospel is lost on most Christians readers due to their lack of knowledge of the Jewish roots of this book.  Matthew presents his account of Jesus’ life as a continuing story tied to various passages from the Tanak (Hebrew Bible made up of the Torah or Pentateuch, The Profits, and Kethubim or "Writings”).  Matthew presents Messiah (Anointed One) as the King Messiah, the Branch of David symbolized by the face of the lion in Ezekiel.  For instance, Matthew employs 128 quotes from the Tanak  into a narrative designed to establish that Jesus was the expected Messiah of Judaism. 

 

This study will be a chapter by chapter examination of the Book of Matthew as viewed from a Jewish-roots perspective.  Consequently, there will be many topics concerning the underlying roots such as anti-Semitism and its impact over the years, various original source manuscripts, original Jewish names used in the book, 613 Laws, various translations and their significance and Jewish traditions and customs at the time of the writing. 

 

Class participation will be encouraged.  Typically we get out what we put in.  Each class will end with a question to be addressed in the following session by the class members and discussion. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Four Gospels?  

 

In Hebrew, there are four levels of understanding (Pardes or PRDS):

 

Distinctive Message:

  1. Like all of the three synoptic Gospels (“seeing together”; commonality and differences of the first three books), one major theme is that of the “Kingdom Offer” (Mt. 11:11). 
  2. It is a midrash (Pardes) tieing about 128 Tanak quotes together into a narrative which is designed to establish that Yeshua was the expected Messiah of Judaism.  He also uses complex forms of Midrashic Exegesis and emphasizes Yeshua;s parables more than any other Gospel.
  3. Shows Messiah to be the Kingly Messiah and the righteous branch” raised onto King David (Jer. 23:5-6). 

 

 

Anti-Semitism

  1. F.F. Bruce “New Testament History”
  2. Before A.D  There are examples of Greek rulers desecrating the Temple banning Jewish religious practices, such as circumcision, Sabbath observance, study of Jewish religious books, etc. Examples may also be found in anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE. Philo of Alexandria an attack on Jews in Alexandria in 38 CE in which thousands of Jews died.  The Jewish diaspora on the Nile island Elephantine, which was founded by mercenaries, experienced the destruction of its temple in 410 BC.
  3. 70 to 120 AD:  It was not cool to be Jewish during this period.  The Jewish rebvolt and the last stand at Masada , the complete destruction of the Temple by the Romans, the scattering of the Christians/Nazarenes, death of the Jews and scattering of them. 
  4. Relationships between the Jewish people and the occupying Roman Empire were at first antagonistic and resulted in several rebellions. According to Suetonius, the emperor Tiberius expelled from Rome, Jews who had gone to live there.
  5. According to James Carroll, "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors such as pogroms and conversions had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million."
  6. Persecutions in the Middle Ages: From the 9th century CE, Christian and Jewish dhimmi were allowed to freely practice their religion in the medieval Islamic world to a greater extent than in medieval Christian Europe. Under Islamic rule, there was a Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain that lasted until at least the 11th century,[27] when several Muslim pogroms against Jews took place in the Iberian Peninsula; those that occurred in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066.[28][29][30] Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Jews were also forced to convert to Islam or face death in some parts of Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad at certain times.[31] The Almohads, who had taken control of the Almoravids' Maghribi and Andalusian territories by 1147,[32] far surpassed the Almoravides in fundamentalist outlook, and they treated the dhimmis harshly. Faced with the choice of either death or conversion, many Jews and Christians emigrated.[33][34][35] Some, such as the family of Maimonides, fled east to more tolerant Muslim lands,[33] while others went northward to settle in the growing Christian kingdoms.
  7. During the Middle Ages in Europe there was full-scale persecution against Jews in many places, with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. A main justification of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious. Jews were frequently massacred and exiled from various European countries. The persecution hit its first peak during the Crusades. In the First Crusade (1096) flourishing communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly destroyed; see German Crusade, 1096. In the Second Crusade (1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and 1320. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including in, 1290, the banishing of all English Jews; in 1396, 100,000 Jews were expelled from France; and, in 1421 thousands were expelled from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland.
  8. As the Black Death epidemics devastated Europe in the mid-14th century, annihilating more than half of the population, Jews were used as scapegoats. Rumors spread that they caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed by violence. Although Pope Clement VI tried to protect them by the July 6, 1348, papal bull and an additional bull in 1348, several months later, 900 Jews were burnt alive in Strasbourg, where the plague hadn't yet affected the city.
  9. Seventeenth century:  During the mid-to-late 17th century the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its population (over 3 million people)/, and Jewish losses were counted in hundreds of thousands. First, the Chmielnicki Uprising when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks massacred tens of thousands of Jews in the eastern and southern areas he controlled (today's Ukraine). The precise number of dead may never be known, but the decrease of the Jewish population during that period is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from diseases and jasyr (captivity in the Ottoman Empire). 

In 1744, Frederick II of Prussia limited the number of Jews allowed to live in Breslau to only ten so-called "protected" Jewish families and encouraged a similar practice in other Prussian cities. In 1750 he issued the Revidiertes General Privilegium und Reglement vor die Judenschaft: the "protected" Jews had an alternative to "either abstain from marriage or leave Berlin" (quoting Simon Dubnow). In the same year, Archduchess of Austria Maria Theresa ordered Jews out of Bohemia but soon reversed her position, on the condition that Jews pay for their readmission every ten years. This extortion was known as malke-geld (queen's money). In 1752 she introduced the law limiting each Jewish family to one son. In 1782, Joseph II abolished most of these persecution practices in his Toleranzpatent, on the condition that Yiddish and Hebrew were eliminated from public records and that judicial autonomy was annulled. Moses Mendelssohn wrote that "Such a tolerance... is even more dangerous play in tolerance than open persecution."

In 1772, the empress of Russia Catherine II forced the Jews of the Pale of Settlement to stay in their shtetls and forbade them from returning to the towns that they occupied before the partition of Poland.[42]

Nineteenth Century

Historian Martin Gilbert writes that it was in the 19th century that the position of Jews worsened in Muslim countries. Benny Morris writes that one symbol of Jewish degradation was the phenomenon of stone-throwing at Jews by Muslim children. Morris quotes a 19th century traveler: "I have seen a little fellow of six years old, with a troop of fat toddlers of only three and four, teaching [them] to throw stones at a Jew, and one little urchin would, with the greatest coolness, waddle up to the man and literally spit upon his Jewish gaberdine. To all this the Jew is obliged to submit; it would be more than his life was worth to offer to strike a Mahommedan."[43]

In 1850 the German composer Richard Wagner published Das Judenthum in der Musik ("Jewishness in Music") under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The essay began as an attack on Jewish composers, particularly Wagner's contemporaries (and rivals) Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, but expanded to accuse Jews of being a harmful and alien element in German culture.

Twentieth century

Two common Anti-semitic depictions of Jews during Nazi Germany: on the left is the Capitalist/Communist global parasite depiction; on the right is the Wandering Jew.

In the first half of the twentieth century, in the USA, Jews were discriminated against in employment, access to residential and resort areas, membership in clubs and organizations, and in tightened quotas on Jewish enrollment and teaching positions in colleges and universities. The Leo Frank lynching by a mob of prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia in 1915 turned the spotlight on antisemitism in the United States. The case was also used to build support for the renewal of the Ku Klux Klan which had been inactive since 1870.

Antisemitism in America reached its peak during the interwar period. The pioneer automobile manufacturer Henry Ford propagated antisemitic ideas in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent. The radio speeches of Father Coughlin in the late 1930s attacked Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the notion of a Jewish financial conspiracy. Such views were also shared by some prominent politicians; Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency, blamed Jews for president Roosevelt's decision to abandon the gold standard, and claimed that "in the United States today, the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money."[44]

In the 1940s the aviator Charles Lindbergh and many prominent Americans led The America First Committee in opposing any involvement in the war against Fascism. During his July 1936 visit he wrote letters saying that there was “more intelligent leadership in Germany than is generally recognized.”

The German American Bund held parades in New York City during the late 1930s where Nazi uniforms were worn and flags featuring swastikas were raised alongside American flags. The US House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was very active in denying the Bund's ability to operate. With the start of US involvement in World War II most of the Bund's members were placed in internment camps, and some were deported at the end of the war.

Sometimes, during race riots, as in Detroit in 1943, Jewish businesses were targeted for looting and burning.