Was (the author of ) Matthew Really a Jew?

[00:00:00] Was the Author of Matthew Really a Jew? By Bart D. Ehrman read by John Paul Middlesworth. [00:00:08] My previous posts were dealing with the themes and historical context of the Gospel of Matthew along with a list of suggested readings for those who want to go deeper. I would like to go deeper myself by returning at greater length to one of the most puzzling features of Matthew its relationship to Judaism. [00:00:26] To begin with, I suggested in my post who, when and why that the author himself was Jewish. I want to explore that at some greater depth here. [00:00:35] The first thing to say is that not all New Testament scholars have thought so. Au contraire. [00:00:41] One of the premier scholars of the NT and the historical Jesus is John Meyer. Before he began his massive multi volume study of the historical Jesus, called a marginal Jew, he was principally known as an expert on the Gospel of Matthew. Myers view was that Matthew was not actually Jewish. One of his pieces of evidence is very interesting and has always struck me as rather amusing. It is this. In Matthew 21 we find the account of Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem. This is the famous scene where Jesus tells his disciples to go to a certain place where they will find a donkey to untie it and bring it to him so that he can ride into Jerusalem. They do and he does. This is to fulfill what was predicted in the prophet that says, your king will come to you as one who is lowly sitting on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey. See Matthew 21:15 quoting Zechariah 9:9 the Old Testament passage is poetic and like most Hebrew poetry, it repeats itself using different words. In Hebrew poetry, for example, in the Book of Psalms, or in Proverbs, or in most of the prophets, the author will state a line and then in the second he will restate the same thing in different words. This is called synonymous parallelism, or he will state the contrasting position. In other words, this is called antithetical parallelism. That's what's happening here. In the passage from sitting on a donkey on a colt the foal of a donkey, the second line repeats the idea of the first line using different words. This kind of synonymous parallelism happens thousands of times in Old Testament poetry. But Matthew, unlike the other Gospel writers, appears to have misunderstood how the poetry works. In his account 21:1:11, Jesus tells the disciples to acquire two animals, a donkey and a foal. They get them both, spread their garments over them, and Jesus rides into Jerusalem straddling the two animals. It's a very peculiar scene indeed. [00:02:49] Meyer argues that no Jew familiar with the way Hebrew poetry works would make a mistake like that. His conclusion is that Matthew was not a Jew, but was a Gentile who simply didn't understand the conventions of Hebrew poetry and who wanted Jesus literally to fulfill what was literally said in the Prophet. Unfortunately, Meyer does not appear to have convinced most scholars. As others have pointed out other instances in clearly Jewish authored works where a Jewish interpreter will do the same thing. Take poetic lines meant to be in parallel with one another as literally expressing two different ideas rather than just one idea in different words. In itself, this passage probably doesn't tell us much about whether Matthew was Jewish or not. [00:03:35] It's too bad. I think it's a terrifically interesting argument, and if nothing else, it creates a rather amusing picture of the triumphal entry.