Tuesday, 8/26/14
In our readings from Matthew’s Gospel over the past few days
we have come across a number of Our Lord’s complaints against the Pharisees,
and to understand his bias against the Pharisees we should recall the history of
how he got that way.
Language scholars who gave close study to Matthew’s Gospel
have shown us how it contains
vocabulary that didn‘t come into use until fifty years after the death and
Resurrection of Jesus. As well, scholars point to Matthew’s allusions to events that took place
fifty years after Jesus was gone. They can assure us that Matthew’s Gospel was
written after the year 81 a.d.. What is more, his Gospel stories reflect
matters of great interest to Christians at that later date. Let’s look into
those matters.
One of Our Lord’s Apostles was called Simon the Zealot. In
Our Lord’s time Zealots were
non-violent men who campaigned for a peaceful break from Rome. However, after
the year 65 a.d. many of the Zealots became terrorists.
Those terrorists, carrying short knives called “shickas,” came
to be known as the Shickarees. Holed up in Jerusalem, they took to ambushing
and murdering the men of Roman patrols, and in the year 67 a.d. they drove the
Roman forum to approve the draconian measure of completely destroying
Jerusalem.
General Vespasian methodically circled the holy city with
trenches. He set up catapults, and he dug down to cut off the water sources to
their wells, and he blocked off all traffic in and out of Jerusalem Then, In 69
a.d. he was chosen as the new emperor, and he entrusted the destruction of
Jerusalem to his son General Titus.
Locked into the city the Shickarees turned their violence
against the Pharisees whom they hated for their having been on friendly terms
with the Romans. That had the Pharisees striking a deal with Titus to allow
them to leave the city for Jamnia, a property they had on the Mediterranean
shore.
On hearing news of the destruction of the temple in 70 a.d.
those Pharisees began asking how they, a people devoted to temple worship,
could survive as a religion. The conclusion they came to was that their orthodox
Judaism was to be found in their complete observance of the Law of Moses, and
their observance of the thousands of precepts they had added to the Law since
the time of Moses.
In the year 80 a.d. the Pharisees at Jamnia began taking stock
of the scattered Jews who had survived the destruction of Jerusalem, and they
found that a third of those Jews had become Christians, while still priding
themselves in being Jewish.
The official Pharisees at Jamnia began telling those
Christians that since Jesus had eaten with sinners, not completely observing
Kosher, he had actually been out to destroy the law and the Prophets.
That had Matthew writing his Gospel where Jesus said, “I
have not come to destroy the Law and the Prophets. I have come to fulfill them.
In his Gospel Matthew recalled for us all that Jesus had said in the Sermon on
the Mount, detailing how Jesus had taken the incomplete rulings of Moses, bringing
them to beautiful fulfillment.
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