Well, good afternoon. We are going to be talking today about Matthew chapter one. We're going through the historic faith commentary series on Matthew, which I'm the editor of. The material is all from the early Christians of how they understood the book of Matthew. As most of my listeners know, one of my big themes is go to the primary source.
And so if we want to know how Christians understood Matthew in the beginning, or at least near the time of the apostles, we need to go to the writing of the people who lived in that time period. Unfortunately, we have lots of writings from that time, and they share a lot about Matthew. So we're going to be starting with the first chapter.
I'm going to be just hitting some highlights on this, some things that were new to me when I was reading the early Christians, or questions that people have asked me either in a Bible study group or have written in and asked. Now, the first one is certainly not a question, but it's the very beginning of the book of Matthew. It's the beginning of our New Testament where Matthew just starts off the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
A fairly short sentence that most of my life, I would have read right past that. I would have seen it. Yep, yep. And gone on. And then skipped, to be honest, skipped the genealogy and then jumped about middle of the first chapter and gone on from there. I really didn't think of a lot of significance to that first sentence. But Matthew, he's an interesting writer. He's different from Mark and Luke. They tend to go into a lot of detail about events and things like that.
Matthew, when he's writing about events and things, he's very short-winded. He puts it in a little capsule. Now, when it comes to the teaching of Jesus, Matthew goes into more detail than the other gospel writers. But on other events, yeah, he's very terse. And so in one short sentence, he sums a lot up. And the early Christians saw a lot of significance in that first sentence. So I'm going to just share with you some of the things that they said. It starts off the generation of Jesus Christ.
In the Greek, you would say Jesus the Christ, the Messiah. And yeah, we're so used to seeing Jesus Christ. We don't give a lot of thought. I think most Christians know that Christ is not His last name, that it's a title, but we don't give a lot of thought beyond that. Most of you, I'm sure, know that the word Christ or Messiah means the anointed one. That's certainly about as far as my biblical knowledge went most of my life.
But a lot was associated with that title, The Anointed One, because for the Jews, the term the Christ or the Messiah pointed to a king in particular. That was their first thought because the Jewish kings were called by that name. Anointed one means you were anointed, which back other than when the Holy Spirit began to be poured out, was with oil. And so Samuel, when he anointed Saul as king, when he made him king, he anointed him with oil. The same thing with David.
So the kings were referred to as the Christ or the Anointed One. So that would have been the first thing a Jew would have thought of with the term Christ. But the early Christians saw more than that. They saw three things, not just him being king, but also being high priest. Because when Moses inaugurated the priesthood, he anointed Aaron with oil. And so anointing was also the way that you made a priest.
And then also, although it wasn't always how a prophet was ordained, but sometimes prophets were also ordained by anointing. When Elijah made Elisha his successor, he anointed him with oil. And in fact, there's a prophecy that Jesus fulfilled. We all know this. It's from Isaiah 61:1. It says, " The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek.
" Now, I never thought about that before, other than that it's a prophecy from Isaiah and how it pointed to the Messiah, but that he was anointed, in this case, not as a king or as a high priest, but as a teacher, as a prophetic teacher. So those were the three offices all summed up in the word Christ or Messiah. Now he goes on, Matthew says, " Son of David " in that same sentence. I think we all know the Messiah had to be a descendant of David. So he points that out. And that was highly significant.
And that's why he sets forth the genealogy was to prove that Jesus was a descendant of King David. And it's interesting that with all the accusations the scribes and Pharisees made against Jesus, and they accused him of all kinds of things, they never denied that he was the son of David, that that's not one of the things they bring out. So they all accepted. Apparently, there was no question that, yes, he was legitimately a son of David. And then in that same sentence, Matthew mentions son of Abraham.
And of course, this would have also spoken to the Jews because they were all fleshly descendants of Abraham, but it also spoke to the Gentiles. We think of Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles, and he certainly was. He uses that designation. But in a sense, the gospel of Matthew is the gospel of the Gentiles. Because I think more than any of the other three gospel writers, Matthew continually points out that Jesus brings in the Gentiles into His kingdom.
And so even mentioning the son of Abraham right there in his initial opening sentence, he brings in the Gentiles because the promise to Abraham was that through him that all nations of the earth would be blessed. This includes the Gentiles, not just the Jews. Now, one of the questions that I've been asked in Bible studies is, why does Matthew set forth the genealogy of Joseph? Because we know that Jesus was born of a virgin. And so Joseph was not his genealogical father. So why does Matthew give his genealogy?
Well, of course, we know because we believe in the virgin birth. And if we believe in the virgin birth, then we don't need a genealogy at all. We accept what the angel Gabriel said, that he was, uh, a descendant of David, that he would, uh, be a son of David. But for the unbelieving Jews, they didn't know that. And for the believing Jews, they needed to be able to explain this to their non-believing neighbors. So it was important to set out the genealogy of Jesus to show he was a descendant of David.
But for non-believers, they believed that Joseph was his father. That was the commonly accepted belief, certainly in his hometown of Nazareth and everywhere else. So unless you're going to first convince him he was born of a virgin, which takes a lot of faith, yeah, you're going to start with Joseph. And even for a believing Jew, this wasn't a waste of time because Joseph was the adoptive father of Jesus. He is the one who took Jesus to the temple.
He's the one who saw that he was circumcised, that he was given a name, that sort of thing. So he took on the parentage of Jesus. In fact, Mary, even at the episode in the temple when Jesus was 12, she said, " Your father and I have been looking for you. " So I mean, even she thought of Joseph as his father, and he was. An adoptive father is just as much a father as what would be known today as a genetic father. So legally through Joseph, Jesus was a descendant of King David.
He also, as we're going to see in a moment genetically from Mary. Okay. I said we would see in a minute that he was also one of marrying. And now this was totally new to me. This is something the early Christians point out, and I started digging and, yeah, sure enough, everything they say lines up with what's in the Bible. But somehow, I was never taught this. I may have just slept through a Sunday school class, but I don't think it's commonly taught. And that is the Jews.
I think I knew they married within their tribe as a normal thing. I didn't think about it a lot. But it wasn't just that. They would try to marry a kinsman. This was what was expected of them. I'm going to read to you a passage I quoted. It's from Philo, who was a Jewish writer from the first century. He was not a Christian. We don't know if he even ever heard of Christ. He lived at the same time as Jesus, but he lived in Alexandria, Egypt, so their paths never crossed.
Anyway, he's just describing Jewish betrothal in marriage. And he says this, " Whenever the time comes for an appropriate marriage, husbands should be selected by merit and approved in all things. " Of course, marriages were arranged. So this is going to be the mother and father of the bride. They're going to be looking at a husband, " Okay, what is this character like? " But it didn't stop there. It says, " Preferably, they should be relatives.
" So you actually tried to marry a relative, like a first cousin, second cousin, something like that. But if not, they should at least be of the same division and tribe so that the lots assigned as dowries will not be alienated through marriages. So God didn't want one of the tribes to end up owning all of the territory of Israel. He wanted it to stay divided just like he had set it up. And so way back in numbers, he gave this law. You may be familiar with it.
It's not one we focus on a lot in most Sunday school classes. It said this, " As for every daughter who exercises the right of inheritance among the tribes of the children of Israel, this particularly concerned land, but often they brought a dowry. In fact, normally, unless they were poor, they brought a dowry into the marriage. So there was a bit of wealth involved.
" It says, " They will become wives to someone from among those of the clan of her father in order that the children of Israel may each have the rights of paternal inheritance. " So it wasn't just the tribe. In my mind, it was only you marry within your tribe. It wasn't just the tribe, it was the clan. So this would come down to a relative or someone fairly close, a distant cousin, perhaps.
So what the significance of this is, once Matthew establishes that Joseph was a descendant of King David, he had just established that Mary was as well. Because being a godly woman, presumably from a godly mother and father, that they would have had her marry somebody within their own kinship, their own clan. If they were descendants of David, they certainly would not have married her outside of the line of King David. And likewise, Joseph would have wanted his wife to be someone in that same lineage.
So to the early Christians, Matthew isn't only setting out the genealogy of Joseph, but by establishing that, he's establishing that Mary was also a descendant of King David. And then, of course, there's the prophecy. When the angel spoke to Mary, he said, " God will grant him the throne of his father, David. " Now, at that point, Mary was not married to Joseph. She's a virgin. And an angel is telling her that she is going to conceive and that God is going to give him the throne of his father, David.
Well, she's not married yet. So that would not have made sense unless she herself was a descendant of David, because he's saying his father, well, she knew Joseph was not the father. So if David is going to be the distant father of her son, then that meant that she also was a descendant of David. And then there's one other prophecy so that there's no doubt. And this is in the Septuagint in Psalm 132. David is told, " I will excuse me, I will set upon your throne the fruit of your womb.
" That's how it reads in the Septuagint. In the Masoretic, it's the fruit of your body. Either way, that somebody who was a genetic descendant from his body, or like I say, literally from his womb, which David wouldn't have a womb. So this would mean some female descendant of David, that he would sit on the throne. So we have actually three proofs just from that that Mary was also a descendant of David. We have her marriage to Joseph, who was a descendant.
We have what the angel Gabriel told her, and then we have this prophecy given to David. Let's move on to the four women in the genealogy of Jesus. Now, if you sat in Bible classes similar to the ones I've sat in or heard sermons, nowadays, and I put an emphasis on nowadays, I don't know when this started, whether it was in the ' 60s or ' 70s, maybe went back to the turn of the 20th century. Certainly not before then.
But somebody invented this very unbiblical theory that women were never mentioned in genealogies in the Bible. And so with the beginning of Jesus, God is doing something dramatically new. Well, of course, feminists have pushed this because they want to make Jesus into the first feminists and that, " Oh, he was changing all of the teachings in the law and actually before the law on the status of husbands and wives and that sort of thing, as if God was unhappy with his own laws and that he saw a need to change them.
And since Jesus never teaches anything directly about changing those relationships, they grasp at straws. And one of them, they say, well, oh, look, four women are mentioned in his genealogy, and that's never been done before. God is, yeah, starting the whole feminist movement with Jesus. Well, talk about going to primary sources. You can't go to a more ultimate primary source in the Bible. I mean, it is the ultimate primary source.
And all you have to do is go through the Old Testament and you see that that's totally false, that there are lots of women who are mentioned in genealogies. In fact, as many women are mentioned in the genealogy of Esau, who is not an important biblical figure at all, as there are in the genealogy of Jesus. When you go to Chronicles, there's over 50 women who are mentioned there.
Furthermore, when you get outside of the New Testament or outside of the Old Testament and just Jewish writings like Josephus, all the way through, when he talks about one of the kings, he always says who the king's mother was. So yeah, that's just totally false that women aren't mentioned in genealogies. That's just something made up. But now the early Christians saw something very significant. It wasn't in the fact that women are mentioned in the genealogy. They knew that was nothing significant.
That was normal and certainly respected and appreciated. But it was, why did Matthew pick those four women? Out of all of the women in the genealogy of Joseph, why those four? I mean, if you wanted to picture the most godly four women in the line, well, he would have certainly started with Sarah, who is an example of a godly wife. She's mentioned in the book of Hebrews. But no, he doesn't even mention her. He starts off with, of all people, Tamar. She was the daughter of one of Judah's sons.
And she's the one who dressed up as a prostitute and lured Judah to have relations with her. In other words, she lay with her own father-in-law knowing she was doing this, which to the Christians was just something horrific. And she is in the line of Jesus. Rahab, she was a harlot. Ruth, she was an idol worshiper at one time in her life. And then you have doesn't even mention the name of Bathsheba. Just out of shame.
It says, " By her of Uriah, " pointing out that her husband was Uriah, and she was committing adultery. So they see that he picks four women who had a disreputable past. To show that Jesus was reaching out to sinners, he makes converts out of the tax collectors and the harlots. And the Pharisees blame him for this, but he said the tax collectors and harlots will enter the kingdom of God ahead of you.
So this was a time of grace and mercy, and it didn't matter how terrible your background was, you were welcomed by the Messiah. Repentance was required, of course, a change of life. But yeah, he included a tax collector among his 12 apostles. One of his very close women disciples, Mary Magdalene, had been possessed of demons. So they see, these aren't accidental picking these four. He's trying to point out there are terrible sinners in the line of the Messiah because He came to cleanse our sins.
There's something else very significant. All four of these women were Gentiles. Tamar was not an Israelite because there were no Israelite women at that point. Dinah would have been the only one. She was probably a Canaanite. Rahab, we know, was a Canaanite. Ruth was from the Moabites. And so when it comes to Bathsheba, she was the wife of Uriah the Hittite. The Israelites were forbidden to give their daughters in marriage to the Hittites.
So Bathsheba could not have been an Israelite daughter or she wouldn't have been the wife of a Hittite. So all four of these women were Gentiles. Matthew lists those four women to show that Jesus would be the Messiah not only for the Jews, but for all mankind, that He was coming to include the Gentiles as part of His inheritance, and that's really exciting. One of the questions that I know I asked when I was a boy, and Christians have been asking from probably ever since the Four Gospels got published.
And that is, why does Matthew give a different genealogy than Luke? Their genealogies are the same up through David, but then they differ. And why is this? And the theory that we are all told today, what I was told when I was a boy, was, " Oh, Matthew gives Joseph's genealogy, and Luke gives Mary's genealogy. " Oh, okay. Well, that made sense. I mean, nowadays, like when I was tracing my family tree, I was interested in both my father's relatives and my mother's relatives.
I mean, that's how we trace genealogy today. And so that makes perfect sense to somebody living today, but it made no sense to people living in ancient times because they traced their genealogy through the father, not through the mother. And that's why in the Bible, women are mentioned in various genealogies, but you don't ever have a genealogy listed up through a mother. So that was not the practice that God established to the Israelites.
So that made no sense to them, particularly since Luke says when he comes down, he takes it down to Joseph, not to Mary. So if it's the genealogy of Mary, well, why wouldn't he say that? I mean, they listed women in their genealogy, so it wasn't like, " Oh, well, you couldn't mention a woman's name in a genealogy, " because we just see in Matthew that they did do that. So how would anyone know if he says this is the genealogy of Joseph, how would anyone know, well, oh, it's really Mary. He just doesn't say that.
Well, obviously, no one knew that because none of the early Christians read that as being Mary's genealogy, nor would have any of the Jews. But they were puzzled. Why does it differ? And one of the early Christians, he's not a well-known one. Julius Africanus, he came up with a theory, and this is all it is a theory. We don't have a final answer, but it made so much sense to the early Christians that I think they universally adopted it.
And his theory was that you had a number of second marriages, maybe because of the death of a husband, or because of levirate marriages. And so because of this, for example, if I'm married to well, my wife, Deborah, and I died without leaving any children, if she was an Israelite, then she would be taken or should have been taken by my brother as his wife to produce an heir. And so then the son that she would have from my brother would be considered my son, even though genetically, he was the son of my brother.
So you could list it either way. You could say his son because genetically it would be the son of my brother. Or if you were looking at it legally, it would be my son. So his theory was you had a number of those. I'm sure it happened a lot with the early mortality in that time period of having a number of levirate marriages. So one person would have two different fathers, the legal father and then the genetic father. That makes perfect sense.
It may not be the final answer, but it's the closest we've been able to come up with. All right, let's move just for a moment to Joseph. Now, of course, Mary is the central figure in the incarnation outside of Jesus. He's a central figure, but next to him, it would be Mary because of the virgin birth. And Luke gives us the story of the conception and that through pretty much the eyes of Mary. Matthew gives the story through the eyes of Joseph.
So it makes a nice combination when you read both Matthew and Luke because you have the two together. Now, Mark and John don't neither one of them mention it. It's just Matthew and Luke. So Matthew tells us about Joseph, and he learns that Mary is pregnant. And it says, " He is a righteous man. " The King James says just man. That Greek word can be translated either just or righteous either way. He's a godly man and he's compassionate. He cares about Mary. That's his first thought.
Now, interestingly, showing how a righteous man acts, he doesn't fly into a fit of jealousy. Now, what else could he think but that she had some other lover, that she had been laying with another man? I mean, so many prospective husbands would be furious. And you could understand that, that I thought you were a godly woman. I was marrying this chaste virgin and obviously you've been sleeping with somebody else, maybe more than one person. He doesn't fly into a jealous rage.
He's torn inside because as a righteous man, we often wouldn't think about it so much today. But for the early Christians, a righteous man wouldn't be marrying an ungodly woman who's sleeping around during her engagement period. And so that would be wrong. He couldn't just say, oh, okay, it's okay, but he didn't want to make a spectacle of her. Now, some people say, oh, she would have been stoned to death if he had said anything.
But the Romans did not permit the Jews to put people to death for those kind of things. If you wanted to put some to death, you had to go to the Romans to do it. Now, sometimes it happened that the Jews would take up stones and stone somebody. But as a normal rule, they didn't do that. They could certainly get in trouble with the Roman authorities. So it's unlikely that her life was in danger, but he didn't want to make a spectacle because they were engaged.
Getting engaged in those days, you entered into a legal contract. And it was assumed that the bride you were marrying was a virgin, or else at least that would have been stated otherwise. So then he finds out she's not. Well, he has grounds now to break the marriage contract. He could have gone to court. That's usually the way it was done. You went to the court, the local court and said, you know, this has been violated a term of it, and it would have been a public spectacle.
So he wanted to do it secretly, quietly, just go to Mary's parents and say, " Look, we need to just call this off and end the contract. " But then the angel appeared to him and told him the situation that it was through the Holy Spirit. Okay, we take that for granted that Joseph accepted that. But you know, when we read Luke's account, we see that John's father, Zachariah, he had trouble believing that his wife was going to conceive in her old age after she had been barren her whole life.
You know He had a moment of is that true? Now, Joseph is asked to believe something, not that an ordinary woman is going to give birth the natural way, just a woman who had been barren, but this was going to be without ever knowing a man? You talk about taking a lot of faith to believe that. I mean, you know, we're so familiar with the virgin birth, we don't think about it, but this had never happened in human history. Imagine being told this, and it's in a dream.
You know, Zechariah, an angel appeared in front of him, but this is just in a dream. And Joseph believes it. He obeys in faith, and he takes Mary as his wife. So it tells us a lot about the character of Joseph, and it's not surprising. Obviously, if God is going to have his son, his eternal son, become human, he would have picked a godly woman to be the mother, the genetic mother. But he would have also picked a godly man who would be raising Jesus, who would be the only earthly father that he knew.
And so we see an example of that in this passage. Okay, just going through the commentary, a couple of other things. Isaiah's prophecy about the virgin birth. When we read our Bibles, and by our Bibles, I mean something like the King James, New King James, ESV, any of that. When you read the prophecy in Isaiah that the angel quoted, it says that a virgin will be with child. And that's what you read in our Old Testament.
But actually, these Old Testaments that are based on the Masoretic text should probably say young woman because the Hebrew word alma that is used there does not necessarily mean a virgin. Now, most young unmarried women who were Israelites would have also been virgins, but there was a separate word, Hebrew word, that meant specifically a virgin. And so this was one reason why the Jews rejected the Septuagint.
That had been their Bible, the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews, the Bible of the Dispersion, for several centuries. It was a Jewish translation, not a Christian translation, but it translates this prophecy in Isaiah with the Greek word Parthenos, which means a physical virgin, not just a young, unmarried woman. And this is amazing because they could have translated it and would have logically translated it young woman.
But I think through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the translators of the Septuagint put in virgin, leaving no question about it. And that is the translation the angel quotes to Joseph, quoting from the Septuagint, not from the Masoretic text. And of course, this is the key Messianic prophecy. And it was after the Christians started quoting the Septuagint, particularly this prophecy, but there are a lot of other Messianic prophecies that turn on the language of the Septuagint.
The unbelieving Jews, this is after the temple was destroyed around the year 100, they just decided we're going to chuck the Septuagint and use only the Masoretic text. And they got some Greek proselytes to then make a new translation because of the fact that the Christians were making such headway using the Septuagint. So those are some of the gems in just the first chapter of Matthew. And I think we'll stop there.
I encourage you to keep studying in the commentary because there are a lot of things I haven't touched. I've just hit some of the highlights that were of particular interest to me. But like I say, Matthew packs a lot of things in there. Thank you.