Well, good afternoon. I'm David Bercot, and we're going to be going again through the Historic Faith Commentary Series on Matthew. And this afternoon, we're going to look at chapter nine of Matthew. Like chapter 8, it is a chapter that doesn't have mainly teaching. It's mainly miracles and events, but each one contains a lot of teaching. And so we learn a lot from this chapter. And again, I'm going to just hit a few of the highlights.
I'm going to direct you to the commentary to get some more of the gems from the early Christians that I talk about in there. This afternoon, I'm just going to mention a few of the highlights, and there's plenty more in the commentary. The first one I want to talk about is the paralyzed man. I think we all remember this event where his friends lowered him down through the roof and Jesus told him that his sins were forgiven. The Pharisees, of course, were upset about this.
And Jesus made this response, and I'll read it. It says, " He turned to the paralyzed man and said, " Arise, take up your bed and go to your house. " And he did this to prove that he had the power to forgive sins. And it says, " And he arose and departed to his house. " So one of the things the early Christians point out is that when Jesus healed people, it was instant and it was complete. They didn't like, okay, it started and then the person slowly got better.
And I'm mentioning this because today a lot of the people who claim to have performed miracles and people who claim they were miraculously healed is like, yeah, they went to this conference, this healing gathering, and the evangelists prayed over them. And then, yeah, slowly they went to the hospital. They got better. They were seeing doctors. They were getting treatment. But let's say it was cancer. Yeah, eventually their cancer was healed and all that.
And they say, see, that's this, you know, Wonder Worker did that. Now, of course, we want to give credit to God for all healing. And every time we pray for healing and somebody recovers from their illness, yes, we have every right to give God credit. We don't know where he's intervened and where he hasn't often because he does work through doctors as well, and he has created our body to be able to fight off diseases. But when Jesus healed people, it wasn't anything like that. It was, you know, just snap.
They're completely healed. I think that there's one exception, the blind man, where when Jesus first touched him, he said, people look like trees or something, and then he did a second step, and the man saw completely. Even that, I mean, it was just in a matter of a few minutes. The man was completely healed. It wasn't something over a period of months or even days. And the early Christians point out, yeah, this man, he got off his guard. He was immediately able to walk. He was completely healed.
We saw the same thing with Peter's mother-in-law. You know, for many years, I would read that and think, it seems odd. I mean, here this woman has been sick. Jesus heals her, and then she gets up and she's waiting on them, bringing food to them, and it seemed like it was a little bit inconsiderate. Of course, you know, Jesus can't possibly be inconsiderate, but it didn't fit, you know, my notions of what someone should do in that.
But the point, why Matthew mentions that she got up and served them is to show she was completely healed. It wasn't like, " Oh, yeah, I'm a lot better now. In a few days rest, I'll be myself. " No, she was just instantly cured. She was able to carry on functions just as normal. Okay, now let's talk a little bit about the conversion of Matthew. He's unusual, although this happened with several of the apostles. In fact, maybe most of them, that Jesus, he was there in his tax booth, and Jesus said, " Follow me.
" He immediately dropped everything and followed Jesus, and he was selected to become one of the 12 apostles. Now, all of us who read the New Testament know that tax collectors are always spoken of as this despicable group of people. And, you know, most of us don't look at tax collectors that way today. They may not be the most popular people, but no one looks at them as lowlife, scum, this sort of thing. You don't think of prostitutes and tax collectors being in the same category.
So, why were they viewed so evil back in the days of Jesus? Well, what I was told as a boy and what so many modern commentators say is, well, the tax collectors work for the Romans. So the Jews viewed them as traitors because they were helping the Roman government and that's why they were so despised. Now the Bible doesn't say that. More importantly, not a single early Christian says that. Perhaps even more important, none of the first-century Jewish writers say that.
Philo and Josephus, they say nothing about that. They talk about the hated tax collectors, but they don't say they were hated because they worked for Rome. And so I started digging into that and you know that theory I think dates back to just the 19th century, this idea that, oh, they were traitors and that's why they were hated. The interesting thing, it wasn't just the Jews who hated the tax collectors, the Romans hated them as well. I'm going to read to you from Celsus. He lived in the second century.
He was a Roman, a pagan Roman who hated the Christians. He wrote a whole book against them. And he says this about Jesus. He says, " Jesus, having gathered around him 10 or 11 persons of notorious character, the very wickedness of tax collectors and sailors. " Well, sailors were looked down upon as being not the most moral men and then tax collectors. And this is a Roman mentioning that. So again, they were hated by everyone. And in fact, most of them did not work directly for the Roman government.
And that's because the Roman system of tax collection was that the Roman emperors and sub-rulers would farm out the tax collection to other people. So some of it did directly go to Rome. You know, when they asked Jesus about paying the head tax, he said that, you know, goes directly to Caesar. It has Caesar's head on it. But not all taxes went to Caesar. A lot of them stayed, perhaps most of them stayed right there in that locality.
And it would maybe be a person, for example, a Jew who was given the right to collect those taxes. We know Herod was given the right to collect taxes in Judea. The taxes went to him. There might have been, like I say, that one tax that went directly to Rome, but most of them went to Herod. Okay, then the men like Herod, the local rulers, the smaller rulers, then they would farm it out to other people. And people would pay for the privilege to be a tax collector.
And so the ruler then, starting with the emperor, see, instead of him collecting taxes, he farmed it out. Someone paid him the money for it. That's when he got his money. Okay, so the money the tax collector's gathering doesn't go back to the emperor. That ultimately goes to the tax collector himself or whoever is his immediate boss. Josephus talks about this. He gives a long example. I'll just sum it up. It was the bidding for collecting the taxes for one year for Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, and Samaria.
So it was a fairly big, big area, the area of Palestine where Jesus carried on His ministry. And he said the highest bidder offered 8,000 talents for the right. That was just for one year to collect the taxes. Now that doesn't mean much, 8,000 talents. Well, in modern terms, this would exceed $100 million. That's how much it was worth. And he said he would pay the ruler that much money to have the right to collect the taxes.
So the ruler would get his money right then, and then that person would be the one collecting it. But as high as that was, this is the amazing thing, and this is from Josephus, you know, a firsthand witness. Someone came forward and he said, " I'll give twice that amount if you'll give me the privilege of collecting the taxes. " And he says, " If anyone doesn't pay their taxes, I'll seize their property and give that to you as well. " And so the king gave him the right to collect taxes.
So that's how the system worked. So why were they so hated? Well, it's because they paid so much money that they and then the men they hired underneath them were basically thugs. Chrysostom calls it robbery under the cloak of law. Ter Tertullian says this: " That tax collector is a name for those men who put the very pathways of the sky for sale, not to mention the earth and the sea.
" So you paid out so much money for the privilege to collect taxes, you then squeezed the people as hard as you could to get as much out of them as you could. I mean, in that example, that man offered to pay $200 million. So he has to collect $200 million himself just to break even, and he's paying all of these individual tax collectors, so he's got to pay them on top of that. So they have to collect well over $200 million for that guy to come out and make a profit on it.
So, I mean, they're going to do whatever it took. Philo, a Jewish writer from the time of Jesus, he gives a description. He calls them the most, well, this is his words are his words. The most pitiless of man. Persons full of every kind of inhumanity. I mean, he talks about how they would literally torture people. I mean, they were just given free rein. I mean, they would beat you up torture you.
He said sometimes, I mean, they were so, I mean, just immoral had had so little regard that say a loved one died and that person owed taxes. They'd come in right in the middle of the funeral, grab his body and take it and hold it hostage, desecrate it, threatened to desecrate it unless the family and all the relatives came up with whatever amount of money that they demanded. And then they would release the body to be buried.
And for the Jews, it was a very big thing to be buried and for a corpse not to be desecrated. So that's how low they would sink. So when you think of a tax collector, yeah don't think of someone like the modern-day IRS or, oh, this was a traitor. No, these were just thugs. I mean, the top guy was a thug and then he would hire brutal men. When you read about Zacchaeus, it says he was small. Don't think that means that he was some little mousey guy. I mean, he might have been brawny. It means he was short.
He had to climb up a tree to see, but short guys can be very brawny. And that's how I pictured him, although he may have had brawny man working for him. So it's no wonder that Gentiles and Jews alike hated tax collectors, and that's why it was a scandal that these tax collectors, that Jesus was reaching out to them, that one of his intimate associates, one of the 12, was a former tax collector. Okay, let's move on where Jesus talks about patching an old garment with new cloth and where he talks about new wine.
And I had heard explanations of these from the time again that I was a boy. They're in all kinds of study Bibles and modern commentaries. And one reason why I wrote or compiled, I should say, the historic faith commentary series is to go back to the primary sources. I mean, modern commentators, they make up stuff. And often when you trace something, it was somebody in, say, 1820 who came up with this idea. He stuck it in his commentary. It made sense to people in modern times in the 19th century.
And so people, other commentators, read it and they put in the same thing. It still makes sense to the modern mind. And so pretty soon you see it in every commentary. You hear it in sermons and you think it's fact and it's something that's just recently been totally made up. So most modern commentators, Jesus said this, " No man patches an old garment with a piece of new cloth. For the patch pulls away from the garment and the tear is made worse. " That's Matthew 9:16.
I started to say most modern commentators, what they say and what I'd always heard, and I probably explained it this way many times in sermons, is that a new piece of cloth hasn't been shrunk yet, and so you wouldn't patch an old garment with it because then when it shrunk, it would tear and rip the old garment. In fact, some modern translations even instead of saying a new piece of cloth, they say an unshrunken piece of cloth. I mean, they just put their own analysis in and change what the Bible actually says.
Now, that's a logical enough explanation, but none of the early Christians give that explanation. Maybe the material they use was already shrunk, and so that would have never been an issue. I don't know. But there's a spiritual issue why that wouldn't make sense that the new patch would shrink, because the old garment represents the mosaic law. The new cloth represents the kingdom of the gospel. Well, the problem is that the gospel doesn't shrink. It definitely, if anything, it expands.
When you look at the Old Law Testament, Jesus expanded a lot of the teachings where it said, " You shall not commit adultery. " He said, " You shall not lust after a woman. " Where it says, " You shall not murder, " he says, " you shall not hate, " and things like that. So yeah, he expands the law when he's dealing with moral teachings. He doesn't shrink it. The difficulty is that the gospel is stronger than the old worn-out law. And as I said, the old cloth represents the law, the new represents the gospel.
A new piece of cloth is going to be stronger and heavier than a worn-out one. If it's used as a patch, the seams are not going to hold because a new cloth is heavier and stronger and it's going to tear those seams. They're not going to hold. And so in the spiritual realm, the law was like an old worn-out garment that had served its purpose. The new fabric of the gospel couldn't be patched onto the law, as the law was not strong enough to hold it. The gospel isn't simply a patch, you know, to fix up the law.
It's a whole new system, a whole new teaching. The kingdom of God, the new covenant, and the teachings of the gospel, as I said, are not simply a new patch placed on the old worn-out law. Christianity is not merely a revised version of Judaism. It is a new thing with a new people. Now that doesn't mean there's no connection between the law and the gospel. There's very much a connection. The gospel builds from the law. It fulfills the law. But no, it's not a patch on an old piece of cloth.
In that same event, he says, " Neither do men put new wine into old bottles. " Some new translation says into new or old wine skins. Otherwise, the bottles break or the wine skins break. The wine runs out and the bottles are destroyed. But they put new wines into new bottles, and both are preserved. I'm using the language of the King James that calls them bottles, and it's actually a correct translation. Because today when we think of bottles, at least I know I do, I always think of something glass or plastic.
But in the days of the new King James or of the King James translators, and in times before that, a bottle more often than not, or just as often as not, was made out of leather. It would be like a leather bag that was used to hold liquid. The Greek term that's used here is askos, ASKOS, ASCOS, which was a goat skin or leather bag. It was used to carry not only wine, but water or any other kind of liquid. So the term doesn't really mean wine skin. It just means a leather bottle.
Okay, now most modern commentators, this is what they say. And I said this for many years because I had based it on those commentaries. That new wine, you said you don't put new wine into old wine skin, okay? The explanation was, okay, new wine refers to unfermented grape juice. So if you put unfermented grape juice into an old wine skin, it's made from sheepskin or goat skin.
It's become old and brittle, and then when this grape juice ferments, it produces carbon dioxide, it expands, and it's going to burst the bottle because the wine skin isn't elastic because it's brittle. That's the explanation I always gave. However, not a single ancient writer gave that explanation. So that got me wondering, okay, how come they're not saying that and everyone says that today?
Well, and so when I started looking at their explanations and what they were saying and then doing some further research just about ancient winemaking, I realized a number of things. First of all, new wine does not mean unfermented grape juice. All of us should know this because in Acts 2, I'll just read to you the passage is on the day of Pentecost when they're speaking in all these different languages and the crowd that assembled were laughing and said, " Oh, they're full of what? They're full of new wine.
" They said, " These men are full of new wine, but Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and said to them, " These are not drunk, as you suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. " So they said, " They're full of new wine. " Peter says, " No, they are not drunk. " Okay, so new wine did not refer to unfermented grape juice. It referred to wine. Wine that hadn't been aged for several years, but newer wine. The wine probably that most people were drinking.
Okay, so that part of the myth is struck out right there just looking at the Bible. Second, neither in ancient times or in modern times is wine made by simply pouring unfermented grape juice into a bottle, whether it's a glass bottle or a leather bottle. I did, like I said, a lot of reading on ancient winemaking. What they would do, you know, they stamp on the grapes. I think we all know that. They crush the grapes.
I've looked at ancient wine presses and where the liquid runs out, they had little channels for it to drain out of the vat that they were trampling the grapes on, okay? Well, then you have the grape juice mixed with skins and other matter from the grapes. And this isn't put into wine skins quote or bottles or anything like that. It was put into big clay vats. That's where the fermenting took place in these great big vats, okay? The first stage of it.
Then they moved it from there into smaller vats where the rest of the fermentation took place. So by the time they put it into a bottle, whether it was a glass bottle or a leather bottle, nearly all of the fermentation had taken place. It's the same way today. So, no, the carbon dioxide wouldn't have burst it because it had already been fermented. So why did Jesus say, well, people don't put new wine into old wine skins? Well, new wine was costly. And so you have this new wine.
An old wineskin would, again, it's an old leather bottle. I mean, it probably has seams that have been mended. It's old. It's brittle. You put the weight of new wine, I guess it could be old wine for that matter, that, yeah, it could easily burst the seams and you're going to lose everything. So no one would have taken that risk. The new wine represents the new life in Jesus that cannot be contained within the confines of the law. Again, he's using two illustrations, the piece of cloth and the new wine.
Both of them is talking about the gospel or the new life in Christ versus the law. The gospel of the kingdom could not be poured into the old bottle of the Mosaic Law. The way of Christ is much too powerful, it's too radical to fit within the confines of the Mosaic Law. To try to do so would have destroyed the law, and it would have also ruined the gospel. I mean, that's what was happening in Galatia.
The Christians there were trying to force Christianity into Judaism and you know why Paul attacked that so strongly. It just doesn't work. Now, I also did a little bit of research on that term wineskin because the Greek word does not mean wineskin. It just means a leather bottle, a skin bottle. You could put anything into it. And I discovered that even that term wineskin was invented in the 19th century. I mean, that's a modern word in itself. Okay, moving on.
Last of all, I want to talk about the woman with the flow of blood. I'll read to you the passage. Behold, a woman who had been afflicted with a flow of blood for 12 years came behind him, talking about Jesus, and touched the hem of his robe. For she said to herself, " If I only touch his robe, I will be well. Now Jesus was on his way to the house of Jairus, who was a ruler of the synagogue because his 12-year-old daughter was very sick. As we know, she actually died.
Now, one of the things I'd never caught my whole life that the early Christian commentators all caught was that, okay, the daughter was 12 years old who was on her deathbed and this woman had had the flow of blood for 12 years. So it started the same time that this young girl was born. So their two lives were intertwined and it wasn't any accident that Jesus is raising one from the dead who was born perhaps on the same day that this flow of blood had started for this woman, certainly the same year of it.
So I thought that was quite an interesting thing of how God works things together. It said that she was seeking help from physicians. Mark says this: " She had suffered many things for many physicians and had spent all that she had and was no better off, but rather grew worse. " And reading both in ancient Roman writings and reading what the early Christians say about the doctors of their day, this totally fits the bill. I mean, it says she suffered many things for many physicians.
I mean, now the Roman doctors, I mean, they were the most advanced up to that point in human history, or at least in the Western Hemisphere. And they could do a credible job on a number of things. If you had a broken leg, they could set it properly. If you had a wound from battle or from a fall or something like that, they could treat bruises, cuts, wounds, things like that quite well. They could even do C-sections. They knew a lot about herbs and different herbs that could heal this or that.
So they had a good bit of knowledge, but they knew nothing about germs, anything that was going to be an internal problem, infectious diseases. I mean, they were useless. They were actually worse than useless because they'd come up with these bizarre procedures that often were very painful. I mean, almost torture that they would do to people. And like I say, if the person got better, it was totally by accident because what they did had no medicinal value. And then often, yeah, it didn't have any effect.
And the person still had to pay out all this money. They were very expensive. So Chrysostom is assuming this was actually a one-time wealthy woman if she had enough money to go to a lot of physicians, but not surprisingly, they weren't able to heal her because she had some sort of internal problem that they wouldn't have had the slightest idea of what was causing it. Now it says that she made her way through the crowd, that she knelt down and she touched the fringes of Jesus ' robe.
And these fringes, the Greek word that Matthew uses is kraspeda, which is the same word used in Numbers 15:38 in the Septuagint, because it's in Greek. I'm going to just read to you that passage. It says, " Speak to the children of Israel and tell them to make tassels, " that's that Greek word " kraspeda " on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put a blue thread in the tassels of the corners.
Then it shall be, " You shall have the tassels, that you shall look upon these and remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them. " So this was a special commandment for the Israelites to remember the commandments, the other commandments that God had given them. This is probably the tassels that this woman had reached out and touched. It proved to be the source of her healing.
Now the final thing I want to mention about her, there's a number of other things that are there in the commentary, was her nationality. I noticed most modern commentators and probably most of my life I did just assume that she was Jewish and that you know she was unclean and that sort of thing. None of the evangelists, none of the four evangelists say that she was Jewish and the early Christians, none of them say that she was Jewish. In fact, they seem to all assume that she was Gentile.
And there is an important clue in what happened that would indicate she was a Gentile. Back in chapter eight, we read where Jesus healed the leper and after he healed him and told him not to tell anyone, he also said, " Go and show yourself to the priest. " Because this was something commanded in the law that when you were healed from leprosy, you showed yourself to the priest for the priest then to pronounce you healed and you made an offering. It was the same with someone who suffered from a flow of blood.
If she had been a Jew, then Jesus would have likely told her, " All right, go and show yourself to the priest, " and she would have been required to make an offering there of either two turtle doves or pigeons to the priest to show that she had been cleansed and to be pronounced cleaned by the priest. But he doesn't say anything about that. So that would indicate again that she was a Gentile. In fact, Eusebius, now this was the interesting thing to me when I was doing my research that I had never known.
Eusebius was very familiar with this. He does say specifically that this woman was a Gentile and that she was from the town of Caesarea Philippi, which was part of ancient Syria. It no longer exists. There's ruins around there. I've been to the region there. And he reports that this healing that this woman received had become legendary in that city because everyone knew about her. She was apparently a fairly prominent woman, had been wealthy as people had suggested. In fact, she became so famous.
I mean, imagine 12 years you've known about this woman with this flow of blood and she suddenly healed. So she became so famous that the inhabitants of that city built a bronze statue. They put it on a pedestal right outside the gates of her house. She had a large house, you know, having been wealthy, even though she used up the cash that she had on these physicians. And this statue, now this is the thing. Eusebius says he had been there in Philippi Caesarea, Caesarea Philippi, and had seen it with his own eyes.
And he describes it. He says it's bronze, it's on a pedestal. There's a woman there on her knees with her arms uplifted. And then there's a man there who is looking down upon her. So that would be probably the earliest representation we have of Jesus. Maybe for good reason the statue was not preserved. But it was still around in Eusebius ' day, which was the early 300s.
But it only lasted a few more decades because after Constantine and after his sons had died, then one of his distant relatives named Julian and is known in history as Julian the Apostate. He tried to wipe out Christianity and bring the Romans back to their ancient pagan religions. So part of his campaign to eradicate Christianity was he went and had that statue in Caesarea Philippi destroyed. So it's not around any longer.
Now, I think God probably approved of that and wanted that so we wouldn't have an ancient statue of Jesus that people would perhaps start worshiping. So those are just some of the gems from chapter 9 that I wanted to share with you. And again, I encourage you to read Matthew 9 for yourself and check the other things the early Christians point out that are written in the commentary. Again, thank you for your time.