The Prophetic Vision and the Real Jesus

Growth of the Prophetic Vision and Its Impact on the Mission of Jesus in Matthew's Gospel

Leske

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532634161
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Using the method of intertextuality, Adrian Leske has traced the growth of the prophetic vision from Amos to the Exile, demonstrating how, after the Exile, the dominant influence on that vision down to the time of Jesus is the positive and new message of Deutero-Isaiah. With opposition from the Zadokite priesthood, and exploitation from foreign rulers, the prophetic and Levite communities find refuge in Upper Galilee and surrounding areas. Using the Gospel of Matthew, the most Jewish of the Gospels, Leske demonstrates how that vision impacted the teaching of Jesus to these communities and how he perceived his mission as the Servant/Son of man. Understanding this prophetic vision and the Jewish nature of Matthew's Gospel brings new insights to Matthean Christology, as well as the authorship and date of that Gospel in relation to the other Gospels.

Chapter I

Introduction

This book is a study of the development of the prophetic vision, beginning with the first writing prophets. It traces how the prophets learned from each other and responded to their changing environments as they were impacted by the events of history. It also touches on how the prophets influenced alternative visions, and particularly, how it found its fulfillment in the message and mission of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew.

Having taught both the prophetic literature and the Gospel of Matthew for many years, it had become quite apparent to me how closely they were related, and how the Gospel of Matthew and the teaching of Jesus therein were dependent on the prophetic literature. Of course, it had always been acknowledged that the writings of the New Testament had gained much from the Hebrew Bible for many of its concepts, ideas and terminology. However, the close connection of the Gospel of Matthew with the writings of the prophets, which exceeds that of any other New Testament writing, and in its portrayal of Jesus coming out of that prophetic milieu, has not always been acknowledged.

The prophetic vision was a gradual development over centuries. Once the message of the earlier prophets came to be written down and disseminated, it became natural for the later prophets to learn from those who had spoken out before and to build on their proclamations, expanding on their ideas for their own situation, often using their terminology and concepts. Out of this interconnectedness the prophetic vision developed to meet new circumstances as it grappled with social and political change, wars, oppression and disasters. So often in the past, study of individual prophets have been done in isolation and have not always taken into consideration the influence on the writings of the prophets who had spoken out earlier. The later prophets clearly built on or interacted with the ideas and messages of previous prophets, and one of the purposes of this study is to demonstrate this intertextuality. This becomes evident as the prophetic vision grows, moves through history and intensifies in time of persecution, injustice and oppression. Of course, the historical context plays an important part in the development of the prophetic vision, making it vital sometimes to reconstruct the historical context of a writing from the hints and allusions in the writing itself.

It is paramount, therefore, to trace the growth of the prophetic vision from the first writing prophets down through history to the time of Jesus. Using the approach of intertextuality, and seeing how the development of the prophetic vision interacts with and influences other movements, calls for a reevaluation of the significance of alternative movements such as the Levites, the Zadokite priesthood, and the origin of the Qumran community with its Teacher of Righteousness and their relation to the prophetic movement. Even more so, it calls for a reexamination of how Jesus, popularly proclaimed as a prophet in his own time, responded to the prophetic vision in his message and mission, its implications for Christology, and even the role of the author of the Gospel of Matthew.

So much of New Testament scholarship has been carried on with only superficial acknowledgment of the prophetic heritage from which the Gospels have emerged. The early church fathers had been mostly concerned with relating the gospel message to their own Gentile environment in the philosophical language of the time. They were thus inclined to interpret the prophets only as speaking of the coming of Christ, often with the use of allegory or typology. Even when interpretation was literal-historical, it was always christocentric and according to the rule of faith preserved in the churches and established in ecumenical councils. This set the general pattern in the West where Scripture was used more as proof texts for the growing doctrinal tradition of the church. During the Reformation period, particularly with Martin Luther’s insistence on “sola scriptura,” greater emphasis was put on exegesis. Luther contended that an understanding of the author and the time of each writing in its historical setting was important, although his interpretation of the prophets remained essentially christocentric.

However, with the development of Protestant orthodoxy during the seventeenth century, the emphasis returned to somewhat more rigid definitions of doctrine, often directed against Roman Catholic tradition. The period of Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was partly a reaction to the traditions and dogma of the church, both Protestant and Catholic. The effects of deism, religious skepticism, and rationalism that followed, eventually led to biblical criticism and a critical examination of how the Gospels were formed. This then led over time to the development of source, form and redaction criticism with virtually no consideration of the prophetic heritage as the precursor of the gospel. In this way, it so easily became open to the presuppositions prevalent at that time. The same must be said about the discussions that became prominent in this period regarding how the Synoptic Gospels related to one another.

Right from the beginning of the Christian movement the Gospel of Matthew had been universally held to be the first Gospel, originally written in Hebrew, and later translated into Greek for the growing number of Greek-speaking Gentiles and Diaspora Jews. Prior to that Greek translation, Papias (110–120 CE) tells us, Gentile Christians had to interpret the Hebrew as best as they were able (Eusebius, Eccles Hist. III.38.16). Yet despite their Gentile orientation, the early church fathers consistently show greater dependence on Matthew’s Gospel than the other Gospels for their discussions of the life and teachings of Jesus. Clement of Alexandria (150–213 CE) reported that the Gospels with genealogies (Matthew and Luke) were written first, and that Mark wrote his Gospel based on Peter’s preaching in Rome where he had served as Peter’s assistant and interpreter (Eusebius, Eccles Hist. VI.14.5–7). Although it later became common to refer to the Synoptic Gospels in the order of Matthew-Mark-Luke, the order in which Irenaeus (120–203 CE) often cited them was Matthew-Luke-Mark (in Against Heresies, III, IV). The same order is found in Jerome’s (347–420) Concerning Illustrious Men where he wrote about Matthew in ch. 3, Luke in ch. 7 and Mark in ch. 8. While Augustine used the order Matthew-Mark-Luke, he did so because he saw Mark as a summarizer of Matthew (Harmony of the Gospels, I.24) and, indeed, writing his Gospel in conjunction with both Matthew and Luke (Harmony IV.10–11).

It is no surprise, then, that when Henry Owen wrote his Observations on the Four Gospels in 1764, he followed this view that Mark had abridged both Matthew and Luke in writing his shorter Gospel. This was then taken up by J. J. Griesbach in Germany in 1776 and 1783 and followed by many scholars in biblical criticism. Other theories were developed, particularly with the idea that there must have been a primitive source from which the three Gospels evolved. Eventually what came to be established as the scholarly consensus in Germany, presented initially in 1863 by H. J. Holtzmann, was that the shortest Gospel, Mark, must have been the first, and that Matthew and Luke had then used Mark, separately of each other, as a framework filling in the narrative with sayings of Jesus supposedly collected into a hypothetical source referred to as Q. This is what eventually became known as the Two-Source Hypothesis. The more Jewish nature of Matthew’s Gospel was attributed to the author’s attempt to “rejudaize” Mark’s Gospel.

Yet the popular view that Mark was the first Gospel was not just because of its brevity. This growing scholarly consensus was helped along by the politics of German unity under Kaiser Wilhelm II and his chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, during the Kulturkampf, which was the battle of Protestant Germany against Pope Pius IX’s claim of papal infallibility in 1870 on the basis of Matt 16:18.1 However, in all of this, the Jewish origins of Jesus, and the influence of the prophetic heritage on his life and teaching which would have given a different perspective on the whole question was lost in the shuffle. The form criticism of Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, which saw Q as a collection of isolated sayings attributed to Jesus in the preaching of the early church further divorced the teaching of Jesus from its prophetic context. In the English-speaking world the two-source hypothesis was made popular in 1924 by B. H. Streeter although he actually argued for two extra sources, L and M, used by Luke and Matthew respectively for those sayings found exclusively in each. Since then, the two-source hypothesis has been followed by the majority of New Testament scholars and written into every textbook introducing the Synoptic Gospels.

It was on the basis of this hypothesis that the quests for the historical Jesus developed in an attempt to rediscover the real Jesus set free from the dogma of the church. Many of the “lives of Jesus” that emerged from these quests were governed by a fair amount of the current rationalism, skepticism or subjective imagination. With Mark, the shortest Gospel, as the basis for their lives of Jesus and with Q understood as a series of isolated sayings, it was easier to assert that many of these sayings and the stories about Jesus were the invention of the early church. Instead of finding Jesus in the Jewish culture and heritage in which he had lived, those involved in the quest tended to impose their own European culture on the Gospels and on the life of Jesus. Thus divorced from his Jewish roots, Jesus could become a teacher of ethics or wisdom with much of the rest regarded as myth, as David Friedrich Strauss expressed in his Life of Jesus Critically Examined of 1835–36.

This separation of the sayings of Jesus from their original historical context into a collection of isolated sayings open to subjective interpretations as general wisdom aphorisms caused one biblical scholar to fulminate: “The tendency (perhaps the agenda in some cases) of much of the recent analysis of Jesus’ teachings rooted in form criticism has been to decontextualize, departicularize, de-israelitize or de-judaize Jesus. The most clearly Israelite elements in the Gospel tradition are determined to be secondary, created at later stages of the Jesus movement. . . . The method by which such judgments are made, however, is blatantly circular.”2 This approach to the life and teachings of Jesus has continued in its more provocative form by the “Jesus Seminar” which itself has recently come under some scathing attacks.3

However, every biblical scholar approaches the text with an arsenal of previous learnings and experiences, whether that be in the Greek classics, philosophy, Christian tradition, dogma, etc. Our tendency is to read into the text what we already know and understand and to impose our presuppositions on the biblical account. While all the disciplines studied before may help in gaining a wide understanding, they actually become peripheral to the unique background of the Gospels. This is particularly true in studying the Gospel of Matthew which bears a much more Jewish orientation than the other Gospels. Thus it is necessary to recreate as best as possible the cultural, religious, social and political milieu from which Jesus emerged. It means gaining an understanding of the whole cultural and prophetic heritage that lies behind the life of Jesus, consciously emptying ourselves of former presuppositions and letting Israelite prophetic history and culture become a part of our whole experience in order to understand the uniqueness of Jesus’ message and mission in his own cultural context. Only in this way do we discover the real historical Jesus. With tha...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter I: Introduction
• Chapter II: The Prophetic Vision before the Exile
• Chapter III: The Beginning of the Exile, and the Priest Turned Prophet
• Chapter IV: The Second Prophet of the Exile: A Prophet of Hope
• Chapter V: After the Return from Exile
• Chapter VI: Zadokites, Levites, and the Prophetic Vision
• Chapter VII: The Prophetic Vision Under Pressure
• Chapter VIII: The Prophetic Turns Apocalyptic
• Chapter IX: Jesus and the Kingdom of God in Matthew’s Gospel
• Chapter X: The Prophetic Vision and the Mission of Jesus
• Chapter XI: Conclusion
• Bibliography