An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 192: Jesus starts to get carried away with His own success. Plus: Christ figures in popular fantasy fiction (Matthew 16-20)

Matthew 16-20
Jesus starts to get carried away with His own success. Plus: Christ figures in popular fantasy fiction.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Matthew 16

“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Again the Pharisees, and the Sadducees, come to bandy words with Jesus, asking Him to show them a miracle (if they’d been paying attention before they might, perhaps, have noticed all the healed lepers and so on wandering around the Galilee region, you’d think). Jesus again engages in a what seems verbal trickery, and shows how old the knowledge of red sky at night, shepherd’s delight, really is. The Pharisees can predict the weather from the colour of the sky, but, says Jesus, they can’t predict the really important stuff concerning God.

Later He asks His disciples who people think He is. Amongst the answers are John the Baptist, Elijah, and Jeremiah. Only Simon Peter says that Jesus is Christ, i.e. the Messiah, for which Jesus gives him his nickname of Peter, the Rock, and thus we get the imagery of St. Peter with the keys to heaven and the belief that the papacy and the church trace its origins back to Peter. But Peter, as the gospel spokesman for the disciples, also usually gets the thankless task of asking the obvious questions, and is often lambasted by Jesus – “O ye of little faith”, “Get thee behind me, Satan” and so on.

This chapter marks a turn to the darker period of Jesus’ story as well. Here Jesus tells His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, where He will die, but will rise again after three days. The disciples beg Him not to do this; from their point of view, here is a man with a death-wish. Jesus here is willingly walking to His death, with the belief that He must do so in order to be reborn. Imagine if someone you knew and respected started talking like that. Here Jesus is willing to die for His beliefs, feeling that it is better to die for what you believe in than to forsake that in order to live – “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” That’s a thorny problem right there for Christian belief, which considers suicide a mortal sin, yet also praises martyr saints and whose entire basis of faith relies on its founder walking willingly to His death.

Matthew 17

“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart”

There’s a sequence of vignettes in this chapter. First of all, Jesus takes what are presumably His three most trusted disciples (and, I think, the first ones from earlier chapters of Matthew) to a remote mountain spot, where they receive a vision of Moses and Elias (Elijah?), and then the voice of God pronounces Jesus as His son. Jesus tells them not to mention this until three days after His death; they ponder that Elijah is supposed to come first, and Jesus intimates that John the Baptist was Elijah.

In terms of messianic prophecy, John the Baptist is an interesting character, a kind of also-ran, a man who almost could have been the One. A rather trivial comparison, but it kind of reminds me of how in Order of the Phoenix it’s revealed that the prophecy everyone is after could have applied to Neville Longbottom as much as Harry Potter, if circumstances had been slightly different. Perhaps not so trivial, given that Harry has to submit to his own death in order to defeat evil – JK may well have been very deliberate with her parallels. Another such example is the character Logain in the Wheel of Time series. A man who was almost the saviour figure, the Dragon, of that series, but was pipped at the post by another with slightly better prophecy-fulfilling qualifications, Rand al’Thor, who also has to submit to his own death to defeat evil. Here, though, it’s pretty certain that Robert Jordan was being deliberate since that entire series is constructed of parallels and echoes of existing myths and legends.

Anyway, after that digression into Jesus figures in popular fantasy series, back to the original. A man brings his “lunatick” son to Jesus to be healed. The disciples are unable to do it, and Jesus rebukes them for having insufficient faith (which, as we learn here, can move mountains). And then Jesus gets chased for tax avoidance, but although He disagrees with the idea of taxation nevertheless pays up, by a miracle of a fish containing money.

Matthew 18

“And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

This is another chapter that expounds upon Jesus’ philosophy, largely written as reported speech by Jesus, with a few interjections from Peter.

Jesus takes a pastoral approach to His followers, who must become as innocent as children (the various references to children in this chapter are not directly meant as about children, but metaphorically as the followers of Jesus), and will be protected by God. There’s still a bit of old-fashioned smiting and vengeance in this chapter – “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea”, and of course “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire”, a rather wrathful invocation of self-harm (it’s not clear from the context, however, what the “offence” might be. Also such a sentiment seems to contradict Jesus’ later example of a shepherd who spends effort looking for one lost sheep in a hundred, because it is the lost and astray that are in more need of help than those who are not (a kind of spiritual triage). So if the example of the severed hands or plucked eyes is meant to mean one part of a whole, perhaps a member of the religious group, who strays, then are they to be removed or saved?

I like the discussion about how to deal with disputes with one’s “brother” – basically (radical idea), it’s better to discuss it and sort it out amicably. And if this doesn’t work, do it again in front of witnesses; even if the brother still causes offence, at least there are others who know the truth of the matter (sounds a bit like an intervention in group therapy terms). How many times do I forgive my brother? asks Peter. Every single time, replies Jesus. Jesus then gives another example about a man who forgives his servant a monetary debt, but then that servant goes out to extort money from others (presumably to pay his debt), and is punished for it. So again I’m not sure what the end message is. It seems to be that humans should forgive each other, leaving the judgment up to God.

Matthew 19

“Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

Something I’ve been pondering as I’ve been working through Matthew, given the large amount of reported speech attributed to Jesus, is the provenance of the words. It’s pretty well established that the Gospels aren’t contemporary accounts, even if they aren’t written much later after the death of Jesus, they aren’t written by disciples who were there. So presumably there must have been either other writings that haven’t survived, or a strong oral tradition, for the words to survive. To have inspired a dedicated following, Jesus must have been a charismatic speaker, and the use of parables and the like gives His words a memorable quality, but for something like, say, the powerful rhetoric of the sermon on the mount – was it so memorable that people remembered it exactly and Matthew wrote it word for word as it happened, or is Matthew (or his sources) himself able to put great rhetoric into the mouth of Jesus? Or, of course, is the whole thing made up? (Or, well, there’s the version for the faithful, which is that the words are divinely inspired and thus exactly correct).

I wonder this now, because this chapter is another collection of little episodes and collected sayings of Jesus, but they feel a bit simplistic and pat compared to Jesus’ earlier philosophy. So either this is a developmental stage between Jesus’ early thoughts (coming, as they do, after His affirmation that He really is the Son of God), or is it an insertion by someone else?

I wonder this because we start with Jesus debating marriage with the Pharisees, and it feels a little like He gets himself tied in philosophical knots here – and earlier Jesus was less apt to fall into the clumsy traps of the Pharisees. I think perhaps I find this section somewhat problematic as it presents a very hard-line traditionalist view of marriage which seems terribly outdated today – that it is only between men and women, and that divorce is not allowed except under a few circumstances, and that it is unlawful to marry a divorcee. There’s a conflict here between the Jesus who supports traditional Mosaic law, and the Jesus who offers compassion and salvation to sinners and outcasts (and in fact, these proclamations are specifically called out here as running counter to Mosaic law, which does allow divorce).

Jesus then gives advice to a man who wants to know how to be good. Jesus tells him to obey the commandments and to give away his possessions, for “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”. There’s also a repetition of the kind of asceticism and denial of family for the sake of religion – “And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life”. Again this presents a contradiction to me – should a person give up all attachment to other people in order to follow God, or should they honour God by exercising compassion and forgiveness to others? Is a hermit really a holy person when he’s not really doing anything to make life better for anyone else?

Oh, and for adage-spotters, this chapter also includes “suffer the little children”.

Matthew 20

“And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle?”

This chapter starts with the example of the vineyard owner. Is it a parable? I’m not sure, I suppose it is. The vineyard owner goes out and hires some men, to work for a penny a day. Later he goes and hires some more, for the same price, and then later again, a few more times. When it comes time for them to be paid, the owner pays those who were hired at “the eleventh hour” the same pay as those who have worked all day, who are naturally pretty aggrieved at this. The owner resorts to what it has to be said is a piece of sophistry, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” and the story concludes with “moral” that “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen”.

Which doesn’t really make sense. All it really shows is that you may as well wait as long as possible before converting, because you’ll get the same reward but with less effort. And as for many called, few chosen, the story doesn’t imply that at all – all get called, all get chosen and all get the same reward no matter how much they’ve earned it. And as for “first shall be last”, what are the disciples, the first followers of Jesus, to make of that? Especially as the next thing that happens in this chapter is that the “mother of Zebedee's children” (who I think were James and John) pleads with Jesus that her sons will have a special place next to Him in heaven. At which the other disciples do, indeed, complain of favouritism, to which they get “whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant”. Which sounds like another piece of sophistry to me.

Oh, and Jesus has started referring to Himself in the third person; “the Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death”. This is never a good sign.