Recovering the Jewish-Messianic Gospel, Part Four

The gospel of Matthew tells essentially the same story as Luke, but there is now a hint of the Wisdom tradition coming in from the Jewish Old Testament as a way of understanding Jesus.  In the roughly twenty year period between the publication of the gospel of Mark and the publication of the gospels of Luke and Matthew, the early Christians have been poring over the Old Testament scriptures in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Jewish Old Testament) and they are asking questions about the nature and origin of Jesus. They must have begun to make connections between the Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament and the person of Jesus. 

In the Old Testament, wisdom was personified as the first creation of God who then helped him create the rest of the world.  For example Proverbs 8:22-30:

“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way,
Before His works of old.
 “From everlasting I was established,
From the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth.
 “When there were no depths I was brought forth,
When there were no springs abounding with water.
 “Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills I was brought forth;
 While He had not yet made the earth and the fields,
Nor the first dust of the world.
 “When He established the heavens, I was there,
When He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep,
 When He made firm the skies above,
When the springs of the deep became fixed,
 When He set for the sea its boundary
So that the water would not transgress His command,
When He marked out the foundations of the earth;
 Then I was beside Him, as a master workman.”

We also find passages like this in a book called the Wisdom of Solomon.  This book was written sometime in the second century BC and it was part of the Septuagint.  Therefore this book was part of the Scriptures that the 1st century Jewish followers of Jesus were reading.  It’s ideas became part of their worldview.

Notice these passages:

“She [wisdom] is the radiance of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God.” (7:26)

“She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other and she orders all things well.” (8:1)

“Wisdom, who sits beside God’s throne.” (9:4)

This is again a female personification of wisdom.  Here wisdom is an expression of the radiance of God and an agent of his creative power. We also see that wisdom is pictured as sitting beside God’s throne as sort of a second divine being.

Paul takes up this theme in his letter to the Corinthians (perhaps 52 AD), when he wrote that “we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, to Greeks folly, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power and wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:22-24).

The highest Christology found in the gospel of Matthew is 11:27-30 which reads like this in the NASB:

^"All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.
 “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

The parallel passage in Luke 10:22 reads like this: (Mark does not contain any of this):

^"All things have been handed over to Me by My Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.”

Luke's version does not include the passage about coming to Jesus to receive rest.  That is added by Matthew. In this passage we see that Jesus is not only the exclusive revealer of the true God (this was a function of wisdom in the OT), but he is now the source of rest for the human soul. Instead of pointing his followers to the Father, Jesus here is pointing his followers to himself. This is a big shift in the developing Christology of the earliest Christians.

I believe that in reality, Jesus in his earthly ministry consistently pointed people to the Father God as the source of life, forgiveness, hope and spiritual rest.  This is what we see in the earliest gospel - the gospel of Mark.  Paul indicates that God the Father is the Source of spiritual life, but that life is mediated through Jesus.  In Paul's first letter to the Christians at Corinth he writes, "yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist" (1 Corinthians 8:6). The gospel of Mark and the letters of Paul reflect the beliefs of a certain set of Christian communities in the 50's and 60's CE.

The shift here in Matthew, some twenty years later after Mark, and fifty years after Jesus' death, is that now Christian writers are beginning to ascribe to Jesus some of the characteristics of God himself.

James D.G. Dunn observes that, “the claim that Wisdom Christology provides us with the main bridge from the earliest belief in Christ as exalted to the belief that Christ also pre-existed with God prior to his life on earth is a substantial one.”(Christology in the Making, Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans Publishing, 1989, p. 163).

The wisdom tradition leads us to the logos tradition that we will find in both the letter to the Hebrews and in the gospel of John.  That will be the subject of our next post.