Talking about being a disciple/follower of Jesus is not nearly enough. We can walk around making all sorts of statements and bragging about our personal commitments to living the life of a disciple, but if we can’t articulate why discipleship to Jesus is so important, then what good is it to be a disciple? (You can find my brief description of a disciple here.)
Following the toledoth of Matthew 1:1-17, we come Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus. It’s fairly obvious that the Gospels – at least those that give an account of Jesus’ birth – all vary to some degree. Critics love to use things like this to tear apart the reliability of the Bible; it’s only problematic if we refuse to accept the fact that each writer had a specific goal/message in mind when they wrote what they did. Matthew, with his Jewish bent, emphasizes discipleship and proving Jesus messiahship to his Jewish readers – hence the toledoth and his generous use of OT quotations.
Matthew 1:18-25 tells the story of an engaged couple when the wife-to-be is discovered to be pregnant. That doesn’t raise too many eyebrows today, but even for the most irreverent Palestinian, this would have been shocking. Jewish law dictated a rather harsh punishment for a woman who became pregnant outside of marriage. Deuteronomy 22:23-24 states,
If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you.
Filed under: Bible Study, Christian Living, Christianity, Theology
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