This Wednesday, as we prepare for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter 2026, I begin with some general biblical observations and then move on to a reflection about Matthew’s Gospel. Thus: a bit longer this week.

Each of the four Gospels was written to present the message and person of Jesus to a specific historical audience. Depending upon that audience, elements mentioned or stressed in one Gospel were minimized or ignored in another. 

Last week we saw that the Gospel of Mark makes no mention of a virgin birth or of Jesus’ infancy. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke do indeed mention a virgin birth. Are they reporting historic fact or accepted suppositions? Certainly, the two accounts of Jesus’ infancy are quite different in details. Matthew suggests that Joseph and Mary already lived in Bethlehem, where they lived in a house and later fled to Egypt to escape King Herod. Luke indicates that Joseph and Mary travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem for a Roman census, and that their baby, Jesus, was laid in a stable’s manger because there was no room for thel in an inn.

Matthew has Jesus’ family going to Egypt and then returning in order to portray Jesus as the new Moses. The Gospels, again, are about the meaning of the Christ-event. They are anchored in the life and meaning of the historical Jesus of Nazareth and belief in him. They do have historical elements but, strictly speaking, they are not historical accounts.

About all scholars of antiquity agree that the man Jesus of Nazareth existed, but scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the biblical accounts. The Gospels contain: bits of history, parables, metaphor, symbol, re-interpreted passages from the Hebrew Scriptures, and imagined scenarios for key events in the life of Jesus. 

Translations of the scriptures are necessary, of course, because people in different places and times speak a variety of languages. Most of our contemporary scripture readers are not fluent in biblical Hebrew, Greek, or Latin. I am, perhaps, a bit unconventional. I can squeak by with my Hebrew, but my Greek and Latin are really quite good.

Ideally, people who want a more comprehensive understanding of biblical texts should use a good biblical commentary, because all translations are filtered through the vision and vocabulary of the translator. Sometimes this creates problems in correctly understanding a passage. 

In recent years, for example, scholars of the New Testament have suggested that we seriously reconsider how one translates the Greek term ioudaios, originally translated in English as “Jews.” Ioudaios is more accurately translated as “Judean,” not “Jew.” The Greek ioudaios and the Latin iudaeus come from the biblical Hebrew word Yehudi meaning “from the Tribe of Judah.”  

 

[Please note: Up until the year 1524, there was no letter “J” in the alphabet, just the letter “I”. The letter “J” was invented by Gian Giorgio Trissino, an Italian author and grammarian who lived from 1478 to 1550. By way of example, the initials INRI so often seen on crucifixes, represent the Latin words: Iēsus Nazarēnus, Rēx Iūdaeōrum) the Latin inscription (found in John 19:19), which in English translates correctly to “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Judeans.” But not “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”]

 

Strictly speaking, there were no people called “Jews” in the days of Jesus. There were Hebrews, anchored in the Abrahamic religious tradition. And the word “Jew” did not appear in the first English translations of the New Testament. The best-known early editions of the New Testament in English are the Douai Rheims edition and the King James Authorized Edition. The Douai Rheims translation was first printed in 1582; but the word “Jew” did not appear in it. The King James Authorized translation was first published in 1611. The word “Jew” did not appear in it either. 

For the very first time, the word “Jew” appeared in both of these well-known editions in their 18th century revised versions. “So, what?” a friend asked. Well, since the late 19th and early 20th centuries the word “Jew” has been used increasingly in a pejorative way and has greatly contributed to antisemitism. Expressions like “Jew someone” or “Jew lawyer” or “Jew down” have been common negative terms.

Antisemitism, unfortunately, is once again showing its ugly face on both sides of the Atlantic. According to a January 2026 UNESCO report, antisemitism and Holocaust denial have reached levels not seen since World War II.

Antisemitism arose because, over the years, a great distortion grew up around “Jews,” linking them with the death of Jesus and with evil and avarice. One can recall Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 CE play “The Jew of Malta” and its demonic image of Jews. And in Shakespeare (1564-1626) we find the “Jew” moneylender Shylock and his bloodthirsty desire to claim his “pound of flesh.” Today, some people try to avoid using the word “Jew” and use “Jewish” instead. Nevertheless, in the days of Jesus there were no Jews. There were Hebrews, who belonged to the Abrahamic religious tradition. Jesus grew up in that Hebrew tradition.

“Jews” did not condemn Jesus. Judean religious leaders in Jerusalem condemned him. “Jews” did not kill Jesus. Judean religious leaders turned Jesus over to the Roman Pontius Pilate, the fifth prefect of the Roman province of Judea. The Romans crucified Jesus. Pontius Pilate called Jesus “King of the Judeans” to anger the Judeans and to stress in a demeaning way that he saw Jesus as a troublemaker, promoting rebellion against the Roman Empire.

Now to focus more directly on the Gospel of Matthew:

Last week I stressed that the Gospel According to Mark was designed for Gentile-Christians in Rome, and composed by an anonymous author, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Mark’s Gentile-Christians in Rome faced and feared persecution and death at the hands of Roman authorities; but they also had to live with discrimination from Hebrew-Christians living in Rome.

Matthew’s Gospel, on the other hand, was actually written for Hebrew-Christians. 

Although a second-century tradition had held that the author was Matthew, a former tax collector and one of the Twelve Apostles, contemporary scholars maintain that we have no direct evidence of that Matthew’s authorship. The Gospel According to Matthew, was most likely written by an anonymous Hebrew-Christian scribe between the years 80 and 90 CE. He was not an eyewitness to the Jesus events but collected various traditions and sayings by and about Jesus and put them in one long essay. Some scholars say the final edition could even have been written as late as 110 CE.

The Gospel of Matthew, however, does contain some apparent contradictions and internal tensions, because the final author simply reproduced testimonies from multiple authoritative sources, without checking the implications. One suspects that he could have used a good text editor. There are, for example, contradictory expressions about God in Matthew’s Gospel: portraying God as a demanding hard-nosed judge focused on strict obedience but also as a supportive and loving God who actively participates in human history.

The author of Matthew wrote for a community of mostly Greek-speaking Hebrew-Christians located in Antioch in Roman Syria.There were some Gentile-Christian members in the community, but they were expected to obey Hebrew religious norms. Perhaps even circumcision. Jesus in the Gospel According to Matthew came, therefore, “not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it” (Matthew 5:17).

For the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus was the great embodiment of all preceding Hebrew history. Matthew’s author constructed a Jesus infancy narrative that begins with “A genealogy of Jesus Christ, Son of David, son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1-17). Matthew’s genealogy features four notable Hebrew women, a number of fulfillment passages that relate Jesus to prophetic Hebrew Scripture texts; and allusions to famous Hebrew men of the past. 

I would again stress the need to recognize that the Gospels are not intended to be historical biographies but rather theological “portraits” as my former friend, biblical scholar, and Catholic University of Leuven doctoral graduate, Fr. Donald Senior (1940-2022) described them in his 1992  book Jesus: A Gospel Portrait. The infancy narratives, for example, do not attempt to give us an historical account of Jesus’ birth but rather, to answer the theological question of “who is Jesus of Nazareth?” This does not mean that the infancy narratives do not contain some history, in theand sense that we understand history today.

We do know historically that Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod, appointed “King of the Judeans” by the Roman Senate in 40 BCE and he secured the throne in 37 BCE after defeating the Hasmonean king Antigonus with Roman support.

On the other hand, we are unable to verify historically that Joseph and Mary migrated to Bethlehem because of a census. Actually, historical records place the census event around 6–7 CE, thus after Herod’s death in 4 BCE

Many contemporary scholars, in fact, presume Jesus was actually born in Nazareth.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus, like Moses, was rescued as an infant from a murderous king (Matthew 2:16-18). In Matthew’s narration, Jesus’ ministry begins with three temptations in the desert. They correspond to the experiences of Israel in the desert, after the Exodus. Jesus is God’s great liberator, the new Moses.

The Gospel of Matthew includes some 600 of the Gospel of Mark’s 661 verses but it adds about 220 additional verses, shared by Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark.

Matthew contains five discourses by Jesus: Matthew 5:1-7:29; 10:1-42; 13:1-52; 18:1-35; and 23:1 through 25:46 which symbolized, for the evangelist’s Hebrew-Christian audience, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. 

• In the first of these, the Sermon on Mount, the rabbi Jesus, like a new Moses, presents his definitive teaching about what it means to be his follower. Jesus, in Matthew, is the great teacher. Notice how Jesus so often says “you have heard it said of old . . . but I say to you.” (Matthew 5:21-22) Rabbi Jesus takes a teaching found in the Hebrew Scriptures and then intensifies and expands on it.
• In the second, Jesus commissions the Twelve Disciples, symbolic again for the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
• In the third discourse, we see opposition to Jesus coming to a head and accusations that his deeds are done through the power of Satan. Jesus in turn accuses his opponents of blaspheming the Holy Spirit and challenges his disciples to understand his teachings.
• In the fourth discourse, we see that the increasing opposition to Jesus will result in his crucifixion in Jerusalem and that his disciples must therefore prepare for his absence. The instructions for the post-crucifixion community emphasized responsibility and humility. In this section, Matthew 16:16,  we read as well that Simon, newly renamed Peter (from Petros, in Greek, meaning “rock”), calls Jesus “the Christ, the son of the living God” and Jesus states that on this “bedrock” (petra in Greek) he will build his “community.” The Greek word in the text is ekklesia which is often mistranslated as “church.” 

 

The official Roman Catholic interpretation has traditionally been that Jesus was making Peter “head of the church.” But another interpretation is that the rock Jesus was referring to was not Peter, but Peter’s statement in Matthew 16:16: “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” In this view, the “rock” is the truthfulness of that statement. The community of Christ is built on the rock-solid truth that Jesus is God’s Chosen One and the eternal Son of God. 

The authenticity of this uniquely Matthew material, however, has been widely discussed and has been challenged on the basis that verses Matthew 16:16–19 are found only in Matthew.

Nowhere in the New Testament is Peter described as being supreme over the other apostles. And as I have written before, we know that Peter did not set up the Christian community in Rome and that Peter was never a bishop of Rome.

Peter certainly was not “the first pope.” The Roman Catholic theologians Raymond Brown (1928 – 1998) and John P. Meier (1942 – 2022) were quite emphatic about this in their book Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Christianity, (Paulist Press 1983).

This is not an anti-Catholic statement. I am still a life-long Roman Catholic and a Roman Catholic theologian. At some point however, official Roman Catholic self-understanding will have to come to terms with this historical reality.

 

• In the fifth discourse, Jesus travels toward Jerusalem, and the opposition intensifies. When he arrives, he is soon in conflict with the Temple’s traders and religious leaders. The disciples ask about the future, and in his final discourse Jesus speaks of the coming end. Jesus warns that there will be false messiahs, earthquakes, and persecutions. His disciples must prepare themselves for ministry to all nations. Matthew notes that Jesus has finished all his words, and attention now turns to the crucifixion. 

 

The central message of Jesus’ preaching in the Gospel of Matthew is the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven and the need for repentance, and a complete change of heart and conduct, on the part of those who are to receive this great gift of God (Matthew 4:17).

The Kingdom of Heaven is both a present reality and a future hope. It is dawning already. The ethic that Jesus lived and taught is exemplified in the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew’s chapters 5, 6, and 7. This is one of the most widely quoted sections of the canonical Gospels and includes some of the best-known sayings attributed to Jesus, such as the Beatitudes and what many consider to be the central tenets of Christian discipleship.

[I explored the Beatitudes in my Another Voice, Ash Wednesday reflection, on February 18, 2026.]

In Matthew’s Gospel, Galilee is the setting for most of Jesus’ ministry. He leaves there for Judea only in Matthew 19:1. But  Jesus’ ministry in the Judean city Jerusalem, the goal of his journey, is limited to just a few days (Matthew 21:1–25:46).

Thinking of Easter, the account of Jesus’ Resurrection, in Matthew 28, highlights a dramatic, apocalyptic event, starting with a violent earthquake and a stone rolled away by an angel, marking the triumph of God over death. Matthew in fact is the only Gospel to describe such an earthquake and the descent of an angel to open the tomb, making the Resurrection as an act of Divine power.

In a passage unique to Matthew (28:11-15), terrified guards report to the chief priests, who then bribe them to spread a false story that Jesus’ disciples stole his body.

Women are the first to witness the risen Christ, emphasizing their role as followers and proclaimers. Mary the Magdalene was the first of Jesus’ followers to bear witness to his Resurrection in the Gospel of Mark. In the Gospel of Matthew, she and the other Mary are the first disciples to encounter the risen Jesus, who instructs them to send the disciples to Galilee. Important and powerful women!

The Gospel of Matthew concludes with Jesus meeting his disciples on a mountain in Galilee, claiming “all authority in heaven and on earth,” and commanding them to make disciples of all nations, promising his presence until the end of the age. (Matthew 28:16-20)

 

Happy Easter and warmest regards to all!

Easter is our hope and our challenge: Living in the Spirit of Jesus.

• Jack

P.S.  Taking some family Easter time. My next post will be on April 22.