finitum non capax infiniti

If you read Matthew’s Gospel without reading Luke’s, you would be under the impression that the hometown of Joseph and Mary was Bethlehem. They are not presented by Matthew as traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem and then back to Nazareth. Rather, they are presented as being in Bethlehem, traveling down to Egypt, traveling back to the “land of Israel,” and then settling in Nazareth because they were warned in a dream not to enter Judea.

It’s a good thing that I’m not a fan of harmonization, because this would drive me wild. It’s also a good thing that I’m not a fan of reading the Gospels in a strictly historical way, because this would also drive me wild. Instead, I would much rather focus on the theological reasons why Matthew shapes his narrative in this way.

In the last quotation that we focused on (Matthew 2.15), we noticed that Matthew places Christ in a geographical location and then explains the significance of that location by quoting from the Old Testament. The same can be said of Matthew 2.18.

After Matthew quotes Jeremiah 31.15 in relationship to Herod’s rage, he turns to focus on the family of Christ. Joseph is told by the angel of the Lord in a dream that it would now be safe for Joseph to leave Egypt. What is interesting is that the place the angel tells Joseph to return to is not Nazareth or Bethlehem, but “the land of Israel.” Here Matthew is presenting the Messiah, the savior and liberator of Israel, as traveling from Egypt to the “land of Israel.” Does that sound familiar?

I would propose that the usage of Hosea 11.1, the geographical locations of Egypt and “land of Israel,” and a king killing babies are all used my Matthew to conjure up thoughts of Moses and the exodus narrative. Here we have Jesus as the Messiah who is also a new and better Moses who, unlike Moses, will now enter into the land and tie together two defining moments in Israel’s history: the exodus and the return from exile. Christ, as the new-and-better Moses will come from Egypt to Israel and lead them to a final and ultimate liberation. So even though Matthew does not quote from either of these narratives, his “use” of the OT in shaping his Gospel narrative is more than obvious.

Matthew moves on to mention that Joseph was warned in a dream not to go to Judea. So Joseph travels with his family to Galilee and settles in a town called Nazareth (which was not his hometown in Matthew’s narrative like it was in Luke’s narrative). Matthew, once again, places Jesus in a geographical location and then explains the significance of this location with a “quotation” from the OT: “He shall be called a Nazarene.”

There’s only one minor problem with this: this is not a verse that is found in the Hebrew Scriptures. As a matter of fact, Nazareth was a newly formed town during this time period and is never mentioned in the OT or in any other non-Christian Jewish literature before it is listed in an inscription of the late 3rd century which lists Jewish priestly courses. In the words of my ghetto neighborhood: What’s the dealie yo?

Some commentators attempt to clear this up my seeing a connection with Isaiah 11.1: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.” The Hebrew term for “branch” here is netzer which, they say, is a play on the term for Nazareth. This is a stretch and would assume that the readers would catch on to a word play that is being written in Greek, playing on a word in Hebrew, and not even including the same verb (“he shall be called” in Matthew; “There shall come forth” in Isaiah”). Besides this fact, Matthew quotes explicitly from Isaiah 6 other times in his gospel. Only once does he not use Isaiah’s name (Matthew 2.5) and that time he uses the genitive singular form “prophet” (Greek: prophetou), not the genitive plural form “prophets” (Greek: prophetwn). In other words, this is highly unlikely and I would go so far as to say wrong.

Others suggest a connection between Nazareth and the Nazirite vow of Samson (Judges 13.5, 7; 16.17). The problems with this is that neither Samson nor any other Nazarite was seen as being Messianic. This is even more unlikely.

Others notice the unique introductory formula of the quotation. Normally Matthew will either name a prophet or, more generally, just use the term prophet and then use the participle “who said” (Greek: legontos). In this introductory formula he uses the genitive plural form of prophets and then uses the dependent clause marker “that” (Greek: hoti) which usually functions as quotation marks in Greek (which is why the term “that” does not appear in most English translations). Commentators who take this route believe that it was not a quotation of a single prophet that Matthew was referring to, but a particular theme that one can find throughout the prophets. In other words, collectively the prophets say that the Messiah shall be called a Nazarene. The only problem with this is that you cannot find this theme in the prophets. Once again, the term Nazarene is not found in the OT (the closest is Judges 13.5 where it reads that Samson will be a Nazirite).

There are other, more creative interpretations of what this quotation is referring to, but the facts remain the same: Matthew explicitly attributes to “the prophets” something that is not found in the prophets.

Does this logically lead us to the conclusion that Matthew makes up a verse to make his case of Jesus as the Messiah? If not this, then what would be another explanation?