Matthew 1:18, God the Son? Part I of IV

//In several past blog posts, I introduced the high Christology of John’s Gospel. In that Gospel, Jesus is presented clearly as God. On the other side of the spectrum, however, is Matthew’s Gospel. These two gospels–Matthew and John–build upon some of the same building blocks, but have gone two different directions. Nowhere is this more evident than in their differing Christology.

We’ve discussed John, so over the course of several posts, I’d like to discuss Matthew’s take on who Jesus is. The conclusion, each time, will be that it never crossed Matthew’s mind that Jesus is God.

In preparing for this discussion, I urge you to recognize that all of the Gospels were written anonymously. All were written between 40 and 70 years after Jesus died, by men who had most likely never seen Jesus. All were written in Greek, not Jesus’ native Aramaic tongue. It is important for this study to divorce yourself from the assumption that the authors of Matthew and John sat together at the feet of Jesus, learning the same doctrine.

Let’s begin with Matthew’s greatest contribution to Christian theology. It is this: Jesus is God’s son. Now, this doesn’t sound very astounding at first. Every Gospel writer calls Jesus the Son of God, and so does Paul, the earliest Christian writer. But how might this phrase have been meant by other writers? In the century of Christ, there were two common understandings of how this phrase was meant in the Old Testament:

[1] A minor deity or angel. The “sons of God” procreated with the daughters of men in Genesis, and the “sons of God” traversed the earth in Job.

[2] One ordained by God, such as the kings of Israel.