Matthew 1:18-25

Matthew 1:18-25     The Birth of Jesus the Christ/Messiah 

The custom within the culture was that a couple be first betrothed (engaged) for some time before living together as husband and wife. 

In this case, Mary’s conception was the work of the Holy Spirit. Matthew offered no further explanation.

The lack of detail is remarkable. Matthew was not concerned with history as such. The story emphasised Joseph’s justness. That justness was the source of his quandary. To keep the law would have meant accusing his betrothed of adultery, for which the penalty was death (though it is uncertain whether the law was observed at the time). To have her killed, or even shamed, did not sit well with him. His compromise solution was not to marry her, but at the same time not to expose her to shame. By privately divorcing her, Joseph would have declared her free to be married by the presumed biological father – should that person choose to accept the opportunity.

It would be hard to see how Matthew could have declared that Joseph’s decision was aimed to protect her from public disgrace. She would have been an unmarried mother. To divorce her would have accentuated her shame, unless Joseph assumed that she would be quickly married by the [presumed] biological father. Divorce may have salvaged Joseph’s honour, but left Mary pregnant and unmarried.  The best way to protect her would have been to forget his honour and to go ahead and marry her (as he later did).

Joseph’s dilemma was resolved in a dream – as would happen on two more occasions. The dream was Matthew’s method of explaining what belonged to the realm of mystery, and angels revealed the otherwise unknowable mind of God.

The Book of Genesis had told the story of another Joseph, also son of Jacob, taken as prisoner to Egypt. In Israel, and later in Egypt, Joseph received the guidance of God through the medium of dreams, of which he became a practised interpreter. The connection may have echoed consciously or unconsciously in Matthew’s mind.

Holy Spirit was not an expression of Trinitarian theology but referred commonly to the direct action of God in human affairs. Joseph’s Davidic descent was emphasised to highlight Jesus’ messianic credentials. No further detail was given about Jesus’ origin (in marked contrast to Luke’s narrative). Joseph was instructed to name the child, and thus formally to accept him as his legal child.

The name Jesus was a variant of Joshua/ Hoshea. (After the Babylonian exile, the name acquired its Aramaic equivalent Jeshua, which in Greek was expressed as Jesus.) The meaning of the name was “God saves”, which accounts for Matthew’s comment: for he will save his people from their sins. Jesus’ coming into the world was tied to his mission of salvation (liberation or relief) from the oppressive and destructive dominance of people’s (and nations’) sinful interactions.

Back in the eighth century before Christ, the prophet Isaiah had looked forward to the birth of a son to Ahaz, King of Judah. The period was marked by the invasion of Israel and Judah by the Assyrian armies (which eventually led to the conquest and deportation of the people of the northern kingdom of Israel, and threatened the existence of the southern kingdom of Judah as well).

In fact, Ahaz soon had a son Ezekiah, who turned out to be a faithful king (one of the few). Within a few years of his birth, the northern kingdom had been overcome and much of Judea overrun (though it managed to retain its independence). Times would be tough for the growing prince, and food would be scarce, but he would survive. 

Isaiah said that the young prince’s name would be Immanuel (God with us), meaning that Hezekiah would be proof that God was, indeed, with the people.

Matthew saw Jesus’ conception as fulfilling what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet. The young woman of Isaiah’s prophecy simply referred to her age. The word used by Isaiah did not directly mean virgin, though, given the strict customs of the time, it would have presumed virginity. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated in Greek, the version with which Matthew was familiar, the word had been rendered as virgin.

Fulfilling the Prophecies

Matthew would make frequent reference to the Law and the Prophets finding fuller meaning in [or literal expression] the deeds and words of Jesus. What did he mean?

Perhaps he meant that many of the words and details of the prophecies applied in fact to Jesus, and were fulfilled literally in him. In that case, the prophets would have been inspired by the Holy Spirit to speak of the distant future, not so much for the sake of their immediate hearers, but for those who, in Matthew’s day, would read them.

There are problems with this understanding. 

• The great majority of prophecies were never fulfilled literally by Jesus, or by anyone.
• Even where some particulars coincided with details from the life and teaching of Jesus, the similarities were very limited.
• The prophecies would have lacked impact on the audience to which they were addressed, and the prophets would have been judged irrelevant.
• For God to treat prophets as mere secretaries, recording details of future happenings about which they otherwise knew nothing, would seem to demean their human dignity. As the Second Vatican Council insisted: “... in sacred scripture God speaks through human beings in human fashion” [# 110].
• To have people unknowingly living out the literal details of past prophecies raises the question of how free they would be. It would engage the perennial problem, ultimately unresolved, of the connection between genuine human freedom and divine foreknowledge.

However, the fulfilment of prophecy can be understood otherwise. The prophets were men (generally) who had an irrepressible hope in the presence and saving action of God among his people. It was this that they tried to share with their contemporaries. They called to conversion and to trust. Their predictions were meant to serve as warnings or consolations for their actual hearers. They were a kind of general indication of consequences of actions and attitudes, rather than precise forecasts of actual future events. If people remained faithful to the covenant, they would experience blessing. If they became unfaithful, they would experience oppression.

Prophets were concerned with the immediate present or the imminent future, not some distant future. Their constant refrain was that God would be faithful, somehow, if they remained faithful now.

As applied to Jesus, the same saving action of God invoked in the past by the prophets was particularly operative now in Jesus. God was definitively at work. The saving action, which up until the advent of Jesus had been partial, was about to become complete; it was in the process of fulfilment.

Why did Matthew choose particular prophetic passages (as he in fact did)? It seems that he was attracted by the happy congruence of words and phrases. In the case just referred to, the words “pregnant maiden” and the name “Immanuel”, and the wider prophecy from which they were drawn, were wonderful instances of the on-going, ever-faithful saving action of God, now about to come to its climax in the life and the teaching of Jesus.

The members of Matthew’s Christian community were largely Jewish, or familiar with the Jewish Scriptures. They were familiar with the stories in their Scriptures and even with the words and images. They loved to hear echoes of these in Matthew’s account of Jesus, and these echoes served to alert them to their original contexts which often threw further light on the words and deeds of Jesus.

Matthew’s intention was to emphasise, as clearly as possible, the virginal conception of Jesus. He was not particularly interested in Mary’s on-going virginity. That became more important in later Christian devotion. His stating that Joseph and Mary had no marital relations until she had borne a son did not necessarily infer that they did have sexual relations afterwards. The word translated before refers simply to the period between when she conceived until the time Jesus was born, with no implications about the future.