Bible Study: Parody and Subversion in Matthew's Gospel

Send us Fan Mail After having gathered in the lost - the tax/toll collectors and "sinners" - he suddenly gets called to a high status household, but on the way heals a marginalized woman suffering from menstrual bleeding. Chapters 8 and 9 have Jesus entering the worlds and lives of people who are very separate from each other: a leper, gentiles, women and men, social outcasts, low and hi...

Send us Fan Mail Jesus has to explain why now is the time to party with the sinners.

Send us Fan Mail The campaign of healing takes the form of a meal with "sinners."

Send us Fan Mail Who has the authority to forgive sins? Only God? Who has the authority to speak for God then? The ruling classes in antiquity used systems of temples, priests, and sacrifice to control the people. Jesus demonstrates to the people that they don't need any of that to have good standing before God and each other.

Send us Fan Mail Jesus crosses to "the other side" and encounters the demons of empire.

Send us Fan Mail The third detailed healing: Jesus crosses the gender divide and continues his campaign of healing.

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I make a mistake in the recording. See if you can catch it...you don't have to be a Bible Scholar, you just need to be paying attention.  I only caught it after it was all done; there is no way to fix it, and I don't have the time or energy to go back and correct it, so let's make it a game. If you find it, let me know on the Facebook page.

Send us Fan Mail Jesus usurps the power and authority of the priests.

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Send us Fan Mail Jesus provides a prayer for his movement rooted in peasant realities of hunger, debt, and the threat of legal prosecution as well as the ancient story of the Exodus liberation.

Send us Fan Mail Jesus lifts up the mutual aid economy of the peasants and tears down the patronage system of the empire.

Send us Fan Mail What's the big deal about taking Oaths? Also, women in Nigeria in 2002 used a tactic that Matthew's Jesus prescribes.

Send us Fan Mail Jesus attempts to build a strong movement, urging solidarity between peasants and curtailing male sexual abuse of and power over women.

Send us Fan Mail Jesus begins laying out his new law or teaching for the new Society. This new teaching inverts the male honor code of the first century Mediterranean World.

Send us Fan Mail Jesus' campaign of healing provides an alternative to more conventional military campaigns (parody?) and signals the dawning of a new society.

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, to address our current situation, I take a break from Matthew and hop over to the Gospel of Luke to look at the Parable of the Dishonest Manager - A strange parable for strange times. I am indebted to Ched Myers for opening up the secrets of this parable for me. You can find his article on it at www.radicaldiscipleship.net under the title Discipleship as Defection...

Send us Fan Mail Jesus takes up John's work of leading a movement for The New Society (Kingdom of Heaven). Matthew's imagery reminds the reader of the setting of this story in the Roman Empire. Jesus liberates his disciples from bondage to the empire, setting them free to join the movement.

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we follow Jesus through his "vision quest," as he retraces his people's journey in the wilderness through a time of testing/temptation. Jesus has to prove what sort of Messiah or "Son of God" he will be. Please leave comments at the Facebook page (click on the Facebook icon at the top)

Send us Fan Mail If this series has not been controversial already, it gets even more controversial in this episode. I make the claim that Jesus joins a liberation movement already in progress to get his start as "Messiah." Also I will assert that temples in the ancient world were government institutions that served as mechanisms through which the ruling classes controlled the people. A...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Jesus and his family become refugees. Fleeing their home country, which is under the brutal occupation of a foreign empire, they take refuge in Egypt, which, according to their national history, was both the place of their people's slavery and also a refuge for those escaping the Babylonian invasion. With this story, the author of Matthew introduces the theme...

Send us Fan Mail The story of the Magi evokes sentimental, feel good memories of Christmas for many of us, but this story, for its original audience, signaled hopes of liberation from a brutal occupation.

Send us Fan Mail This episode is the only one that will not look at one particular text (all the other episodes will continue progressively through Matthew), but rather at the book as a whole. I make the argument in this episode that the whole Gospel of Matthew parodies a genre in the ancient world to get across a very serious message.

Send us Fan Mail The "virgin birth" of Jesus, the title "Son of God," and the concept of the forgiveness of sins all had resonances in the first century Mediterranean world that they no longer have today. Understanding what those terms and concepts signaled, as well as how this story "fulfilled" the prophetic texts will greatly expand our understanding of what this st...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I describe how the genealogy in Matthew is actually a parody of a genealogy. In the gospel in which Jesus instructs his followers to "call no one on earth 'father,'" this list of fathers is intentionally ironic. I also talk about other "trickster" texts in the Bible such as the praise of King Solomon and the story of the rise of Josep...