Introduction

          In this paper I will briefly examine the Gospel Tradition as it is formulated in the Gospels of Matthew and John.  In the first part of the paper I will explicate the typological connection between the Gospel of Matthew and the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament).  This typological form of interpretation, which is normally overlooked in historical critical research, views certain soteriological events of the Old Testament as being definitively reenacted and fulfilled in the New Testament.  This interpretive system is embedded in the documents themselves and was used extensively in the early Church in order to show how the New Covenant is hidden within the Old and the Old Covenant is made manifest in the New [see Catechism of the Catholic Church, #129].  Thus the Gospel of Matthew is intentionally designed to express a relationship between the New Law and the Torah, and it does this through its overall schematic structure in which it mimics the five-fold structure of the Pentateuch.

          Following this, in the second part of the paper I will point out some difficulties inherent within the historical critical method itself, and will focus particularly on its tendency to deconstruct the Gospel narratives.  By deconstructing the texts this method of research destroys the overarching theme inherent within the texts, thus clouding the archetypal image of Jesus as the suffering Messiah, and distorting the author's main intention.  This deconstruction involves an additional with this method of modern research, which concerns its rationalist approach to the documents and its denial of the supernatural elements in the texts.  In order to illustrate how this demythologization prevents one from understanding the narratives overall theme, I will briefly examine the structure of the Gospel of John and its relationship to the Jewish liturgical system and mythic time.  The historical critical method often fails to recognize the limitations of historical research and thus creates its own image of the so called historical Jesus which ultimately has no basis in the original texts themselves.

Typology

          As I indicated above, the Gospel of Matthew can be divided into five major discourses corresponding to the five books of Moses.  In his book Myth and Ritual in Christianity, Alan Watts showed that each discourse ends with the standard phrase, "And it came to pass that when Jesus had made an end of . . ." [Watts, 125] in its concluding sentence.  With this information he was able to divide the Gospel into five books as follows:  "(1) Chapter 3:1 to 7:29; (2) 8:1 to 11:1; (3) 11:2 to 19:2; (4) 19:3 to 26:2; [and] (5) 26:3 to the end" [Watts, 125].  The purpose of this structural typology is to emphasize the fact that ". . . the Gospel is to be the New Law superseding the Old Law of Moses" [Watts, 125].  This five-fold structure helps to reveal the typological relationship between Jesus, who is portrayed as the Lawgiver of the New Covenant, and Moses, who received the Old Law from God on Mount Sinai.  In presenting the gospel this way the author of Matthew also highlights a difference between the two dispensations, and the preeminence of the New Covenant because it was given directly by God incarnate to mankind, while the Old Covenant is given by God through the mediation of Moses, a mere man.  In addition, this connection to the Pentateuch is, no doubt, the reason why the Gospel of Matthew was placed at the beginning of the New Testament canon, thus completing the correspondence between the two Testaments.

          The connection between Jesus and Moses in the Gospel of Matthew is quite striking.  As Moses crossed the Red Sea by parting the waters, so Jesus crossed the sea of Galilee by walking on water, both of them having control of this primal element.  While the people of Israel wandered through the wilderness, Moses distributed the manna from heaven, and in a similar fashion Jesus fed more than 5,000 people by miraculously multiplying the five loaves of bread and two fish.  It should also be noted that this miracle is connected to the miracle of the Eucharist in which Christ, the true bread of heaven, feeds the New People of God with his body and blood.  Another of the connections between Matthew and the Pentateuch is shown when Christ delivers the New Law in his Sermon on the Mount, symbolically reenacting and fulfilling the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.  Jean Danielou points out that, "The parallel between Moses and Christ terminates in the Transfiguration, with its numerous references to the Exodus:  Moses himself, the cloud, the Divine Voice, [and] the tabernacles" [Danielou, 160].

          Next, the Gospel of Matthew presents Christ as the true Israel.  Christ, like the people of Israel in the book of Exodus, is called by God out of Egypt.  Later, after Christ's baptism in the river Jordan, which mystically represents the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, Jesus fasts for forty days and nights in the wilderness.  This corresponds to the forty years of Israel's wandering in the Sinai wilderness, and just as the ancient people of Israel were tempted, so too Jesus is tempted during his time in the wilderness.  As Danielou indicates, "[Matthew's] narrative of the Temptation presents it as the true Exodus, in which the true Israel, both in the desert and on the mountain top, offers the contrast of his own fidelity to the waywardness of the first Israel in the desert of Sinai" [Danielou, 159].  These are just a few of the connections between the Gospel of Matthew and the Pentateuch.

          Greater attention should be given to the typological structure of the four Gospels in scholarly research because it reveals more about how they were composed and what message their authors intended to convey in writing them, but this is difficult for many modern exegetes to do in that they are attempting to reconstruct the so called historical Jesus, and thus they tend to discount the schematic structure inherent in the gospel narratives because they see them as later non historical developments in the understanding of Jesus and his mission in the faith of the Church.  But as I indicated above, Matthew portrays Christ as the new Moses and the true Israel and to discount this fact ultimately damages the integrity of the Gospel text itself.  The author of Matthew intentionally manipulated the information he had about Jesus in order to convey this specific archetypal image of Christ, and though he used historical materials he was not writing a historical narrative in the modern sense of the word.  It is important to note that each of the Gospels presents Jesus in a different way and with a different emphasis, for example John's Gospel presents Jesus as the new Adam and the Word of God.  The connection between the Gospel of John and the book of Genesis is evident in various parts of that Gospel's narrative.  The most obvious examples of this are the creation stories in the first chapters of each book, and John's crucifixion narrative which recapitulates the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.  So the typological method of interpretation allows one to see the overall schematic structure of the Gospel books, and thus dramatically highlights their connection to the Old Testament.

Mythic Time

          In this section of the paper I will discuss the difficulties with the historical critical method of interpretation that I mentioned earlier in the introduction.  In doing this I am not saying that this method of interpretation is pointless, but I am merely pointing out some of its limitations.  The first difficulties involve the method's deconstruction of the Gospel texts; because though the exegete can learn much about the formation of the texts by tearing them apart, he does this at a price, in that he loses the overall compositional structure of the texts.  This is what is called the Fallacy of Composition, in which one takes a thing apart, breaking it down into its component parts, and then says that the parts equal the whole.  But if I have a clock, and I take it apart, losing none of the pieces, but I lack the knowledge necessary to reassemble it, I no longer possess a clock.  The whole is more than the sum of its parts.  Along with the pulling a part of the text there is a tendency to discount anything of a supernatural nature, which is a denial of the world view of the author of the text.  As Luke Timothy Johnson points out, for those in the early Christian community, "signs and wonders done in the name of Jesus are a regular occurrence, hearing of such deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospel narratives is no surprise or scandal" [Johnson, 145].  When a modern scholar discounts these elements, he is ultimately distorting the intention of the author who recorded these events in order to establish the community's view of whom Jesus is.  The Gospels are not historical documents in the modern sense of the term; they are intended to express the living faith of the first generation of Christians.

          The Jesus Seminar is an example of the historical critical school of thought run wild.  It is an excellent illustration of what can happen if one fails to take account of the schematic structure of the Gospel narratives.  If this occurs, it is then possible to ". . . impose patterns on the Gospel materials other than those given by the Gospel narratives themselves.  If meaning derives above all from narrative, and if we remove the meaning of Jesus' ministry given it by the Gospels, we are simply left with a pile of pieces that must be reconstructed on the basis of some other pattern" [Johnson, 151].  In the Jesus Seminar you actually have ‘scholars' voting on what they think Jesus actually did and said [cf. Funk, 35], as if this is a valid form of scholarship.  The Jesus Seminar is thus trying to impose a pattern on the Gospel materials which is foreign to the documents themselves, instead of trying to see the inherent compositional pattern unique to each Gospel narrative, or even to look for a common elements among them, these scholars try to configure the accounts to fit their preconceived notions.

          As I indicated earlier, the Gospel of Matthew presents Christ as the new Moses, as the New Lawgiver; while Mark presents Christ in his Gospel as the Son of God; and Luke sees him as the Son of Man; and finally John presents Christ as the creative Logos (the Word).  Each approaches the Christ event from a different angle, but as Luke Timothy Johnson points out in his book, The Real Jesus, there is one element common to all four Gospels, and that is, "The  image of Jesus as the one who suffers in obedience and in service" [Johnson, 153].  The passion narrative dominates all four of the Gospel texts, though this idea of suffering is not confined to the closing chapters of the four Gospels.  Suffering is thus the common archetypal image of Christ, and it is archetypical in that it is also meant to be recapitulated within his disciples.  I am using this term in the sense in which Mircea Eliade used it in his book The Myth of the Eternal Return, and this brings me to another weakness in the historical critical method's scientific approach to the Gospel of Matthew.

          This difficulty concerns the historical nature of the Gospel of Matthew and the concept of history itself.  Is the Gospel of Matthew simply a historical text?  Or, is it a document of faith, produced in order to express the belief of a living community?  I accept that the Gospel of Matthew contains historical information, as do the other Gospels, but is it properly speaking a book of history?  My answer to these questions, based on my research into the religious nature of the Gospel text, is to say that it is not historical in the modern sense, though it does contain historical information, yet it also contains meta historical elements.  The author of Matthew's Gospel has utilized his materials in order to convey an archetypal, mythical, or what might be called a mystical connection between Jesus and the Church.  As Mircea Eliade states, "The message of the Savior is first of all an example which demands imitation.  After washing his disciples' feet, Jesus said to them: ‘For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.' (John 13:15)," professor Eliade then goes on to say that, "Humility is only a virtue, but humility practiced after the Saviour's example is a religious act and a means of salvation" [Eliade, 23], and in this sense it transcends time.

          In reference to this mythic, or in Catholic terms, liturgical time, I think it opportune to return briefly to the Gospel of John, which as I indicated earlier was designed in such a way as to recapitulate the Genesis narrative of the creation and the fall of man.  But it should be noted that there is another way in which the author of this Gospel organizes the historical materials as his disposal and which also explains why the fourth Gospel differs so markedly from the three synoptic Gospels.  The author of John's Gospel has arranged his narrative in order to make it conform to the Jewish liturgical cycle.  He has structured his materials so that Christ's discourses coincide with the triennial lectionary in use in the synogogue during the first century in Palestine.

          The Jewish festal cycle reflects the mythico-liturgical conception of time.  Through the ritual recitation of the events of Sacred History, the events themselves are re-actualized for the worshipping community, and in this way time is transcended and generation after generation is able to live the foundational events of the covenant.  The author of the Gospel of John structures his sources so that it follows the lections in the synogogues liturgical cycle and in this way he is showing that the Sacred History of Israel is recapitulated in Christ.  Thus the author of John utilizes the historical information he possesses not so much as to give an historical account in the modern sense; instead, he is giving an account of Christ's ministry which is based on mythico-liturgical time, in this way it represents an archetypal pattern which fulfills the Sacred History of Israel bringing it to completion in the person of the Savior.

          This mythico-liturgical view of time pervades both Jewish and Catholic thought.  It is exemplified in Judaism in the Seder meal, which re-actualizes the events of the Exodus, and within Catholic Christianity by the Mass, which renders present the one sacrifice of Christ on Calvary.  Through these liturgical services the events recalled are re-actualized and are rendered present as a living reality for the participant in the ritual action.

          Any system of interpretation which neglects the overall structure of the Gospel texts in favor of a modern ideologically motivated reconstruction of the materials ultimately impoverishes the texts and distorts the Gospel tradition.  Any attempt to discover the so called historical Jesus is pointless, because Jesus is presented in the Gospel narratives as an archetype, as an exemplar, in other words, as the figure to whom his disciples are mystically configured.  Any reduction of the Gospel texts to mere historical documents misses the point of what they are ultimately about, and thus as I said earlier, when scholars tear the Gospel of Matthew apart, or any of the other Gospels for that matter, they are reducing them to their component parts, and something vital to the Gospel texts is then lost.

Conclusion

          In closing I want to state clearly that I am not asserting that the historical critical method is useless; instead, I am arguing that it needs to be balanced with other methods of interpretation and that scholarly research should not limit itself to trying to understand the Gospel texts from a merely historical viewpoint.  Understanding the Gospel of Matthew's typological structure is vital to understanding the nature of the person of Christ, as the author of that text intends to portray him, to ignore this element is to lose sight of the meaning of the text as a whole and ultimately this impoverishes our understanding of the document in question, while simultaneously distorting the image of the narratives' central figure, Christ.  It is equally detrimental to our understanding of the Gospel of John for the exegete to ignore the connection of that Gospel to the Jewish liturgical system.  The Gospel narratives are an inseparable blending of history and faith, to try to separate these two elements actually dissolves the texts, and is in fact a misguided attempt to update the narratives.  Studying something should not require that one simultaneously destroy the thing in question, but only understand it as it is.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jean Danielou.  From Shadows to Reality.  (Westminster:  The Newman Press, 1960).

Mircea Eliade.  The Myth of the Eternal Return.  (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1954).

Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover.  The Five Gospels.  (New York:  Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993).

Luke Timothy Johnson.  The Real Jesus.  (San Francisco:  Harper San Francisco, 1996).

Alan W. Watts.  Myth and Ritual in Christianity.  (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1968).

Catechism of the Catholic Church.  (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1994). 

The Pontifical Biblical Commission.  The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.  (Boston:  St. Paul Books & Media, 1993).

The Gospel Tradition:  Typology, Mythic Time, and the Historical Critical Method

by Steven Todd Kaster

San Francisco State University

Philosophy 500:  Philosophy of Religion

Doctor Epstein

25 October 2000

Copyright © 2000-2025 Steven Todd Kaster