Nothing Written

The record of the genealogy of Jesus the ^]Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham:  Matthew 1:1 NASB

Record – By now you certainly know that Matthew purposely altered the genealogy of Yeshua to fit the Gematria numerical arrangement of the word “David.”  The fact that he did this isn’t too surprising.  What is more surprising is that his audience knew that he changed the actual genealogy and they didn’t object.  Why?  The answer is simple: they knew the correct order of the kings because they knew the traditions, and so it was clear that Matthew’s record was theological, not historical.  And since everyone knew that, why object?  Why not wait to see what Matthew attempts to do with this obvious alteration?  Matthew’s genius is how he rearranges history, not how he accurately records it.

Perhaps you’ll have a comment or two about this, but that’s not why we want to look at this passage again.  There’s something else here that is quite remarkable.  What is that?  It is the fact that the scriptures which Matthew enlists are primarily oral.  People did not have a copy of the written Torah or the Talmud gracing their bookshelves.  Certainly there were copies of the Torah but they were few, very expensive, and held by only the elite or the powerful.  As for the Talmud, it wasn’t written at all in its collected form until long after Yeshua and Matthew.  What this means is that most people understood their sacred texts orally; memorized and passed from one generation to the next verbally.  With careful transmission, of course, especially since the community was self-correcting.  If you made a mistake (as Matthew demonstrates) others were there to correct you.

It seems to me that this is the reason Yeshua never wrote anything.  Why would he?  His teaching was in line with the expectations of the rabbis and the culture.  It was oral.  It was memorized.  It was not written until the witnesses realized that their oral testimony was fading away.  But this fact raises an important point about the difference between our culture and the culture of ancient Israel.  We rely on written texts, and we have come to think of those texts as sacrosanct, eternal, pure, and unchangeable.  Our religious culture is a culture of the written word, but this has not always been true.  “Scripture is widely understood today to be the antithesis of a community’s oral tradition.  It is conceived as the tangible document that fixes the fluid sacred word and gives it substance and permanence.  The idea hardly even occurs that a sacred text could exist for long without being written; nor does the recognition come easily that virtually every scripture has traditionally functioned in large measure as vocal, not silent discourse.”[1]  What does this mean?  We already know that various versions of the Scriptures were sacred to various communities—that is, they had there own orally transmitted sacred words.  Their communal spiritual experience was not based on a standardized text.  That didn’t happen until much later.  We might need to reconsider what that means for our religious understanding.  How much of what you believe about God depends on the written words rather than the communal experience?  What would your relationship with God feel like if you didn’t have a written Bible?  And lastly, how has humanity’s understanding of God been affected by printinstead of practice?

Topical Index: written, sacred, oral, Scripture, Matthew 1:1

[1] William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. ix.