Matthew's birth story: an early milepost in the history of Jewish marriage law.(Essay)

Abstract

The New Testament's initial narrative, the Matthean birth story, though immensely well-known, can still provide some surprises. One of its novel elements is its presumption that Joseph requires a divorce in order to sever his betrothal to Mary, pregnant with another's child. That betrothal constitutes a marriage and requires a get to terminate is a commonplace in the law of the Mishna, bur appears nowhere in the laws of the written Torah: Matthew, though notoriously anti-Pharisee, is promoting the Pharisaic interpretation of marriage law, and is probably the earliest source available to us for this interpretation. This brief essay suggests some of the new ways that an examination of its contribution to the history of Jewish law provides, to look at this familiar passage.

Key Words: Matthew, birth story, Jesus, divorce, marriage, Jewish law.

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To sets of literature are more-or-less obsessed with Jewish marriage law: the rabbinic corpus, taken as a whole, and the New Testament, taken as the Gospel of Matthew only. While the former obsession is well established, scholarship has been slow to recognize just how interested the anonymous author of the first Gospel is in the particularities of Jewish law generally, and the laws regarding marriage and divorce in particular. Were Matthew's Gospel the only one of the canonical Gospels to survive, contemporary readers would be likely to view it as much as a legal casebook as a narrative about the beginning and end of the life of the Messiah.

What else, after all, would a naive contemporary reader make of Matthew's description of Jesus, than that his main teaching objective is to provide a correct interpretation of the Jewish Law? Rather than abolishing the Jewish Law, Jesus sets out to fulfill it (5:17ff); his audience is forbidden to break even the least of the mitzvoth (Heb. divine laws). The author portrays his protagonist offering discourses on the laws of Shabbat (Heb. Sabbath), (12:1-7 and 9-14), on netilat yadayim (Heb. hand-washing) (15:1-20), and, especially, on the laws of gittin (Heb. divorce) (5:31ff and 19:3ff).

It is easy to demonstrate that Matthew has a greater interest in divorce law than any other New Testament author: apoluo + gyne (acc.), "to divorce a wife," or apoluo + auten "to divorce her," appears seven times in the first Gospel, compared to three times in Mark and once in Luke (and nowhere …