|
In their effort
to reconstruct the life story of Jesus, Matthew scoured the scriptures for
any verses that might be construed as prophecies about the coming savior of
the Hebrews. Since the savior would have to fulfill these prophecies, they
made sure that their story about Jesus included the appropriate prophecy-fulfillments.
In the example described
below, Matthew claims that the wailing of the mothers of the children
murdered by King Herod was foreshadowed hundreds of years earlier in events
described in the book of Jeremiah. We will show that the Jeremiah story
probably had nothing whatever to do with an evil king and murdered children,
and that the authors were mistaken.
Jeremiah's
Rachel Passage is About Hope and Joy
In the passage below,
Jeremiah speaks of the Jews who had been scattered abroad during the
Diaspora, figuratively referring to the land of Israel as Rachel weeping in
the town of Ramah for her children. But, the Lord tells Rachel to dry her
tears and rejoice at his promise that Israel's children would soon be coming
home out of captivity.
"This is what the LORD says: The people who survive
the sword will find favor in the desert; I will come to give rest to Israel.
.... I will build you up again and you will be rebuilt, O Virgin Israel...I
will bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the ends of
the earth...a great throng will return. They will come with weeping...They
will come and shout for joy.... they will rejoice in the bounty of the
LORD....they will sorrow no more.....This is what the LORD says:
A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great
weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted,
because her children are no more.
This is what the LORD says: Restrain your voice from
weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded, declares
the LORD. They will return from the land of the enemy. So there is hope for
your future, declares the LORD. Your children will return to their own
land." (Jeremiah
31:1-17)
Meaning
of Jeremiah Verse is Distorted
In telling the story
about King Herod ordering the murder of all the young male children of Bethlehem--a
heinous act that apparently nobody but Matthew knew about and reported by no
historian of the first century--he took special notice of the grieving
mothers of the murdered children, an event that he apparently claimed was
foretold in the book of Jeremiah. Here are Matthew's words:
"After Jesus was born in Bethlehem... King
Herod...asked them where the Christ was to be born. 'In Bethlehem in Judea'
....he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who
were two years old and under...Then what was said
through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to
be comforted, because they are no more." Matthew
2:1-18
If one can believe Matthew, the wailing of the Bethlehem mothers was somehow
related or foretold by Rachel's wails in Ramah. However, one can clearly see
that Jeremiah is not speaking of dead children and grieving mothers six
centuries in the future, but of the joy over the eventual return of exiled
children who are very much alive.
Thus, there is not the
slightest meaningful connection between the events described in Jeremiah and
the story of Herod's slaughter reported by Matthew. In Matthew's story of
Herod's murders, the children are dead and are never to return; in
Jeremiah's story, the children are alive and returning to their
homeland. In no way does the Jeremiah passage have anything to do with a
king's murder of children, or any other event in the life of a savior in the
first century. Furthermore, if Matthew is right, then the mothers'
lamentations and cries of grief were so loud that they could be heard in the
village of Ramah, twenty miles from the scene of the crime in Bethlehem. If
such sounds were heard there, then surely they also were heard in Jerusalem,
which lay between Bethlehem and Ramah. How, then, could it have been
possible that Matthew--alone among all of the gospel writers--could have been
the only one to write about this horrible crime? Could it be that so
few children were killed that no historian wrote of it?
Conclusions
Matthew's story seems to
be just one more example of a misguided effort to mold Jesus to Old Testament
passages, even if the pieces don't fit. This failed attempt--just one of
several-- to grow a messiah out of non-existent prophecy-fulfillment based on
a non-existent prophecy is reason enough to question all of the book Matthew
and the intelligence of the committee of elder infallible churchmen who
decided to include his writings in their bible.
Harmonization
Requirements
Inerrantists wishing to
explain away the apparent inconsistencies between the Ramah verses in
Jeremiah and Matthew will need to address the following points:
 The
alleged Herod murders occurred in Bethlehem, not twenty miles away in Ramah.
Jeremiah
spoke of scattered Israelis of the Diaspora, not murdered babies.
Rachel
was weeping for her lost children, not her murdered children.
Matthew
says Jeremiah foretold the grief of the mothers of Herod's murder victims.
Only
Matthew wrote about or referenced the Herod murders.
There
is no extra-canonical account of these murders.
|
