Fabricating the Jesus Story –
"Matthew": A Gosple for Messianic Jews
A Greek-speaking Jew, writing in the pagan city of Antioch shortly after the riots of 117 C.E. had convulsed Palestine and the diaspora was at pains to reassure the Roman state that his particular creed posed no threat to the imperium. The writer, a follower of the Rabbi Saul, having fled 'fundamentalist' Jerusalem for the relatively enlightened pagan city of Antioch, took a copy of 'Mark' as the basis for his own ‘story’ and concocted what would eventually become known as 'Matthew.'
At this point, the Christ story acquired the first of two (contradictory!) geneologies. Though ‘son of the creator god’, and presumably not really needing an earthly pedigree at all, Jesus nonetheless acquired a surrogate father, Joseph, and a lineage back to King David. Again, none of this is to be found in Paul’s writings but Paul is now dead.
In order to meet traditional Jewish expectations that the messiah would arise from the ‘House of David’ the writer prefaced 'Mark's' baptism story with an impressive geneology. The author of Matthew also tried to tidy up the embarassing theology of Christ’s baptism by the 'sinner' John the Baptist, added a ‘rationale’, absent from Mark:
‘Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.'
(Matthew 3.15)
Some rationale!
But establishing a bona fides claim to messianic hopes of the Jews had to go hand-in-hand with toadying to Rome. Thus the writer rehashes the story of Pharoah’s murder of male babies (found in Exodus) into Herod’s murder of male babies. Since Herod had died in 4 B.C.E. and the supposed Jesus hadn’t been ‘born’ until the governorship of Quinirius (beginning in 6 C.E.) the validity of this mass murder is questionable, even before one considers the total absence of historical evidence. Yet the point was to blacken further the Jews (Christ-killers and baby- killers!) and distance Paulite Christians from them.