If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:46-48, emphasis added)
If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. (Luke 6:32-35, emphasis added)
The Book of Matthew attempts to ground nearly every event about Jesus as a fulfillment of some passage from Hebrew scripture that is seen as prophetic. It draws more direct comparisons between Moses and Christ than the other of the Gospels, and its genealogy descends Jesus from the Patriarch Abraham. Luke's family tree takes Jesus's forebears all the way to the legendary ancestor of all humanity: Adam. Its sequel, the Book of Acts, relates how the message was first taken to the Gentiles by the Apostles, and it is only in Luke that we find the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37). In this parable, Jesus tells how a traveler between Jerusalem and Jericho was robbed, beaten and left half-dead on the side of the road. When a priest happened by, he left the man and passed by. The same thing happened when a Levite (another sacred class among the Jews) came upon the scene. Only a Samaritan—a member of a group who adhered to a closely-related religion but whom contemporary Jews thought of as foreigners—is shown to stop and render help to the man. The greater virtue of relative aliens compared to that of Jewish authority figures is thus once again emphasized in the New Testament.
Once we acknowledge that Matthew was tailored for a more Jewish audience than Luke, which seems to be aimed at Gentiles, Jesus’s claim that a Roman centurion’s faith exceeds that of all contemporary Jews (Matthew 8:5-13) only stresses the underlying imperial purpose of all four of the oldest Gospels. Notice, too, that it is in Matthew that the Jewish crowd assumes collective responsibility for the death of Jesus: “When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’ All the people answered, ‘His blood is on us and on our children!’” (Matthew 27:24-25) Anti-Semitic in its impact, this apparent justification for their subsequent collective punishment was originally aimed at Jews themselves.
The differences between the Gospel of John and the three earlier Gospels (known as the “Synoptics” because of their overlap) are also well-established. In John, Jesus waxes abstract and self-conscious about his own divinity in a way not found in the Synoptic Gospels. For example, Jesus calls himself “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” (John 14:6) And for its author Jesus was the pre-existent Logos that was with God and was God and was God at the Creation. This understanding of Christ’s divinity is also exhibited in Paul’s writings, as welclass="underline" “…yet for us there is but one God the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.” (1 Corinthians 8:6, emphasis added) The Synoptic Gospels do understand Jesus to be divine, as seems implicit in a number of ways: the virgin birth, his asserted superiority over John the Baptist (a mere prophet), and perhaps most strongly by Jesus’s forgiving of sins.
“When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’
“Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, ‘Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:5-7, cf. Luke 7:48-49)
However, Jesus himself is never so expansive or overt on the subject of his own status as he is depicted being in the Gospel of John, suggesting this Gospel to be the latest of the four, reflecting a more fully developed theology.
57. St. Croix, G.E.M., "Why Were The Early Christians Persecuted?," Journal of Historical Studies, November, 1963, pp. 6–38, reprinted in Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, And Orthodoxy, 2006, Oxford University Press.
58. Hebrews 6:19-20, emphasis added.
59. “Anchor,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, emphasis added.
60. Ibid
61. Ibid
62. Ibid
II. Religion and Propaganda
1. Meshorer, Ya’akov, Ancient Jewish Coinage, Volume I, 1982, Amphora, pp. 60-63.
2. Meshorer, Ya’akov, Ancient Jewish Coinage, Volume II, 1982, Amphora, pp. 26-27. NOTE: Pagan symbols can even be found in some ancient synagogues, and a famous example of Zodiac imagery has been found in a 6th Century CE synagogue in Galilee. Of course, in all such instances, the pagan images themselves were never objects of worship as they never symbolized God. They were aesthetic in nature, never Jewish religious symbols. Zanger, Walter, Jewish Worship, Pagan Symbols: Zodiac Mosaics in Ancient Synagogues, 8-24-2012, Bible History Daily, http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-israel/jewish-worship-pagan-symbols/
3. Eusebius, History, trans. G.A. Williamson, 1989, Penguin Classics, Book 4, section 6
4. Philo of Alexandria, On the Embassy to Gaius, XXX.203. NOTE: Some contemporary scholars attribute much of the notorious behavior of the 1st Century Emperor Caligula—such as reports of his incest with and deification of his sister—to an effort on the emperor’s part to model his monarchy on that of the Pharaohs, the divine rulers of Egypt. For criticism of this position, see, e.g., Barrett, Anthony A., Caligula: the Corruption of Power, 1989, New York: Simon & Schuster, Chapter 14.
5. Suetonius, Vespasian, 23
6. See Rehak, Paul, and Younger, John Grimes, Imperium and Cosmos: Augustus and the Northern Campus Martius, 2006, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 93; Brent, A., The Imperial Cult and the Development of Church Order: Concepts and Images of Authority in Paganism and Early Christianity Before the Age of Cyprian, 1999, Brill, pp. 17-18, 53-54.
7. Ibid
8. NOTE: Suetonius retells the fabulous account of Atia, the mother of Augustus, spending the night in the Temple of Apollo, where she had a mysterious encounter with a serpent and became pregnant, bearing the future emperor nine months later. It is reported that Atia developed a birthmark in the shape of a serpent after her mysterious encounter at the temple. Moreover, Augustus constructed a new temple to Apollo that connected to the imperial palace itself, a structure ranked as one of three most noteworthy of his reign by the same historian. (Suetonius, Augustus, 94, 29) This echoes the stories told about previous Hellenistic monarchs such as Seleucus I whose father Antiochus allegedly told his son that he was, in reality, the son of Apollo. We are told that the god gave to the mother of Seleucus a ring with the image of an anchor on it, and that Seleucus, as well as his sons and grandsons, had a birthmark shaped like an anchor. (Grainger, John D., Seleukos Nikator: Constructing a Hellenistic Kingdom, 1990, Routledge, p. 2.)