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Nazareth and The Branch
Matthew 2:23 and Interpretation of the Old Testament
Dennis Bratcher
I often hear the comment that as Christians we should interpret the Old
Testament through the lens of the New Testament. Along with this perspective
usually goes the affirmation that Paul, or the Gospel writers, must have
understood the Old Testament better than we do, so we should automatically take the
New Testament
as the final authority on interpretation of the Old Testament.
Of course, there is some sense in
which the first comment is true. That is, we as Christians will never be
able to hear the Old Testament apart from the Incarnation and God’s self-revelation in
Christ. We will always be looking at the Old Testament texts as Christians.
However, there is also a dimension in which it is not true. That is, the
Old Testament is not inherently a Christian book, and if we impose categories onto the
Old Testament which are alien to it, we may risk not really hearing the Old
Testament for what it
says, on its own terms. It is more likely that we will simply impose onto
the Old Testament biblical texts our more modern and Christian perspectives. And we may
even distort or not fully understand the rich confession about God if we do
not let the Old Testament speak from its own categories and in its own way.
As to the second comment, that the New Testament writers must have
understood the Old Testament better than we do, there is an interesting assumption at work that
we don’t usually acknowledge. We assume that Paul or the Gospel writers are
trying to understand the Old Testament on the same level that we are trying
to understand it. I would say strongly that no, they are not. They
are not doing Old Testament exegesis; they are trying to communicate a truth
about the Incarnation of Jesus the Christ and its results in the world. They are interpreting
current revelatory historical events (the Incarnation) for their own day.
And they are using a vast array of literary techniques to do so, including
the Old Testament in direct quotes, in indirect allusions, in thematic references, in
allegorical applications, in secondary references that only make sense from
the Greek or Targumic (Aramaic) translations, sometimes incorrect citations
from memory, vague references, connections of single words or even sounds of
words, word plays, etc.
Some of those ways of using the Old Testament, or trying to understand
it, we would not use today. Does
that mean they were wrong in how they used the Old Testament? Of course not, unless we
impose the narrow criteria that they were intending to give us the "correct"
meaning of a particular Old Testament passage. I don’t think they were
trying to interpret the Old Testament. Rather, they were trying to tell
people about Jesus in any and all ways that they thought people would
understand. They did not feel bound to a particular method of
interpretation, because they were not interpreting the text of the Old
Testament; they were bearing witness to the revelation
of God in Christ. They did that one way to the Jews, and another way to the
Greeks. Their testimony
is primary, not their interpretive methodology.
That does not mean that they twist or pervert Old Testament scripture to accomplish
that goal, nor does it mean we can interpret Scripture today, Old
Testament or New Testament, with the same methods. But it does mean that they felt more freedom in
using the text than we might allow, especially since we have a far narrower
understanding of the "authority" of the written word than they did.
It also means that we even have to
do exegesis on the New Testament to understand what
they were doing, just like we have to do exegesis on the Old Testament to understand
it! So the answer to this issue is not to shift absolute truth from the text
of the Old Testament to the New Testament writers’ application of the
Old Testament. The answer is to
interpret the New Testament in terms of what the New Testament is and says, and to interpret the
Old Testament in terms of what it is and says, and then ask questions of how they
relate to each other in terms of theology.
Now, let’s look at an example. It is Matthew’s Gospel that most often
uses the formula "this happened that it might be fulfilled what was spoken
by the prophet, saying . . .." This is usually used with a particular event
in the life of Jesus that Matthew connects with the Old Testament, something he is much
more concerned to do, it seems, than are the other Gospel writers. The most
common assumption here is that the Old Testament was predicting this event, and that
event then happened to fulfill that prediction. So the connection is seen as
directly historical, working forward. (This is even apart from the
implications concerning predestination that this assumption raises!) Sounds
good. Well, maybe. But if we don’t make that assumption, what are other
possibilities?
There is an interesting verse in Matthew 2:23 that seems rather
enigmatic: "And he went and dwelt in a city called
Nazareth, that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, 'He shall
be called a Nazarene.'" This is the conclusion of the birth narratives
in Matthew, immediately preceding the accounts of John the Baptist (ch. 3)
and the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry in (ch. 4). It simply says that
Joseph and his family returned to live in Nazareth of Galilee. And on teh
surface Matthew
seems to make the simple connection that this is "fulfillment" of an
Old Testament "prediction" that this would occur.
The problem is that there is no such prediction, or even remotely
similar comment, anywhere in the Old Testament. In fact, the city of Nazareth is never
mentioned in the Old Testament or Apocrypha, even though it existed as a tiny village
from around 900 BC until the Babylonian exile, and was then reestablished
during the Maccabbean era around 200 BC. It remained a small, remote, and
virtually unknown rural village, although it was not far from the major
Roman center of Sepphoris in Jesus’ time.
Now, did Matthew just make a mistake in his use of the Old Testament? If we cast
this directly in terms of New Testament interpretation of the Old Testament, it appears he did.
Or, we are reduced to scrambling to find some sort of extrabiblical or
rational explanation in order to salvage a certain view of prophecy or the
authority of Scripture or Matthew’s integrity. But there may be a far
simpler explanation that comes directly from Scripture. It is one
that pointedly raises the issue of how Matthew is dealing with the Old
Testament, and
how our assumptions about the Bible lead us to ask the wrong questions about
it.
Several Old Testament prophets express the conviction that God would once again act
in the life of the Israelite nation to raise up a righteous king who would
lead them to a recovery of their vitality as the people of God. Zechariah,
speaking to the post-exilic community who was without a king (c. 520 BC),
talked about God again empowering a restored monarchy and a new high priest
(Zech 6:9-15). Jeremiah had little good to say about Israelite kings,
especially Jehoiakim. He spoke from
the impending collapse of the Israelite nation to the Babylonians (c. 600
BC), yet looked forward to a time when God would raise up a new king who
would execute justice and righteousness in the land (Jer 33:14-26, see the
Commentary on Jeremiah 33:14-16). Isaiah of Jerusalem spoke from the
Assyrian crisis in which the pitiful king
Ahaz was willing to sell out the very soul of Israel to Assyria to
retain his power (c. 700 BC). Isaiah talked about God working though a new
king whose reign would be marked by wisdom, justice, and peace (Isa
11:1-9).
The prophets used various metaphors to refer to this anticipated revival
of the ideal monarchy to replace the corrupt kings of the day, including
"servant" (Haggai, Isaiah), "signet ring" (Haggai), "shepherd" (Micah,
Ezekiel), or simply "David" (Amos). But in all three of the above examples,
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zechariah also use the term "branch" as a metaphor to
refer to the new king that God would raise up from the line of David (Isa
4:2, 11:1, Jer 23:5, Zech 3:8, 6:12). The metaphor is most clearly expressed
in Isaiah 11:1: "There shall come forth a shoot from
the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots."
In Hebrew, the word "branch" is netzer, actually only three
consonantal letters: NZR. Note that the
town NaZaReth
contains the same three primary letters (plus an ending often attached to
nouns). In the Aramaic form of Nazareth, (Aramaic was the common
language spoken by most Israelites after the exile; some have suggested that
the entire book of Matthew was originally written in Aramaic rather than
Greek), it comes very close in sound to the Hebrew word for "branch."
It seems, then, that Matthew was not at all "mistaken" in this
Old Testament reference, although he was certainly not exegeting Isaiah. He was
identifying the obscure Galilean town of Nazareth in which Jesus grew up
with the Old Testament reference to a netzer
(Branch)
God would raise up to bring justice and righteousness and peace to His
people. In other words, this was the means Matthew used to identify Jesus,
even as a child returning to an obscure town in remote Galilee ("can
any good thing come from Nazareth?" -John 1:47), as the "King" from
the line of David whom God had finally raised up to restore His people.
It is no coincidence that it is Matthew more than the other Gospels in
which the idea of the Kingdom of God and the reign of God through His King
finds particular prominence. This is Matthew’s way of confessing Jesus to be
the Messiah (the Christ)! But he is not doing it historically, or
geographically, as we so often assume, nor is he simply connecting
predictive prophecy with its later fulfillment. He is doing it
theologically, by using the similarity in sound between a word in
Hebrew and a word in Aramaic, as he is (probably) writing in Greek! He is
not interpreting Isaiah directly. He is bearing witness to Jesus as the
Christ, the Messiah, the Branch!
What all of this suggests is that it is very unlikely that Isaiah in 700
BC, or Jeremiah in 600 BC, or Zechariah in 520 BC had in mind the city of
Nazareth as they talked about the Branch. They were not predicting anything
about the city of Nazareth. They were talking about God's gracious restoration
of a future people of God by referring to a new godly leader, a new king, a
new anointed one whom God would raise up to renew and revive His people. Matthew’s application here cannot be
used as the key to understand those prophetic books. It must
work the other way. That is, we cannot really understand Matthew’s reference without
first
understanding the entire concept and set of metaphors, and some cultural
history, from the Old Testament prophets. What those prophets affirm in the metaphor of
the Branch is that God will not leave His people without a leader to show
them how to be His people. It is not a predictive prophecy; it is an
affirmation about God’s grace, that He will continue to work in history to
enable His people to respond faithfully as His people.
Matthew understood both the significance of the coming of Jesus
and the affirmation about God that those prophets of long ago made. And so
he links
the two in affirming that in Jesus, the Christ, the Branch, God has once
again been faithful to His people by entering history and providing a way
for them to be His people. Matthew takes the insignificant town in which
Jesus grew up and uses it as a metaphor to confess Jesus as the fulfillment
of the hopes of a thousand years, and the revelation of the faithfulness of
God to His people. To me that is a far more significant affirmation than
trying to figure out how to use Matthew to interpret Isaiah, or to use this
as an example of predictive prophecy.
-Dennis Bratcher, Copyright ©
2018, Dennis
Bratcher, All Rights Reserved
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Related pages
Another example of how New Testament
writers made use of Old Testament passages:
Immanuel in Isaiah and Matthew
Voice Bible Study: Matthew
Bible Topics
Issues in
Biblical Interpretation
Old Testament
New Testament
Text Index
Lectionary Index
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