Clearly fictitious, it was driven by ideology rather more than by capitalism, which is to say that, yes, it sold lots of copies and therefore made a decent profit for the author, but the number of souls acquired for the new religion outweighed this considerably.
I mention this vulgarity of commercialism because Matthew spent the early part of his own adult life as a tax-collector for the Romans, making sure that people rendered unto Caesar the tithes that were Caesar's, and caring very little how much undeclared spiritual income was havened away at the local synagogue; all of which made him somewhat despised by his fellow disciples, and highly likely therefore that he wrote his book as much to demonstrate the seriousness of his changed commitment as it was for the taxable extra revenue.
Book - or books. For the one I was meaning in the above was "The Gospel of Matthew", the first of the four Canonicals, and not this account of the Messianic childhood attributed to him. Matthew, incidentally, should be Mattit-Yahu, the Mattit being "a gift", "Yahu" one of the names used for the Jewish deity, and Mattit-Yahu as a whole best known as the founding father of a very different sect and movement, that of the Hasmoneans, who overthrew the Greek conquerors of Yehudah during the 160s BCE, and established the dynasty that ruled the land, under the Seleucids until 110 BCE, fully independent until the Roman conquest in 37 BCE.
The fact that we first encounter him in Kfar Nahum (Capernaum) may be because he happened to be there, but it is an interesting coincidence that the north-western corner of the Sea of Galilee has several villages (Tiberias wasn't built yet), of which Mary Magdalene came from Magdala, whence her last name, Mattit-Yahu, and several other disciples, were met at Kfar Nahum, the feeding of the five thousand took place at Tabgha, the Sermon on the Mount in the foothills of Mount Korazim immediately above Tabgha, and Yishai (Jesus) himself was rather more likely born at Genaseret (today's Ginosar), which is a village and also another name for the Sea of Galilee - and all these villages, as the adjacent map illustrates, within less than a mile of each other.
And if Mattit-Yahu did come from Kfar Nahum, and Yishai from Genaseret, then he would likely have known, or been able to easily find out, the story of Yishai's childhood, which is the subject-matter of "Pseudo-Matthew". But if it were truly believed that Mattit-Yahu of Kfar Nahum had written it, why would it be called "Pseudo-Matthew"?
The childhood of the Saviour, then, from Hejirah to the former slave-pots of Egypt, as far as Bar Mitzvah preparation at the Temple - these being the stopping and re-starting points of the Canonical Gospels; but actually it was the Life of Mary that really interested people, and in the Middle Ages, when the art of fresco enabled every Catholic church in Europe to teach the doxology to the illiterate by simply painting it on the church walls, it was from "The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew" that virtually every one of those Piagetian images was taken (and what a shame that, in Britain anyway, good Queen Bess had the entire history of fresco whitewashed from those walls, with explicit instruction to make the whitewash thick enough that they would never be recoverable).
The request from said Bishops was for Jerome to make a translation of "a Hebrew volume, written by the hand of the most blessed Evangelist Matthew", concerning the birth of the virgin mother and the infancy of Jesus. Jerome a logical choice given his vocation as the translator of the Masoretic text, and his expertise in the Hebrew language - he was taught, by correspondence, by a Jewish convert, during his two-year hermetic retreat at Chalcis. Nor is it even certain that he carried out the task - scholars ever since have argued that the style simply is not his: "no one who is acquainted with the style of Jerome's letters will think this one authentic" as one scholar has expressed it. Other scholars think he actually wrote the original himself, still others that the style doesn't feel like his precisely because he was a good translator, and therefore stayed religiously with the style of the original.
But the letters insist that he did (unless there was a second person, also named Jerome; it was a very common name, after all), that he took care to "render it word for word, exactly as it is in the Hebrew, since it is asserted that it was composed by the holy Evangelist Matthew, and written at the head of his Gospel," which affirms the good-translator hypothesis, but which is then undermined by Jerome himself expressing grave doubts about the authenticity of the actual document.
✤
What then of the coming-of-age tale, the bildungsroman epic. Like all good family histories, this one begins a generation earlier, with Mary's parents Yo'achim and Chanah, or Joachim and Anne in English versions: it tells how upset the grandparents were that they couldn't have a child, how badly treated they were for being childless, Joachim's exile (it isn't entirely obvious why he was exiled: I need to look that up), and his return to find Anne pregnant (most people don't realise that the Immaculate Conception was Anne's pregnancy with Mary, not Mary's with Jesus), and then the birth of Mary.
Chapter Two then follows Mary's childhood, her entry into service as a Temple virgin, her life of prayer and vow of chastity, her choice of Joseph as her husband and guardian when she reached the age that she could no longer serve as a Temple virgin - I do need to interrupt at this point to say this: that not one single piece of this could have any historical validity, because what is described is early Church practice, and Temple practices were completely and entriely different.
So we come to the Annunciation, and Joseph's distress at finding his wife pregnant - the text has told us that he married her, so her being pregnant should not have required angelic intervention - and his eventual acceptance of her honesty. After this, he and Mary are summoned to the Temple to be questioned, and her continuing virginity and innocence is accepted by the people, and no one questions Joseph's potency, or wonders if an unconsummated marriage should not be annulled. But these are not matters raised in the text, only by it.
All the above suggests a traditional Tammuz or Adonis cult, a fertility tale of the type we are accustomed to from the Tanach (Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, Chanah etc) in which the powers of the fertility goddess are rendered ceremonial through the account of a barren woman who manages to conceive, and the subsequent dedication of the child to the shrine; it reflects, in other words, Christianity as the Rebirth of Tammuz, and not Christianity as the coming of the Jewish Messiah.
For those of you who have already read my page on the "Protevangelium of James", much of the above will be remarkably familiar, and the truth is that "The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew" was probably plagiarised from it. Though not entirely, because James does not include the Hejirah to Egypt (no other known source does, so GPW probably made it up), and there are similarities elsewhere to the "Infancy Gospel of Thomas". But the real clincher for the importance of this text does not lie in its apparent coalescing of those two works, but rather in the fact that this was the first recorded confirmation of the presence of both an ox and an ass at the Nativity.
 |
| Botticelli, La Nativita Mistica, complete with ox and ass |
GPW was included by Jacobus de Varagine in his book "The Golden Legend", published in 1260, and one of the few literary accounts of Jesus' life to reach a significant number of readers outside the theological world - the point, made above, being that about 98% of the Christian population of Europe was illiterate at that epoch, so it was more likely that you had the book read to you by somebody who could, than actually scanning a copy of the text yourself. But the impact was huge, leading to literally dozens of bandwagonners, plagiarists and people who insisted that their work was "derived", "based on" or "influenced by", and therefore entirely valid, legitimate and not open to accusations of breach of copyright.
The two most famous of these were the "Libellus de Nativitate Sanctae Mariae", a name whose title I leave you to translate from the Latin for yourself (Libellus is the key word here, and you will translate according to your personal faith-position), but which only tells the tale from Annunciation to Nativity; and the "Arabic Infancy Gospel", which is full of some absolutely wonderful flights of fancy, similar to the fairy tale of Muhammad's trip to Jerusalem one night on a winged, talking horse - and that one made it into the Qur'an, Surah al-Isra (I wonder if that's where J.K. Rowling got the idea for quidditch?).
And lastly, and painfully, because it compels me to acknowledge that imperialist bully of useless bot-knowledge Wikipedia, because someone else quoting it informed me about this terribly important side-detail: that "The Cherry-Tree Carol", so central to every school Nativity play and Joan Baez concert, was based on the tale as told in GPW (click here to hear her sing it, and note oddities like Mary as "Queen of the Galilee", and the existence of cherry trees in that part of the world).
You can read the full text of "The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew" by clicking here.
Copyright
© 2020 David Prashker
All
rights reserved
The
Argaman Press
No comments:
Post a Comment