Killer Mike

I watched "Dateline" last night about the birth of Jesus. John Dominic Crossen mentioned something about close parallels between the story in Matthew about the Roman Emperor ordering the killing of every male child under one year, and Mary and Joseph fleeing with the baby Jesus to Egypt for 40 days to escape. Apparently when Moses was born, the King at that time also ordered a mass killing and they fled to Egypt for 40 days. Ive also heard the story of a baby Jesus floating down the river is similar to that of a baby Moses floating down the river. Other Gospels do not mention any such fleeing to Egypt.

Being that Im no Bible scholar yet interested in the origins of mythology of the Bible, can anyone shed some light on this? I thank you for your due consideration.

pharoah

Shouldn't this be in BC & H?

Bumble Bee Tuna

There's a war going on, tsunamis, hurricanes, terrorism, and you're worried about some TV show about an imaginary character? Get your priorities straight.

Machiavelli

But just maybe, if he can disprove the bible, and make all of the Christians say, OH, Guess we were wrong, then just maybe they won't be so self ritcheous and will decide to bring home our troops.

Sarpedon

You are right, pharaoh, to BC&H we go!

Zeichman

I think Chris Weimer has looked into this a bit. What does spring to mind in terms of parallels is the obvious birth narrative, the five blocks of teachings, the addition of "not including women and children" when numbering the people at the feeding scenes (cf. the 600,000, not including women in children in Exodus), the fourty days of fasting in the wilderness, the sermon on the mount as a commentary on the ten commandments, the face explicitly shining during the Transfiguration and yeah... that's all that comes to mind.

Chris Weimer

Actually, I just finished my paper on this (hooray!).

Actually, the Moses parallels are far deeper than the obvious ones Zeichman mentioned. In fact, there have been so many papers done on Mosaic parallels alone that if I had done another, it would have been redundant. So I shifted the focus a bit.

Besides the narrative parallels, there's also the idea behind the narrative. Who was Jesus? What is his mission? How were the original covenanters supposed to know about Jesus?

As for the narrative parallels, yes, you can say Matthew directly borrowed it. It's a literary device, i.e. superimposing past events on the future for the purpose of making a point.

His point? In 1st century Israel, in 70 CE, the Romans had just destroyed Jerusalem. Matthew answers why this happens and what this means for the new religion Christianity.

Since Christians traditions strongly are tied in with Judaism, Matthew used Moses as a paradigm for Jesus' character. His use of the Old Testament reflects the "promise" for God to create a new covenant, one with a new Israel led out of "slavery" (traditional Judaism) into the "Promised Land" (Kingdom of Heaven) with the new "Israel" (Christians).