Thank you for the notes on pesher — it’s good to learn yet another new thing today! I agree also that a willful distortion of the texts would have been rejected by any synagogue worth its weight.

I was just reading Barclay again and he’s far more conservative, estimating 20-30 children that might have been targeted. That makes a sin of omission far more likely by the historical record…

That is an excellent point, Damian, and a worthy indictment of our modern verse-by-verse mentality.

I noticed this when I was reading this months NG as well. My instant thought was along the lines of – firstly, its impossible to be ‘certain’ when it comes to 1st Century acts, and secondly that if Herod had killed 100 children, it wouldn’t have been a big deal in the light of the other people he’s famous for massacring.

Regarding Gundry’s midrash theory, I’ve been studying the Gospel of Matthew in depth the last month or so, and I’ve come to the conclusion that calling it Midrash is unneccesary.

Regarding Matthew’s use of the OT, I’m of the school that tends to assume that an OT quote implies the relevance of the entire passage that quote is within. In Matthew, especially early Matthew, this approach works quite well, and so I don’t think he misappropriates prophecy at all.

As Steve said, in the ancient world, I’m sure playing fast and loose with either prophecy or past events, especially in a time where memory of those events were still fairly fresh, would not be rewarded.

You also must keep in mind that the NT, when speaking of “fulfillments”, doesn’t always mean “fulfillment” in the sense that we do. For instance, most modern scholars – even some conservative ones – recognize in the Gospel of Matthew an application of the common first century interpretive tradition known as pesher used extensively (but not exclusively) at Qumran. In the pesher tradition, passages from the OT were called up (often quite out of context) and recycled in a much nuanced sense to establish a common pattern. For instance, one theme of the Gospel of Matthew is that Jesus is the new Israel. So when Matthew links Hosea 11.1 with the child Jesus’ return to Nazareth with the words, “Out of Egypt I have called my son,” and does so with “fulfillment” language, he was not saying that the original referent of Hosea’s words, the nation of Israel, was not the true or ultimate referent – only that Jesus fit the type or pattern. We see this pesher-style usage of the term “fulfill” elsewhere in Matthew.

This doesn’t really necessarily contribute to the question of whether any of these events tied to various OT prophecies were historical or concocted for literary style. I think too much of the latter, even in the ancient world, would probably have been considered deceitful and that the morality of Christians concerned with spreading the faith would have made them uncomfortable with doing this; in other words, I’d side with Barclay here and say that, no matter how the events were “mythologized”, I suspect that there was at least some perceived level of historicity for those events.