[Faith-talk] Baffling Bible Questions Answered for Monday, September 12, 2016

[Paul Smith]

Hello and good day once again to my astute Bible students out there.  I 
hope that your day is going well, by God's matchless grace and His 
providential care.

Yes, I know that it's not the Christmas season, but the questions and 
answers will doubtless remind you of Christmas from the Book of Matthew.



Matthew 2:1

Question:  Who were the "magi," and how did they know that a star would 
announce the Messiah's birth?

Answer:  The popular ideas that the wise men were kings and that there 
were three of them are inventions not derived from the biblical text.  
In Old Testament times, magi were a scholarly class who advised 
Babylonian and Persian rulers.  While we cannot identify the magi of 
the Bible, we do know that this scholarly class persisted in Persia 
into New Testament times and was at times influential in the Parthian 
kingdom east of Palestine.

We have no information on how these wise men recognized the star that 
announced Jesus' birth.  Some suggest they relied on the prediction in 
Numbers 24:17:  "A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out 
of Israel." A knowledge of this prophecy in the lands east of Israel is 
not at all unrealistic.  A large and vital Jewish community thrived in 
the east from the time of the Babylonian conquest, and the fruit of 
their intense study of the Old Testament is available today in the 
Babylonian Talmud, one of the two major sources of religious tradition 
in Judaism.



Matthew 2:2

Question:  What was the star of Bethlehem?

Answer:  Many attempts have been made to link the star that appeared at 
Jesus' birth with a natural astronomical phenomenon.  Some have 
suggested a conjunction of planets, others a comet, still others a 
supernova.  However, Matthew 2:9, which says that the star "went ahead 
of them until it stopped over the place where the child was," makes it 
clear that the star was supernatural rather than natural phenomenon.  
This will trouble those who doubt the possibility of miracles, but it 
will hardly bother the Christian believer.



Matthew 2:6

Question:  Why does Matthew not quote Micah 5:2 accurately? If we 
changed the meaning of a verse of Scripture, we would be roundly criticized.

Answer:  Matthew does not change the meaning but rather paraphrases to 
bring out the intent of the text.  Micah notes that Bethlehem is a 
relatively insignificant (small) city and yet is destined to be the 
birthplace of the Messiah.  Matthew appropriately interprets this to 
imply that Bethlehem is not insignificant, because from it the ruler 
"who will be the shepherd of My people Israel" has actually come.  This 
last phrase is not found in Micah but is taken from 2 Samuel 5:2.

Such a blending of different Old Testament texts in a single quotation 
(a conflate quotation is not unusual (see also Matt. 27:9-10; Mark 1:2-3).)

What we have in this quotation is not a misquote or an error but an 
authoritative, Holy Spirit-guided interpretative paraphrase of the Old 
Testament text intended to emphasize its original intent.



Matthew 2:6

Question:  Did the disciples of Jesus simply go back to the Old 
Testament after Christ's death and find parts of written prophecies 
that they twisted so they would appear to show Jesus was the Messiah?

Answer:  The problem with this theory is that long before Jesus was 
born, the Jewish rabbis had identified and studied the key Old 
Testament Messianic texts.  In his "Life and Times of Jesus the 
Messiah," Edersheim lists 456 Old Testament passages applied to the 
Messiah or Messianic times by the "most ancient Jewish writings." A 
study of Edersheim's material shows that the disciples of Christ did 
not invent their applications of Old Testament passages to Jesus, but 
that most of these passages were recognized as Messianic long before 
Jesus was born.

And there you have this week's Baffling Bible questions column which I 
hope gave you food for thought.

Please note that tomorrow there may or may not be an uplifting literary 
contribution, because the undersigned will have come back from an 
outing and may not feel up to posting anything.  It's not that I'm rude 
or anything like that; it just may be that I'll be tired from the outing.

And that will do for now.  Until next week when, Lord willing the next 
in this series of articles will be posted, may the God of Abraham, 
Isaac and Jacob just keep us safe, individually and collectively, in 
these last days in which we live.  Your Christian friend and brother, Paul