The Complete Guide to the Papacy in the Holy Bible by Christiaan Kappes & William Albrecht

Author:Christiaan Kappes & William Albrecht [Kappes, Christiaan & Albrecht, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Patristic Pillars press
Published: 2022-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

It would appear that St. Matthew was not satisfied with simply adding on Jesus sayings to his Gospel but was commenting upon them to assure believers that the end of the world is not imminent. Again, this material all directs us to the same conclusions: St. Peter is either alive or his legacy is still living. The division between Saints Peter and Paul has already happened to bad effect. At the same time, St. Matthew was utilizing these memoirs to answer the theological questions of his day, which perhaps arose after the outbreak of the Jewish war or destruction of the Second Temple, whether the end is imminent or not. St. Matthew pens assurances to his community that generations of people are yet to be produced even though they wonder in virtue of the present signs (around AD 68-70) if Jesus’s sayings should be taken to mean that the Romans will usher in the end of the world. The Jewish war not only affected Palestine but, as Josephus reports, it had dire consequences for the populations around Syria, who were also persecuted by opportunists. To Jesus’s predictions, St. Matthew has in his possession to add parable material spoken by Jesus and used to prepare his followers for the end times. These stories are ideal to put in chapter 25 to use Jesus’s parables –known to all– to interpret the prediction of the end times in order to avoid a sense that Jesus foresaw the Second Coming immediately after the Temple was destroyed. This likely means that this material was added around AD 68 or even later when a lot of expectation was occurring. It is meant to modulate enthusiasm and to exhort patience. If it were meant to explain disappointment that the end had not come, we would expect very explicit stories or material with Jesus explicitly elongating the time of his Second Coming because of people losing heart or losing faith. Instead, we see vague allusions that are supposed to temper enthusiasm but not crush it. The Jesus sayings are meant to keep the local church in an uncomfortable tension that it might be tomorrow but that, if it is a tomorrow, then that tomorrow is a figurative and literary tomorrow, that is to say: after several generations of Christians have been born and started to feel that they can go about their everyday business again. On one hand, this means that Christians of each generation must keep on their toes, for Jesus might return, but on the other, Jesus himself preached that people would be having children and going through the cycle of marrying and burying when his surprise return became manifest.

For our purposes, the end of this chapter is very interesting, for it returns to the theme of Jesus sitting in judgment in the midst of a holy Sanhedrin: “When the Son of Man comes in glory, and all his holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of his glory” (Matthew 25:32-35). This

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