I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 1-4

Matthew starts his account of Jesus’ ministry by establishing the prophetic basis for believing that Jesus is the Messiah, the Chosen One of God.  Matthew also makes the case that God revealed Jesus’ Divine mission in other ways (that is the purpose of including the account of the wise men).  Actually, all of this passage up until Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness serves the purpose of placing Jesus’ ministry in the context of God’s working at the time.  First, Matthew establishes that Jesus is descended from David.  Then he shows the divine nature of His birth.  He follows that up by showing how God revealed Christ to those who worshiped Him who were not Jewish, and the threat which Jesus was to those in political power.  The account of John the Baptist and Jesus’ baptism by him ties Jesus to the Jewish religious revival movement of the Essenes (perhaps the only Jewish religious group of the period without a strong hint of hypocrisy about it).  There are other things we can learn from what Matthew wrote here, but his primary purpose in including these elements was to thoroughly establish Jesus’ ministry in Jewish religious traditions.

Even Matthew’s account of Jesus calling His first disciples fits into the Jewish religious context of the time.  However, as I understand how someone normally became a rabbi’s disciple in First Century Judaism, Matthew is using this to show that Jesus was a different sort of Jewish religious teacher.  Normally, someone who wanted to study with a rabbi requested to be taken as his student and the rabbi would accept only the best of the applicants.  Jesus, on the other hand, chose His disciples.  They did not choose Him.