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

When John the Baptist was preaching he preached “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”  Later, Matthew tells us that after John was imprisoned Jesus began preaching exactly the same message.  We normally teach that Matthew did this to show that John had come to prepare the way for Jesus.  We are not wrong to think that because that was indeed part of Matthew’s message in today’s passage.  However, we miss the similarity between what John says when he condemns the religious leaders for putting their trust in being Abraham’s descendants and things that Jesus said later in His ministry on the same subject.  Matthew was connecting Jesus to a line of teaching among religious Jews of which John the Baptist was a part.  What the original readers of Matthew’s Gospel would have known that we had forgotten until recently is that John the Baptist did not arise out of nowhere to begin teaching.  The Bible mentions two major Jewish religious traditions of the time of Jesus: the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  With the discovery and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls we learned that there was a third major Jewish religious tradition, the Essenes.  A comparison of what the Dead Sea Scrolls tells us of some of their practices suggests that John the Baptist was part of that tradition.  Matthew knew this, as did those to whom he was writing.

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