The little first-century urban church that I have been imagining to try to understand how the Gospel of Matthew was understood in its own time was a Gentile church. Its members were almost surely new to the Jesus faith. They would have been mostly poor and with little education. One wonders how they would have understood the story about healing two demoniacs in Matthew 8:28-34. Did they know enough Palestinian geography to know that the story took place in Gentile territory, not Jewish? What did the title, "Son of God," mean to them? It, apparently, was a Jewish messianic title. Would they have known that? Had they ever heard the Gospel of Mark read or even know about it with its very different version of this story (Mark 5:1-20)?I raise these questions because this story in 8:28-34 must have required a more than passing knowledge of "things biblical" in order to be understood by first-century audiences. The title, "Son of God," is a particularly important one. In the first century, it did not mean that Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, the whole trinitarian thing having yet to be worked out. In a Jewish context, it was a term for the Messiah. But, how would a Gentile audience have heard it? Their background was not Jewish, and I'm not sure just how much background they had in Jewish theology. Something like, "Son of God," was applied to the Roman emperors of the day. What did they hear when the demons proclaimed Jesus to be the Son of God?
Let me offer a possibility. The demon's declaration comes in the midst of three stories about Jesus, which display his power and authority. As we have seen in Matthew 8:23-27, Jesus had power over the storms, over chaos. In this story, he has power over demons. In the next story, 9:1-7, he has power to forgive human sin. Nature. Demons. Sin. That's a lot of power! It certainly places Jesus in a category all by himself, one that puts him a lot closer to God than anyone else. The title, "Son of God," in this context thus could have meant to our little church at least that Jesus had divine-like power and authority that came from God. They could well have thought of him as being human-plus, something more than merely a human being. They already knew about his resurrection, and this story must have served to reinforce a deep reverence for Jesus, the Christ. And our little church would have taken great comfort in his divine-like power over the forces of chaos, evil, and sin.
In sum, our little church may not have known a whole lot about the Jewish context of the story of the demoniacs, but that may not have mattered very much either. The basic message of the gospel as they heard it read to them was clear enough, and it reinforced their experience of Jesus as being practical, life-changing good news for them individually and in their life together as a community of faith.
