Before moving on to Matthew chapter nine, I would like to linger for a moment on the title the demons used with Jesus, "Son of God." Modern readers, whether devout Christians or not, are almost surely going to assume that the demons were addressing Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity, the divine, pre-existent God-Jesus who has been the object of Christian faith and devotion for many long centuries. But that's not how the small, urban first-century church we've been imagining would have heard this title. We can't be sure, actually, how they heard it or what it meant to them.Bart Ehrman in his book, The Orthodox Corruption of the Church (Oxford University Press, 1993), points out that there was great theological ferment and diversity among Christians in the first three centuries of the church. He writes that some Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries believed there is one God, others believed in more than one. Some thought Jesus was only human, others that he was God and human (including some who thought that he was only temporarily part God), and some thought that he wasn't human at all. They didn't even agree on whether or not Jesus' death on the cross was for salvation. Some even believed that the biblical God is evil—and, yet, all of them were followers of Jesus.
When early Christians, thus, heard the term, "Son of God," some would have associated it with the Jewish Messiah, others would have heard "merely" a term of respect for Jesus. Still others would have seen it as a sign that God worked through Jesus or maybe temporarily inhabited Jesus. And some may well have simply assumed that, since they were all God's children, that this was just a fancy way of pointing to Jesus' humanity as another son of God. We don't know.
The important point here is that a modern-day Christians by-and-large read the Bible on the basis of a whole host of assumptions that have nothing to do with the ancient text(s) or the time in which they were written. Those assumptions represent Christian traditions that developed in later centuries, which now are frequently treated as if they have the force of scripture themselves; and all they do is make it less likely that modern-day readers will wrestle with the meaning of the biblical text. We feel that we don't have to wrestle because we already know what the Bible means—supposedly.
My sense is that the Spirit speaks through the Bible best when we wrestle with it, question it, and try to make sense of it in its own time and since then. And, for me personally at least, the best way to wrestle with the text is to try to put it back in its original siz im leben, place in life. That is nearly impossible, of course, but even so and with some imagination as well as research and reflection (and humility) we can still discern important some tangible, ancient meanings. What a great challenge! Amen.
