You are holding in your hands a tiny book which has changed more human lives than The Communist Manifesto or Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams: a book which has shaped whole civilizations: a book which, for many people, has been not a gospel but The Gospel.

And you are bound to ask, because you are born out of time in a post-Christian age, into a world of newspapers and investigative reporting and science – ‘Is it true?’ Did a Virgin really conceive (1 : 23) and give birth to a boy-child in Bethlehem (2 : 1)? Did wise men, guided by a star, come to worship him (2 : 2)? Did he grow up to be able to walk on water (14 : 26), to perform miracles, to found the Church (16 : 26), to rise from the dead?

Stop, stop. Don’t ask. They are all questions which seem reasonable enough, but they will lead you into the most pointless, arid negativism. Your educated, scientific, modern mind will decide that no one ever walked on water; no Virgin ever conceived; that corpses do not come to life. And by rejecting this Gospel, you will reject one of the most disturbing and extraordinary books ever written; not, as you might think, on intelligent grounds, but because you (and I, alas) are too hemmed in by our imaginative limitations to see the sort of things this book is doing.

Before you apply to it the supposedly rational tests which you would apply to a newspaper report or a television documentary, imagine the chapters which describe the trial and Crucifixion of Christ set to music in Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. Consider the millions of people who, for the last 1900 years have recited the prayer (6 : 9–13) which begins ‘Our Father’. Think of the old women in Stalin’s Russia, when the men were too cowardly to profess their loyalty to the Church, who stubbornly continued to chant the opening verses of the Sermon on the Mount in defiance of the KGB. ‘Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted’ (5 : 4).

This is a book, not of easily-dismissed fairy tales but of power and passion; more arresting, disturbing and truthful than most reading-matter which you could buy for the price of a magazine on a station bookstall or in the paperback store. This is the Gospel of Christ, in all its terribleness, its wonder, its awe-inspiring truth and its self-contradictions.

Nor should you think that the contradictory emotions which assail and trouble you as you read it – as trouble you they must – are all storms and tempest inside you. For this book itself was born out of conflict and struggle and contradiction.

Matthew’s Gospel reflects the tension which saw the new religion – what we call Christianity – being fashioned from the old – Judaism. It is by paradox an intensely Jewish, and an intensely anti-Jewish work – indeed it is the great Ur-text of anti-semitism. The historical Jesus is not to be found in this book, nor in any book. He eludes our search. Matthew’s Jesus is seen through the prism of a particular faith, of a particular group, somewhere in the Mediterranean world. Rome? 85–100 ad?

By the time the book reached something like its present form (50 years after Jesus had left the scene?) Christianity was emerging as something which, if not distinct from Judaism, was at least repellent to most Jews. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (of circa 50 ad) describes a rift between the first Christians of Asia Minor, converts of Paul, and the followers of Peter and James in Jerusalem who had known the earthly Jesus. It seems like an angry and irreconcilable quarrel. Paul, though, or because, a Jew, had decided that those who followed the Jewish Law (Torah), the Law given by God on Mount Sinai to his people, were living in bonds from which Christ came to set them free. For Peter and his friends, the dietary laws of Judaism, the requirement of circumcision, and so forth, were ‘not bonds but wings’; they were symbols of lives dedicated to God.

No compromise, surely, was possible, between these two ways? Either you circumcise your son or you don’t. Either it is sinful to eat pork, or it isn’t.

But to another generation, Matthew’s, the problems were different. The irreconcilables, rather than being fudged, are held together in self-contradiction. Peter and Paul, who in earlier New Testament texts were the leaders of opposing Ways, emerge in this text as co-partners (though, of course, Paul’s ideas, rather than his name, are what we find here).

It is Jesus himself, in this legendary reconstruction, who speaks lines which, in an earlier generation of Christianity, had been assigned to protagonists in the quarrel. On the one hand, with the followers of Paul, he wants to leave the synagogue. See chapter 12, a key moment, when the Pharisees accuse Jesus of breaking the Law by healing a man on the Sabbath. His reaction is to lead his people away from the mainstream of Jewry, but he does so, as Paul had done, by quoting the Jewish Scriptures. ‘I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall shew judgment to the Gentiles’ (12 : 18). On the other hand, Matthew’s Jesus is not simply a libertarian like Paul. He wishes to reassure the Jewish conservatives: ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil’ (5 : 17).

How is the miracle accomplished? It is done by seeing the new congregation or synagogue, or gathering-together of the Elect as the New Israel: the Church.

So Matthew constructs his book as a miniature Torah. Like Moses, Matthew’s Jesus goes up to a mountain (5 : 1) and delivers a New Law to his followers. At the end of the tale, in a gesture which could never have taken place in history but which is heavy with religious paradox, a pagan, Roman Governor performs a Jewish purification ritual – he washes his hands – to demonstrate his innocence of Christ’s murder. It is the Jewish mob who cry out, ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ (27 : 25). A terrible text which would have profound consequences in Europe during the centuries that it penetrated the collective consciousness. It was not just a few Jews in this Gospel who are responsible for the torture and death of Jesus. It is ‘all the people’ (27 : 25).

Matthew’s Gospel is not just the product of the embryo-Church. It is, really, a book about the Church, and it shapes what the Church, both in East and West, was destined to become.

The Church is a house founded upon a rock; and that rock is, primarily, the teaching of Christ. ‘Therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock’ (7 : 24–5).

The teachings, of course, are the exact reverse of worldly-wise notions of security. Our obsessions with security – financial, military, domestic – are blown sky high by Jesus’s teaching: not to lay up treasure, not to resist evil with violence. Yet a detachment from what we would call security seems like a prerequisite here for church membership. And the Church, for Matthew, is the ante-chamber of the Kingdom of God.

And notice the extraordinary emphasis on the superiority of the poor over the rich. When John the Baptist asks (chapter 11) whether Jesus is the One who is to come, the message comes back, ‘Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see’. A list follows, reaching a rhetorical crescendo. ‘The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up’ … Each thing is more remarkable than the last. But what is more remarkable even than the resurrection of the dead? The final item in the list: ‘The poor have the gospel preached to them’ (11 : 4–5).

That is not because Jesus was a sentimentalist or a socialist. It is because only the detached and the dispossessed, that is the poor, can hear his gospel. When a rich young man tried to follow Jesus, he ‘went away sorrowful’ (19: 22) because the message was too simple, and too stern. Only those who live as though there is no tomorrow, and who do not store up treasure, can enter the kingdom.

This is the rock on which the Church is founded. It is founded on a rock in another sense: it is founded on Simon whose title or nickname, given to him by Jesus in one of the most dramatic scenes in the Gospel, is Peter. There is no name ‘Peter’ in the ancient world. You find it on no ossuary or tomb. It is a word meaning ‘Rock’. It is a Gospel word. In chapter 16, Jesus asks his friends who do men say that he is? And they tell him – some say he is a prophet, or Elijah come back to earth. But you? Who do you say that he is?

The fisherman from Galilee blurts out, ‘“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” And Jesus answered and said unto him, “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church;’ (16 : 16–18).

This is the Simon who, only a little while earlier (14:27–31) has attempted to walk with Jesus on the water of the stormy lake of Galilee and who has sunk because he had no faith. This is the Simon Peter who, as Jesus had predicted, has no courage at the last. As Jesus had predicted, when his Master had been arrested, Peter denies even knowing him; and, when he confronts his own cowardice and weakness, ‘he went out and wept bitterly’ (26 : 75).

Here we see how the Christian community which shaped this Gospel has reconciled the early conflicts between Paul – for whom the Gospel was the acceptance of Grace – and Peter for whom it had been an observance of Law. For the Rock on which the Church is founded is not a rock of success, or moral strength, but of doubt, weakness, failure. The boat (another metaphor for the Church throughout this book) runs into storms and its crew panics. Only Jesus, apparently asleep, can calm the storms. ‘And he hath said unto me, “My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness”.’ (2 Corinthians 12 : 9).

The attempt to follow the new Torah, the Sermon on the Mount, will not lead to a new legalism. Nor will anyone be able to follow Jesus’s command to be perfect, even as God is perfect (5 : 48). Instead, it will lead to an understanding that, though we might abstain from murder, we shall still be angry; though we might avoid adultery, that is nothing to be proud of: for we shall still feel lust. It is Matthew the sinner and tax gatherer who is accepted in the Beloved. Christ the physician comes to heal sinners, not the righteous.

The author of this book did not attempt to write a realistic narrative of the kind we might expect from a post-enlightenment historian. For instance, judging from the earliest Christian writings and the Letters of Paul, it seems fairly likely that the Church began in Jerusalem. But Matthew has it beginning on a hillside in Galilee. Mark, the Gospel on which this book relies so heavily, says nothing about a miraculous conception, or a birth in Bethlehem. But the tale of a Virgin-birth and the recognition of the child by the wise men from the east perfectly illustrates the double-sided purpose of this book. On the one hand, the child is born to fulfil the Messianic prophecies of Judaism. On the other hand, he is recognised, not by the king of the Jews, but by wise Gentiles. Just so, at the end, he tells his followers to go into the ends of the earth, baptizing and teaching all people.

The sceptical mind will find these 28 chapters to be a catalogue of improbabilities. To any student of ethics, who has studied Aristotle or John Stuart Mill, or Dewey or Rawls, here is no morality at all but what Chesterton called ‘The Ethics of Elfland’.

At the centre-stage is Jesus, calling the rich to discard their wealth and offering the kingdom to the poor. He offers not peace but a sword (10 : 34). Yet he says (11: 28), ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’

Perhaps the most distinctive and haunting of all Matthew’s stories – perhaps the most haunting passage in the entire New Testament – is that parable in the final discourse (25 : 31–46) when Jesus predicts that the King will welcome the chosen into his kingdom. They are those who have seen him, not in his glory, but as poor, naked, hungry, in prison and in need. Neither the blessed, nor the damned, in this tale, understand during their lifetimes, that in so far as they responded to the depths of human need in others, they had responded to God. It is in the context of this story that we begin to understand the sense in which this book is true. By the stern test of that parable and of this Gospel, most of us will feel like that rich young man. We will go away sorrowful, deeply conscious of our inability either to understand the Gospel, or to live up to its precepts or to have the humility to accept Divine Grace. Yet, though we are sorrowful, and though we go away, we shall never read this text without being, in some small degree, changed.

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