TRANSLATION MATTHEW 10:34

Don’t imagine that I have come to bring peace on the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and a man’s enemies will be members of his own household.

Anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not carry his execution stake and follow after me, is not worthy of me. The one who gains his soul will destroy it, but the one who destroys his soul for my sake, will gain it.

These are the family values of Jesus! Certainly some experience of family division must lie behind these teachings, but we do not know if that is of Jesus himself or of his followers after CE 70.,The former is the more difficult option and I tend towards it for that reason.

What after all do we know about the family life of Yeshua bar Iosef? Not much is the honest answer. The tales of his mother’s pregnancy are theological romances even if they have some factual basis. We know his father Joseph was a tekton, that is, builder, carpenter, boat- mender, almost any kind of skilled construction or repair. But Jesus too is referred to as a tekton, so we can assume his involvement in a family business. Joseph disappears fron the gospel story although Mary remains. His death at a comparatively young age is the most likely explanation, but a serious family disagreement is not impossible.

It is likely indeed that the absence of Jesus’ pupils from family duties caused anger. The unsympathetic tone of Jesus’ teaching on this issue may show that it was a matter of personal experience. To place love for oneself and one’s mission over love for parents is profoundly un-Jewish, and remains one of the teachings of Jesus which still cause offence to his compatriots.

Then there is tha matter of the execution stake. I have deliberately avoided the expression “take up your cross” because it has been evacuated of all political meaning in English, where it has come to mean no more than something painful or troublesome. It is not possible that Jesus used the word for the most brutal of Roman punishments to mean anything other than itself. He was warning his pupils that commitment to any other Rule than Caesar’s might be interpreted by Rome as rebellion.

“To gain one’s soul” is a curious expression, which may mean “to have security of life and identity,” that is, precisely the sort of status that we most desire. Jesus promises paradoxically that only those who destroy that desire will truly gain that status. None of this is comfortable for any pupils anywhere but especially so for pupils of Jesus in risk-averse cultures.

The terrible freedom that Jesus offered his pupils is a measure of how important he considered his gospel to be. And that in turn is a measure of how needy and sinful he considered his people to be. This material brings a note of profound and disturbing realism into Matthew’s magical story.

• Hebrews
• This is intended as a new translation of Hebrews, because only the King James Version makes much of an attempt to translate the splendid rhetoric of the original; and the Jacobean language of the KJV puts it beyond the appreciation of many people today. My attempt can be rightly judged a failure if it does not reproduce at least some of the elegance of the original or does not accurately make its message clear in modern english. I have tried to translate literally in the main, only here and there changing a word for the sake of expressing the sense. My only reference books have been dictionaries of the Common Greek in which Hebrews is written.
• RELEASE ISTVAN ONODI
• MAGICAL MATTHEW 138
• MAGICAL MATTHEW 137