Saint Matthew

Matthew is the Gospel writer who gives us the royal lineage of Joseph, directly descended from the original kings of Israel, David and his son Solomon. He claims to be an eye-witness of these events and pronounces Jesus as the expected Jewish Messiah. He also seems to be big on the Virgin birth from a prophecy of Isaiah, but probably related to the curse on Jeconiah recorded in Jeremiah 22.

In April 1996 a book was published by the name of "Eyewitness to Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin of the Gospels" by Thiede and D'Ancona.

The book claims that three ancient papyrus fragments, known as the Magdalen Papyrus, corroborate the tradition that St. Matthew actually wrote the Gospel bearing his name, that he wrote it within a generation of Jesus' death, and that the Gospel stories about Jesus are true.

Causing questions: Why are there three other Gospels, with Mark traditionally seen as the earliest one? Who is the mysterious Q source for the words of Jesus? How does Matthew treat this material differently than the other three accounts?

Mary, the Virgin?

What to make of this discovery of the tomb at Talpiot in 1980?

Six names were found on ten ossuaries. Mary, Martha and Matthew are .names of some disciples of Jesus that we read about in the Gospels. Matthew is also one of the writers of the Gospel. The other names are Jose (a form of Joseph), Judah and Jesus himself.

Obviously this is not the tomb of Jesus and his family because as far as we know (from scriptures), Jesus had no family. At best, he had some step-brothers (4?), step-sisters (2?) and various disciples. Jose may have been the name of one of the step-brothers.

The scriptures call Jesus a "life giving spirit". In the book of Acts the risen Lord comes into his full power as such, even more so than during his earthly ministry. Therefore, if Jesus is a spirit, then the finding of a body or burial location is not going to be of much importance in this greater scheme of things.

Theologically I can understand all of the above, and the evil of desecrating a burial place (Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.), and yet this finding of a tomb raises certain questions that cannot easily be cast aside without meditation.

Could this possibly represent a Christian burial rather than a strictly Jewish one?

One can only speculate on the relationships of these individuals in the attempts to make some Biblical sense of it, if any.

If one agrees that Jesus the risen is not in this tomb, can one then pose the
possibility that Mary could have remarried someone named Jesus, son of Joseph, at Jerusalem, sometime after her first husband Joseph died in Nazareth/Bethlehem? And that Mary and Jesus had sons by the name of Jose and Judah, who are step-brothers of her son, Jesus? The statistics show that these names were common, Jesus and Joseph, at that time, and so it seems not so far-fetched as it might at first contact.

This seems incredible, but certainly would lessen the controversy of having Jesus, the son of Mary, being placed in a tomb next to his mother, Mary., and he being married to a Mariamne, and they being the parents of a child together, etc. etc. etc., compounding the mystery, especially knowing that scriptures do little to back any of this up, which would have been obvious to first century believers, if not to us. Can we believe that one of the Gospel writers would not have mentioned something about this? For what purpose does it serve for Jesus to have a child when he is obviously consecrated in the last three years of his life (some say last 9 months only as the Paschal Lamb.) to being a sacrifice?

Let's not be so quick to write this off as a non-find until we check out the facts and where they lead. Perhaps something will come of it after further study, but for now we can only speculate ...

Perhaps the step brothers and sisters of Jesus are actually cousins, children of a brother or sister of Mary. Unfortunately, we don't have the geneological records that were destroyed in the Temple in 70 A.D. to verify this.