Jesus’s Origins (Matthew 1–2) as Cultural Trauma

Abstract

Jeffrey Alexander’s social theory about trauma provides a theoretical framework to explore Matthew’s Gospel’s two first chapters as a trauma narrative that wrestles in a creative way with at least two significant issues for its original audience: (1) How can Jesus be the Christ/Messiah and yet undergo a shameful and violent death? (2) What are the national and theological implications of the destruction of the Temple in AD 70? Alexander’s four dimensions of representations of cultural trauma (the nature of the pain; the nature of the victim; the relation of the trauma victim to a wider audience; and the attribution of responsibility) guide the analysis. Matthew 1–2, as a trauma narrative, processes past trauma to encourage resilience against future traumatization. This can be a powerful tool to shape identity and promote solidarity by opening new avenues for understanding violent imagery.

1. Introduction to Cultural Trauma

We typically associate the accounts of Jesus’s birth with Christmas time and its joyous familial gatherings and gift giving. This interpretative context does not help us to relate to the ‘dark side’ of the story presented in the first two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. The violence of the Bethlehem infanticide is uncomfortable, and it questions our reading assumptions. Since Frechette and Boase (2016, pp. 1–23) suggest that studying the representation of trauma will ‘open up new avenues for understanding violent imagery’, I intend to interpret Matthew 1–2 as cultural trauma, a social construction of meaning that alters collective identity.

Matthew 1–2 can be read as a trauma narrative that wrestled in a creative way with at least two significant issues for its original audience: (1) How can Jesus be the Christ/Messiah and yet undergo a shameful and violent death? (2) What are the national and theological implications of the destruction of the Temple in AD 70?1 These two events raise important theological questions. How do we speak of God after Jesus’s death and the Temple’s destruction? With a story set in the context of Jesus’s origins and birth that includes trauma, Matthew’s Gospel helped its original audience to understand these terrible events. Such a narrative helped form a group identity and can also help 21st century readers deal with contemporary trauma.2

Trauma studies following Alexander’s works have made two important distinctions (Alexander and Breese 2011, pp. xiv–xxii). First, literary representation of trauma creates meaning for communities and does not equate with the pain of individuals who form these groups.3 Second, there is a difference between devastating events and cultural trauma expressed through literature4. Cultural trauma opens a discussion about the ways that trauma is represented. These literary representations of trauma take multiple forms and can express cultural trauma that is not necessarily connected to a single event. For example, Dube (2013, pp. 107–22) analyses the trauma of Jesus’s death in relation to the violence and injustice endured by the community of his followers.

At face value, Matthew 1–2 is a narrative about Jesus’s origins that does not explicitly relate to Jesus’s crucifixion or the destruction of the Temple. However, as Granofsky (1995, p. 5) argues, linguistic symbols that point beyond themselves bond individual and communal experiences to allow traumatic memories to be faced from a certain distance that permits safe confrontation of traumatic experience. My interpretative proposition is to see Matthew’s story about Jesus’s origins as a safe space for dealing in an indirect fashion with trauma related to Jesus’s crucifixion and the destruction of the Temple. This article will thus pursue this interpretative proposition by exploring how literary devices of the beginning of the Gospel according to Matthew point beyond themselves, beyond the sole story of Jesus’s birth.

Alexander’s (2012) social theory about trauma provides the theoretical framework for the analysis of this symbolic-cum-emotional representation as a collective process of meaning-making. He proposes four dimensions of representations of cultural trauma (Alexander 2012, pp. 17–19): (1) The nature of the pain: What actually happened? (2) The nature of the victim: What group of people were affected by this traumatizing pain? (3) The relation of the trauma victim to a wider audience: To what extent do the members of the audience of trauma representations identify with the group being victimized? (4) The attribution of responsibility: Who caused the trauma? The first two dimensions will be treated together, initially within the story of Matthew 1–2, and then by reading it along with the original audience of this Gospel. I will then describe how some literary features open the narrative to engage its readers. Finally, the attribution of responsibility for Jesus’s death and the destruction of the Temple will be explored through Matthew 1–2.

2. The Nature of the Pain and the Nature of the Victim in the Story

The genealogy (Matt. 1:1–17) puts forth a specific interpretation of Israel’s history in which Jesus’s birth is presented as the pinnacle of three sets of fourteen generations.5 This patrilineal genealogy starts with Abraham, the father of the nation. It goes through the patriarchs and eventually leads up to King David. Interestingly, Matthew’s genealogy points to David’s failures by noting that David fathered Solomon with Uriah’s wife.6 After David, the genealogy continues with the other kings of Judah. Although a few of them are remembered in Israel’s traditions as positive figures, most are not. This list of kings leads up to the deportation to Babylon. The Exile and destruction of Jerusalem are biblical trauma par excellence and represent an important pivot in this genealogy.7 After the deportation, the genealogy presents Zerubbabel, a biblical character linked to the failed attempt to restore the Davidic dynasty. The names following Zerubbabel are unknown and contrast with the preceding list of patriarchs and kings. Exegetes such as Piotrowski (2016, p. 36) interpret the genealogy as a way to situate Jesus in the midst of a people that in many ways were still in exile. In short, at the story level, the people affected by the pain were the Israelites represented by the genealogy; the nature of the pain was the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, the deportation to Babylon and the end of the Davidic dynasty.

In Matthew 2, the massacre of Bethlehem’s children (2:15–17) is the most obvious pain at the story level. Herod killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under. Jer. 31:15 is then quoted to comment on this tragedy: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’ Although Jesus was not killed, his family fled to Egypt to seek refuge. They were also victims of Herod’s violence. The effect of this episode was a prolonged exile. After leaving Egypt, they never came home to Bethlehem out of fear of Archelaus, Herod’s son, and settled instead in Nazareth.

Matthew’s appeal to Israel’s scripture is an important feature of this narrative. The prophetic tradition is exploited by five quotes that interpret the events around Jesus’s birth as accomplished scripture. It is significant that Matthew refers to Isaiah, Micah, Hosea and Jeremiah, whose traditions represent responses to Israel’s traumatic experiences. These intertextual relations open the Matthew 1–2 narrative to a wider audience by using a web that connects the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the story of Jesus’s birth.8 This intertextual web shows how the beginning of the Gospel according to Matthew opens possibilities to think about traumatic narratives when recounting Jesus’s origins.

3. Reading with the Original Audience: The Nature of the Pain and of the Victim

As Alexander (2012, p. 4) puts it, ‘Collective traumas are not actual events, but symbolic renderings that reconstruct and imagine them’; they are therefore relatively independent from historical events. Exegetical readings are well accustomed to viewing biblical texts in other ways than as literal renderings of historical events. From the story level, we will proceed to how this story could function if seen as a trauma narrative for its original audience.

The original audience of Matthew’s Gospel is a highly contested issue. Although there are different views on this subject, there is a consensus that its first audience was after AD 70 and was composed of people who would have seen themselves as both followers of Christ and members of Israel (Davies and Allison 1988, pp. 7–58; Sim 1988, p. 31; Brown 1993, pp. 46–48; Luz 2007, p. 93; Carter 2001, p. 37; Overman 1990). This posited audience was challenged with two traumatic events that can be seen as ‘the nature of the pain’ symbolically addressed by Matthew 1–2. The death of the Messiah, followed in a relatively short time with the destruction of God’s dwelling place, sets a disturbing setting in a context of social upheaval and religious catastrophe. Matthew was written in a time that could have been seen by its original audience as the utmost tragedy that could be imagined (Knowles 2006, pp. 59–60). God’s land was controlled by foreigners, Jerusalem and its Temple had just been destroyed, and the Messiah had been crucified.9

Jesus’s death and the destruction of the Temple are linked in all the New Testament Gospels. In Matt. 26:61, Jesus was accused of having said that he could destroy and rebuild the Temple in three days. This saying does not explicitly link the destruction of the Temple and Jesus’s bodily destruction, as does John 2:21.10 However, in Matthew’s narrative, this saying about the destruction of the Temple was the testimony that caused the high priests to condemn Jesus to death (21:66). A statement attributed to Jesus about the destruction of the Temple resulted in the destruction of his body. The ‘three days’ also links Jesus’s death and resurrection with the destruction and reconstruction of the Temple. Moreover, the spectacular tear in the veil of the Temple (Matt. 27:51) presents itself as an immediate effect of the death of Jesus. One of the common interpretations of this tear is that it symbolically anticipated the destruction of the Temple.11 It was not just an opening in the veil, but a rupture (σχίζω) in two, from top to bottom. An important and sumptuous part of the Temple was thus destroyed in this story describing Jesus’s death. I follow Cohen’s recent study (Cohen 2020, pp. 75–101) that emphasizes Matthew’s positive view towards the Temple within the dominant view of Second Temple groups who, in spite of various tensions, understood the Temple as the locus of God’s presence. Cohen’s article is embedded in the growing interpretation of Matthew within Judaism.12

3.1. The Death of the Messiah

The Psalms of Solomon show that under Roman occupancy, the Messiah was to restore Israel by defeating its enemies as did King David in Israel’s traditions: ‘See O Lord, and raise up for them their king, the son of David, at the time which you choose O God, to rule over Israel your servant. And gird him with strength, to shatter in pieces unrighteous rulers, to purify Jerusalem from nations that trample her down in destruction.’ (Ps Sal 17:21–22) (See Trafton 1994, pp. 3–19; Willitts 2012, pp. 27–50). Research shows the diversity of messianic expectations in the Second Temple period (Charlesworth 1987, pp. 225–64; Theissen and Merz 1998, pp. 537–37; Sanders 1992, p. 295; Wright 1992, pp. 307–8; Collins 1995, pp. 3–4, 11; Dunn 2003, p. 618; Struckenbruck 2007, pp. 112–13). However, an executed criminal was not part of these hopes. The Messiah was perceived as a leader of the nation, not as one who would be put to death by religious and political authorities. The New Testament can be seen as a literary collection of traditions that understand Jesus as Christ by redefining messianic expectations in light of his death and resurrection. This inappropriate and surprising end for a Messiah generated interpretations of Jesus’s life that helped make sense of his death. As we see in Matthew 1–2, it also generated interpretations of prophetic traditions showing how they were fulfilled (πληρόω) by the events in Jesus’s life.

The crucifixion of the Messiah raised questions: Who is responsible? How could God allow this? What happens to the group of people who followed Jesus and believed him to be the Christ? My first hypothesis is that Matthew 2 addresses the trauma of Jesus’s death in a symbolic way. Matthew’s infancy narrative shows that from his birth, Jesus was persecuted by Jerusalem’s authorities, but he was nonetheless the rightful king/Christ and God was with him through his persecution.

For Scarsella (2018, pp. 256–82), the trauma of Jesus’s crucifixion is the starting point of Christian theology, ‘The discipline of Christian theology is itself a response to trauma. Without the traumatic event of Jesus’s crucifixion and the rupturing belief that the one who was killed rose again from the grave, Christian theology as we know it would not have come into being’. Nevertheless, how can we posit that this death was traumatic for Matthew’s audience? It is worth mentioning that crucifixion is not part of our modern reality. The cross bears a wide range of meaning, from a piece of jewellery to an important Christian symbol for life after death. However, for the followers of Christ who lived under the same political regime that executed Jesus, crucifixion was one of the worst possible fates.13 It meant long torture and no burial rights. As for Jesus, his followers’ own lives were at stake. Furthermore, Matthew’s implied audience lived in a way that echoed Jesus’s traumatic end. For example, Matthew’s Beatitudes (5:3–12) are addressed to those who mourn (πενθέω), who are humble (πραΰς), and who hunger and thirst for justice (δικαιοσύνη). Their conclusion focuses on ‘those who are persecuted for the sake of justice’ (v.10) and speaks of a time ‘when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account’ (v.11). The implied audience of Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes was living in a very difficult situation; a similar position to that of their Christ. The experience of oppression comes up in several other episodes, notably in the sending of the disciples that leads to persecution (Matt. 10:16–23). When reading Matthew, we see that the traumatic persecution of Jesus’ followers is analogous to the persecution that led to Jesus’s death.

3.2. The Destruction of the Temple

The contemporaneity of the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 with the composition of the synoptic Gospels is undeniable. However, this chronological link is not sufficient to show that this destruction was a traumatic event for Matthew’s audience. The negative portrayal of the Temple as a ‘den of robbers’ (Matt. 21:13) could be invoked to justify disregarding the Temple. Nevertheless, in this quotation from Jer. 7:11, this saying does not mean that Jeremiah wanted the Temple to be destroyed. It is a way to interpret the destruction of the first Temple by describing its wrongful activities. The high importance of the Temple is established in the way Matt. 23:21 links the Temple with God’s presence: ‘whoever swears by the temple, swears by it and by the one who dwells in it’. The Temple’s destruction as ex eventu prophesy (Matt. 24:2) specifically shows how this event is to be seen as the beginning of eschatological trauma. This prophecy is followed by descriptions of unparalleled distress that is summarized as the greatest affliction of all time, ‘For at that time there will be great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.’ (Matt. 24:21)14

As argued by Reinhartz (2014), the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Romans in AD 70 was traumatic for Jews, and thus also for Jewish followers of Christ.15 The impact of this event was certainly not the same for those who lived in the Diaspora versus those who lived in Palestine, especially Judea.16 It is common to posit Matthew’s Gospel within Palestinian Judaism; this makes its original audience among those who would have been the most impacted. Many died in this event and many fled, leaving everything behind to seek refuge from the destruction.17 This event also asks theological questions—How could God allow this? Who is responsible?—and social identity questions—What happens to Israel, God’s people, if he has abandoned them? The nature of the pain is thus multivalent. The pain of death and exile are physical and emotional, but the questions about national identity and God’s abandonment can also generate social and spiritual pain. The people who held Jerusalem, its Temple and its God as important were deeply affected by this event. Their world fell apart. Naturally, first-century Jews associated this event with the similar destruction by Babylonians several centuries before18. My second hypothesis is that the events of AD 70 are symbolically addressed in Matthew 1–2 by its insistence on the deportation from Babylon and its response to the ongoing exile under Roman occupancy.19 Like all Jews living in the fourth quarter of the first century AD, Matthew’s audience lived under Roman domination instead of under God’s Davidic rule.20 Similar to Joseph, Mary and their child in Matthew’s story, many experienced violence and endured forced displacement.

4. Relation of the Trauma Victim to the Wider Audience

As a trauma narrative, Matthew 1–2 has the potential to engage readers in ethical questions of social responsibility and political action. The performative power of this narrative expands what Alexander calls ‘the circle of the we’ (Alexander 2012, p. 7). Readers are invited to look toward Rachel’s lamentation as a voice for their pain (Matt. 2:16–18). They are encouraged to feel and act as belonging to the group of ‘his (Jesus’s) people’ (Matt. 1:21). The presentation of Jesus as Emmanuel, God-with-us (Matt. 1:23), builds a bridge from the story world to readers’ worlds. This offers readers the opportunity to experience the reading of this story as a trauma narrative that conveys the power to change the collective identity of those who read or hear it.

4.1. Rachel Weeping

The figure of Rachel weeping is a very effective way in which this trauma narrative draws a complex intertextual web on an affective or emotional level.21 Rachel’s lamentation recalls many Hebrew Bible traditions. First, the prophetic quote (Matt. 2:16–18) directs readers to Jer. 31:15, where Rachel refused to be comforted because of the death of her symbolic children. This is a possible allusion to the Assyrian invasion of the northern kingdom in 722–721 BC (Bright 1965, pp. 281–82; Thompson 1980, p. 573; Soares-Prabhu 1976, p. 256; Holladay and Hanson 1986, pp. 186–87; Brown 1993, pp. 205–6; Mazurel 2004, pp. 181–89) and/or Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem in 597 and 587 BC (Gundry 1967, pp. 210–11; Lindars 1979, pp. 47–62; Becking 1994, pp. 229–42). There is also an allusion to Jacob’s response to the supposed death of Joseph in his refusal of comfort (Gen. 37:34–35).22 In addition, there is a strong resonance with the book of Exodus (1:15–22), which narrates Pharaoh’s massacre of Hebrew male babies. What effect do these intertexts have on Matthew’s readers? How could this affective appeal concerning Rachel’s tears impact its audience’s response to Matthew’s story? The episode of the Bethlehem massacre uses many levels of intertextuality as a rhetorical device, to solicit an emotional response powerful enough to influence the reader’s worldview. Traditional exegesis struggles with the violence of Matthew’s text. In the context of trauma theory, however, this difficult passage can be read in a new light. Rachel’s weeping acts as a powerful metaphor that allows the reader to remember the worst periods in Israel’s history: moments characterized by violence, destruction, exile, death and lack of hope. The audience is thus extended to all who look at these events as an important part of their social identity, as well as those who suffer from violence, especially violence caused by foreign empires.

4.2. ‘His People’

Matthew’s readers are invited to feel and act as belonging to the group of ‘his people’ (τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ) that will be saved (Matt. 1:21).23 A history of interpretation has shown the polysemic nature of this expression. For some, it points to Israel (Miler 1999, p. 28; Luz 2004, pp. 119–37; Repschinski 2006, pp. 248–67), for others, to the people who follow Jesus (Davies and Allison 2004, p. 210). As part of a literary representation of trauma, this expression opens the narrative to all hearers who identify themselves as needing salvation, as first-century Jews needed salvation from Roman occupants.24 Exiled Jewish Christians of Matthew’s original audience certainly fit this description.

4.3. ‘God with Us’

Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 to present Jesus as ‘Emmanuel’. The fulfilment of the Scriptures is based on the presence of God with his people through Jesus. This citation links Jesus’s birth with an important prophetic tradition, but it also builds a bridge from Matthew’s story to his readers’ worlds. The narrative says that ‘they will call him Emmanuel (αλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ) God-with-us’ (1:23). Who is the subject of the verb αλέσουσιν (they will call)? Who is referred to by ἡμῶν (us)? In the rest of the Gospel, no character calls Jesus by the name of Emmanuel. The only people who could fit the description are outside of the narrative. Readers who follow the Gospel’s perspective are those who can call Jesus ‘Emmanuel’, the embodiment of God’s presence.25 This specific way of conveying God’s presence to readers through Jesus is particularly important in the narrative structure of the Gospel according to Matthew, since there is an inclusio between God-with-us in 1:23 and the very last verse of the Gospel where the risen Christ says: ‘and I am with you (ἐγὼ μεθ’ ὑμῶν) every day until the end of time’ (Matt. 28:20). Matthew’s Gospel can thus be understood as a narrative that aims to convey God’s presence through Jesus to its readers.26

In Alexander’s terms, these literary devices help forge the ‘we’ of this trauma narrative. Matt. 1:21 and 1:23 point beyond the story. They orient readers toward the audience of the Gospel. ‘We’ are invited to identify with the collective identity of those who are saved by Jesus (1:21) and who see him as the manifestation of God (1:23).

5. Attribution of Responsibility

The story gives readers helpful clues to understand who bears responsibility for the traumatic situations it describes. The attribution of responsibility for the deportation to Babylon mentioned in the genealogy is not explicit. Many pages of the Hebrew Bible try to explain this disaster by Israel’s failure to follow the covenant or God’s will. Here, the genealogy precedes the deportation with a list of Judah’s kings. This list points to their failures as cause for the Exile.27 As for the Bethlehem massacre, this is attributed to Herod, whose rage was triggered when he was ridiculed (εμπαιζειν) by the magi (2:16). This passage gives a very negative characterization of Herod.28 The king of Judea killed innocent children in spite of the fact that he, as king, should have been responsible for their safety. Thus, the narrative infers that Herod was not a legitimate king. Readers could then consider who the rightful king should be. In this narrative, therefore, violence is an important rhetorical element used to subvert imperial ideology.29 These chapters infer that, on one hand, Davidic kingship failed and led Israel into exile, and on the other hand, Rome’s imperial rule through Herod was illegitimate. It was also this violent empire that crucified Jesus and destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple.

Since this is a reading of Matthew 1–2 as a trauma narrative for Jesus’ death and the destruction of AD 70, the next step is to ask if this version of Jesus’s origins can offer traces of attribution of responsibility for these events.

5.1. Who Is Responsible for Jesus’s Death?

In an indirect way, the story raises the question of the level of responsibility borne by different agents in Jesus’s execution.30 Asking this question brings up important ethical issues. Matthew’s Gospel has ‘polarizing effects’ (Alexander 2012, p. 17) in its potential to trigger horrific group conflicts, as anti-Semitic interpretations have shown (Harrington 1991, p. 20; Philipps 2016, pp. 106–27). Recent scholarship’s emphasis on the Jewish background of Matthew’s Gospel, as well as empire studies or post-colonial interpretations of this Gospel, provide guardrails that help steer us away from discriminatory interpretations. Claassens (2018, pp. 221–36) rightfully points out that ‘Alexander’s work on cultural trauma and the construction of trauma narratives offers helpful avenues to explore, in order to help one be vigilant of the ways in which manifestations of cultural trauma may contribute to further victimization of other individuals and groups’.31

5.1.1. The Political Authority Representing Rome

The question of the level of responsibility of religious and political figures for Jesus’s execution has been debated for centuries and will not be resolved by this paper. While crucifixion was a Roman method and Pilate a Roman prefect, the Passion narratives in the Gospels also attribute blame to Jerusalem’s religious authorities. A closer look at Matthew 2 as a trauma narrative may shed some light on this question. Like Pilate, Herod was the political figure representing Roman rule. In both cases, the story focuses responsibility on the one person who represented Roman occupants and had complete authority over Judea. An implicit criticism of this authority can be seen in Matt. 2:5–6, which quotes Mic. 5:1 and brings ideal leadership to readers’ minds: ‘From you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people’. This citation centres on leadership from Bethlehem that is like that of David. By recalling Davidic leadership with prophetic quotes, Matthew’s narrative subverts the ruling of foreign nations.32 Pilate served Roman rule and his command condemned Jesus (Matt. 26:24–26), but Matthew 1–2 questions the legitimacy of foreign rule over God’s people. Both Pilate and Herod killed people born in Bethlehem, but both stories show that these executions did not foil God’s plan or the work of the Gospel.

5.1.2. Jerusalem’s Religious Authorities

At Herod’s side, we find ‘the chief priests and scribes of the people’ (Matt. 2:4). They were the ones who pointed the magi and ultimately Herod toward Jesus. In Matt. 26:3, ‘the chief priests and the elders of the people’ plotted to kill Jesus. In the Passion narrative, they had a greater responsibility than in the birth narrative, because they explicitly wanted to have Jesus killed. While in Matthew 2, the Jerusalem religious authorities’ interpretation of scripture indirectly pointed the representative of imperial power toward Jesus, in Matthew 26, they brought Jesus to Pilate.

5.1.3. The People of Jerusalem

The roles of the people of Jerusalem can also be compared. In the birth and Passion narratives, religious authorities are linked to the people: ‘τοὺς ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ γραμματεῖς τοῦ λαοῦ’ (2:4); οἱ ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ οἱ πρεσβύτεροι τοῦ λαοῦ (26:3)33. Although in Matt. 2:3, the people of Jerusalem had the same emotional response as Herod to the magi’s question34, they did not play a role in Herod’s decision to kill the infants in Bethlehem. The responsibility of the crowd was greater in Matthew 26, since they explicitly requested Jesus’s crucifixion under pressure from the priest and elders.

5.1.4. God

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In Matt. 27:46, Jesus’s last words speak of his abandonment. Indeed, Jesus was discarded and died in a gruesome way. However, the end of this Gospel describes an astonishing reversal: Jesus rose from the grave. In Matthew 2, the Lord’s angel guided Joseph to protect Jesus. But why did God ignore and abandon the other families of Bethlehem? The abandonment and execution of the Bethlehem children by Jerusalem authorities create a connection to Jesus, who also eventually shared the same fate. The one who had escaped the violence of Bethlehem came back and suffered from that same violence, but he subverted it. His suffering and death allowed an unexpected break in the cycle of violence perpetrated by his opponents. Political and religious authorities in Jerusalem succeeded in killing Jesus. He died just like the Bethlehem children did. However, since God raised Jesus from the dead, symbolically all who can identify with him—like the children of Bethlehem—can also be seen as being raised with him. Chapter 28 with its reversal invites readers to go back and rethink the entire narrative. We are moved to reread the story, to see how places of death could also be indicators of new and unexpected life35.

5.2. Who Is Responsible for the Destruction of the Temple?

Matthew 1–2 has nothing to offer in terms of direct access to the historical events of AD 70. However, the way it presents Jesus’s genealogy and the five prophetic quotations can help ‘make sense’ of Israel’s great tragedies. As a trauma narrative, Matthew 1–2 alludes to Israel’s oppression in Egypt, the Assyrian invasion and the Babylonian exile.36 These quotations and allusions have at least two major effects. Foremost, they permit readers to link Jesus with Israel’s story. Furthermore, for a first-century hearer, the evocation of Israel’s worst national tragedies must have recalled its latest tragedy.37 ‘Jewish Christians’ who had been forced into exile because of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 would probably consider Egypt, Babylon and Herod in this narrative in relation to Rome’s oppressive power that led to the destruction of the Temple. Reading this narrative with the emotional force of its intertextual links could have led its first audience to reflect on their own world and how it needed to change.38

Heard in the first century under Roman occupation, this story about Jesus as ‘God-with-us’ could be a response to imperial domination. According to Carter (2001, p. 101), this expression defied the Roman emperors’ claim to be manifestations of the gods. In addition, after AD 70, there were allegations that God withdrew from the Temple when it was destroyed (Josephus).39 In Matthew, the presence of God was transferred onto Jesus, the Emmanuel, from the time of his birth (1:23), to the end of the age (28:20).

As a trauma narrative, Matthew 1–2 could have been utilized to bring hope. Paradoxically, all the national tragedies have generated rich theological reflection and biblical narratives that emphasize Israel’s sin, God’s violent judgement, and his promise of restoration. Surprisingly, several books of the Hebrew Bible interpret these very events as symbols of hope. The consoling and liberating presence of the Lord is brought forth when recounting the most difficult moments. Matthew 1–2 speaks of the people’s sin from which they will be saved (Matt. 1:21) and of God’s promise of his presence (Matt. 1:23). As God has saved his people before, Matthew 1–2 asserts that he will do it again through Christ.

6. A Trauma Narrative Read in the 21st Century

Typically, literary analysis views Matthew 1–2 as an anticipation of the Passion and Resurrection.40 There are indeed multiple links between both narratives. The beginning of this book opens something that will unfold in the end. Yet, for the original audience—and for readers who already know that Jesus was executed—it not only anticipates what will come later in this Gospel, but it also opens an interpretative space to symbolically deal with traumatic experiences.

Obviously, we cannot be sure of the first-century reception of Matthew 1–2, but our own 21st century use of the massacre of Bethlehem to speak of traumatic events such as the use of Jesus’s family’s escape to Egypt to speak of Christian views on the immigration of contemporary refugees41 shows how this powerful narrative still helps us ‘make sense’ of today’s social traumas.42 Matthew 1–2, as a trauma narrative, processes past trauma to encourage resilience against future traumatization. It can be a powerful tool to shape identity and promote solidarity.

Since ‘storytelling is a complex and multivalent symbolic process that is contingent, contested, and sometimes highly polarizing’ (Alexander 2012, p. 17), this reading of Matthew 1–2 does not pretend to be the only valid interpretation. However, its contemporary use by people wrestling with trauma shows that it is an effective narrative that deals with trauma.

Alexander asserts, ‘By allowing members of wider publics to participate in the pain of others, cultural traumas broaden the realm of social understanding and sympathy, and they provide powerful avenues for new forms of social incorporation’ (Alexander 2012, p. 28). It is astounding that even though we live in cultures so different from the original audience and 20 centuries apart, we still turn to Matthew 1–2 to put words to our own social traumatic experiences. This is a good example of the symbolic power of a trauma narrative.