Every Gospel writer faced essentially the same challenge because every Gospel writer was proclaiming the unbelievable. Every Gospel writer wanted the world to know that an obscure itinerant Rabbi was the messiah, the one the Jews had hoped for, or beyond that even the Son of God. But the challenge was that Jesus was unknown by most of his contemporaries and so every writer had to somehow deal with the question of why this person who is so important could be so obscure. If he was the Jewish Messiah then you would think that many Jews would have heard of him and worshipped him. If he was the Savior of the world and the Son of the most high how could he have been so unnoticed? One of the most striking aspects about the man who now could claim nearly two billion adherents to the religion that he inspired, by far the largest religion in the world, the man who almost everyone alive today has at least heard of, hardly made a ripple in the historical records of his day.

If you look outside the Gospels there is almost no information about Jesus. There are exactly four references to Jesus in written recorded history for the one hundred years after his death. That is it, four, and those four hardly have any information in them about Jesus. There is a letter from Pliny the Younger who was a Roman Governor in the province of Bythinia-Pontus who wrote to the Emperor Trajan to ask advice as to what he should do with respect to the Christians meeting in his area. That reference is made in a letter dated 112 C. E. or in other words about eighty years after Jesus’ death. The historian Tacitus mentions Christians in connection with the burning of Rome by Nero. Tacitus was writing about the same time as Pliny the Younger. From these sources we get very little information about Jesus. Tacitus does mention that Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. That is a little bit more information than we get from Pliny but it isn’t much especially for the savior of the world.

In the Jewish sources there is not much more than that. Flavius Josephus is the one we depend on for almost all our information about the history of the Jewish people at the time of Jesus. In two of his works Jesus is mentioned, actually many people named Jesus are mentioned but as far as Jesus of Nazareth, though he is not named in that way, there seem to be two references. One mentions the death of James who is identified as the brother of Jesus “who is called the messiah.” The other is more lengthy but is extremely problematic for the historian. It has in it details that only a believing Christian would include. Josephus was Jewish and remained Jewish his whole life. It is unlikely that a Jew would identify Jesus as the savior of the Jewish people if he didn’t believe he was, especially in the year 130 C. E. when we know that there was great competition and enmity between Jews and Christians.

So in all the hundreds of sources that we have that survived from that time there is hardly any mention of Jesus. And none that are dated earlier than eighty years after Jesus died. Even in the Christian sources that predate the Gospels there is very little information about the life of Jesus. For a personage as well known today as Jesus seems to be it is very strange that so few people had heard of him or knew much about him when he was alive.

And that was the problem for the Gospel writers. How do you explain to someone that this person that they have never heard of was truly the chosen of God. Wouldn’t God have made sure to make a big splash when sending his Son to earth? Well God didn’t and each Gospel includes an explanation of why God did not.

The Gospel of Matthew has been said to be the most Jewish of all the Gospels. And it is true that the writer of Matthew goes to some length to describe Jesus as the messiah that the Jewish people expected. Time and again in Matthew you find scripture being quoted and sayings that thus and so happened to fulfill a prophecy from the Hebrew Bible. Matthew’s claim is that Jesus was sent to the Jews, fulfilling every prophecy or many prophecies found in Hebrew scripture but the Jewish people didn’t understand it especially the leaders. They missed it completely and so Jesus couldn’t have been well known at his time because he was sent to a group of people who could not understand what was happening to them or the gift that God had sent.

In the reading for today, out of the Gospel of Matthew, there is an episode that captures the essence of the writer of Matthew’s explanation for the obscurity of Jesus.

In this reading Jesus challenges the leaders of the Jews, the chief priests and the elders. Jesus is responding to a question that they have asked him. They want to know where he gets his authority. As the reader we know that it comes from God. And every time I read this I cannot escape thinking something like, “How stupid of these guys not to get it.” I wonder how chief priests could be so undiscerning. Of course because they are portrayed this way many times the worst of motivations have been given to these Jewish leaders. Explanations like they were power hungry and jealous of Jesus come up time and again. Jesus was a threat to them and their cushy existence as chief priests. Matthew puts the Jewish leaders in a terrible light but the truth is that they were being true to their beliefs by not believing that Jesus was the messiah.

There is nothing in Jewish scripture or understanding that made room for a messiah that would come and suffer and die as a criminal. That he died that way absolutely disqualified him from being the Jewish Savior for most Jews. And during his life time there was not a whole lot that identified him as the Jewish Messiah at least a Messiah that the scriptures or the people expected. The Messiah was to be a warrior coming in power on a cloud as described by Daniel. Or he was to be a great leader like Moses or a King like David. Jesus hardly fit the bill regardless of what the Gospel of Matthew claims and any good Jew who knew his or her scripture would reject this man as the Messiah.

So Matthew’s task is to explain how the Chief Priests could have been so wrong although the Jewish leaders just thought they were being faithful. As I said Matthew explains with this little story. In the story the chief priests and elders, as I said, ask him by what authority he does these things. And Jesus returns the question. He wants them to answer a question about John the Baptist. And the question really is, “Is he legit?” The chief priests and the scribes take a pass on that one. They don’t want to admit that John is a prophet but they also don’t want to buck popular opinion and so they are trapped into silence. And for Jesus, presumably, and for the Gospel writer certainly this is their problem. They cannot take a stand. And as long as they cannot take a stand they will never know about Jesus or God or really anything about faith. They cannot make the leap of faith necessary to grasp the idea that Jesus is the one.

I don’t know if that was the problem of the Chief Priests and the Elders. I actually think it was simply a religious difference and they were staying true to their religious traditions. I don’t know if Matthew’s accusation is correct and the Chief Priests and Elders were people who could not take stands and would rather duck questions of faith than step up and say what they believed, but I do know that faith is not possible if you cannot meet such a challenge. Actually any authentic life is not possible if you can not define yourself and what you stand for.

The most important task for maturity is deciding what you believe in. As I say all the time it is one’s beliefs that determine the very quality of ones life. But if you do not know what you believe in, or you don’t think it is important to know what you believe you are lost.

There is a quote that my old mentor Ed Friedman always used to repeat. “You cannot distinguish an ill wind from a good wind if you don’t know you destination.” If you don’t know what you believe you are lost.