Blogging the Bible: Matthew

By Ryan Corcoran

The Gospel According to Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, is an eye-witness account of the life and teachings of the savior of mankind that had been foretold by centuries of Jewish tradition, Jesus Christ the Messiah. Blogging the Bible: Matthew is a commentary on the complete text by a newly converted Christian that takes a brief glimpse at this compelling and encouraging book. Taken from the website, , this book is a collection of "blogs" over the course of a month and a half. Each blog features a commentary, research, a "key verse," a categorical tag, and a summarizing "Seed Thought." This book is not an authoritative scholarly Bible commentary, but rather a personal exploration by an ordinary Christian, seeking to improve his Bible knowledge and understanding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257608843

Book preview

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Blogging the Bible: Matthew

A commentary on the book of Matthew from a new Christian’s perspective.

by

Ryan Corcoran

Copyright ©2007, Ryan G. Corcoran

bible.ryanandsamantha.info

Dedicated to my wife, Samantha, with praise and honor to the Almighty Creator.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, TODAY’S NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society®. Used by permission of International Bible Society®. All rights reserved worldwide.

TNIV and Today's New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society®. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright ©1960,1962,1963,1968,1971,1972,1973,1975,1977,1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Ryan Corcoran was born and raised in Kansas, USA. Having parents of differing faiths, Ryan was left to discover God for himself. He attended a Presbyterian church with his friends in Middle School and early High School, but found that they were not able to sufficiently address his questions about the Bible. He then began an almost 10-year soul search to find his faith and the truth. Ryan studied Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism in addition to continuing to read the Bible.

Ryan met his future wife, Samantha in the fall of 2000. Samantha grew up attending the church of Christ, which Ryan admittedly had never actually heard of until he met her. She began teaching Ryan the Bible from a holistic point of view (big picture first, then down to the small details) and inviting him to attend church with her at Northside church of Christ in Wichita. After 3 years of studying (and debating) with his then-fiancée, Samantha, he was baptized into Christ in June of 2003 at the age of 25.

Ryan has continued to study and become an active member in the church, doing graphic design and website design for the congregation. He and Samantha also traveled to Hitachi, Japan in the summer of 2006 for a two-week Mission project through Let’s Start Talking (LST). Samantha teaches Bible class and a singing class regularly. Both Ryan and Samantha serve as ministry team leaders at the Northside congregation in the fields of children’s education and member care.

Foreword

What follows is a collection of thoughts and research that I completed while participating in my church’s daily bible reading program. It was designed to go through the entire New Testament in one year, starting January 1, 2007. Because of this, some days required reading an entire chapter; some only required parts of a chapter.

Every blog post follows the same format: first is the date of the original online post, followed by the scripture heading and my own title for that particular reading. After that is my synopsis/commentary of that day’s reading which may include research information, opinions, or sometimes flat-out conjecture. I still consider myself a young Christian, and as such, my understanding of these passages may be very different than someone else’s (or even my own future self’s opinion).

After the commentary follows the Key Verse which I select from each day’s passage as the most important take-away verse, or the one that I felt would make the best Seed Thought which comes next. The Seed Thought was an idea that I stole from the Let’s Start Talking organization that encapsulates the reading and perhaps tries to put the meaning of the text into more familiar situations that would be easier to understand.

Each post also includes a label (a feature on Google’s Blogger). This is simply a category listing that I selected for the passage. It is often more of a commentary on my Seed Thought than on the passage itself, however. I have included them in this book for the purpose of doing a more topical study so that, for example, one could go back and read all the posts with the label God to get a better picture of who God is.

The online version of this can be found at bible.ryanandsamantha.info. The online version includes hyperlinks to all the references that are included at the end. I recommend viewing the online version for a much more in-depth study.

Thank you for taking the time to read my first attempt at a complete commentary of a book of the Bible.

Monday, January 01, 2007

God

Matthew 1

Immanuel, God with us

For the new year of 2007, we are going to be going through the entire New Testament and we begin with the first chapter of Matthew. The book of Matthew was written in between 50 and 70 A.D. by an eye-witness: Matthew, a tax collector, called by Jesus to be an apostle.

The first 17 verses are a genealogy proving that Jesus was born in the lineage of the patriarchs of the Jewish people, thus fulfilling prophecy about the lineage of the Messiah. Matthew’s genealogy traces Jesus’s line from oldest to youngest through Joseph (Jesus’s adopted father). The key verses in the genealogy are verse 2 (Abraham->Isaac->Jacob->Judah), verse 6 (Jesse- >David->Solomon), and verse 16 (Jacob->Joseph->Jesus). The entire line can be summed up with verse 1 and verse 17: This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham (v. 1); Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah (v. 17). Often people who try to prove the Bible is false by having inconsistencies will look at verse 1 and say "look! It says Jesus was the son of David, when everyone knows it was Joseph. In Greek, the word ʋʅOʋ" (huios) can mean either son as we use it in English, or also just descendant. When one finds discrepancies in the Bible, it is important to verify the meanings of words before drawing assumptions based on personal bias.

Verses 18-24 discuss how Joseph learns of Mary’s pregnancy and about his son’s destiny. When Joseph found out his fiancée was pregnant, he planned to divorce her. But an angel came to him explaining what had happened and instructing him to wed Mary as planned and to call the baby Jesus which means God saves. The angel tells Joseph that Jesus will be called Immanuel and will fulfill the prophecies told about the Messiah (Isaiah 7:14). After this encounter with the angel, Joseph married Mary and waited until after Jesus was born to consummate the marriage.

In my opinion, the fact that Joseph decided not to divorce Mary is one of the strongest testimonies about the divine nature of Jesus’s birth. From a man’s perspective, I know that if my fiancée became pregnant by another man, I would probably plan to divorce her also. And during that time period and in that culture, it would have been even more important for the man to distance himself from her. Joseph had the legal and moral right to divorce Mary, but something made him change his mind. That something is what Christians call the truth.

Key Verse: Matthew 1:21 - She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (TNIV)

Seed Thought: One of the most difficult precepts of Christianity that is difficult for non-believers to accept is the virgin birth. People want to apply man’s limitations to God and say that it’s physically impossible for a virgin to get pregnant, and even more so pregnant by some mystical Spirit. If our God is capable of creating space, our earth, and life, then getting one young woman pregnant 2,000 years ago would be a breeze. Many people like to take the smorgasbord approach to Christianity and pick and choose the parts they think are true. However, if one or several aspects are true, on what evidence (other than personal bias) can one say that the other parts are false?

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Prophecy

Matthew 2

The birth of Jesus

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