The Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the first four books in the New Testament. They detail the miraculous ministry and subsequent resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, who is the central figure in Christianity. When the Gospels were written, some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion of Jesus, Christianity was nothing more than a small group of people who had either witnessed the wonders Jesus performed first hand or were at most a degree separated from someone who was a firsthand witness. For Christianity to gather a greater following in its infancy, the authors of the Gospel had to do everything in their power to entice people of other religions to come join their new and hip religion. The Gospels essentially had to become the best marketing tools of the time and the authors the most creative advertisers in order to keep their new religion from dying out. The author of Matthew understood this assignment and took note of who his audience was going to be: Jews. Matthew, though the book can not be attributed to one person because the author is unknown, writes his Gospel in a location where there is a strong Jewish presence. At the time in which it was written, the state of Jewish identity was up in the air; the temple had fallen and Jewish people were trying to identify themselves without this place. Matthew, seeing this religion in a state of confusion, picks up the pen, quill, or whatever writing utensil was used at the time, used the Gospel of Mark and the unknown source Q as inspiration, and wrote a Gospel specifically for the Jews. To truly emphasize the message of Jesus and appeal to the maximum number of Jews, Matthew utilizes the motif of dreams throughout his Gospel.
The Gospel of Matthew includes six dreams, with five being used at the beginning of the book and one towards the end of the book. The first dream comes in the first chapter of the book, in which Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, is told by an angel to not leave Mary upon learning that she was pregnant through immaculate conception. Joseph is not the recipient of the second dream, as it is the three wise men from Jesus’ birth narrative that were “warned in a dream not to return to [King] Herod” (The Jewish Annotated New Testament. Matthew 2.12). The third is written immediately after the second, and in this one the sleeping Joseph is met by an angel telling him to leave Bethlehem with Jesus and Mary and take off to Egypt, where they would be safe from King Herod, who had ordered that all boys two years of age and younger, which included Jesus, to be executed. The fourth and fifth dreams go hand in hand, with the fourth telling Joseph that he can take his family back to Israel, and the fifth directing Joseph away from Judea and to Galilee. The sixth and final dream is presented to a character that is never referred to by name, Pontius Pilate’s wife, and the contents of this dream compel her to tell Pilate to “‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man [Jesus]’” (Matthew 27.19). These six dreams can be separated as the dreams of Joseph and the Magi during the birth and infancy narrative of Jesus, and the dream of Pontius Pilate’s wife before Jesus’ passion narrative.
When writing the five dreams of Joseph and the Magi during the birth and infancy narrative of Jesus, Matthew appears to use a very similar format for each of the dreams, even “being considered as a cluster of dreams” (Vilijoen, 847): the characters are placed in a situation, a theophany, which is a visible manifestation of God to humans, appears to a character in their dream, warns said character and gives them an order, and once the character awakens they fulfill that order. This common presentation and material of the dream motifs is not something of coincidence, but rather a skillful attempt by Matthew to further appeal to his Jewish audience. God intervening in human affairs is something that Matthew’s Jewish audience would be familiar with and something that they could correlate to the Jewish literature of the time. Matthew relates back to the book of Genesis when he references that “an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream” (Matthew 2.13) in the fact that the theophany is an angel connected to God; in a dream to the character Jacob “the angel of God” (Genesis 31.11) speaks to him. The relation to Genesis does not stop there, as the dialogue from the first dream is very reminiscent of two different birth annunciations from the Old Testament: the birth of Isaac in Genesis and the birth of Samson in the book of Judges. The line the angel that speaks to Joseph in the first dream of “‘she will bear a son’” (Matthew 2.21) is echoing God telling Abraham that his wife “‘Sarah will bear [him] a son’” (Genesis 17.19) and an angel from God announcing to the character Manoah’s wife that she is “going to become pregnant and give birth to a son” (Judges 13.3). Including these callbacks to the Old Testament early in the book of Matthew allow for the Jewish audience to be hooked in and feel a sense of comfortability when reading the Gospel.
Matthew was able to draw in the Jewish audience with the first dream motif, but getting people to read his book and getting people to convert to Christianity are two different things. Though he drew references to a couple different passages from the Old Testament with that first dream, the Jewish audience could have read those and have been waiting for more. Matthew delivered more to the readers in the biggest way that he possibly could have, by likening this new guy Jesus to the man that is the largest figure in all of Judaism, Moses. Before the use of dreams to relate Jesus to Moses is discussed, the crux of the Gospel of Matthew must first be understood. The audience to which Matthew is writing to does not want to abandon their core values and their heritage to join an “up and coming” religion such as Christianity, so the question remained “Is it possible to become a Christian and remain a Jew, or are these mutually exclusive”; Matthew, throughout his Gospel, emphasizes that Jesus and Christianity is not entirely different from Judaism, but rather Jesus is the fulfillment of Judaism. Matthew knows what he is doing, he has read and studied the Old Testament before, he knows that the Jewish messiah was promised to come from the line of King David. So what does Matthew do: he uses the first chapter of his Gospel to establish a lineage from King David; by doing this, Matthew is writing that Jesus is the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament.
To further this claim that Jesus is the Jewish messiah, Matthew uses his Gospel to draw parallels between Jesus and the most important man in all of Judaism, Moses. Moses’ importance to Judaism can not be understated, and Matthew understands his importance to the Jewish population and uses that to his advantage when writing the third dream in his Gospel. In this third occurrence of the dream motif, Matthew writes that “an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him’” (Matthew 2.13). After learning that a boy who was said to be the “King of the Jews” was just, King Herod feels threatened and orders that all boys two years of age and younger must be killed. Because of this, Matthew has God intervene and have his theophany order Joseph to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt, away from Herod, to keep the baby Jesus safe. The location of Egypt was not one that Matthew randomly drew out of a hat, he purposely chose Egypt out of the many different Middle Eastern locations, but why is that? It is because Moses also fled to Egypt as a baby to escape persecution from the current governing bodies. Matthew designed this narrative so that when the Jewish audience is reading it, they will immediately see the resemblance between Jesus and Moses, allowing them to feel more comfortable reading this and eventually accepting this religion. This relation to Moses is further emphasized throughout the Gospel, with Jesus’ sermon on the mount being reminiscent of Moses receiving the law on Mount Sinai being the biggest callback to Moses.
While attempting to appeal to the Jewish audience and convert them, Matthew is also distinguishing Christianity from Judaism; he does this best when writing of the trial when Jesus was sentenced to crucifixion. Rather than place the blame for Jesus’ crucifixion on the Roman officials, Matthew writes of “the chief priests and elders” (Matthew 27.1) that brought death upon Jesus, who were in fact the chief priests and elders of the Jewish community. Matthew knows that at the time he is writing this, the Jewish community is undergoing an identity crisis and their faith in Jewish leadership has been tainted, so he uses this to his advantage and blames the Jewish leadership for the death of Jesus, the Jewish messiah. To absolve the Roman authorities from blame, Matthew includes the dream motif of Pontius Pilate’s wife, in which Matthew writes “While he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him’” (Matthew 27.19). As a result of hearing this, Matthew writes that Pilate left the decision of which criminal to crucify, Jesus or a character named “Barabbas”, up to the public, who was persuaded by the chief priests and elders to choose Jesus to crucify. By leaving this decision up to the public and out of the hands of Pilate, a Roman official, Matthew takes the blame out of the hands of the Romans and places it on the Jewish officials. After reading the entirety of this Gospel, the Jewish audience may have been moved towards shifting their views to Christianity, but the blaming of Jewish authorities coupled with their own views of the Jewish leadership at the time fully drove the Jewish audience towards Christianity.
The dream motif utilized by Matthew was meant to resonate with the Jewish audience of seventy CE when it was written, but its importance has carried itself all the way to the twenty-first century. Joseph, the recipient of four of the six dreams in the Gospel of Matthew, was regarded as one of the most important figures in Christianity, and in “In 1870, Pope Pius IX declared Joseph the patron saint of the entire Catholic Church” (Falcão Dodd, 2022). In 2022, Pope Francis dedicated an entire mass service towards teaching about Saint Joseph, who, as he puts it, was a “man who dreams” (Francis, 2022). The main point that Christian teachers, such as Pope Francis, make about Joseph is that he was devout Christian who allowed for God to intervene in his own life, and for following God’s orders he was blessed; the message that is taught is that modern Christians is that God will guide and bless those who pray and do what God asks. Christian shops have used this dreaming Joseph character as a means to sell statues of a sleeping Joseph to pray to, and different sects of Christianity today have specific prayers towards Saint Joseph that read: Dear Saint Joseph, as you rest in the Lord, confident of His absolute power and goodness, look upon me. Please take my need (mention your request) into your heart, dream of it, and present it to your Son. Help me then, good Saint Joseph, to hear the voice of God, to arise, and act with love. I praise and thank God with joy. Saint Joseph, I love you. Amen. Christians who use this prayer are under the belief that should Saint Joseph dream of something, it will come true, as the dreams in the Gospel of Matthew that Joseph had all resulted in blessings towards him and his family. Modern Christians have taken the motif of dreams that Matthew used to gain a larger following from the Jewish community and have made it into something much bigger than Matthew could have ever imagined at the time of the writing of the Gospel.
This is an example of a Sleeping Saint Joseph statue that can be bought from Christian stores, or from somewhere as common as Amazon.