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2026-10-22T03:48:28-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Sermon on the Mount, Part II: Matthew 5:13-37

Last updated on: October 22, 2026 at 3:48 am By Gabriel Blanchard

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The Sermon on the Mount, Part II (Matt. 5:13-37) The Sermon on the Mount continues; where the Beatitudes laid out an idea of how spiritual growth may be expected to progress through eight stages, we now transition to direct moral instruction. This fits into a preëxisting genre of contemporary Judaic literature: midrash, more specifically מִדְרָשׁ הֲלָכָה [midh’råsh halåkhåh] or “exposition of the way” in English. (There was another type of midrash, but it does not concern us at the moment.)... Read more

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2026-10-16T10:02:32-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Sermon on the Mount, Part I: Matthew 4:12-5:12

Last updated on: October 16, 2026 at 10:02 am By Gabriel Blanchard

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The Sermon on the Mount, Part I (Matthew 4:12-5:12) St. Matthew moves from Christ’s temptation to his active ministry.1 We receive abbreviated descriptions of the calling of the two pairs of brothers who form the earliest and most intimate core of the Twelve: the bar-Yonah brothers, Rocky and Andre (or Peter and Andrew bar-Jonah), and then the bar-Zevadyah “sons of thunder,” Yakov and Yochanan (or James and John bar-Zebedee). There follows a generic description of his early career as a... Read more

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2026-10-08T05:23:08-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Gospel of Matthew: Christ and Antichrist

Last updated on: October 8, 2026 at 5:23 am By Gabriel Blanchard

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Christ and Antichrist (Matthew 3:13-4:11) St. Matthew quoted “Out of Egypt I called my son” in chapter 2, aligning Christ’s story with that of Yisroel in general and Moshe specifically; in that light, we now come to Christ’s baptism and his forty-day fast in the wilderness. The baptism, since it took place in the River Yarden, could be analogized with the Hebrews’ initial entry into the Promised Land, which itself took place under the leadership of Moshe’s heir Yehoshuah, who... Read more

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2026-10-02T06:40:10-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

John the Baptist and the Winnowing Fork: Matthew 3:1-12

Last updated on: October 2, 2026 at 6:40 am By Gabriel Blanchard

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The Winnowing Fork (Matthew 3:1-12) At this point, the Gospel of Matthew gets going in earnest: if you refer back to our outline from the introductory post, we have completed Book Alef and made our entry into Book Beyt, which will culminate in the Sermon on the Mount. But before we get to that mountain—an echo, arguably, of Sinai—we must pass through two ordeals, one from above and one from below. The first is the Lord’s Baptism, and the fact... Read more

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2026-09-25T05:00:06-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Gospel of Matthew: The Coventry Carol

Last updated on: September 25, 2026 at 5:00 am By Gabriel Blanchard

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The Coventry Carol (Matthew 2:13-23) Apologies for the late post, folks! We come now to the Holy Family’s sojourn in Egypt, warned by an angel to escape from Herod’s slaughter of the children in the environs of Beyt Lechem. This is remembered in one of the loveliest, and one of the few mournful, Christmas carols in the English language: the Coventry Carol. You’ll find a few different modernizations of the lyrics; its original text-form (according to Wikipedia, anyway) is below.... Read more

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2026-09-17T09:36:48-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Gospel of Matthew: Midnight Epiphanies

Last updated on: September 17, 2026 at 9:36 am By Gabriel Blanchard

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Midnight Epiphanies (Matthew 1:18-2:12) Having been introduced to St. Joseph by lineage, we now learn his character, both by direct statement and by example; we then change focus, from an heir of the House of David to a king from a different dynasty. Both Joseph and the foreign visitors to his household find themselves guided by omens and dreams in preparation for the reaction of the king. (Also, as a piece of “housekeeping”: since the RSV’s text is here primarily... Read more

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2026-09-10T09:27:29-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Gospel of Matthew: The House of Yosef

Last updated on: September 10, 2026 at 9:27 am By Gabriel Blanchard

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Housekeeping As I’ve done in the past, for each post for the Gospel of Matthew, I’ll offer a little bit of intro material up front, followed by two renderings of the passage in question: the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version or RSV-CE (the “default” translation used by the Ordinariate of the Chair of Peter), and my own. Following that will be textual notes, giving further information about particular words, phrases, etc. I may include a postcript following the... Read more

History and Religion

Education and Religion

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2026-09-04T16:50:56-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Who Really Wrote the Gospel of Matthew?

Last updated on: September 4, 2026 at 4:50 pm By Gabriel Blanchard

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Introduction to the Gospel of Matthew i. A Fore-Foreword As a refresher, here’s our plan of the New Testament. We’ve restructured it on the plan of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh.1 The Tanakh is the story of the Temple; the New Testament is likewise the story of the Church. The Tanakh begins with the Torah, the Law—Genesis through Deuteronomy—which illuminates the meaning of the Temple (initially, the Tabernacle): it affords mankind a place in which to welcome the Presence of... Read more

General Christian

History and Religion

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2026-08-31T03:48:16-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Historica Apocrypha, Episode 2: The Gospel of Marcion

Last updated on: August 31, 2026 at 3:48 am By Gabriel Blanchard

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Who’s Afraid of Marcion of Sinope? On last week’s premier “episode” of Historica Apocrypha, we discussed the Gnostic heresies. We recounted some things they were, a few things they weren’t, and (most importantly) why nobody in the world except me is allowed, legally, to call anything “Gnostic” any more. This week, I’d like to zero in on a related but much more specific topic: a modern attempt to reconstruct a specific Gnostic text that’s been lost for many centuries. That... Read more

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2026-08-24T13:08:00-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Historica Apocrypha, Episode 1: What Was Gnosticism?

Last updated on: August 24, 2026 at 1:08 pm By Gabriel Blanchard

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Introducing: —the “Hidden History” Series! A folio from the Book of Kells (c. 800), one of the most celebrated examples of Hiberno-Saxon manuscript art, written in a beautiful uncial hand. Of the Mistresses of Charles Brown With John complete and Matthew on the way, I felt like some variety here on the blog. Besides the Greek and Latin languages, one of the big focuses of Classics (the field I got my degree in) is ancient history, so my thoughts turned... Read more

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