The birth of Yehoshua ha-Mashiach happened this way. His mother Miryam was betrothed to Yosef, and before they consummated their marriage she was found to be carrying a child, from the Breath of Wholeness. Yosef her husband was a Tzaddik, and he did not want to make a public example of her, so he decided to release her [from her marriage engagement] quietly.
The Gospel of Matthew | chapter 1 (excerpt) | Shuva B'rit Translation
The Man Who Never Speaks
Yosef of Natzrat never says a word.
You know him as Joseph of Nazareth, the husband of Mary and the legal father of Jesus. Search all four gospels and you will find no line of his. His wife Miryam speaks. Her kinswoman Elisheva speaks. Shepherds, travelers from the east, an old man in the Temple, and a murderous king all get lines. The man who raised Yehoshua gets none.
Matthew gives him actions in place of speech. Yosef wakes. He gets up. He takes the child and the mother, and he goes. A dream warns him four times, and each time he acts on it. [1] Matthew builds him almost entirely out of verbs.
Matthew also gives him one description. Before Yosef does anything at all, the gospel stops to tell us what kind of man he is. It uses a single Greek word, dikaios. English Bibles print it as "righteous" or "just," and most readers pass over it in half a second. It sounds like a compliment. Joseph was a good man, and the story moves on to the angel.
I want to stay on that word for the length of this essay.
The argument is simple to state. Behind Matthew's Greek sits a Hebrew word, Tzaddik. In Yosef's world that word described a job as much as a character. A Tzaddik was the person in a community who made the Covenant's justice real in daily life. He protected households from ruin. He stood between the powerful and the people they could hurt. Matthew shows us Yosef doing that work in the very next clause. The title then passed to the boy he raised, and after him to that boy's brother.
"Joseph was a righteous man" may be the most important sentence anyone ever wrote about him. It deserves a slow reading.
First, Some Housekeeping
A few names and terms need settling before we start.
This Archive calls people by the names they used for themselves. Yosef bar-Yakob is Joseph, son of Jacob. He belonged to Bnei David, the "sons of David," meaning the descendants of the old royal house. Miryam is Mary. Yehoshua is Jesus. Ya'akov is the brother your English Bible calls James. Natzrat is Nazareth.
The "long first century" runs from 63 BCE to 135 CE. It opens when the Roman general Pompey took Jerusalem. It closes when Rome crushed the last great Judean revolt, led by Bar Kokhba. Those two centuries posed one continuous problem for the people in this story. They had to work out how to live by the Covenant under an empire.
The Covenant is the agreement made at Sinai between YHWH and the people of Israel. The Torah is its written law. A large share of that law concerns land, debt, wages, and courts, which is why this Archive reads it as a constitution.
Four words carry the essay.
Tzedek is justice at the scale of one person. The honest scale in the market is tzedek. So is the fair verdict, and so is the refused bribe. [2]
Tzedakah is the same justice at the scale of a whole society. English Bibles usually print it as "righteousness," and later usage shrank it to "charity." The Archive defines it more exactly. Tzedakah is the equitable redistribution of assets and land on a fixed calendar. Every seventh year, creditors released their debts. Every fiftieth year, land returned to the families who had lost it. Every third year, a tenth of the harvest stayed in town for the landless, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. [3] The system ran on a schedule, and nobody had to feel generous for it to work.
A Tzaddik is a person who does both. He practices tzedek in his own dealings, and he keeps tzedakah working in his community. The plural is tzaddikim.
Dikaios is the Greek word that stands in for Tzaddik. We know this because of a translation made in Egypt in the third century BCE. Scholars in Alexandria put the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, and their version is called the Septuagint. When they met the word tzaddik, they wrote dikaios as their standard choice. Noah is the first man the Torah calls a tzaddik, and the Greek calls him dikaios. [4] Greek-speaking devotees of YHWH read one word and heard the other. Matthew wrote for readers like that. [5]
One last note. What follows is a reconstruction. I build it from the surviving texts and from scholars who have spent careers on them, and the notes show the work. Where I press a source further than its author would, the notes say so.
What the Word Demanded
The Hebrew scriptures like to pair two words. The pair is mishpat u-tzedakah. Mishpat means judgment, the ruling a court hands down. English Bibles usually translate the pair as "justice and righteousness." That translation is accurate and nearly useless. It tells you the words are good things. It leaves out what anyone did.
Moshe Weinfeld, a scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, set out to find what people did. He traced the phrase through the Hebrew scriptures and through the records of Israel's neighbors. He found that when a ruler "did mishpat and tzedakah," the words pointed to specific acts. The ruler cancelled debts. He freed people who had been bound into service to pay what they owed. He returned land to families who had lost it. Kings in Mesopotamia issued the same kind of decree. Their word for the release is a cousin of the Hebrew word used for the fiftieth year. [6]
The scriptures use the phrase the same way. King David "did mishpat and tzedakah for all his people." The prophet Jeremiah praises King Josiah in the same terms, and then he explains what he means. Josiah took up the case of the poor and the dispossessed. [7]
The prophet Ezekiel brings the word down from the palace to the household. He describes a single man and calls him a tzaddik. Then he lists what the man does. The list opens with loyalty to YHWH and faithfulness in marriage. Then it turns to money, and it stays there. This man wrongs no one. He gives back what a debtor left with him as security. He takes nothing by force. He gives his bread to the hungry. He puts a coat on the person who has none. He lends without charging interest. He judges fairly between two people in a dispute. Ezekiel ends with a verdict. Such a man is a tzaddik. [8]
That passage is the closest thing the scriptures have to a job description.
The prophet Amos, nearly two centuries earlier, shows who the tzaddik stands beside. He accuses the powerful of selling the tzaddik for silver and the ebyon for a pair of sandals. An ebyon is a person who has been stripped of what he needs to live. The plural is ebyonim, and this publication takes its name from it. Amos sets the two words side by side a second time. The powerful, he says, crush the tzaddik, take bribes, and turn the ebyonim away at the gate. The gate was where a town held court. [9]
Psalm 112 gives the same portrait in song. Its tzaddik lends freely and runs his affairs with mishpat. He distributes to the ebyonim, and the psalm says his tzedakah stands for good. [10]
Richard Horsley has shown how these pieces fit together as a system. The Covenant's rules on debt, interest, land, and harvest shared one purpose. They kept each family on its own ground, able to feed itself. [11]
So the word reached Yosef's century with its meaning already filled in. A Tzaddik was a man whose money, whose loans, and whose judgments all ran in the direction the Covenant pointed.
The Ground Under Natzrat
Now set that word down in the place where Yosef lived.
K. C. Hanson and Douglas Oakman have reconstructed how the economy of the Land worked under Rome. A farming family owed three powers at once. Rome took tribute. Herod's house took taxes. The Temple took tithes and dues. In a thin year the family borrowed to cover the gap. If it could not repay, it lost the land. The former owner then worked the same field as a tenant, or he hired himself out by the day. [12]
The Covenant had a remedy for exactly this. Every seventh year the debts were supposed to fall away. By Yosef's lifetime that remedy had a hole in it. Lenders had stopped lending as the seventh year came near. The sage Hillel answered with a legal document called the prosbul. It let a creditor hand his loan to a court, and a loan held by a court survived the release. [13] Credit kept flowing, and the release year lost its force.
We know how heavily those debts weighed on people. When revolt broke out in Jerusalem in 66 CE, one of the rebels' first acts was to burn the public archives. Josephus, the Judean historian who lived through the war, says they wanted to destroy the lenders' contracts. [14]
Horsley argues that villages answered the pressure long before that fire. They turned back to the Covenant's own rules. Neighbors released each other's debts and shared what they had, one village at a time. [15]
Others fought. Martin Hengel traced the armed current from its start to its end. It began in 6 CE, when Rome ordered a census for taxation. A teacher named Yehudah the Galilean told the people that paying tribute to Caesar was a form of slavery. His followers recognized no master but the divine. [16] Yosef would have known that story well. Tzippori, which the Greeks called Sepphoris, was the chief city of Galilee. It stood about four miles from Natzrat. Rome had burned it and enslaved its people after an uprising in 4 BCE. Herod's son Antipas was rebuilding it during Yosef's working life.
Hengel also showed how far Greek speech and Greek habits had spread through the Land, most of all among the wealthy families of Jerusalem. [17] Two things follow from that. The gap between the priestly elite and the villages was cultural as well as economic. And a Hebrew title could cross into a Greek gospel with its meaning intact, because people in the Land lived in both languages.
Those elite families held the high priesthood. Josephus describes how some of them behaved a generation after Yosef. They sent servants to the threshing floors, where farmers brought in the grain. The servants seized the tithes meant for ordinary priests, and they beat anyone who objected. Josephus says some of the poorer priests starved to death. [18]
In that country, a man who still returned the pledge and lent without interest was paying a real price. His neighbors could see it. They had a word for him.
A Name Worth Fighting Over
The word belonged to a family of words, and powerful people wanted the family name.
The high-priestly aristocracy were called the Tzadokim. English Bibles call them the Sadducees. The name most likely comes from Tzadok, the high priest under King Solomon, and Tzadok's own name grows from the root for justice. [19] So the men who ran the Temple carried justice in their title.
Others said they had forfeited it. The sharpest of those voices survive in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls are the library of a community that had walked away from the Jerusalem establishment. They were found in caves near the Dead Sea, beginning in 1947. This community called its priests the Bnei Tzadok, the sons of Tzadok. It called its founder the Moreh ha-Tzedek, the Teacher of Justice. It called its great enemy ha-Kohen ha-Rasha, the Wicked Priest.
The scrolls say why he was wicked. One of them is a commentary on the prophet Habakkuk. It reads the old prophecy line by line as a description of the community's own day. The Wicked Priest, it says, abandoned the Covenant for the sake of wealth. He plotted to destroy the ebyonim, and he robbed them of what they had. [20]
A second commentary works through Psalm 37. That psalm promises that the tzaddik will outlast the wicked and that the humble will inherit the land. The commentary names the heirs. It calls them "the congregation of the ebyonim." It reads the psalm's hunted tzaddik as the Teacher himself. [21]
Robert Eisenman has followed this vocabulary further than anyone. He shows the same cluster of words appearing wherever opposition to the priestly establishment appears. The cluster includes the tzaddik, the ebyonim, and zeal for the Torah. He follows it out of the scrolls and into the circle around Ya'akov. [22]
George Nickelsburg found the same figure in a story that Judeans told again and again in these centuries. A just man is hunted by the powerful, and the divine vindicates him. In the Wisdom of Solomon, rich men plan to grind down a poor tzaddik because his way of life accuses them. In the letter attached to the book of Enoch, the writer calls down woe on those who pile up silver and gold by injustice. He promises the tzaddikim, their victims, that the account will be settled. [23]
Individual men carried the word as a name. The high priest Shimon was remembered as Shimon ha-Tzaddik, Simon the Just. Josephus explains the name. Shimon was devoted to the divine, and he was devoted to the good of his own people. [24] The prophet Yohanan, whom you know as John the Baptist, carried the word too. Mark says the ruler Antipas was afraid of him, because he knew Yohanan was a tzaddik. [25]
By Yosef's day, then, the title was public, and it was claimed from two directions. One side held it by inheritance and office. The other side said a man had to earn it, and that the proof was how he treated the dispossessed.
Matthew's Tzaddikim
Matthew used this word more than any other gospel writer. He uses dikaios seventeen times, and Mark uses it twice. He uses the noun built from it seven times, and Mark never uses it at all. [26]
He also shows what he means by it. Yehoshua blesses those who hunger and thirst for tzedek. He blesses those who are hunted for its sake. He tells the crowd that their tzedek must go beyond that of the scribes and the Pharisees, the legal experts of the day. Otherwise they will never enter the Commonwealth of the Heavens. [27]
In Matthew the tzaddik is a recognizable kind of person. Yehoshua speaks of welcoming a tzaddik into your house, in the same breath as welcoming a prophet. He speaks of prophets and tzaddikim who longed to see what his students were seeing. He mentions the monuments that people built for the tzaddikim of the past. He calls Hevel, the murdered brother of Genesis whom you know as Abel, a tzaddik. [28]
Then, near the end of the gospel, Matthew tells us what tzaddikim do. Yehoshua describes a final judgment in which the nations are sorted. One group is called the tzaddikim. They are the ones who fed the hungry and gave the thirsty a drink. They took in the stranger. They clothed the person who had nothing to wear. They went to the sick and to the prisoner. [29] It is Ezekiel's list, six centuries on.
One more detail ties the book together. Matthew has a phrase for receiving a message "in a dream," and no other New Testament writer uses it. It appears five times in the opening chapters, and four of those dreams belong to Yosef. It appears once more at the end. The wife of Pilate, the Roman governor, sends him a warning during the trial. She tells him to leave "that tzaddik" alone, because she has suffered over him in a dream. [30] The first tzaddik in the gospel receives dreams. The last one is the subject of a dream. Matthew set Yosef and Yehoshua inside the same frame.
Benno Przybylski's study confirms the pattern. In Matthew, righteousness is something a person does. It is conduct, and the Torah is the measure of it. [31]
The Case Before Yosef
Now we can read the sentence.
Yosef and Miryam were betrothed. In their world a betrothal was a binding contract, and only a divorce could end it. A betrothed woman found pregnant by another man stood accused of adultery.
The Torah gave Yosef public options. He could bring the matter to the town elders at the gate. The law for a betrothed woman in that position named the penalty as death by stoning. A second procedure sent a suspected wife to the priest for a public ordeal. [32] Scholars doubt that courts in Yosef's day still carried out the stoning. The public hearing was real enough. A village the size of Natzrat would have remembered it for the rest of her life.
Matthew says Yosef refused to "make a public example of her." The Greek verb means to put someone on display. A letter in Paul's name uses the same verb for a conqueror parading his beaten enemies. [33]
So Yosef chose the other lawful path. He would "release her quietly." The word for release is the ordinary word for divorce. Later legal tradition tells us what the quiet version looked like. A man wrote out the document and handed it over in front of two witnesses. There was no hearing, and no charge was read aloud. [34]
Look at what that ruling does. It keeps the Covenant's law, because Yosef refuses to pretend that nothing has happened. It also keeps Miryam out of the gate. Her name stays clean in the village. Her family keeps its standing. Whatever danger the statute held for her never arrives. Ezekiel said a tzaddik judges fairly between two people and wrongs no one. Here the man with the grievance is also the man with the power, and he uses the power to shield the other party.
Raymond Brown wrote the standard study of these chapters. He walks through centuries of argument over this one verse, and he ties the word dikaios to Yosef's respect for the Torah. [35] I think that is right, and I think Matthew tells us which Torah he has in mind. Twice in this gospel Yehoshua quotes the prophet Hosea, who said that YHWH desires chesed above sacrifice. Chesed is loyal, practical kindness, the kind you owe to people bound to you by covenant. No other gospel has that quotation. Later Yehoshua names the weightiest matters of the Torah. They are mishpat, chesed, and faithfulness. [36] Yosef's ruling holds all three. W. D. Davies and Dale Allison, in the fullest modern commentary on Matthew, read Yosef's justice against this same Hebrew background.
The ruling cost him something. Scot McKnight has written about what a village tzaddik stood to lose. His standing rested on his reputation for keeping the Torah. A man in Yosef's position put that reputation at risk the moment he showed mercy to a woman the village assumed was guilty. [37]
Then the dream comes, and it asks for more. The messenger addresses him as "Yosef, son of David." In all of Matthew, only he and Yehoshua carry that title. The messenger tells him to take Miryam home as his wife. Yosef wakes and does it. When the child is born, Yosef names him. Brown points out what the naming means in law. A man who names a child claims him as his own. Through that act the boy enters the house of David. [38]
A third act follows. King Herod wants the child dead. A dream warns Yosef, and he takes the child and the mother out of the country by night. [39]
Count what the silent man has done. He kept a young woman out of court. He gave a child a name, a father, and a royal house. He carried them both beyond the reach of a king. In the Torah, the widow and the orphan are the standing test of a community's justice. Yosef saw to it that his house held neither.
Yosef bar-Yakob, the Dreamer
Matthew had one more way of telling his readers who this man was.
His genealogy says that a man named Yakob fathered Yosef. So this is a Yosef, son of Yakob, who receives dreams and goes down to Egypt, and whose going saves his family. Every person who heard this gospel knew the first man who fit that description. [40]
The first Yosef, son of the patriarch Yakob, was the dreamer of Genesis. His brothers sold him. He rose to manage the grain supply of Egypt. For seven good years he stored the surplus. For seven lean years he opened the storehouses, and his own family lived because of it. [41] His justice ran on a calendar, and it took the form of bread.
Readers before Matthew had already given him the title. The Wisdom of Solomon was written in Greek some decades before the gospel. It retells his story in a single line. Wisdom, it says, stayed with a dikaios when he was sold. Later tradition would call him Yosef ha-Tzaddik outright. [42]
Matthew's first hearers would have caught it at once. A tzaddik named Yosef, son of Yakob, was once again keeping a family alive in Egypt.
A House of Tzaddikim
The title outlived Yosef.
The boy he named grew up, and Rome killed him. His students were soon calling him by his father's title. Kefa, whom you know as Peter, stands in the Temple court in the book of Acts and calls him "the Holy and Just One." Stephanos calls him "the Just One" in front of the high council. The first letter of Kefa and the first letter of Yohanan both call him a tzaddik. [43]
His brother's letter uses the word in a telling place. Ya'akov ends a furious charge against wealthy landowners who have held back the wages of the workers who cut their fields. The Torah required a day laborer's pay before sunset. Ya'akov tells the landowners that the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of YHWH. Then comes his last accusation. You have condemned and killed the tzaddik, he says. Richard Bauckham has shown how closely this letter follows the teaching of Yehoshua and the old prophetic tradition of judgment on the rich. [44]
Then there is Ya'akov himself. A second-century writer named Hegesippus recorded what Jerusalem remembered about him, and the church historian Eusebius preserved the passage. Everyone called Ya'akov "the Just," Hegesippus says, from the days of Yehoshua onward. He drank no wine. He spent so long kneeling in the Temple, asking forgiveness for the people, that his knees grew as hard as a camel's. Hegesippus adds a second title that the city gave him. He translates it as "bulwark of the people," which is to say their protecting wall. [45]
Paul met this man. He tells the assemblies in Galatia that Ya'akov and the other leaders in Jerusalem approved his mission and asked one thing of him. He was to remember the poor. [46]
Ya'akov died in 62 CE, and Josephus tells the story. The high priest Hanan ben Hanan saw his chance in the gap between two Roman governors. He called a court, accused Ya'akov and others of breaking the law, and had them stoned. Josephus says the people of the city who were known as the most fair-minded, and the most careful about the law, were offended. They protested to the king and to the incoming governor. Hanan lost his office after three months. [47]
Josephus reports the raids on the threshing floors in the same pages, shortly before this killing and shortly after it. Hengel reads those years as the collapse of public order under the priestly houses. Eisenman sets Ya'akov at the head of the opposition to them. I read the two reports together. The priesthood that starved its own poor is the priesthood that killed the man the city called its bulwark. [48]
Memory kept the title on Yosef too. A later Egyptian work called the History of Joseph the Carpenter has Yehoshua tell his students the story of his father's life and death. He calls him "righteous Joseph" again and again, until the word works as part of the name. [49]
The early communities had a name for this family. They called them the Desposyni, "those who belong to the Steward." A third-century writer named Julius Africanus reports that they came from Natzrat and the village of Kokhaba, and that they kept the family's genealogy. Bauckham has traced their part in leading the movement for generations. [50]
So Matthew's sentence marks the start of a line. One household produced three men who carried the title. They were the father, the son he named, and the brother who led Jerusalem. Descent from David gave the house its claim. The title of Tzaddik was the part each man had to earn.
What "Righteous" Was Hiding
Go back to the sentence one last time.
Yosef, her husband, was a Tzaddik.
Matthew's first hearers knew what that meant. Yosef was a man of David's house in a hard country. By the word's own definition, he returned the pledge, lent without interest, and judged fairly. His neighbors knew him as someone who kept the Covenant's justice when it cost him. Then a case came into his own home, with a young woman's future in his hands. He ruled in a way that honored the law and kept her from ruin. Then he went further and gave her child his name.
That child grew up in a tzaddik's house. Years later he taught his students to pray for the release of their debts as they released their own debtors. He told a story in which the just are known by the bread, the coat, and the open door. It is fair to think he learned the word at home.
English kept half of this. "Righteous" preserves the goodness and loses the work.
Yosef never needed a line. Matthew gave him a title, and then showed him earning it.
Recommended Reading
Start with Weinfeld's Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East for the phrase at the root of everything here. Horsley's Covenant Economics is the most readable account of the system as a whole. Hanson and Oakman's Palestine in the Time of Jesus supplies the ground under the villages. Brown's The Birth of the Messiah remains the place to begin with Matthew's first two chapters. Bauckham's James and his Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church carry the story into the household's next generation.
Notes
[1] Matthew 1:20; 2:13; 2:19; 2:22. Matthew's phrase for "in a dream" appears six times in his gospel and nowhere else in the New Testament. Five fall in the first two chapters. The sixth, at 27:19, returns later in this essay.
[2] Leviticus 19:36 requires scales and weights of tzedek. Deuteronomy 16:19 to 20 forbids the bribe and commands the pursuit of tzedek in the same breath.
[3] Deuteronomy 15:1 to 2 sets the seventh-year release. Leviticus 25:8 to 13 and 23 to 28 set the fiftieth-year return of land. Deuteronomy 14:28 to 29 and 26:12 set the third-year tithe.
[4] Genesis 6:9, in the Hebrew and in the Septuagint.
[5] Benno Przybylski, Righteousness in Matthew and His World of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). See also W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), on Matthew 1:19.
[6] Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Weinfeld's subject is the paired phrase and the acts of rulers. Extending it to the individual Tzaddik is this essay's step, and it rests on Ezekiel 18.
[7] 2 Samuel 8:15; Jeremiah 22:15 to 16.
[8] Ezekiel 18:5 to 9.
[9] Amos 2:6; 5:12.
[10] Psalm 112:5 to 9.
[11] Richard A. Horsley, Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009).
[12] K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998).
[13] Mishnah, Shevi'it 10:3 to 4.
[14] Josephus, Jewish War 2.427.
[15] Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).
[16] Martin Hengel, The Zealots, trans. David Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989); German original, Die Zeloten (Leiden: Brill, 1961). On Yehudah the Galilean, see Josephus, Antiquities 18.4 to 10 and 18.23. On Tzippori, see Antiquities 17.271 to 272, 17.289, and 18.27.
[17] Martin Hengel, The 'Hellenization' of Judaea in the First Century after Christ, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989).
[18] Josephus, Antiquities 20.180 to 181 and 20.206 to 207.
[19] 1 Kings 2:35. The derivation from Tzadok is the most widely held explanation of the name.
[20] Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab), columns 8 and 12.
[21] Pesher on Psalms (4Q171), columns 2 through 4.
[22] Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Viking, 1997). Eisenman goes on to identify Ya'akov with the Teacher himself. This Archive dates the Teacher to the second century BCE, and it draws on Eisenman for the vocabulary alone.
[23] George W. E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity, expanded edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). See Wisdom of Solomon 2:10 to 20 and 5:1 to 8, and 1 Enoch 94:6 to 8, 96:4 to 8, and 97:8 to 10. Nickelsburg also treats Daniel 12 and 2 Maccabees 7.
[24] Mishnah, Avot 1:2; Josephus, Antiquities 12.43.
[25] Mark 6:20.
[26] The adjective appears at Matthew 1:19; 5:45; 9:13; 10:41; 13:17, 43, 49; 20:4; 23:28, 29, 35; 25:37, 46; and 27:19. The noun appears at 3:15; 5:6, 10, 20; 6:1, 33; and 21:32.
[27] Matthew 5:6, 5:10, and 5:20.
[28] Matthew 10:41; 13:17; 23:29; 23:35.
[29] Matthew 25:31 to 46.
[30] Matthew 27:19.
[31] Przybylski, Righteousness in Matthew; Davies and Allison, Matthew, vol. 1.
[32] Deuteronomy 22:13 to 21 and 22:23 to 27; Numbers 5:11 to 31.
[33] Colossians 2:15.
[34] Mishnah, Gittin, chapter 9. The Mishnah was compiled around 200 CE, and it is used here as a witness to older practice.
[35] Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, new updated edition (New York: Doubleday, 1993). Brown reads Yosef's respect for the Torah and his unwillingness to shame Miryam as two qualities side by side. This essay reads them as one.
[36] Hosea 6:6, quoted at Matthew 9:13 and 12:7; Matthew 23:23. Davies and Allison, Matthew, vol. 1, on 1:19.
[37] Scot McKnight, The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2004). His chapter on Yosef is titled "Joseph: The Story of Reputation," and it describes Yosef's standing as a tsadiq. bookey
[38] Matthew 1:20 and 1:24 to 25; Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, on the naming.
[39] Matthew 2:13 to 15.
[40] Matthew 1:16; Genesis 37 through 50.
[41] Genesis 41:47 to 57; 45:7.
[42] Wisdom of Solomon 10:13 to 14. The title Yosef ha-Tzaddik is standard in later rabbinic literature.
[43] Acts 3:14; 7:52; 22:14; 1 Peter 3:18; 1 John 2:1.
[44] James 5:1 to 6; Leviticus 19:13; Deuteronomy 24:14 to 15. Richard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage (London: Routledge, 1999). Some readers take the tzaddik of James 5:6 as Yehoshua, and others take him as the righteous poor man in general. Either reading sets the title against the landlords.
[45] Hegesippus, in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.4 to 7.
[46] Galatians 2:9 to 10.
[47] Josephus, Antiquities 20.200 to 203.
[48] Hengel, The Zealots; Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus. Josephus does not connect the killing of Ya'akov to the tithe seizures. The connection is this essay's inference.
[49] History of Joseph the Carpenter, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8. The text calls him "righteous Joseph" and "that righteous man" throughout. It survives in Coptic and Arabic and was probably composed in Egypt in the late sixth or early seventh century. The Hebrew form of the title is this Archive's rendering. wikisourceWikipedia
[50] Julius Africanus, in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 1.7.14. Richard Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990).
