There is strong criticism by some on this forum concerning those that believe Jesus to be resurrected. I can understand someone not believing the resurrection but to mount a criticism? Why?
I can't speak for others. For myself, I don't think I was strongly criticizing those who believe in the resurrection. I don't think I even criticized the belief itself. I don't believe in it myself, but I realize the pointlessness of squabbling about things like that. In the post you responded to, all I was doing was contradicting your assertion about the authorship of Matthew.
I've been hearing all my life that Matthew was written by a Jewish Christian, either for Jewish Christians or in the hope of proselytizing Jews. I've never found that claim believable. Granted, the rabbinic literature I've read is of a later date, but it's of such a different character that I can't see how any rational person would direct this kind of effort at faithful Jews. Matthew so obviously takes the Jewish scriptures out of context that I can't imagine it would have had the desired effect. It's the intellectual equivalent of a Chick tract, and I just don't believe that first century Jews would have been quite so easily fooled.
Convincing first century Jews of the claims of Christianity would have been a task not unlike convincing twenty-first century Jews that the last Lubavitcher Rebbe was the Messiah. You can always find an audience for that sort of thing, but it's always going to be a relatively small, fringe sort of audience. And in fact we don't see any mass conversion of Jews to Christianity happening. What we see, instead, is an ever-widening gap between Christianity and Judaism -- including the original Jesus community, which retained its Jewish identity and rejected much of the myth of Christianity.
I think it's far more likely that Matthew was not written either for Jews or for Jewish Christians, but for Gentile Christians, and that its goal was to demonstrate to
them that Christianity had superseded Judaism.
