Matthew Henry: The Bible, Prayer, and Piety
Paul Middleton
1. Introduction
The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE is a pivotal moment, not only on the religious landscape of the first century, but also for New Testament scholarship. Discussions of dating many texts of the New Testament invariably begin with the question of whether or not the author appears to be aware of the fall of Jerusalem. Mark’s gospel is generally placed at the epicentre of the Jewish revolt, either just before or a little after the temple’s destruction, on the basis of Jesus’ prediction concerning the temple: ‘Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down’ (Mark 13:2).1 Luke’s reworking of Mark 13 less ambiguously reflects knowledge of the Roman siege and its aftermath:
21:20When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.… 23For there will be great distress on the earth and wrath against this people; 24they will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken away as captive among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.
Luke 21:20, 23–242
The destruction of the temple had a significant impact on first-century Judaism and Christianity; the fall of what was believed to be the habitation of God required a theological explanation. Such a catastrophic and traumatic rout by the Romans precipitated a rethink about what it meant to be a Jew in a post-temple period,3 while Christians, already struggling with their identity as a messianic Jewish cult which welcomed gentiles, had to consider what the sacking of Jerusalem—the centre of ‘Jewish-Christianity’—might mean for the future of the movement. Both explicit and implicit references to the fall of the temple are found throughout the New Testament, not least on the lips of Jesus,4 and often explain the catastrophe as God’s judgement for rejecting their messiah.5
There is a possible allusion to the destruction of the temple in a notorious passage in the first extant Christian writing, Paul’s epistle to the Thessalonians. In 1 Thess 2:14–16, Paul commends his young church for perseverance in the face of opposition, and assures them that their experience is shared by the wider church. However, they should not despair because God will soon exercise his judgement upon their enemies:
2:14For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judea; for you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews (Ἰουδαῖοι), 15who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all people 16by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God’s wrath has come upon them completely (εἰς τέλος)!
1 Thess 2:14–16
However, it is precisely the way in which the author pronounces judgement on the Jews that has led some commentators to question whether Paul could really have penned these words.6 In the first instance, it is claimed that these verses contradict Paul’s far more positive view in Rom 9–11. Secondly, 1 Thess 2:15 is the only place in the Pauline corpus where the Jews are blamed for killing Jesus. Third, the claim the Jews ‘oppose all men’ is strikingly similar to the gentile charge that Jews were guilty of odium generis humani, and it is difficult to imagine Paul deploying this outsider rhetoric against his fellow Jews.7 Finally, it is not obvious to what event Paul is referring when he claims God’s wrath has come upon them completely. This lack of a clear event has led some to see these verses as an insertion linked to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.8 However, the majority of scholars reject the interpolation theory, and so dismiss this reference. Nonetheless, this is precisely how Matthew Henry understands these verses.
In fact, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE features prominently in Henry’s commentary. While this might be expected in his treatment of New Testament passages that probably allude to the Jewish War, the Roman destruction of the temple is discussed many times in his exposition of the Old Testament. In this essay, I will examine the various ways in which Henry interprets the temple’s destruction, both as an event in the past, and its continuing relevance and theological significance in his own day.
2. 1 Thessalonians 2:13–16
In his comment on 1 Thess 2:13–16, Henry9 finds a convenient list of charges against the Jews, whom he calls ‘the most bitter enemies Christianity had’. Following the story of Paul’s visit to Thessalonica in Acts 17, the Jews are accused of being ‘the ringleaders of persecution in all places’. Their behaviour was ‘enough to justify their final rejection and the ruin of their place, and church, and nation, which was now approaching’. Henry lists their offences, following 1 Thess 2:15–16:
(1.) They killed the Lord Jesus, and impudently and presumptuously wished that his blood might be on them and their children.10 (2.) They killed their own prophets: so they had done all along; their fathers had done so: they had been a persecuting generation. (3.) They hated the apostles, and did them all the mischief they could. They persecuted them, and drove and chased them from place to place: and no marvel, if they killed the Lord Jesus, that they persecuted his followers.11
These expositional comments already go well beyond Paul’s text. The author, by referencing Matt 27:25, clearly links the killing of Jesus to the experiences of that generation and beyond. Moreover, he makes the persecution of the righteous an essential characteristic of the Jews; they were doing as they had always done.
(4.) They pleased not God. They had quite lost all sense of religion, and due care to do their duty to God. It was a most fatal mistake to think that they did God service by killing God’s servants. Murder and persecution are most hateful to God and cannot be justified on any pretence; they are so contrary to natural religion that no zeal for any true or only pretended institution of religion can ever excuse them.12
Clearly, at this point, the Jews are made to stand for those who have persecuted the Protestant Church,13 which as we will see is a move Henry makes on several occasions.
The final two complaints concern the Jews’ opposition to the welfare and salvation of humankind:
(5.) They were contrary to all men. Their persecuting spirit was a perverse spirit; contrary to the light of nature, and contrary to humanity, contrary to the welfare of all men, and contrary to the sentiments of all men not under the power of bigotry. (6.) They had an implacable enmity to the Gentiles, and envied them the offers of the gospel: Forbidding the apostles to speak to the Gentiles, that they might be saved. The means of salvation had long been confined to the Jews. Salvation is of the Jews, says our Saviour. And they were envious against the Gentiles, and angry that they should be admitted to share in the means of salvation.14
Here at least, opposition to the salvific workings of God, because it prevents the salvation of others, constitutes the most serious crime of the Jews, rendering them susceptible to just punishment:
Thus did the Jews fill up their sins; and nothing tends more to any person or people’s filling up the measure of their sins than opposing the gospel, obstructing the progress of it, and hindering the salvation of precious souls. For the sake of these things wrath has come upon them to the uttermost; that is, wrath was determined against them, and would soon overtake them. It was not many years after this that Jerusalem was destroyed, and the Jewish nation cut off by the Romans.15
Clearly, the temple’s destruction is interpreted as a sign of God’s wrath rather than principally Rome’s military might. Just to push home the point, Henry uses the fate of the Jews, once God’s chosen people, to warn Christians of his own day of the need for faithfulness; the destruction of the temple was a visible sign to the world16 and to members of the Christian church not to sin:
God, who certainly foresees the ruin of sinners, and gives them warning of it, that they may prevent it by a true and timely repentance, or else be left inexcusable.17
That ‘the God of infinite goodness’ can turn on judgement and engage ‘in the destruction of his own creatures, even those that had been favourites’ is a warning to Henry’s readers of the terrible consequences of sin.18
Nonetheless, Matthew Henry is not consistent on what he regards as the Jews’ greatest sin, and therefore what justified God’s judgement upon them, manifest in the fall of the temple. At various points in the commentary different explanations are offered, though most are covered by Paul’s list, which are variously emphasized. Henry also uses the fall of the temple to speak positively of salvation history, but also to warn his own and other Christian churches of eighteenth-century England.
3. ‘They Killed the Lord Jesus and the Prophets’
The accusation that Jews were responsible for killing Christ has a long history in Christianity. If 1 Thess 2:15 is authentic, the charge goes back to the earliest extant Christian writing, and is also found in Matt 27:25, where the evangelist has the people curse themselves and their children for spilling Jesus’ blood. Indeed, it was as recently as Pope Paul VI’s 1965 Bull Nostra aetate that Jewish corporate responsibility for the crucifixion was renounced.19 Needless to say, for Matthew Henry, Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ death is taken for granted. Old Testament passages that warn of God’s judgement if the people stray into idolatry are reinterpreted as just recompense for rejecting and killing Christ. The Roman destruction of the temple ‘shows that their sin, in rejecting Christ and his gospel, was more heinous and more provoking to God than idolatry itself’.20 The Babylonian exile is interpreted by Henry as chastisement for their sin of idolatry from which they were corrected. However, despite this clear warning, Henry finds it inexplicable that the Jews failed to learn God’s lesson from the far more severe judgement of the Roman destruction:
For their captivity in Babylon cured them effectually of their idolatry in seventy years’ time; but under this last destruction now for above 1600 years they continue incurably averse to the Lord Jesus.21
Henry often points to the Jews’ past and continued rejection of Jesus as their ultimate or ‘measure-filling sin’ with the temple’s destruction the wrath that justly followed.22 Even where the text has nothing to do with either the temple’s destruction or coming of the Messiah, Henry can find a reference to the temple. Commenting on Zech 11:1 (‘Open thy doors, O Lebanon, that fire may devour thy cedars’), Henry argues the call to open the doors is a call from Jesus to the Jews to let in their king, but ‘he came to his own and his own received him not [John 1:11]; now thou must open them to let thy ruin in’. Lebanon, explains Henry, stands for the temple because it was built of Lebanese cedars, but ‘it was burnt with fire by the Romans, and its gates were forced upon by the fury of the soldiers’.23
The destruction of the temple is interpreted by Henry as the ultimate act of God’s vengeance for the rejection and killing of Jesus.24 In order to make scripture point consistently in this direction, he interprets all reference to the Babylonian destruction as prophecy of the final destruction by the Romans. However, in another remarkable exegetical move, Henry reinterprets the enemies of Israel throughout the Old Testament to refer to Israel itself. In order to do this, various Hebrew Bible figures such as Moses, David, and Jeremiah become ‘types of Christ’; their sufferings anticipate Christ’s. The judgements that would therefore befall their persecutors fall on the Jews for rejecting and killing Christ. So, when David curses his enemies:
These imprecations are not David’s prayers against his enemies, but prophecies of the destruction of Christ’s persecutors, especially the Jewish nation, which our Lord himself foretold with tears, and which was accomplished about forty years after the death of Christ.… The rejection of the Jews for rejecting Christ, as it was a signal instance of God’s justice and an earnest of the vengeance which God will at last take on all that are obstinate in their infidelity,…25
Furthermore, David’s curses, ‘Let their habitation be desolate’ (Ps 69:25) and ‘Let them be blotted out of the book of the living’ (Ps 69:28), for Henry are clearly ‘fulfilled when their country was laid waste by the Romans … [and] multitudes of unbelieving Jews fell by the sword and famine’.26 These ‘dreadful judgments’ are brought upon the Jews because of their persecution of Jesus (‘They persecuted him with a rage reaching up to heaven; they cried Crucify him, crucify him’),27 but also because of their persecution of the saints (‘the suffering saints were God’s wounded, wounded in his cause and for his sake, and them they persecuted … For these things wrath came upon them to the uttermost’).28
Therefore, while Henry frequently cites killing Jesus as the ultimate Jewish sin that leads to destruction, elsewhere the cause of judgement is the Jewish persecution of the church. For Henry, Jeremiah’s experience of suffering anticipates the persecution the faithful will face at the hands of the Jews.29 Persecuting the church was enmity towards God and brought ‘wrath upon them without remedy, for it was sinning against the remedy’. Using Acts 9:4 as a proof-text, Henry argues that to persecute the messengers of God is like persecuting God: ‘Nothing is more provoking to God than abuses given to his faithful ministers; for what is done against them he takes as done against himself. Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’30
Similarly, it is persecution of the church rather than specifically killing Christ that is the action responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem in Henry’s comment on Ps 5:10 (‘Destroy thou them, O God; let them fall by their own counsels’), and Ps 97:3 (‘A fire goeth before him, and burneth up his enemies round about’), which refers to the:
… enmity of the unbelieving Jews to the gospel of Christ, and the violent persecution which in all places they stirred up against the preachers and professors of it … [which] turned to their own ruin … [as it] filled up their sin, and brought wrath upon them to the uttermost … [and] was fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation by the Romans.31
Once again 1 Thess 2:15–16 is referenced. Both verses are also deployed by Henry in relation to persecution and judgement in his comments on Hagar, who is made to stand as a typology for the bullying Jews (Gen 21:9–13); as Hagar was cast out, so the Jews ‘provoked God to cast them off [because of] their mocking and persecuting the gospel church, God’s Isaac, in its infancy, 1 Th. 2:16’.32 Persecution of both Christ and the church is the sin that demands divine punishment and ‘brought upon Jerusalem its final destruction by the Romans’.33
The Romans do not escape God’s wrath for their role in persecuting the Christians. Indeed, the Jews are accused of choosing Caesar over Christ, and siding with the Romans against Christianity. While it was God’s ‘rod of iron’ and not Roman power that destroyed the temple, so in return the power of Paganism will be shattered by the establishment of Christianity under Constantine: ‘Observe how powerful Christ is and how weak the enemies of his kingdom are before him; he has a rod of iron wherewith to crush those that will not submit to his golden sceptre’.34 For Henry, Rome’s decline was caused by its persecution of the church,35 and there is even a suggestion their destruction of God’s temple may also have provoked their downfall.36 In the end, all enemies of God will be destroyed, and those who persecute the church will endure ‘the hottest place in hell’!37
4. ‘They Displease God’
We have seen that killing Christ and persecuting the church are the chief reasons Henry gives for God’s judgement coming upon the Jews; judgement that was expressed most fully in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. However, Henry levels a more general charge against the Jews that is found in 1 Thess 2; ‘they displease God’. For Henry, this also becomes part of the explanation for God’s destruction of the temple. As we have noted, Henry habitually links the two destructions of Jerusalem and argues that they both share the same cause. As idolatry led to the Babylonian exile, so the Roman destruction of Jerusalem stands as a symbol of the Jews’ past and continuing disobedience to God.
Spiritual judgments often bring temporal judgments along with them upon persons and places. This was in part fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans, …; but, the foregoing predictions being so expressly applied in the New Testament to the Jews in our Saviour’s time, doubtless this points at the final destruction of that people by the Romans, in which it had a complete accomplishment, and the effects of it that people and that land remain under to this day.38
Henry follows the standard Deuteronomistic view of history; God will bless his people when they are obedient and punish them when they stray into disobedience and idolatry. So, he says, the Jews provoked God’s wrath upon them, because in wilfully refusing to walk in his way, ‘they sold themselves to iniquity’.39
While Henry readily employs those Old Testament passages that deal with judgement on Israel to bolster his belief that the Jews have been rejected decisively, those prophecies of restoration cause him some problems. For example, in Isa 52:1 God promises ‘Jerusalem, the holy city’ that ‘there shall no more come into you the uncircumcised and the unclean’. Both God’s promise and its failure cause a potential difficulty for Henry. Henry compounds the problem in his translation of the verse: ‘there will no more come against thee (so it may be read)40 the uncircumcised and unclean’,41 switching the possible cultic meaning to a militaristic setting. For good measure, he even cites Ps 79:1 (‘The heathen shall not again enter into God’s sanctuary and profane his temple’), making the Roman assault the point at which this prophecy fails. Henry’s inventive solution both preserves God’s faithfulness, and condemns the Jews. He insists that God’s promise should be understood conditionally; if the Jews keep close to God he will protect them. However, should they become disobedient and ‘corrupt themselves, Antiochus will profane their temple and the Romans will destroy it’.42 Therefore, that the temple was later defiled and destroyed in no way threatens the reliability of scripture or God’s promises, rather it demonstrates the Jews’ disobedience.
Henry’s problem with the Jews was their persistence with the ceremonial law. To do so after the death of Christ, Henry claims, constitutes idolatry. Jews, he says, did not recognize that after the death of Christ – what he calls ‘the great sacrifice’ – all ceremonial sacrifice had been set aside.43 To continue to sacrifice was contemptuous of Christ, ‘treading underfoot the blood of the covenant’.44 Nonetheless, ‘the Jews would not be persuaded to quit it; still they kept it up with more zeal than ever’, even martyring Stephen because he spoke up against it. Instead, the leaders of Israel ‘should have discerned the signs of the times and given notice to the people of the approach of the Messiah, but who instead of that opposed him’.45
However, Henry acknowledges that the law was both ancient and divine, and he was also aware that the extent to which the law was still in force was a live debate in early Christianity. It is in relation to this question that Henry makes his most creative use of the destruction of the temple. In his exposition of the parable of the wicked husbandmen (Matt 21:33–45), Henry argues that the ceremonial law was like the partition wall or hedge around the vineyard, which Christ took down.46 However, the Jews’ resistance to giving up the law is offered as the reason for killing Jesus. The wicked tenants, Henry asserts, sought to kill the landowner’s son so they could gain the inheritance (the church), and then impose the ceremonial law on it. However, as in the parable the owner destroys the wicked tenants and hands the vineyard over to others, God destroyed the temple, Jerusalem, and Judaism, and built a flourishing church on its ruins.47 In other words, for Henry, God intervenes decisively in the controversy that engulfed the early church over the place of the law.
Providence soon determined this controversy (which is the only thing that seemed a controversy between the Old Testament and the New) by the destruction of Jerusalem, the desolations of the temple, the dissolution of the temple-service, and the total dispersion of all the remains of the Jewish nation, with a judicial defeat of all the attempts to incorporate it again, now for above 1600 years; and this according to the express predictions of Christ, a little before his death.48
For Henry, the destruction of the temple was God’s decisive engagement with this early Christian debate.49 The destruction of the temple is decisive proof the ceremonial law has ended. There were those Jewish believers in Jesus who struggled to overcome what Henry dubbed ‘their affection for the Law’.50
Many of the Jews who embraced the faith of Christ, yet continued very zealous for the law, … they therefore kept them up [observances of the law] after they were by baptism admitted into the Christian church, … Herein they were connived at, because the prejudices of education are not to be overcome all at once, and in a few years the mistake would be effectually rectified by the destruction of the temple and the total dissolution of the Jewish church, by which the observance of the Mosaic ritual would become utterly impracticable.51
Henry effectively argues that the destruction of the temple was necessary to help early Jewish-Christians see that one could not be baptized in Christ and continue with the law of Moses.
However, although Henry notes that the difference between the Old and New Testaments is principally in relation to the status of the Jews, with the Old Testament ceremonial law being set aside, he is equally insistent that there exists no tension between the two covenants. He argues that the Jews were always going to be laid aside, but not through being violently cast off, but through a natural process of progressive revelation.
The Jewish church was swallowed up in the Christian, the mosaic ritual in evangelical institutions. So that the New Testament is no more the undoing of the Old than the sending of a youth to the university is the undoing of his education in the grammar-school.52
Ultimately, for Henry, Judaism and Christianity could not co-exist. The Jewish edifice had to be removed to allow the development of Christianity, and so the destruction of the temple was inevitable; ‘the Kingdom of the Messiah shall be set up in the world by the utter destruction of the Jewish polity, which stood in the way of it’.53 Henry reads into John the Baptist’s preaching that for true religion to extend to the gentiles, total destruction rather than intense pruning was necessary. The axe laid at the root of the tree refers again to the destruction of the temple, the ‘total final and irrecoverable extirpation of that people, in which all those would perish that continued impenitent’.54
Jerusalem’s destruction becomes an apocalyptic event, when God’s wrath is poured out on his former people for their rejection and killing of Jesus, their persecution of the church, and their refusal to recognize, despite God’s warning, that the ceremonial law had ended. The fall of the temple becomes so important for Henry, and those who finished his commentary, that many biblical passages that are generally taken to refer to the eschaton are instead applied to the temple’s destruction: the day of the Lord (Amos and Acts); the Son of Man coming in his kingdom (Mark 9:1); the last days (Acts 2:17–21); the end of all things (1 Pet 4); the sixth seal (Rev 6:12); and the judgement of the Lamb (Rev 6:15).
5. ‘Wrath has Come Upon Them’
So for Henry, there could be no legitimate version of Judaism after the Christ-event. All true Jews must embrace Christ in order to remain the people of God. The destruction of the temple becomes the sign of their total abandonment. Judaism, for Henry, could not function without the temple, and therefore its destruction reinforced his view that there was effectively no more Judaism. Those Jews who crucified or rejected Jesus, or persecuted the church filled up their measure of sin, so God’s wrath justly came upon them. Moreover, those Jews who continue in unbelief do so despite the overwhelming evidence, not only of Scripture, but also the fact that the temple’s destruction demonstrates for all to see that God has finished irrevocably with his formerly chosen people.
At several points, Henry finds a complete rendering of salvation history in a single chapter. So, for example, introducing Zech 11, he writes:
God’s prophet, who, in the chapters before, was an ambassador sent to promise peace, is here [Zech 11] a herald sent to declare war. The Jewish nation shall recover its prosperity, and shall flourish for some time and become considerable; … But, when thereby the chosen remnant among them are effectually called in and united to Christ, the body of the nation, persisting in unbelief, shall be utterly abandoned and given up to ruin, for rejecting Christ; and it is this that is foretold here in this chapter—the Jews rejecting Christ, which was their measure-filling sin, and the wrath which for that sin came upon them to the uttermost.55
Henry then explains how Zech 11 perfectly maps on to the history of Israel’s unbelief:
Here is, I. A prediction of the destruction itself that should come upon the Jewish nation (v. 1–3). II. The putting of it into the hands of the Messiah. 1. He is charged with the custody of that flock (v. 4–6). 2. He undertakes it, and bears rule in it (v. 7, 8). 3. Finding it perverse, he gives it up (v. 9), breaks his shepherd’s staff (v. 10, 11), resents the indignities done him and the contempt put upon him (v. 12, 13), and then breaks his other staff (v. 14). 4. He turns them over into the hands of foolish shepherds, who, instead of preventing, shall complete their ruin, and both the blind leaders and the blind followers shall fall together into the ditch (v. 15–17).56
Finally, Henry states that this is a situation about which those unbelieving Jews can have no complaints: ‘This is foretold to the poor of the flock before it comes to pass, that, when it does come to pass, they may not be offended’.57
Henry stresses Jewish culpability; they could have been a blessing to the nations, but chose instead to reject the Messiah.58 Yet at the same time he defends the righteousness of God’s judgement against what might be thought to constitute excessive punishment.59 God, Henry observes, gave the Jews ample time to repent, offering to them a helping hand, but they ‘slighted him and all the tenders of his grace’.60 For Henry, the destruction of the temple was the inevitable consequence of the Jewish sins of killing Christ, persecuting the church, and continuing in idolatry by rejecting the true gospel. The consequences of that sin were still being felt in his own day as, he observes, the Jews were still scattered among the nations, bearing the mark of Cain.
Their calamity shall continue from generation to generation and … they shall be so dispersed that they shall never unite or incorporate again; they shall settle in a perpetual unsettlement, and Cain’s doom shall be theirs.61
The Jews stand as the paradigmatic enemies of God, who though formerly chosen, became an apostate people, and as a result were subjected to God’s wrath through the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. However, as this judgement had continuing effects, the Jews are made to stand as a warning to all who might be tempted to disobey God, or who persecute the true church. Like Cain, condemned like the Jews to wander the earth without a homeland, they are ‘a spectacle of horror to all’.62
As a template for apostasy, Henry is able to draw comparisons between those ancient enemies of God and contemporaneous enemies of the gospel, namely Roman Catholics. Henry complains that they too persecute the true church and engage in traditions tantamount to idolatry. As with the Jews, Henry cannot deny the Roman Church has arguments to deploy to bolster their position, but he manages to fasten the behaviour of the Jews onto the ‘Romanists’, with the implicit threat of the same fate. He notes that Jewish idolaters ‘burn incense unto the queen of heaven’ but defend themselves, for even ‘the most absurd and unreasonably wicked men will have something to say for themselves’.63 But he then suggests that these wicked idolaters ‘plead many of the things which the advocates for Rome make the marks of a true church, and not only justify but magnify themselves with; and these Jews have as much right to them as the Romanists have’. Henry then draws seven points of comparison between their idolatrous claims: antiquity, pretended authority, claims of unity, universality, visibility, practice of the mother tradition, and prosperity.64 For Henry, Roman Catholic devotion to Mary demonstrates for all their claim to authority ‘that idolatry which he [Jesus] foresaw his church would in after-ages sink into, … a crime which the Roman catholics, as they call themselves, are notoriously guilty of’.65 Like the Jews, Henry claims, the Roman Church persecutes the people of God just as the ancient Romans did: ‘Persecuting power and rage in Rome heathen, and no less in Rome papal, against the Christian religion’,66 and like the first-century Jews who handed Jesus over to Pilate, the Roman Catholic Church uses civil magistrates to persecute true Christians:
See how these corrupt church-rulers abused the civil magistrate, making use of him to execute their unrighteous decrees, … Thus have the kings of the earth been wretchedly imposed upon by the papal powers, and condemned to the drudgery of extirpating with the sword of war, as well as that of justice, those whom they have marked for heretics, right or wrong, to the great prejudice of their own interests.67
The Roman Church, who like the Pharisees clung to ‘corrupt traditions’ and ‘men that hated to be reformed’,68 were persecutors of the church and were therefore liable to the same judgement.
Finally, we have seen that Henry interpreted God’s destruction of the temple as essentially adjudicating between law-observant Judaism and Christianity by ‘abolishing the ceremonial law’,69 effectively removing the means by which Judaism could function, since there was no longer any possibility of atoning for sin.70 However, by interpreting the ex eventu prophecy about the destruction of the First Temple as also predicting the Second, and reading the Roman War into texts that speak of conflict, Henry, with some creative exegesis, is able to find remarkable details of the Jewish Revolt in the pages of the Old Testament. So in Deut 28:45–68, one of the consequences of rebellion against God will be that:
28:49The LORD will bring a nation from far away, from the end of the earth, to swoop down on you like an eagle, … 52It shall besiege you in all your towns until your high and fortified walls, in which you trusted, come down … 53you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your own sons and daughters … 62Although once you were as numerous as the stars in heaven, you shall be left few in number, because you did not obey the LORD your God.… 64The LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other; …
Deut 28:49, 52, 53, 62, 64
For Henry, Moses predicts the fall of Jerusalem accurately, the reference to the eagle obviously referring to the Roman ensign.71 The people, he explains, have been scattered throughout the world, and even the reference to eating the flesh of children finds fulfilment in Josephus’ account of the Jewish War, in which a woman eats her own child in the midst of the famine, and is discovered by a mob who smell the cooking meat and share in her cannibalism.72 Such remarkable accuracy in the pages of the Old Testament, for Henry, demonstrates that the truth of prophecy, Scripture, in short, Christianity, is incontestable:
[Moses] foretells their last destruction by the Romans and their dispersion thereupon. And the present deplorable state of the Jewish nation, and of all that have incorporated themselves with them, by embracing their religion, does so fully and exactly answer to the prediction in these verses that it serves for an incontestable proof of the truth of prophecy, and consequently of the divine authority of the scripture.73
6. Conclusion
The destruction of the temple and the Roman ravaging of Jerusalem in 70 CE pervades Matthew Henry’s massive commentary and serves several theological purposes. In common with some ancient Jewish accounts of the temple’s destruction, the Roman sack of Jerusalem is interpreted as God’s judgement upon his disobedient children. Where Henry parts company with these writers, and finds common cause with New Testament and other early Christian authors, is that event is not a temporary chastisement but a wholescale rejection of his formerly chosen people. In the pages of both the Old and New Testaments, Henry finds strikingly accurate predictions of Israel’s ultimate fate; a fate that any ‘reasonable’ reader of Scripture should have been able to anticipate! The Jews provoked God through rejecting and killing Jesus, and persecuting the church. Moreover, in refusing to abandon the ceremonial law, which had been clearly superseded, Jews compounded their disobedience by committing idolatry. Idolatry had resulted in the destruction of the First Temple, an event interpreted as God’s judgement but one that could be redeemed. In the destruction of the Second Temple, God had not only punished disobedience but decisively settled any doubt that the Christians had replaced the Jews as his chosen people.
Matthew Henry’s full-blooded supercessionism is, of course, jarring to modern ears. Yet from the beginning, Christian thinkers as far back as Paul have wrestled with the problem of the place of Judaism after the Christ-event. From the Gospel of Matthew to Matthew Henry and beyond – until the horror of the Holocaust – supercessionism was the dominant and most logical Christian answer. After all, how else could one account for the destruction of God’s temple in Jerusalem, which had declared Christianity victorious, other than as a sign of God’s complete wrath come upon a people who had filled up their sins to their full measure?
1. See, for example, the discussion by Joel Marcus, ‘The Jewish War and the Sitz im Leben of Mark’, JBL 111 (1992): 441–62. Biblical quotations largely follow the NRSV but with some adjustments.
2. The fall of Jerusalem is also important for the dating of Revelation and Hebrews.
3. Among important studies are: Philip F. Esler, ‘God’s Honour and Rome’s Triumph: Responses to the Fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE in Three Jewish Apocalypses’, in Modelling Early Christianity: Social Scientific Studies of the New Testament in its Context, ed. Philip F. Esler (London: Routledge, 1995), 239–58; Kenneth R. Jones, Jewish Reactions to the Destruction of the Jerusalem in A. D. 70: Apocalypses and Related Pseudepigrapha, JSJS 151 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Frederick. J. Murphy, ‘2 Baruch and the Romans’, JBL 104 (1985): 663–69; Jacob Neusner, ‘Judaism in a Time of Crisis: Four Responses to the Destruction of the Second Temple’, Judaism 21 (1972): 312–27; Michael. E. Stone, ‘Reactions to Destructions of the Second Temple’, JSJ 12 (1981): 195–204.
4. Mark 13:2; 14:58; 15:29; and parr.; Luke 19:44; John 2:19; Acts 6:14; Gos. Thom. 71. This view is also found in Jewish texts, e.g., 2 Bar. 6–8; 4 Bar. 4:1; Josephus, J.W. 5.9.3–4.
5. This is particularly pronounced in the parable of the tenants (Mark 12:1–12 // Matt 21:33–46 // Luke 20:9–19), in which in response to the killing of the owner of the vineyard’s son, ‘He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others’ (Mark 12:9).
6. This view goes at least as far back as Baur, who concludes, ‘this passage has a thoroughly un-Pauline stamp’; Ferdinand C. Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Work, his Epistles, and his Doctrine, trans. A. Menzies, 2 vols. (London: Williams, 1875), 2:86. In fact, Baur goes on to argue that both Thessalonian letters are not by Paul.
7. So Tacitus, Hist. 5.5. Tacitus, of course, later makes the same charge against Christians in his description of the Neronic persecutions (15.44). Josephus similarly defends Judaism from the charge of hatred of others (Ag. Ap. 2.121). Compare Paul in Rom 9:1–5; 10:1–4; 11:25–32.
8. So Birger A. Pearson, ‘1 Thessalonians 2:14–16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation’, HTR 64 (1971): 79–94.
9. Following Matthew Henry’s death in 1714, Daniel Mayo (ca. 1672–1733) was author of the commentary on 1–2 Thessalonians (and 2 Corinthians) drawing on notes left behind by Henry. As we will see, these notes are not inconsistent with the way in which Henry references 1 Thess 2:15–16 elsewhere in his commentary.
10. Cf. Matt 27:25.
11. Henry on 1 Thess 2:13–16.
12. Henry on 1 Thess 2:13–16.
13. For a classic treatment of persecution and martyrdom in the Reformation period, see B.S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); see also John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
14. Henry on 1 Thess 2:13–16.
15. Henry on 1 Thess 2:13–16.
16. See Henry on Zech 5:5–11.
17. Henry on Deut 28:45–68. Henry spends some time on the rejection of God’s chosen people: ‘It is amazing to think that a people so long the favourites of Heaven should be so perfectly abandoned and cast off, that a people so closely incorporated should be so universally dispersed, and yet that a people so scattered in all nations should preserve themselves distinct and not mix with any, but like Cain be fugitives and vagabonds, and yet marked to be known’ (Henry on Deut 28:45–68).
18. Henry on Deut 28:45–68. The same idea is found in Henry on Matt 21:38–45; the Jews are ‘a warning to all nations and churches, to take heed of leaving their first love, of letting fall a good work of reformation begun among them, and returning to that wickedness which they seemed to have forsaken, for the last state of such will be worse than the first’.
19. See Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini’s reflections: ‘Christianity and Judaism: A Historical and Theological Overview’, in Jews and Christians: Exploring the Past, Present, and Future, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 19–26. On Nostra aetae and other Vatican documents, see Michael A. Hayes, ‘From Nostra aetate to “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah” ’ in Christian-Jewish Relations through the Centuries, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Brook W. R. Pearson, JSNTSup 192 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 426–45.
20. Henry on Deut 28:45–68.
21. Henry on Deut 28:45–68.
22. Henry on Zech 11. Similarly, in Henry’s comment on Dan 9:20–27, it is the killing of Christ that is called ‘the sin that filled up the measure of their iniquity and brought ruin upon them’.
23. Henry on Zech 11:1–3.
24. So Henry says the kingdom ‘came with power, when vengeance was taken on the Jews for crucifying Christ’ (Henry on Mark 9:1–13). See also Henry on Dan 2:31–45 for the same thought.
25. Henry on Ps 69:22–29.
26. Henry on Ps 69:22–29.
27. See also Henry on Ezek 7:1–15 for the same charge that the Jews called out for Jesus to be crucified.
28. Henry on Ps 69:22–29.
29. Henry on Jeremiah and Jer 2:29–37.
30. Henry on 2 Chr 36:11–21.
31. Henry on Ps 97:1–7.
32. Henry on Gen 21:9–13.
33. Henry on 2 Chr 36:11–21.
34. Henry on Ps 2:9.
35. Henry on Dan 7:9–14.
36. Henry on Ezra 6:1–12.
37. Henry on Matt 21:33–46.
38. Henry on Isa 6:9–13.
39. Henry on Isa 42:18–25.
40. I am unaware of any published Bible translation that renders 
as ‘come against’ rather than ‘come into’.
41. Henry on Isa 52:1–6.
42. Henry on Isa 52:1–6.
43. Henry on Isa 66:1–4.
44. Henry on Isa 66:1–4.
45. Henry on Dan 9:20–27. Henry generally blames Jews collectively for idolatry, but occasionally, such as here, he singles out the leaders. See also Henry on 2 Chr 36:11–21: ‘The priests…who should have opposed idolatry were the ring-leaders in it’.
46. Henry on Matt 21:33–45.
47. Henry on Matt 21:33–45.
48. Henry, preface to Exposition vol. 5.
49. 49. The same idea is found in Henry on Matt 22:1–14: ‘Judgment came upon it and ruin without remedy, and it is set forth as an example to all that should oppose Christ and his gospel. It was the Lord’s doing, to avenge the quarrel of his covenant’.
50. Henry on Matt 5:17–20.
51. Henry on Acts 15:1–5.
52. Henry, preface to Exposition vol. 5.
53. Henry on Mark 9:1–13.
54. Henry on Matt 3:7–12. So Henry says, ‘When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, and the nation of the Jews, as a nation, quite blotted out from under heaven, and neither root nor branch left them’ (Henry on Mal 4:1–3). In his commentary on Mark 13, which does point to the temple’s destruction, Henry draws back from this rhetorical total destruction. He acknowledges the Romans threatened ‘a universal slaughter of all the people of the Jews’ and that had the war continued ‘no flesh could have been saved, not one Jew could have been left alive’. Remarkably, Henry interprets Mark 13:20, which refers to the Christian elect, as pointing to God’s mercy in the midst of his wrath on the Jews, so that ‘As a church and nation the ruin was complete, but many particular persons had their lives given them for a prey, by the storm’s subsiding when it did’. For Henry, this was to fulfil the promise that ‘a remnant should be saved (Isa. 10:22)’ (Henry on Mark 13:14–23).
55. Henry on Zech 11.
56. Henry on Zech 11.
57. Henry on Zech 11.
58. Henry on Ezek 5:5–17.
59. Henry tells of ‘a wicked man, who, upon reading the threatenings of this chapter [Deut 28], was so enraged that he tore the leaf out of the Bible’ (Henry on Deut 28:45–68). However for Henry, the total destruction of the Jewish nation was ‘just punishment of those that put him to death’ (Henry on Dan 9:20–27).
60. Henry on Isa 50:1–3.
61. Henry on Zech 5:5–11. Henry links the Jews with Cain several times, either for their role in spilling innocent blood, or that they bear Cain’s curse living as ‘fugitives and vagabonds’ (Henry on Jer 15:1–9); see also Henry on Prov 29:27, Isa 58:3–7, Ezek 5:5–17, 7:16–22, and Hos 9:1–6.
62. Henry on Jer 15:1–9.
63. Henry on Jer 44:15–19 (cf. Jer 44:17).
64. Henry on Jer 44:15–19.
65. Henry on John 2:1–11. Henry makes accusation of idolatry in Exod 20:1–11; 2 Kgs 22:1–10; Acts 14:8–18; Rom 1:19–32; 2 Thess 2:3–12; 1 Pet 2:4–12; Rev 13:11–18; Rev 16:12–16 (in which the idolatry of Rome is accused of being a hindrance to the conversion of the Jews).
66. 66. Henry on Dan 7:15–28.
67. Henry on Matt 27:1–10. See also Henry on Hos 6:4–11: ‘In popish countries the clergy are observed to be the most bloody persecutors’ demonstrating that even ‘the best institutions, that are ever so well designed to keep the balance even between justice and mercy, are capable of being abused and perverted to the manifest prejudice and violation of both’.
68. Henry on Matt 15:10–20.
69. Henry on Ps 69:22–29.
70. Henry on Lev 16:20–28.
71. An insight Henry attributes to a ‘bishop Patrick’, which makes Moses’ prophecy ‘the more remarkable’ (Henry on Deut 28:45–68).
72. Cf. Josephus, J.W. 6.3.4.
73. Henry on Deut 28:45–68.