Interpretation. A Journal of Bible and Theology. October 2010

In This Issue

Volume 64 Number 4 October 2010

“God with Us”: Perspectives from the Gospel of Matthew

339

EDITORIAL

341

GOD IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW • BENEDICT THOMAS VIVIANO The God of biblical revelation is present everywhere in the Gospel according to Matthew, but often in a self-effacing way, receding behind Jesus, Emmanuel, God-with-us. God’s presence is veiled by divine passives, hidden behind the reverent circumlocution “heavens.” This gospel usually speaks on a horizontal plane of everyday life, where the Transcendent awaits us at every turn as the horizon.

356

MATTHEW’S NARRATIVE CHRISTOLOGY: THREE STORIES • M. EUGENE BORING Matthew’s Christology is theocentric, presenting God’s rule as manifest in the life of Jesus as an alternative to the sovereignty and power of this-worldly rulers. This Christology is expressed in the narrative mode. It can be appreciated and appropriated better in the context of the narratives in which contemporary interpreters are embedded.

368

SCRIPTURES, HERMENEUTICS, AND MATTHEW’S JESUS • F. SCOTT SPENCER Eschewing a truncated focus on single proof-texts, Matthew’s Jesus interprets Scripture by Scripture across the canon in creative and provocative ways. His hermeneutical methods and aims resist narrow profiling. Above all, Matthew’s Jesus emerges as the church’s authoritative biblical exegete and teacher.

380

WHICH GOD IS WITH US? • BARBARA E. REID There is a tension in the Gospel of Matthew between two very different images of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, God is portrayed as being boundlessly gracious and forgiving, while in eight Matthean parables, God is seen as vindictive and punitive. This poses an ethical dilemma: which God is with us and whom should we emulate?

390

“WHEREVER THIS GOOD NEWS IS PROCLAIMED”: WOMEN AND GOD IN THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW • DOROTHY JEAN WEAVER A careful examination of Matthew’s narrative reveals a striking portrait of those who in the patriarchal world of first-century Palestine are largely people of little power and low esteem. To bring God into the story of women is ultimately, for Matthew, to grant women extraordinary and unanticipated significance for the life and the faith of the people of God. BETWEEN TEXT & SERMON

402

Major Book Reviews 414

Matthew 3:13–17 – Andrew Foster Connor

406

410

– Charles B. Cousar

Matthew 11:2–24 – Charles H. Talbert

Inhabiting the Cruciform God by Michael J. Gorman; Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision by N. T. Wright; and The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul by Douglas A. Campbell

418

Matthew 26

A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 4: Law and Love by John P. Meier – Jonathan Klawans

– David Renwick 422

Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology by David H. Kelsey – Ian A. McFarland

426

Short Book Reviews and Notes

442

Volume 64 Index

O F F I C E S TA F F

DEBRA REAGAN Managing Editor WILLA JACOB Subscription Manager NAROLA AO MCFAYDEN Editorial Fellow & Office Assistant

INDEXED BY

PUBLISHER

EDITORIAL OFFICE SUBSCRIPTIONS TOLL-FREE (U.S.) WEBSITE E-MAIL

ADVERTISING

PRINTING OFFICE

Copyright 2010, by Union Presbyterian Seminary. All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America.

Academic Abstractions Arts & Humanities Citation Index Arts & Humanities Search ATLA Religion Database Book Review Index Current Contents/Arts and Humanities Guide to Social Science and Religion in Periodical Literature Humanities Index Index of Articles on Jewish Studies Index to Book Reviews in Religion International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature on the Humanities and Social Sciences International Bibliography of Periodical Literature on the Humanities and Social Sciences Internationale Zeitschriftenschau für Bibelwissenschaft und Grenzgebiete New Testament Abstracts Old Testament Abstracts Theologische Literaturzeitung Union Presbyterian Seminary 3401 Brook Road Richmond, Virginia 23227 (804) 278-4296 (804) 278-4297 (800) 229-2990 ext. 297 www.interpretation.org [email protected] Address advertising correspondence to: Charles A. Roth, Jr CA Roth, Jr., Inc. 86 Underwood Rd. Falmouth, ME 04105-1418 mobile: 516-729-3509 fax: 914-470-0483 [email protected] Carter Printing Co. 2007 N. Hamilton Street Richmond, Virginia 23230

Abbreviations used in Interpretation can be found in The SBL Handbook of Style (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999). Subscriptions: U.S.

Non-U.S.

1 Year

$

29.00

$

2 Years

$

52.00

$

3 Years

$

70.00

$

8.00

$

Single copies

$

U.S. Library

Non-U.S.Library

40.00

$

48.00

74.00

$

91.00

$

97.00

$

112.00

$

10.50

$

13.50

$

55.00

104.00 128.00

$

15.00

Interpretation (ISSN 0020-9643) is published (January, April, July, and October) by Union Presbyterian Seminary. 3401 Brook Road, Richmond, Virginia 23227. Periodicals postage paid at Richmond, Virginia. Postmaster: Send address changes to Interpretation, 3401 Brook Road, Richmond, Virginia 23227. RETURN POSTAGE GUARANTEED.

Interpretation 339

Editorial “And they shall name him Emmanuel . . . ‘God with us’” (Matt 1:23). Thus begins Matthew’s Gospel. But what does “God with us” mean for Matthew’s readers? Five prominent New Testament scholars explore the question in this issue. “Does Matthew . . . have anything particular to say about God?”“Yes” is the correct answer, but it is too simple, as Benedict Viviano’s lead essay shows. Matthew’s God, veiled behind circumlocutions and divine passives, is “never far away, yet not directly visible or graspable.” To embrace Matthew’s Emmanuel, readers must be open to Matthew’s values and spiritual orientations. Matthew’s Christology, as Eugene Boring demonstrates, “is not oriented to the question ‘Who is Jesus?’ but ‘Who is God?’” The answer is expressed in three interwoven narratives (the stories about, of, and in the gospel), each inseparable “from the person of Jesus, who is Godwith-us.” These narratives “can be appreciated better in the context of narratives in which contemporary interpreters are embedded.” Scott Spencer focuses on Jesus’ oft-repeated question to the Pharisees for clues to the meaning of Emmanuel: “Have you not read the Scriptures?” Jesus’ hermeneutic is not for the “the faint of heart or the feeble of mind,” because it confronts readers with both the “liberal” Jesus who relaxes Scripture’s mandate (e.g., Matt 12:1–8) and the “conservative” Jesus who restrains Scripture’s teaching (e.g., Matt 19:1–9). Matthew’s advice for negotiating these tensions (Matt 18:20), is the basis for Spencer’s concluding invitation: “With open Bibles and hearts in the community of God’s people, we may encounter the living Emmanuel afresh, continuing to guide us through God’s word to the fullness of God’s truth.” Barbara Reid’s study of Matthean parables raises a pointed question: which God is with us—the God of the Sermon on the Mount who is gracious and forgiving or the God of the parables who is portrayed as vindictive and punitive? The ethical dilemma for readers is acute: “If the godly way of establishing righteousness is by punishing evildoers, then ought we to do the same?” Reid examines possible resolutions to the tensions between these two images of God. Without diminishing the dilemma, she accents Matthew’s final image (Matt 28:20): “Godwith-us is the One whose power of love overcomes all forces of evildoing, even death, empowering all who believe in him to pass this image on to others.” How is Matthew’s Emmanuel “good news” for women in first-century Palestine, typically people of little power and low esteem? In answer to this question, Dorothy Jean Weaver focuses on a “lower-level” perspective that discloses Matthew’s narrative, largely patriarchal, world, and an “upper-level” perspective, where Matthew’s rhetoric “often subverts his own story.” The latter, which grants women an extraordinary and unanticipated presence at Jesus’ birth (Matt 1:1–2:23), during his ministry (Matt 3:1–25, 46; 27:55–56), and at his resurrection (Matt 26:1–28:20), is fundamental to a gospel that “concludes as surprisingly as it has begun. And women create the surprise.” As Weaver says in conclusion, “Let the reader understand.”

340 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

was professor of New Testament at the Graduate Seminary of Phillips University and Professor of Religion at TCU before joining the faculty at Brite. Boring has spent several semesters at Göttingen, Germany, and translated several books from German. His writings include commentaries on Revelation, Matthew, Mark, and First Peter. Boring’s most recent book, co-written with Fred Craddock, is The People’s New Testament Commmentary (Westminster John Knox, 2010).

Saint Matthew and the Angel, 1661. Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606–1669). Oil on canvas, 96 x 81 cm. Location: Louvre, Paris, France. Photo Credit: Herve Lewandowski / Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.

CONTRIBUTORS BENEDICT THOMAS VIVIANO, O.P., a Roman Catholic priest, recently retired as professor of New Testament at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Viviano (Ph.D., Duke University) has also taught at the Aquinas Institute of Theology in his native St. Louis and at the E%cole Biblique in Jerusalem. He has been visiting fellow at Emory and Oxford Universities. Viviano has written the commentary on Matthew in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary series. His most recent book is Matthew and His World: The Gospel of the Open Jewish Christians (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). He is interested in the relationship between Matthew and rabbinic Judaism, as well as the history of interpretation of Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God and its implications for social justice. Viviano continues to be active in the Society of New Testament Studies, in the ecumenical dialogue with the Reformed Churches and with the Jewish communities of Switzerland, and in preaching in both the United States and in Europe. M. EUGENE BORING (Ph.D., Vanderbilt) is Professor of New Testament (Emeritus) at Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University. An ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), he served congregations in Indiana and Tennessee. He

F. SCOTT SPENCER is Professor of New Testament and Preaching at the Baptist Theological Seminary of Richmond. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Durham (England). Spencer has published five books, most recently, The Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles in Abingdon’s Interpreting Biblical Texts series. He is currently writing a book on women and feminist criticism in Luke and a commentary on Luke in the Two Horizons series, both for Eerdmans. Spencer enjoys acting in seminary and community theater, including recent productions of Shadowlands and Godspell. He is an ordained Baptist minister and has served several churches as interim pastor. BARBARA E. REID is a Dominican Sister of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from The Catholic University of America. She is Vice-President and Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Reid’s most recent book is Taking Up the Cross: New Testament Interpretations Through Latina and Feminist Eyes (Fortress, 2007). She is General Editor for a new 60-volume feminist Bible commentary, the Wisdom Commentary Series (forthcoming from Liturgical Press). Currently, Reid writes the weekly column, “The Word,” on the Sunday readings for America magazine. DOROTHY JEAN WEAVER is Professor of New Testament at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. She holds a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary, Richmond. Her publications include Matthew’s Missionary Discourse: A Literary Critical Analysis (Sheffield Academic, 1990) and Bread for the Enemy: A Peace and Justice Lectionary (Mennonite Church Peace and Justice Committee, 2001). Weaver serves on the Steering Committee for the Matthew Section of the Society of Biblical Literature. She has taught New Testament courses in Beirut, Bethlehem, and Cairo. She also leads regular study tours to Israel/Palestine.

God in the Gospel According to Matthew BENEDICT THOMAS VIVIANO Professor Emeritus of New Testament University of Fribourg, Switzerland The God of biblical revelation is present everywhere in the Gospel according to Matthew, but often in a self-effacing way, receding behind Jesus, Emmanuel, God-with-us. God’s presence is veiled by divine passives, hidden behind the reverent circumlocution “heavens.” God’s supreme designation is Father. This gospel usually speaks on a horizontal plane of everyday life, where the Tran-

A

scendent awaits us at every turn as the horizon.

n inquiry into God in the Gospel according to Matthew presents students with a number of dilemmas. Should we begin with a word study of theos (God) in the concordance? No, that would not suffice. We would have to add the reverent circumlocutions for God that are frequent in Matthew and in the Judaism of his period (85–95 C.E.), especially in the Aramaic Targumim (paraphrases of the HB). The most common of these reverent circumlocutions is “the heavens” (ouranoi); the most important is “the Father” (pate3r) or a combination,“the heavenly Father,” “(our, my, your) Father in heaven.” God as Mother is also present. God also works indirectly through angels and dreams, especially in Matt 1–2. God in Matthew is often hidden behind the divine passives that are found throughout the gospel. In these cases, the evangelist (or Jesus) uses a verb in the passive voice, which if it were unscrambled or turned into an active voice would have God for the subject. For example, in the Beatitudes, Matt 5:3–12, when it says that they will be comforted/satisfied/shown mercy, it means that God will comfort/satisfy/pardon them.

These preliminary remarks already lead us to a dazzling insight presented by Ernst Lohmeyer.1 As in the HB, the generic name of God (and the gods) is El or Elohim, and the specific name of the God of Israel is YHWH; so, too, in the NT, the generic term for God is theos and the specific name is Father or Abba. (Since the seventh century, this way of thinking about and praying to God, so appealing to Jews and Christians, has become a source of abhorrence in Islam, for which God is above ordinary biological relationships.) Every step is mined here. The next preliminary remark leaps out at the reader from the first verse of Mark and of Matthew when they are compared. Mark begins with “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Matthew begins with “A book of the origins of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” This difference, between Son of God and son of David/Abraham, suggests that the

1 Ernest Lohmeyer, Our Father: An Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 44–45. Lohmeyer makes it clear that he was not the first to see this.

342 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

divinity is de-centered in Matthew. The focus is on the humanity of Christ. Not for nothing, then, is the traditional symbol of the evangelist Matthew a man, and for Mark, a lion. Matthew is the gospel of Jesus the Emmanuel—God-with-us, the presence of the Transcendent in our world in a human way, horizontally, we might say. This special emphasis in Matthew could help to explain why it has not been customary to write about God in Matthew.2 To write on this subject could almost be viewed as an irreverent, not to say blasphemous, inquiry, contrary to Matthew’s authorial intention or strategy, fleshing out what he prefers to conceal. Matthew is a Christian author, no one doubts, yet his discretion can be a help to Christians today who are attempting a new relationship with non-Christian religions, especially Judaism and Islam. Both were founded in their present form after the time of Jesus. (This is obvious for Islam; I believe that Aqiba gave a new edge to rabbinic Judaism.) These two have already integrated many prophetic and Christian criticisms of various paganisms; they have also, I would suggest, integrated many Christian values, explicitly or implicitly. One could argue that Matthew sees an inner logical connection between his reverent awe before the Holy One and the need for Jesus as Emmanuel, Godwith-us, near, approachable. To be sure, the Father of Jesus is everywhere present in the gospel, which is after all a religious book. Yet up till now, the focus in research has been on Christology, eschatology, ethics, or ecclesiology in Matthew. This gospel is not known for special redactional viewpoints about God. Herein lies the special challenge of the title of this essay. Does Matthew as theologian have anything particular to say about God?3 The answer to that question is “yes,” I hope to show, but first we should look at the facts. Statistics alone suggest the slightly de-centered place of theos in Matthew: 51 times, compared with Mark’s 48 times, Luke’s 122 times, John’s 83 times, Acts’ 166 times, and Paul’s 548 times, a NT total of 1314 times; 52 columns in the concordance to the Septuagint.4 It goes without saying that Matthew is the grateful, respectful heir of the rich, many-sided revelation of God in the Hebrew Scriptures5 as well as of the refinements added by the Septuagint. These refinements include, besides the partial purging of blunt anthropomorphisms (e.g.,“God is my rock”), the entire book of Wisdom. The Wisdom of Solomon, while remaining faithful to the basic Israelite conviction of the centrality of the exodus experience and to Israel’s hostility to idolatry, nevertheless integrates in a discreet fashion the Greek philosophical idea of knowledge of God by analogy (Wis 13:5) and some notions of Greek ethics (Wis 8:7). Matthew also knows the biblical

2 Three exceptions to this general statement may be mentioned. Jack D. Kingsbury, Matthew (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 58–77, has a chapter on Matthew’s understanding of God, but it is really about the Kingdoms of God and of Satan. Andries van Aarde, God-With-Us (Pretoria: Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 1994), uses a predominantly literary method; cf. JBL 115 (1996): 141–43); R. L. Mowery, “From Lord to Father in Matthew 1–7,” CBQ 59 (1997): 642–56. 3 An idea of earlier research on God in the NT may be gained from the entry on theos by Kleinknecht, Quell, Stauffer, and Kuhn in Kittel’s TDNT, 3:65–123; Karl Rahner, “Theos in the New Testament,” in his Theological Investigations (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), 1:79–148; and Jacques Schlosser, Le Dieu de Jesus (Paris: Cerf, 1987). 4 Robert Morgenthaler, Statistik des neutestamentlichen Wortschatzes (Zurich: Gotthelf, 1958), 105. 5 On God in the OT, see Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (2 vols.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:178–288; Edmond Jacob, Theology of the Old Testament (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 37–120; the classic essay “El and Yahweh,” by Otto Eissfeldt, JSS 1 (1956): 25–37; an update is available in J. M. Van Cangh, Les sources judaiques du Nouveau Testament (BETL 204; Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 295–48, 377–409; Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1995).

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 343

tradition that God dwells in thick darkness (1 Kgs 8:12; Pss 18:12; 97:2), that God’s face is not to be seen (Exod 33:20). Matthew is not much given to abstract speculation, but one suspects that his reserve concerning direct discourse about God is based on his awareness of the deep mystery of God and the corresponding importance of learning about God through Jesus, God’s mirror, the image of God’s goodness (Wis 7:26; Matt 11:27–30, Jesus as personified Wisdom). This reserve before the all-holy, only good (Matt 19:17), Transcendent One on Matthew’s part is worth a moment’s pause. Matthew lives in a religious world where one prays and fasts, goes to the temple and to the synagogue, and where miracles are performed. His is not a disenchanted world, to use the phrase coined by Schiller, made famous by Max Weber and Marcel Gauchet. We sense the divine presence; it is never far away, yet it is not directly visible or graspable, except through the tassels of Jesus’ robe (Matt 9:20). To take an example at random, let us look at Matt 9:37–38 (Q // Luke 10:2). Jesus looks directly at nature, the Galilean wheat fields, perhaps large estates (latifundia) worked by slaves.6 It is harvest time (there were two harvests each year). Jesus remarks to his disciples,“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” This saying in all likelihood goes back to Jesus himself. This way of referring to God is unprecedented: God as Lord of the harvest. But it is not original or unique. The image of the harvest is itself traditional among some prophets as a way of referring to the last days (e.g., Isa 17:5; Joel 3:13). A little after Matthew, Rabbi Tarfon (around 130 C.E.) said: “The day is short and the task is great and the laborers are idle and the wage is abundant and the master of the house (baal habayit) is urgent” (m. )Avot 2:15). Perhaps the rabbi allowed himself to be inspired by Matthew. In any case, Tarfon was said to be a wealthy landowner with many slaves.7 Among exegetes, there is a debate over whether the harvest refers to the eschatological judgment or to the early mission of the disciples. What concerns us here is the image of God contained in the phrase “Lord of the harvest.” The text sees God present in nature, in the rhythms of human life. But it also compares God to a land owner or foreman. The lord has workers under his direction, whether slaves or freeholders. The labor of harvesting in itself or as eschatological gathering would be hard work. But insofar as the labor involves mission, evangelism, or preaching, it could be a joy as well. In context and combined with the (royal) shepherd imagery of the preceding verse (9:36), the accent is rather on mercy and mission. God is also seen here as reflected in sociopolitical and economic relations. Yet God himself remains elusive behind the images. The discourse about God in this gospel is situated somewhere on the spectrum between what the Byzantines call apophatic theology and kataphatic language about God. That is, one can say we are not able to state positively who God is (e.g., just, good, merciful, almighty), because justice in God is more unlike than like our human notions of justice, and so with the other attributes. That is the apophatic or negative position. Or one can make positive statements about God, lists of attributes, known

6 W. E. Arnal, “Galilee,” NIDB 2:514–18; David A. Fiensy, Social History of Palestine in the Herodian Period (Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen, 1991); Sean Freyne, Galilee and Gospel (WUNT 125; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2000); SBL Seminar Papers 1988 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 160–99. There was a gradual urbanization of Galilee, including the arrival of Pharisees. 7 Cf. L. H. Silberman, “From Apocalyptic Proclamation to Moral Prescript,” JJS 40 (1989): 53–60.

344 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

by analogy (Wis 7:22–23; 13:5; Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, ch. 3). That is the kataphatic or affirmative position in theology. Matthew would probably lean toward the kataphatic position, but with great caution. The image of God as Lord of the harvest is concrete and real, yet not sentimental. The hard life of the Galilean peasants shimmers through the language, not to mention the horizon of judgment. Matthew, then, respects the divine mystery, yet does speak about God. His manner of speaking has provoked different reactions. Among the few who have written on God in Matthew, some come away with a negative view. A Nazi-era German finds that Matthew assimilates Jesus too much to his Palestinian Jewish context, flattening out the differences. For example, Matthew warns of a harsh judgment and encourages anxiety in view of it (Matt 7:2, 19, 22–23; 13:41–42).8 (In fact, Jesus himself was Jewish, an apocalyptic preacher and prophet of judgment, if Q is any guide. These things Matthew did not have to invent, though he may have insisted upon them.) A French Jesuit also finds Matthew’s God lacking in spiritual refinement.9 It would be better to stick with the God of Paul or John if one has a delicate stomach.

E M B R A C I N G M AT T H E W ’ S R E V E L AT I O N O F G O D To embrace Matthew’s way of revealing God, it helps to be open to the following set of values or spiritual orientations. 1. One has to be interested in a moral piety that takes human conduct and its consequences seriously. What counts in such a view is, on the basis of generally good health of mind and body, to want to do the will of God. Matthew is a gospel for “do-ers,” activists, people who are incensed about big problems in the world like genocide, ethnic cleansing, institutionalized racism, systemic rape practices, child abuse, sweatshop labor conditions, unemployment, war and peace, and clean water and air. Subjective states of feeling count for less in this range of concerns. Depression and torturing scrupulosity are not top priorities. (In this sense, Matthew is pre-Romantic.) Yet it is also true that the Sermon on the Mount is given to people enrolled in 12-step programs to help them overcome additions to alcohol and drugs. 2. The sympathetic reader of Matthew should be willing to accept a rather Jewish or JewishChristian soteriology, sometimes dismissed as works-righteousness. That is, God makes the sun to rise on the bad and the good (5:45). God is in ultimate control. There is a primacy of the divine initiative in the total process of our salvation.10 Yet, there is a large place for human responsibility. God judges us by our works of love (25:31–46). God is just, but also generous (20:1–16). God’s will is to save us (18:14), yet the possibility remains intact that some will refuse the offer by their harmful actions. 8 Walter Grundmann, “Die Arbeit des ersten Evangelisten am Bilde Jesu,” reprinted in Das Matthaeus-Evangelium (ed. Joachim Lange; Wege der Forschung 525; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchhandlung, 1980), 88–93. 9 Paul Lamarche, “Hypotheses a: propos des divergences theologiques dans le Nouveau Testament,” in Le Canon des E%critures (ed. Christof Theobald; LD 140; Paris: Cerf, 1990), 441–91, esp. 455–58 on God. 10 Krister Stendahl, “The Called and the Chosen: An Essay in Election,” in The Root of the Vine (ed. Anton Fridrichsen; New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), 63–80.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 345

3. A disciple of Jesus in Matthew’s spirit would be content with a sober, simple religion, without charismatic bursts of ecstasy or much metaphysical speculation (however, cf. 6:23–34); yet including gifts of prophecy, heroic virtue (e.g., the love of enemies 5:43–47), and the pursuit of perfection (5:48; 19:21; cf. Heb 6:1). 4. A Matthean Christian would be willing to deal with the sort of binary oppositions that males stereotypically enjoy, even while striving to overcome them. This point requires explanation. Boys often like to divide up into two teams and then proceed to fight or to play a game. Grown-up boys can then transform this drift into various forms of professional or business competition or to fullscale war. Against this model would be one of circular inclusion. Matthew has a tendency to moralize parables, dividing characters up into just and unjust, wise and foolish, honorable and shameful (e.g., 13:38, 49; 25:1–13). Yet Matthew also tries to go beyond this. He tries, for example, to hold the leaders of the community together with “the little ones” (ch. 18). He emphasizes acquiring divine reward and honor through virtue,“affiliative norms” like hospitality to the stranger, love, kindness, mercy, justice, and the “state of the heart,” rather than through daring agression and violence.11 5. A Matthean reader must be willing to engage the violent endings of 8 (!) of the parables found in Matthew’s Gospel and to “deal” with them, that is, wrestle some sense out of them, even if they contain some highly offensive elements, especially torture (13:40–43, 49–50; 18:23–35; 21:33– 46; 22:1–14; 24:45–51; 25:14–30; 25:31–46). Some solutions to the difficulties these endings raise include that Matthew writes for people with a low level of moral development. (This amounts to the view that his God is not spiritual enough, a view we have already encountered.) Another approach is to try to distinguish between the present time, during which believers should seek a nonviolent response to evil, and the end-time future when God will mete out a violent punishment for the persistently evil. Leave the punishing to God, so to speak. But is our loving God such a punisher? Is God held to a lower standard than we are? Here again, we run into mystery. What is good and true and just in these metaphoric parables is that God takes grave human evil very seriously. God does not remain indifferent. Unrepentent perpetrators of genocide and child abuse will be brought to account for their crimes. God will comfort suffering victims. Tensions remain between the ethical teaching (nonviolence as a present strategy) and violent imagery, but the ethical core of burning concern for righteousness remains constant throughout the gospel and is sound doctrine.12 6. This point leads us to the most difficult problem of all in current thinking: Matthew’s teaching on an eternal, fiery hell, where there will be “weeping and the gnashing of teeth.” This is a phrase Matthew likes to repeat (Matt 8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30; Luke 13:28=Q). Although the risk of hell is present throughout the NT, rabbinic Judaism (Gehenna), Islam, and some pagan visions of the future, there has been a withdrawal of conviction concerning this doctrine since the nineteenth

11 L. J. Lawrence, “Investigating Honor Precedence and Honor Virtue,” CBQ 64 (2002): 687–702, refining Jerome H. Neyrey, Honor and Shame in the Gospel of Matthew (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998). 12 Barbara E. Reid, “Violent Endings in Matthew’s Parables and Christian Nonviolence,” CBQ 66 (2004): 237–55.

346 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

century. This teaching, while immensely popular and lively in the imagination of many people, including artists, meets with reserve among modern students of theology, at least in Europe. These young people are no longer used to the finality of the death penalty. Crowds used to throng public executions. But these crowds have often given way now to protesting demonstrations, sometimes international protests. Mindful of this, modern theologians have parsed every element of the traditional doctrine, especially the terms “eternal” and “fiery.” If hell is not eternal, it becomes purgatory, a limited time of cleansing before entering into eternal bliss with God. “Fiery” now means painful loss of the divine presence. One can also embrace the annihilation of the condemned. Another approach is that one not deny the existence of hell, but that one not set limits to the hope of universal salvation. Thus, on the last day hell will be closed for lack of patronage. People will have chosen not to go. On Holy Saturday, Christ descended into hell and cleaned it out. This is Hans Urs von Balthasar’s revival of Origen’s apocatastasis, the restoration or restitution of all things (based on Acts 3:21; cf. Matt 17:11); Elijah will restore all things. Nevertheless, for those who share Matthew’s spirit, hell is a necessary and a pastorally useful concept, not a joke or a myth. It is a language designed to help us take our choices in life seriously, to take God’s hatred of injustice seriously. How God will apply this eschatological arsenal of concepts in the future can be safely left to God for the Matthean believer. Matthew is not for the faint of heart. Presently, however, the harsh, vengeful, ending of Ps 137 is often omitted from worship services (despite C. S. Lewis’ efforts to give it a positive meaning, viz., the expulsion of persistent venial sins). The same sometimes happens with Matt 25:41–46. One commentator describes Matt 25:31–46 as un-Christian, because it stresses our good works.13 This essay is not cluttered with the special language of modern literary criticism. Yet here, we could invoke the term “ideal reader” to name the sense of these six points, the kind of reader who would be sympathetic to Matthew’s redactional accents, while granting that they leave us with plenty of problems with which we must continue to wrestle. Before going on, let us try a little test from a comparative religious point of view. If we took a standard twentieth-century presentation of traditional Judaism by the late Arthur Hertzberg,14 and summarized its chapter on God, we would find that Matthew comes very close to its main lines, presented under four headings: 1) God is a given; there is no need to prove his existence. He is present in the world, and we can pray to him. We should feel at home with him. 2) God is one. 3) God is moral. God creates both good and evil (Isa 45:7), but desires the good. The evil is also under God’s control. God has a special love for the poor and the needy. God is all powerful, yet just, and can be appealed to, as Job and Abraham show. 4) Mortals must love and serve God and overcome their inclination to evil. Matthew’s Gospel agrees with all these points, but in its own way. 1) For Matthew, God is in-

13 “In this final judgment scene there is surprisingly little that is specifically Christian,” Francis W. Beare, The Gospel according to Matthew (San Francisco: Harper, 1981), 496–7. 14 Arthur Hertzberg, Judaism (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1991), 63–84.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 347

deed present, Emmanuel (Isa 7:14; 8:8–10), but especially so in Jesus, the Son of David (1:1, 23). More will be said on Emmanuel later. 2) In context, Matt 19:17—“There is only one who is good”— clearly refers to God the Father. 3) The morality of Matthew’s Gospel is especially present in the Sermon on the Mount (chs. 5–7). Therein, the Beatitudes reserve first place for the poor in spirit, often identified with the anawim of the Psalms. Jesus appeals to God in the garden of Gethsemane (26:36–46), on the cross (27:46), and bows before the divine will (26:39, 42). 4) Jesus teaches the commandment to love God (22:34–40), to which he joins the command to love our neighbor. Jesus himself knows temptation, the yetzer hara (Matt 4:1–11; 26:36–46), but emerges victorious from the trials in that he submits his will to God’s. Jesus also practicies devakut, cleaving to or union with God (11:25–27), but does so with a claim to a unique sonship or filial relationship that goes beyond normal Jewish expressions of piety. Another short test is to measure Matthew’s God against the rather full presentation of the God of the HB as found in Edmond Jacob’s Theology of the Old Testament.15 It is interesting to note that while most of the Hebrew elements in its picture of God are also present in Matthew, a few are left out. Present above all is the living God as the center of revelation and faith (as the background to the Christology), e.g., “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16). The holiness, righteousness, faithfulness (h9esed), or mercy of God (18:14), the love and, indirectly, the wrath of God, as well as God’s wisdom, are all present. Divine manifestations through angels and demons are also present. The significant omissions (what the French call les non-dits, the “notsaids”) are first of all the absence of any polemic against or even any neutral reference to the gods of the pagans, a theme that occupies a major part in the prophetic denunciations of idolatry. One could perhaps see a trace of paganism in the portrait of the emperor on the coin (Matt 22:15–22), since by Matthew’s time, the emperors were often deified. The text of Matthew presupposes that the emperor is not divine; rather, he is contrasted with the one true God of Israel. There is a reference to the limited ethical conduct of the pagans in 5:47. Their conduct is regarded as falling short of perfection but not as without any value. Another difference is that Matthew does not make mention of the divine names in Hebrew, except for the cry Eli, Eli. But God is lord (baal, adon), king (melek) and father ()ab) in Matthew. The rock (s[ur) image, however, is transferred to Peter (16:18; cf. 7:24, 25). Some of the outward manifestations of the divine, such as God’s face, glory, or name tend to be transferred to Jesus or are brought into association with him and the disciples, e.g., the bright cloud at the transfiguration (17:5; possibly the star in 2:2). In sum, the main themes of OT theology are present in Matthew, except for the polemic against idols, a problem that seems no longer urgent in this gospel. A note on method: I will be employing the redaction-critical method, treating Matthew as an

15

Jacob, Theology of the Old Testament, 37–120.

348 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

author, pastor, and theologian in the service of the Jesus traditions he inherited from Q, Mark, Paul, and oral traditions. My goal will be to discern what Matthew emphasizes, his special interests and contributions, his shaping of the received material, his use of the OT in both Hebrew and Greek as well as Aramaic. The name Matthew will refer here to the author of the Greek gospel and to the book itself, not to the apostle and tax collector. The subject of God in Matthew could easily be treated at book length.16 Pondering the concordance, we note that God is referred to 7 times in quotations from the First Testament. God as free-standing subject, in the nominative, is rather rare. Once, in a Q text (6:30), God “clothes.” God joins man and woman in matrimony (19:6, from Mark). God “speaks/ says” (15:4). More often, God is modified by a noun in the genetive, e.g., the God of Israel (15:31), the God of the three patriarchs (22:32, quoting Exod 3:6), the God of the dead or of the living (22:32), the Son, the Spirit; or God is modifying something: the kingdom, house, mouth, thoughts, temple, way, Scriptures and power (22:29), and angels (22:30). God can be the object of prepositions: for (para, 19:26), by the throne of God (en, 23:22), by (kata, 26:63), and trust in (epi, 27:43). Most dramatic is the vocative, Jesus’ cry of abandonment, “Eli, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (27:46), quoted from Ps 22. To summarize the results of Mowery’s research (note 2 above), he sees a progression in the first seven chapters of Matthew from Lord to God to Father. The patterns of usage established in these early chapters are then found throughout the rest of the gospel. While Lord and God are found in quotations or allusions and the usage is more generic or concerned with power, Father is more personal, found only on the lips of Jesus. Mowery is a careful scholar and there is no reason to disagree with his results, subtle though they be.

REDACTIONAL EMPHASES AND THEMES 1. The Kingdom of the Heavens. Among the reverent circumlocutions for God, one of the most frequent is in the phrase “the kingdom of the heavens,” where “heavens” means always and only God. But what is of importance to Matthew is not that God reigns in heaven. This Matthew never doubts. What he cares about (and this is true of every religious believer who prays to a personal God) is that God be strong to save and protect us. It is God as helper, as savior, that concerns the evangelist. Paraphrasing Melanchthon, he could say: to know God is to know his benefits. And the kingdom of God is God’s greatest benefit to humanity. It brings justice, peace, and joy (Matt 6:33; Rom 14:17; Matt 2:10; 13:20, 44; 25:21, 23).17 In this phrase, God’s existence, saving presence, and benefits are all held together. The phrase unifies the gospel as a literary whole and as a book of the-

16 Andries van Aarde, God-With-Us: the Dominant Perspective in Matthew’s Story and Other Essays (Pretoria: Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 1994) is the only book-length study of God in Matthew of which I know. See the review in JBL 115 (1996): 141–43. 17 Benedict T. Viviano, The Kingdom of God in History (Wilmington, Del.; Glazier, 1988).

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 349

ological faith. The phrase Kingdom of Heavens/God must be held together with the Son of man as king to whom it is transferred (Dan 7:13–14; Matt 16:27–28; 28:18). 2. Divine Passives. Without claiming to be exhaustive, let us now run through the whole gospel to see how this usage, another example of reverent circumlocutions, both conceals and makes present the divine. The first case (1:22) refers to the Lord speaking through the prophet, literally “to fulfill what had been spoken (to rhethen) by the Lord through the prophet.” Here, the subject hidden in the passive is made explicit by the phrase hypo theou,“by the Lord.” So God is present in the biblical word. In the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, the rewards are four times given by God in the passive (5:4, 6, 7, 9), as we have already noted. In the six “hypertheses,” the Hebrew Scriptures are cited thus: “You have heard that it was said” (5:21, 27, 31, 33, 38, 43); that is, God said it. In 7:1–2, it is God who judges and measures; in 7:7–8, it is God who gives to the asker, who opens the door to the knocker. In 7:19, God or his angel will cut down the tree and throw it into the fire. In ch. 9, one could argue that it is God who forgives sin in vv. 2–3, but in v. 6, it is the Son of Man who does it; in v. 8, men do it. Yet the crowds glorify God, not his angels. The picture is blurred, or the action slippery. In 9:15, God will take away the bridegroom (Jesus). In ch. 10, God is implicity behind the punishments of Sodom, Gomorrah, and unreceptive towns. God will tell the persecuted what to say to the judges, through his Spirit (vv. 19–20). In 10:26, God will uncover and make the secrets known. In 11:22–24, God is implicitly the judge who brings to Hades. In 12:37, God will justify or condemn men for their words. In 13:11–12, it is God who gives and takes away. In 16:19, God will bind and loose as Peter decides. In the passion predictions, it is God who will raise Jesus from the dead (16:21; 17:9, 23; 20:19; 28:67). In 17:22, who betrays Jesus? Is it God or Judas or God through Judas? In any case, it is God who raises Jesus up (v. 23). In 18:18, God endorses the decisions of the disciples, as he had those of Peter in 16:18. In 18:20, is it God who gathers the two or three, or is it the leaders, or is it both? In 21:43,God who will take away the kingdom of God from a sinful people and give it to a virtuous people. In 25:34, God has prepared the kingdom from the foundation of the world, and the eternal fire for the devil and his angels. Finally, it is God the Father who has given all authority on heaven and earth to the crucified and risen Christ. In brief, although there are a few uncertain cases (e.g., concerning Judas), there are divine passives throughout the gospel. Sensitivity to them discloses more of the divine dimension. 3. Emmanuel. In this redactional emphasis, unique to his gospel within the NT, Matthew is building on a section of proto-Isaiah where God through the prophet is insisting on the centrality of Jerusalem under an anointed ruler. God will be present as savior (Isa 7:14; 8:8–10). Matthew makes the connection with Jesus through the virginal conception in LXX Isa 7:14, applied to Mary the mother of Jesus. The name Emmanuel, meaning God with us, is carefully placed by Matthew

350 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

(1:23) as a climax, crescendo, and high point of the gospel’s opening. It occurs in the very first of Matthew’s 11 formula citations, which provide the evangelist’s commentary or reflection on the deeper meaning of the events recorded. The first use of the term theos (God) occurs in this quotation. Matthew 1:23 provides the first of the brackets that frame the entire gospel. The closing bracket occurs in the last verse (28:20): “I (Jesus) am with you always.” However, it occurs also in the middle of the gospel (18:20), where Jesus identifies himself as the divine name, presence, and law. In a sense, this Emmanuel theme contains the whole gospel in a nutshell: God is present and strong to save, in Jesus, in the Kingdom.18 The reader will have a hard time getting excited about the short phrase “with us” (or “with you”) until he or she realizes that this is a condensed reference to the formulary of the covenant that runs through the whole Bible like a red thread. In its fuller form, it runs: “I will be your God and you will be my people.”19 It expresses the marriage or mutual commitment between God and the chosen people. Matthew’s entire gospel has been read in part as a Christian reception of the Deuteronomistic-Chronistic covenant theology.20 Matthew is expressing something fundamental here. Yet he presents the divine Transcendent One with care, reverence, indirection, through mediations. In Roman terms, we could say: numen adest, the uncanny, the divine, mysterious, awesome, and fascinating, is present here. Or, with Virgil, vera incessu patuit dea, the indubitable goddess was revealed in her step (Aeneid 1.4050). Yet the mystery remains intact. Compare Ps 77:19, “Your way was through the sea . . . , yet your footprints were unseen,” with Matt 14:25, Jesus walking on the water. It is hard to speak about the great things without overanalyzing them. Matthew goes about his high task gingerly. God for him is present, yet elusive, hidden and ungraspable, except in “his” ways of manifesting Godself. This paradox is basic to biblical religion.21 4. God as Father. Although this is a way of referring to God that should be simple and easy, smooth, and spiritual to analyze historically, in recent decades the discussion of the use of the titles Father and Abba for God has become a place of turbulence and discord. For older students, wedded to the Jeremias construction,22 it has been a painful process of separation from some of the details of this construction, made reluctantly, under pressure from accusations of Nazi political ideology, patriarchy, ignoring the newest data from Qumran, ignoring old data from Hellenistic Judaism, and ignoring the Roman imperial context.23 Clearly, we have some revision work to do. However, it is not necessary to revisit the entire debate concerning the Aramaic address abba, since that term does not occur in Matthew. If we stick to the uses of pate3r, father, in Matthew, we should emerge with some calm results.

18

David D. Kupp, Matthew’s Emmanuel (SNTS MS 90; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). The covenant is a large theme in the Bible. For a start, see Klaus Baltzer, The Covenant Formulary (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971). 20 Hubert Frankemoelle, Jahwe-Bund und Kirche Christi (Muenster: Aschendorff, 1984). 21 Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), is a biblical theology that emphasizes both the transcendence and the hiddenness of God (Isa 45:15). 22 Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (SBT 2.6; Naperville IL: Allenson, 1967), 11–65; Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus (New York: Seabury, 1974), 256–61; Benedict T. Viviano, “Hillel and Jesus on Prayer,” in his Trinity-KingdomChurch (NTOA 48; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 88–113, specifically 107–10). 23 M. R. D’Angelo, “Theology in Mark and Q: Abba and ‘Father’ in Context,” HTR 85 (1992): 149–74; idem, “Abba and ‘Father’: Imperial Theology and the Jesus Traditions,” JBL 111 (1992): 611–30. These articles enable one to follow the debate. On comparisons in ancient religions, cf. also Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990). 19

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 351

In the HB, God is referred to some 15 times as a father, sometimes in moving appeals for help in the midst of historical crisis, a cry from a prophet and people who believe that they are bound to YHWH by a covenant of God’s choice and election, e.g., Isa 63:16,“For you are our Father ()a4bînû), though Abraham does not know us and Israel does not acknowledge us; you, O Lord, are our father ()a4bînû); our Redeemer (go4a]le3nu]) from of old is your name.” The prayer goes on into the next chapter. Its religious pathos is powerful. Jesus and the early church are heirs to this prophetic prayer. The Aramaic abba for “father” occurs only 3 times in the NT: Mark 14:36 (Gethsemane); Gal 4:6; and Rom 8:15. The usage may well go back to the practice of Jesus himself. The Four Gospels show 170 cases of “father” as a title for God in the sayings of Jesus. Of these, 109 are found in John. There is a clear tendency to increase the number of such cases in the later gospels. In Matthew, I count about 40 occurences. There are only 4 in Mark, 9 in Q. This tendency presumably builds on something that the earliest strata show to be characteristic of Jesus’ religious language, but that the later evangelists liked and multiplied. Going through all the cases in Matthew would take too long. I will make some general remarks and then look at a few key passages and clusters. First, I note that the title does not occur until 5:16. That means that it is not present in the infancy gospel. (There the fight is between two rival claimants to the throne of David, Herod and Jesus.) But that also means that the title is not used in the stories of the baptism, the temptation, and (we may add here) the transfiguration. In these instances, each highly significant, it is rather a case of Jesus being acknowledged as God’s son. In the Sermon on the Mount, then, we begin with: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (5:16). Here, we see Matthew’s characteristic emphasis on good works, balanced by a concern that these works not lead to arrogance, but rather to the glory of God. The goal is to become children of the Father in heaven (5:45), to be perfect as he is (5:48), imitatio dei as in the OT (Lev 19:2). This leads into the great prayer, 6:9–13, one of the hallmarks of Christians everywhere, but worded in such a way that a Jew or other theist could recite it, except, alas, for the Muslim. Islam rejects the idea of God as Father because it too easily leads to a biological-genetic understanding. The Christology is veiled behind the petition for the kingdom to come, because the kingdom is given to the Son of Man according to Dan 7:13–14, who is in turn identified with the second coming of Christ in Christian faith. There is one comparative point that needs to be made. If readers look at the parallel to the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:2–4, they will notice that it begins abruptly with “Father.” The “our . . . who art in heaven” is left out; it is not there. The normal view, which I fully share, is that this is the earlier, original way the prayer began, perhaps taught by Jesus himself. Why was it changed? The normal view, as I would again put it, is that the unadorned “Father” seemed too abrupt, too direct, “too

352 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

naked.” It needed to be dressed up, vested for liturgy if you will. So Matthew or the tradition he inherited “clothed” the invocation for community worship with “our . . . who art in heaven.” The “our” represents the community. The “in heaven” is, as we have said, a reverent circumlocution for God. It is not meant to limit God to heaven. The rest of the prayer (v. 10) makes it clear that it desires God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. The addition serves to heighten the religious, transcendent, reference of the prayer. Theologically, by far the most dense and important passage concerning our subject is in Matt 11:25–27, the cry of jubilee. In these three verses, the term Father is mentioned five times. It is a Q passage (// Luke 10:21–22) and, despite contrary voices, most likely goes back to Jesus himself. Here, Jesus first solemnly addresses God as both Father and Lord of the universe; he praises and thanks God for the gift of revelation. There are two fundamental keys to v. 25 from the HB. The point of origin of the OT theology of mystery is found in Deut 29:29: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things to us and to our children. . . .” This verse provides the basic contrast between the hidden (hannista4ro4t) and the revealed (hanniglo4t). But Jesus makes a surprising move against the tradition. In Dan 2:20–23, there is an admirable prayer thanking God for giving “wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the understanding” (v. 21). This is in sharp contrast with Jesus’ praise of his Father for hiding things from the wise and intelligent and revealing them to babes, to the simple. Here emerges a trace of Jesus’ revolutionary fire as savior of the little ones, the anawim, the uneducated. This verse also contrasts with the normal pattern in Matthew, where understanding (syniesis) is a hallmark of the good disciple (e.g., Matt 13:51–52). All this is as nothing in comparison with the powerful content of v. 27. The mysterious “all things” that have been handed over to Jesus are the kingdom of God (Dan 7:13–14). The donor is God the Father, no longer called the Ancient of Days. Then the language of immanence comes. It speaks of the deep mutual knowing of the absolute Father and the absolute Son (cf. Mark 13:32). This language implies a filial consciousness on the part of Jesus, without prejudging a messianic consciousness. This phrase is the germ of all future Christology, from John to Nicea and beyond. The Son in turn reveals the Father to whom he will. Matthew’s redactional response to this crucial revelation is contained in the Great Invitation to come and take upon oneself Jesus’ yoke, in order to find the rest that the heavenly Father will give. The last “Father” texts we will examine come in the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus wrestles with God (and with himself) about his destiny to suffer and to die the most painful and shameful death on the cross (26:36–46). This is a preeminent text concerning an insistent (threefold) prayer in a matter of life and death. In the Markan parallel, the links with the Lord’s Prayer are more pronounced and the Aramaic original abba is retained. Matthew repeats the invocation,

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 353

Father, twice. From this passage, we could reasonably conclude that the address to God as Father is most appropriate in moments of worship, prayer, crisis, and extreme need. Although most appropriate on the lips of Jesus as the Son par excellence, the text invites the disciples to watch and pray thus, with the Master. 5. Theodicy. This section begins with a long quotation from Hans Dieter Betz. God is the creator and Father of the universe who rules it with justice and beneficence (Matt 5:45; 6:25–34; 7:11). The evil that exists in the world has come about through human disobedience toward God and his rule (see 5:11, 37, 39, 45; 6:13, 23, 34; 7:11, 17, 23). God has given humanity the choice through the law (5:17–18; 7:12). Obedience to the law is required to maintain righteousness (5: 6, 10, 20, 45; 6:1, 33); disobedience leads to unrighteousness (5:45; 7:23), “bad fruit” (7:15–20) and eschatological punishment. Everyone must give an account at the last judgment. Those who have obtained rewards in heaven (5:12, 46; 6:11, 2, 5, 16) will have Jesus as their advocate (7:21–23) and will enter into the divine kingdom (5:3–12, 19–20); the others will be rejected and go to hell (5:22, 29, 30; 7:23). On earth, under the conditions prevailing, no human being, not even the faithful disciples, can escape getting involved with evil. Human evil has its roots in the heart (5:8, 28; 6:21); it manifests itself in evil language (5:37), failure of vision (6:22–23), and the whole range of evil acts, of which life is full. What is it that motivates humans to commit evil? It is basically the failure to respond to God’s beneficence adequately and to serve him as one ought to (6:24). Why such failure occurs is not explained, but “foolishness” in its widest sense is named throughout (esp. 7:24–27; cf. 5:13, 22) as the reason for not obeying God and his will. There is also a remedy for those who need it; God forgives the faults of those who ask him (6:12, 14, 15; 7:11); those who receive no forgiveness (6:15) end up in condemnation (7:23). . . . The SM as a whole serves as the guide on the way through the dangers of this life into life eternal (6:33; 7:13–14, 21–23, 24–26). Most astute is the awareness of the theodicy problem in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:12– 13). . . . In the last two petitions, evil is understood as unfulfilled obligations on the part of humans; they can be taken care of by forgiveness (6:12). The persistence of evil, however, condoned by God, creates a constant temptation. The final petition, therefore (6:13), comes close to questioning God’s justice. It is assumed that by letting evil continue to exist, God would lead people into temptation. Instead, he is asked not to let this happen but to rescue humanity from evil. . . . [R]ighteousness is, after all, a balance of relationships between God and humanity, a divinely instituted partnership.24

Matthew is the only synoptic evangelist to use the word justice (dikaiosyne3), and he does so 7 times (3:15; 5:6, 10, 20; 6:1, 33; 21:32). It is one of the major themes of his gospel, coming just after

24 Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 313–15, with a good bibliography. Note further the Jewish Christian reflections in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, ch. 19.

354 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

Jesus himself and the kingdom of God. Moreover, there is for Matthew a strong connection between eschatology and ethics. But mercy (eleos) is also a value in the gospel (e.g., Matt 5:7; 9:13; 18:33), linked with forgiveness (aphiesis) (e.g., 6:12, 14, 15; 18:21–35). The question may be asked: “Which attribute of God will predominate in the final judgment?”25 Sometimes the gospel suggests that few will be saved; think of the narrow and wide gates (7:13–14; 21–23). Sometimes the reader gets the impression that it is a matter of an even balance, e.g., 50%-50%, in the three parables of judgment in Matt 25 (five wise, five foolish virgins). Yet, the statement in 18:14 and the parable in 20:1–16, especially the emphasis on generosity, leads to the conclusion that a) God in Matthew inclines to mercy, b) that God is not unjust, but that c) his justice includes his mercy in his generosity.26 6. The Triad. Earlier, I asked the question of whether Matthew had anything distinctive to say about God. In addition to what I have already mentioned, especially Matthew’s way of handling the Emmanuel theme, there is also the triadic baptismal formula in the second to the last verse: “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” This formula is called triadic, because it does not yet express a full-blown Trinitarian theology. Elsewhere in the NT, one is baptized into the name of Jesus. Matthew has contributed this distinctive formula. How did he arrive at it? In brief, the early Christians after Easter needed a rite of initiation that would be the same for men and women (unlike circumcision). The rite of baptism practiced by John the Baptist lay ready to hand. Matthew most probably shaped this formula on the basis of pre-existing apocalyptic patterns such as that in Dan 7, where you have the Ancient of Days (which Matthew christianized as the Father), the Son of man, and the Saints of the Most High, which Matthew condensed into the Holy Spirit. (The Spirit of God is present in the Bible from the first page of Genesis till the last chapter of Revelation.) In Ezek 1 and 1 En. 14, we find the Elect One and the Angel instead of Son and Spirit.27

CONCLUSION In conclusion, we can see that Matthew does have certain distinctive accents in his theology, even though he remains as faithful as he can to the traditions arising out of the Bible and early Judaism, and to Jesus son of David, son of Abraham, whom Matthew wants to be his only teacher (Matt 23:8–10). In reality, Matthew also depends heavily on Q, Mark, and oral tradition to mediate Jesus to him. But the evangelist shaped the traditions he received to emphasize Emmanuel, God as Father, who is both just and merciful, who takes ethics seriously, and who is everywhere present in an elusive and discreet manner, who reveals himself most wonderfully in Jesus Christ.

25 Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages, their Concepts and Beliefs (trans. Israel Abrahams; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975), 448–61, gives an excellent summary of rabbinic-talmudic debates on this classic matter. Even though the texts discussed are for the most part later than Matthew, they share a similar outlook in many ways and help us to appreciate the inner dynamic of the gospel on this point. 26 Daniel Marguerat, Le Jugement dans l’E%vangile de Matthieu (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1981). 27 Jane Schaberg, The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (SBLDS 61; Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1982); Simon Legasse, Naissance du Bapteme (LD 153; Paris: Cerf, 1993).

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 355

New from Baker Academic Constructing Jesus

Creation Untamed

MEMORY, IMAGINATION, AND HISTORY

THE BIBLE, GOD, AND NATURAL DISASTERS

Dale C. Allison Jr. 9780801035852 608 pp. • $54.99c

Terence E. Fretheim 9780801038938 176 pp. • $19.99p

Available November 2011 “Displaying jaw-dropping acquaintance with primary evidence and the oceanic body of scholarship on Jesus, a sweet reasonableness toward the complexities involved, and just plain good judgment time after time on controverted issues, Constructing Jesus is essential reading for anyone concerned with the scholarly approach to the Jesus of history.”—L. W. Hurtado, University of Edinburgh

Healing in the Bible

“Who better than Fretheim to take up the hard contemporary question concerning the destructive forces on exhibit in creation! The author has spent his life thinking about these issues and reading these old texts forward toward our time and place. He begins with the conviction of the goodness of God’s creation, and from there he launches into the dangers of reality and takes us with him.”—Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary

Paul and Scripture

THEOLOGICAL INSIGHT FOR CHRISTIAN MINISTRY

STUDYING THE NEW TESTAMENT USE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Frederick J. Gaiser 9780801031014 288 pp. • $24.99p

Steve Moyise 9780801039249 160 pp. • $21.99p

“In this book, Gaiser, a first-rate scholar with a pastoral heart, offers no simplistic answers to complex questions about healing, but he will make you think. His comments are sane, balanced, and scriptural to the core and remind the church of its necessary healing ministry.” —Klyne Snodgrass, North Park Theological Seminary

u

“Moyise, one of the leading international scholars on the subject of the New Testament’s use of the T t t asks k hhow eachh of the main features Old Testament, of Paul’s teaching grows out of and interacts with the Hebrew Scriptures. Moyise illuminates well how Scripture functioned for the first great Christian theologian without ignoring the various questions that such treatment still raises both for students of Paul and for those who ask how Scripture should function today.”—James D. G. Dunn, Durham University

Available at local bookstores, www.bakeracademic.com, or by calling 1-800-877-2665. Subscribe to Baker Academic’s electronic newsletter (E-Notes) at www.bakeracademic.com.

Matthew’s Narrative Christology: Three Stories M. EUGENE BORING Professor Emeritus of New Testament Brite Divinity School

Matthew’s Christology is theocentric, presenting God’s rule as manifest in the life of Jesus as an alternative to the sovereignty and power of this-worldly rulers. This Christology is expressed in the narrative mode. It can be appreciated and appropriated better in the context of the narratives in which contemporary interpreters are embedded.

M

atthew writes from the conviction shared by the Christian community then and now that the definitive event in human history is this: God has sent the promised Messiah. Matthew does not compose a “Christology” in the sense of a subheading of systematic theology, a topical discussion of the person and work of Jesus that may be placed alongside his “Ecclesiology,”“Eschatology,”“Ethics,” and such, as though they were separate-butrelated chapters in a book. He composes a single narrative that weaves all these together. Matthew’s Christology cannot be summarized. It is available only to those hearers/readers who are willing to enter into the story world he has created, and engage the Jesus who is encountered there as Emmanuel, God-with-us. While Matthew’s Christology cannot be explicated as a list of titles or points, it is possible to reflect on how the narrative is read as a way of enhancing our understanding and appreciation of his Christology. Our own reading of the Gospel of Matthew is itself inextricably involved in three interwoven narratives. Our efforts toward a better grasp of Matthew’s Christology will be facilitated by getting these three narratives more clearly in mind: The Story about the Gospel of Matthew—how Matthean interpreters have gone about understanding his Christology • The Story of the Gospel of Matthew—how Matthew came to think and speak of Jesus in this way • The Story in the Gospel of Matthew—the narrative Matthew composed •

Of these, Matthew’s own narrative Christology is by far the most important, but since our understanding is intertwined with the other two, it is better to begin with them.

OCTOBER 2010

Interpretation 357

THE STORY ABOUT THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW—HOW MATTHEAN INTERPRETERS HAVE GONE ABOUT UNDERSTANDING HIS CHRISTOLOGY Just as Matthew found his Christian faith expressed throughout his Bible, so Christian theologians prior to the eighteenth century mostly read their Bible, OT and NT, as a homogeneous book of Christian faith. Dogmatic and historical theology were not separated, and the Bible was mined for texts that supported the later teaching of the church. The idea that there was a “Matthean Christology” distinct from that of the other NT writers or from that of later Christian theologians did not occur to churchly interpreters whose Bible spoke directly to the existential realities of their own time. The rise of historicism in the eighteenth century was signaled by Johann Philip Gabler’s 1787 “Discourse on the Proper Distinction Between Dogmatic and Biblical Theology and the Correct Delimitation of their Boundaries.” Biblical theology began to be defined as a purely historical discipline, whose task it was to explicate what the ancient biblical authors thought, in their own terms, without later dogmatic constraints. Biblical theology aspired to be a purely descriptive there-and-then academic discipline, leaving the task of here-and-now normative meaning, if any, to systematic theologians. In theological seminaries, biblical scholarship became a separate field from systematic theology. Bible scholars did not claim to be theologians; theologians deferred to Bible scholars on exegetical matters. Turf was respected. This approach was classically expressed in Krister Stendahl’s 1962 article, “Biblical Theology, History of” and institutionalized in the firm line literally drawn between “exegesis” (what it meant) and “exposition” (what it means) of the Interpreter’s Bible, the dominant commentary for a generation among mainline churches.1 This approach was liberating. It allowed interpreters to explore the Bible without the constraints of church theology or personal faith, which could be bracketed for the purposes of study, whether or not the interpreter was a Christian believer concerned to interpret the Bible as normative Scripture for the life of the church. The “So what?” could be bracketed in the interest of “What?” It seemed valid that the historical question of how to describe Matthew’s Christology was a separable and prior question to what, if anything, this might mean today. This allowed scholars to pursue, for example Matthew’s Christology in comparison and contrast to that not only of Nicean, Chalcedonian, and later affirmations, but to distinguish the profile of Matthew’s Christology from that of Hebrews, Mark, or 1 Clement. One of the major achievements of this approach was the investigation of the titles attributed to Jesus by each of the NT authors, and their meaning(s) in their historical context.2 Matthew uses the following titles, listed in descending order of frequency in their reference to Jesus: 1. Lord (34x). The common Greek term kyrios, used in the LXX for God, is also the conventional polite term of respectful address, comparable to its English derivative “Sir”. The Jews so

1 Krister Stendahl, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary,” IDB 1:418–32; George Arthur Buttrick, ed., The Interpreter’s Bible (12 vols.; Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1951–1957). 2 Classic works of this period include Ferdinand Hahn, The Titles of Jesus in Christology: Their History in Early Christianity (trans. Harold Knight and George Ogg; New York: World, 1969); Reginald H. Fuller, The Foundations of New Testament Christology (New York: Scribner, 1965); and the recently reprinted Sigmund Mowinckel, He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism (trans. G. W. Anderson; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

358 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

address Pilate (27:63), and human masters are called “lord” without any connotation of divine status. Matthew uses it a total of 80 times, 34 times with reference to Jesus. 2. Son of Man (30x). The expression ho huios tou anthro4pou sounds as strange in Greek as “the Son of Man” sounds in English, since it is not a native Greek term but is the literal translation of the common ben adam or Aramaic bar enosh, both of which mean simply “human being.” Ezekiel uses the phrase 93 times to designate the prophet as a mere human being (NRSV “mortal”) in contrast to God. Under the influence of Dan 7, the figure of the Son of Man was understood in some circles of first-century Judaism to be the apocalyptic deliverer from the heavenly world who will come as judge at the end of time. In Matthew as in the other Gospels, the articular singular is used only with reference to Jesus, and exclusively in the sayings of Jesus, as his self-designation. 3. Christ (17x) The Hebrew term Messiah (ma3s\îah9) is translated into Greek as christos; both words mean “anointed,” reflecting the ancient Israelite ritual of pouring oil on the head of one being inaugurated into office. Prophets were anointed (cf. 1 Kgs 19:16; Isa 61:1), as were priests (Exod 28:41; Ps 133:2), but it was especially kings who were referred to as “the Lord’s anointed” (1 Sam 16:1–13; Ps 89:19–20). 4. Son of David (10x). Like “Christ” and “king,” this phrase denotes the Davidic eschatological ruler God will raise up in the last times. All 10 occurrences are used with reference to Jesus. 5. Son of God or “my (=God’s) Son” (9x). Like Son of Man, this phrase is used only of Jesus. It has a variety of meanings in the Jewish Scriptures: the people Israel (Exod 4:22; Hos 11:1); righteous Israelites (Wis 2:12–20); divine beings in the heavenly court (Gen 6:1–4; Deut 32:8; Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7); the Israelite or Jewish king (2 Sam 7:14; Ps 2:7). In the Greco-Roman world, divine and semi-divine beings, including the emperor, were called “sons of God.” 6. Teacher (10x)/Rabbi (4x). These words are used as synonyms in Matt 23:8. 7. King (6x). Not counting the allusive use to Jerusalem as the “city of the great King” (5:35) and the metaphorical use in parables that point to God or Jesus, the word is used only for Herod and other earthly kings, and for Jesus, who is referred to 6 times as king of the Jews or king of Israel. 8. Prophet (4x). Matthew uses this term 40 times, mostly referring to the biblical prophets (29x). John the Baptist is called a prophet 4 times, including once approvingly by Jesus (11:9). Matthew refers to Christian prophets 5 times, plus two other references to (false) prophets of the end times that may also include Christians (24:11, 24). Crowds and the general population designate Jesus as “a prophet” 3 times, and he once refers to himself with a proverb about prophets (13:57).

.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 359

9. The One Who Is to Come (3x). Although “the one who is coming” (ho erchomenos) does not seem to have been a traditional designation for the Messiah in Judaism, Matthew adopted and developed the christological use of the phrase from his tradition, reserving the articular use exclusively for Jesus (11:3; 21:9; 23:39). An additional 3 times he associates it closely with the Son of Man (16:28; 24:30; 26:64). 10. Son (2x). The common word huios is used 89 times by Matthew in a variety of ways, but only twice does he use the term christologically in an absolute sense, referring to Jesus as “the Son” (11:27; 28:19). This cataloguing of titles facilitates some interesting observations. Matthew’s Christology utilizes a plurality of titles, and does not seem to bind christological significance to any one title. Some titles important elsewhere in early Christianity are missing (e.g., Logos [Word], Theos [God], and Priest). There is an obvious focus on royal titles: Christ, king, and son of David are clearly in this category, and both Son of God and Son of Man have royal overtones elaborated in Matthew’s narrative. There are also problems with the titular approach as such. A catalogue of titles fails to reveal aspects of Matthew’s Christology clearly of major importance to him. The Gospel presents Jesus in numerous roles, functions, and paradigms not bound to any particular title, but indispensible to Matthew’s understanding of Jesus’ identity: new Moses, suffering servant, divine wisdom, healer, definitive interpreter of Scripture, miracle worker, and the one who saves his people from their sins. One key example is Emmanuel, the Christ who represents and mediates the continuing presence of God with the church through history, and is himself its builder and sustainer (cf. 10:40; 16:18; 17:17; 18:20; 26:29; and the climactic 28:20). These roles remain “in solution” in the Matthean narrative and are not precipitated out as titles. The titular approach tends to isolate “Christology” as a discrete topic that can be discussed by itself. But not only can Matthew’s Christology not be grasped in isolation, neither can other Matthean concerns such as ethics be separated from his Christology. One cannot claim, for instance, to be interested in Matthew’s ethic as focused in the Sermon on the Mount, but uninterested in such “speculative” issues as Christology, for in the Gospel of Matthew, these are inseparably fused. This approach tended to regard the designations of Jesus as static titles with a more-or-less fixed content determined by their pre-Christian historical setting, which were then “applied” to Jesus, rather than seeing them as dynamic elements in the development of early Christian theologies and the formation of the particular documents in which they occurred.

360 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

Recent NT scholarship has thus recognized that the titular approach to Christology, taken by itself, is inadequate.3 Before considering that important step in exploring Matthew’s own narrative, however, there is another narrative that must be investigated: the story of Matthew’s Gospel itself.

THE STORY OF THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW—HOW MATTHEW CAME TO THINK AND SPEAK OF JESUS IN THIS WAY 4 All contemporary Christology is reinterpretation of Christian tradition. No one today can simply look at Jesus and reflect on the presence (or absence) of God’s act in and through him and what this might mean. This was also the case for the author of the Gospel of Matthew, even if, contrary to the view presupposed here, the gospel was written by an eyewitness of some of the scenes in Jesus’ ministry. A thumbnail sketch of the story of the formation of the Gospel of Matthew presents the following four stages: 1. Christological transformation. Two generations before Matthew wrote, and some time before he himself became a Christian, the fundamental christological transformation occurred, a few days after the crucifixion of Jesus. Stories, impressions, and sayings from and about Jesus of Nazareth were transformed in the light of God’s raising him from the dead. While Matthew tells the story of Jesus forward, from birth to resurrection appearances, he sees and writes only in retrospect, beginning from the conviction that God did not let the crucifixion be the end of the story of Jesus. He did not believe that one could have come to a legitimate understanding of Jesus as the Messiah by following him around throughout his life and drawing inferences from the things he said and did. He did not believe anyone could have looked at the “historical Jesus” and seen a “manifestation of God.” For the earliest church and still for Matthew, the resurrection was the sole and indispensable christological sign (12:39–40; 16:4). Jesus’ true identity is an insight that comes only by revelation (16:16–17). Though plotted within a pre-Easter narrative framework, this disclosure constantly presupposes Easter as the decisive revelation.5 This was the first transformation in understanding Jesus, and the emergence of Christology.6 2. Reinterpretation. When Matthew and his community received the traditions expressing this faith, they had already undergone various degrees of reinterpretation. The christological interpretations inherited by Matthew first become visible to us in the reconstructions of Q. The prophetic missionary teachers who composed Q were active in the formation of new Christian communities in Syria. In Matthew’s church, in or near the Syrian capital Antioch, Q played a role in shaping and expressing their faith, including their Christology. Q was not a narrative of the life, death, and res-

3 Leander Keck, “Toward the Renewal of New Testament Christology,” NTS 32 (1986): 362–77, was a key factor in this development. There has been something of an overreaction, however, that has sometimes neglected the values of the titular approach. The turn toward a narrative approach is documented in Jack Dean Kingsbury, Matthew: Structure, Christology, Kingdom ( Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975) and idem, Matthew as Story (2d rev. ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988). 4 Here, I sketch what seems to me to be the most plausible outline of the development of the Gospel of Matthew as it bears on his Christology. For further documentation of the perspective presented here, see the introduction in M. Eugene Boring, “Matthew: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible (ed. Leander Keck; 12 vols.; Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 8:89–119. Further supporting evidence and arguments are found in Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1–7: A Commentary (Hermeneia; trans. James E. Crouch; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 18–59. 5 One might note, for instance, how the missionary speech to the disciples in 10:5–42, set within the pre-Easter framework, modulates seamlessly into the post-Easter situation of the Matthean church (10:18!). 6 Udo Schnelle, Theology of the New Testament (trans. M. Eugene Boring; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 163–92.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 361

urrection of Jesus, but primarily a collection of sayings arranged to represent the teaching of Jesus. The Jesus who speaks in Q is not merely a sage or rabbi, however; he speaks with the eschatological authority of the transcendent Son of Man. Nor are the sayings of Jesus merely good advice; the radical and authoritative reinterpretation of the Torah embodied in the teaching of Jesus will be the standard of judgment when the Son of Man returns. By far the dominant christological title in Q is Son of Man, found 8 times for the eschatological judge and 3 times for the earthly Jesus, and not at all for the suffering/dying/rising savior figure. Apart from Son of Man, titular Christology plays hardly any role in Q. The one to come is found in Q 3:16;7 7:19; and 13:35. Lord is not used christologically except in Q 6:46; Son of God is found only in the devil’s false ascription (Q 4:3, 4:9), though the Son is found in the Father/Son language of 10:21–22 as the only mediator of revelation. Christ is not found in Q. 3. New narrative form. Twenty or thirty years prior to Matthew’s own composition, a Christian teacher, probably in Syria, had devised a new, narrative means for communicating the Christian faith. The Gospel of Mark combined the kerygmatic focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus basic to Pauline theology with stories about Jesus in which the saving power of God was manifest in his earthly life. Integral to Mark’s narrative were several key christological terms not found or not prominent in Q: Christ, Son of God, Son of David, Lord, Teacher, and King of the Jews. Mark added a crucial new category, the suffering/dying/rising Son of Man. For a decade or more, Matthew’s community of Hellenistic Jewish Christians had been guided by their understanding of the Scripture and Jesus’ message as focused in Q. The great transformation in Matthew’s Christology came when his community began to use the Gospel of Mark as authoritative Christian tradition. 4. A definitive reinterpretation. For some years, Matthew’s community used both Q and Mark in catechesis, worship, and preaching, acknowledging both documents as authentic witnesses and guides to the meaning of the Christ event. Matthew and the church in which he was a teacher became very familiar with both Mark and Q, and continued to interpret them as normative for the life of their congregations. But the time came when a definitive reinterpretation was needed. Matthew could have chosen the commentary mode of updating the meaning of Q and Mark for his church. There is ample precedent for this in his contemporary Jewish context. The Habakkuk Commentary from the Qumran community provides a telling example. In this mode, the original authoritative text is quoted, then its contemporary meaning is given. It is a striking fact that neither Matthew nor any other Christian teacher in the NT period reinterpreted their faith by writing commentaries on authoritative texts. Such a procedure would have disturbed the unity between hearers/readers and sacred text. Instead of commentary, Matthew adopts the biblical mode of retelling. His Bible already included books that reinterpret earlier books, but not in the

7

I have followed here the convention of designating Q texts by their Lukan location.

362 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

explanatory mode that distinguishes primary text and secondary commentary. The two-volume work of the Chronicler reinterprets the earlier narratives of 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings, but by incorporating them into a contemporizing retelling that fuses text and interpretation into an inseparable unity. So also the later strata of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, and the Prophets incorporate later interpretation within the ongoing narrative. Matthew takes up Mark, Q, and other traditions and combines them into one coherent narrative, retold to address the needs of his own Christian community. Matthew’s Christology, along with his ecclesiology, eschatology, ethics, and all the other elements of his theology, are available only as grasped together within this story.

THE STORY IN THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW—THE NARRATIVE MATTHEW COMPOSED I will first summarize his basic hermeneutical moves in representing these traditions. 1. Matthew adopts the Markan narrative as his basic framework. In terms of genre, the narrative form devised by Mark was not merely a Hellenistic bios with a Christian spin, but a distinctive narrative combining stories of the powerful, Godlike Son of God with the image of the truly human Jesus who suffers and dies. In Mark, this paradoxical juxtaposition was facilitated by the messianic secret. In adopting and adapting Mark’s narrative, Matthew adopted and further interpreted this theological-literary accomplishment, preserving its fundamental christological affirmations without attending to the means by which Mark had achieved it. Matthew can thus relax the messianic secret. His adding the birth story, in which not only Mary and Joseph, but also Herod and the magi, know that the Messiah has been born, means that when Jesus comes to be baptized, John, too, already recognizes him. The voice from heaven declares to all “This is my Son”—not “You are . . .” as in Mark (Matt 3:17; Mark 1:11). The secret disclosure to Jesus has become public revelation to all who will hear and believe. The messianic secret appears only vestigially in Matthew, where it plays a different role than it had in Mark. Matthew, too, believes that Jesus was recognized as the Christ only after the resurrection, but he tells his story in such a way that the post-Easter reality is collapsed into the pre-Easter narrative. 2. Matthew inserts the Q material into this framework. The Q sayings become part of the overarching narrative and are interpreted by it. Though Mark had magnified Jesus’ role as teacher, he was wary of the sayings tradition that had circulated in collections such as Q. Such sayings of Jesus were too easily heard as separate from the story of the crucified and risen Jesus, and thus liable to be misunderstood as independent wisdom, good advice rather than good news. Such independent sayings collections were too easily expanded and interpreted as sayings of the risen Lord, not

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 363

anchored in the history of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew’s church, too, has Christian prophets who continue to speak in the name of the risen Lord, and he, too, regards them with some suspicion (7:15, 22; 10:41; 23:34). He is not suspicious of the sayings genre as such. For some decades, he and his church had heard in Q the continuing voice of Jesus. Matthew neutralizes Q’s potential dangers by including the sayings of Jesus within the Markan story of the crucified Jesus. 3. Matthew surrounds the Markan narrative with the birth story and the resurrection appearances. He thus gives the narrative a proper beginning and ending, and brings the gospel form devised by Mark more into line with the conventions of Hellenistic biography. The concluding promise that the risen Christ will be with his church forever forms an inclusio with the initial promise that God will constitute Jesus as Emmanuel, God-with-us (1:23; 28:20). The birth story sets the tone and provides the categories by which the following narrative is to be interpreted. 4. Matthew restructures his traditions to provide an extensive introductory section. Part One of his narrative (1:1–12:21) provides the hermeneutical key to Part Two (12:22–28:19). Source analysis of Matthew has often noted that Matthew composes freely in the first part of his narrative, drawing material from all his sources and rearranging them according to his own purpose. The second part, from Matt 12:22 onward, joins the Markan narrative at Mark 3:22, and thereafter never deviates from the Markan order. From the point of view of Matthew’s narrative Christology, the significance of this arrangement is that the first part of Matthew’s Gospel is his own carefully structured guide to his reinterpretation of the community’s traditions. By the time Matthew’s audience/readership gets to Matt 12:22/Mark 3:22, they are prepared to understand their whole tradition in a new light, and can follow the familiar Markan story line through to the end. 5. This restructuring is not random, but is in the service of the plot. Q was not a narrative, though an implicit narrative world can be formulated on the basis of the sayings of Jesus it includes. Mark was truly a narrative, not merely a collection of stories. The stories and sayings in Mark were held together by the plot, which involved Jesus’ conflicts with the demonic world, this-worldly authorities, and his own disciples. Matthew takes over this plot and makes it more explicit and focused, restructuring his sources so that the whole narrative can be read in terms of one comprehensive plot. 6. The plot of the Gospel of Matthew resolves the conflict of kingdoms. The survey of christological designations above suggests that the variety of titles in Matthew converge on the royal image of Jesus-as-king. Pursuing this narrative thread through Matthew’s Gospel tends to confirm this approach, as illustrated in the following incomplete list of comments on particular texts:8 Matthew 1:1. Matthew begins with a constellation of christological terms designating his

8 The same narrative approach illustrated here with respect to royal imagery can be pursued with regard to other important Matthean christological foci, such as images of the servant, the new Moses, and divine wisdom. It will be found that the narrative weaves the various images together. The important Moses typology, for example, overlaps and is knit together with both the servant and the royal imagery. See Dale C. Allison, Jr., The New Moses: A Matthean Typology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 27, 34–35, 70, 74, 275, and passim.

364 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

composition as the story of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. Son of Abraham designates Jesus as a Jew who stands in the covenant history of the people of God, but the phrase does not become a christological theme. The case is different with Son of David. Pairing “Christ” and “Son of David” suggests that Matthew intends that Messiahship should be understood in terms of God’s promise of eschatological kingship (cf. e.g., 2 Sam 7:1–17). Matthew 1:6b–17. The Matthean genealogy presents Jesus as Son of David, descended from the kings of Israel. This is different from Luke 3:23–31, in which Jesus is descended from David, but not from the royal line. Matthew 1:23. Matthew’s first “formula quotation” is from Isa 7:14: the son of the virgin will be called “Emmanuel,” God-with-us. Matthew does not relate virginal conception to Jesus’ identity as Son of God (again, contrast Luke 1:31–32) and never refers to it again. The Emmanuel theme, however, becomes a leitmotif of the whole narrative. Is this a separate christological theme, or does it, too, fit within Matthew’s royal Christology? In the Isaiah context, the prophetic oracle was addressed to the “House of David” (Isa 7:2, 13); the other such oracles (Isa 9:1–7; 11:1–9) specifically promise the birth of a Davidic king who will bring salvation. To be sure, Matthew does not attend to the context of his citations from Scripture in the same way as modern historical study. Yet he may have been drawn to this text more by the Emmanuel reference than by his understanding of its validation of the virginal conception. Is this a royal name, a throne-name, given by God, expressing the reality that comes into being with the coming of Jesus? Matthew 2:1–4. Immediately after the birth of Jesus, magi from the east come to Jerusalem seeking the newborn king; in the same context, Matthew identifies “king” and “Messiah” (2:2–4). The plot thickens. A new king has been born. But there is already a king, and there is room for only one king. The status quo ruler attempts to destroy the new king, but God’s intervention preserves him and establishes his throne. This, too, is parallel to the Davidic paradigm, in which the unlikely shepherd boy was already the anointed king of God’s people even though he was not yet acknowledged as Israel’s actual ruler, and the old regime continued (1 Sam 8–2 Sam 7). Matthew’s readers can recognize in this pattern not only the story of Jesus, but their own situation. They believe Jesus is already God’s anointed Messiah, but the world goes on as before under the apparent control of this-worldly rulers. The confession that Jesus is the Christ is an affirmation about who is ultimately in control of the world. Matthew 3:2, 15, 17. In Mark, John the Baptist proclaimed baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and Jesus submitted to this baptism (Mark 1:4, 9) This introduced a christological issue that plagued all the later evangelists. Matthew responds by rewriting the Baptist’s message, transferring forgiveness of sins from John’s ministry to Jesus’ (from Mark 1:4 to Matt 26:28), and introducing Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God into John’s

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 365

message (from Matt 3:17 to Matt 3:2). Thus, in Matthew, when Jesus comes to be baptized, it is a matter of doing righteousness, the revealed will of God—a central Matthean theme (e.g., 1:19; 3:15; 5:6, 10, 20, 45; 6:1, and combined with the kingdom of God in 6:33). Of the evangelists, only Matthew makes doing the will of God a matter of the coming of the kingdom (6:10). The heavenly voice that declares Jesus to be God’s Son echoes the coronation liturgy of Ps 2:6–7 that combines the language of kingship with that of sonship. Just as the Davidic king is equipped by the Spirit for his mission (Isa 11:1–5), so the Spirit descends on Jesus, the royal Son of God at his baptism. Matthew 4:1–11. The devil’s repeated “If you are the Son of God . . .” does not question the reality of Jesus’ sonship or kingship, but probes the nature of his rule. Will he use his great power to offer the world bread and circuses, in the manner of the rulers of this world? In the final temptation, this becomes blatantly explicit: “Do it my way, acknowledge me to be the master, and you will indeed become the ruler of all the kingdoms of the world” (Matt 4:8–9). Jesus is king, but what will be the nature of his rule? If it has not occurred to the audience before, the question of the relation of Rome’s rule to God’s rule is now unavoidable.9 Matthew 16:13–20. We have seen enough to confirm and illuminate the idea that that the meaning of God’s act in Christ is discerned from engagement with the narrative itself, and skip now to a key passage. In the pivotal scene in which Peter confesses Jesus to be the Christ (Mark 8:27–30; Matt 16:13–20), Matthew adds Son of the living God to Mark’s Christ. This is not to make the confession more metaphysical, but more royal. The point is not that Jesus is Son of God and not merely human, but that Jesus is God’s anointed king. While Matthew has no doubts that Jesus is both truly human and truly divine, these later categories are not important to him. Matthew’s Christology does not focus on the metaphysics of Jesus’ person, but on Jesus’ role in God’s restoration of the divine sovereignty of the Creator, the ultimate establishment of God’s justice throughout creation. For Matthew, the scene of “Peter’s confession” is not the critical turning point in the perception of Jesus’ identity that it is in Mark. People have long since known that Jesus is Son of God, and this has already been confessed by all the disciples (14:33). Matthew’s retelling is here concerned to relate Jesus’ Messiahship to the church and to discipleship. This is one of numerous illustrations that Matthew has no interest in Christology as a separate theme, but only as interwoven into his whole story of the meaning of God’s act in Jesus. 7. What kind of king? Many modern readers of the Bible, even those who regularly pray “Thy kingdom come,” are nonetheless understandably suspicious of kingship language. This language and imagery was omnipresent in the world of the NT authors, and was deeply embedded in their Scripture and religious tradition. Early Christian teachers responded in different ways to the issue of how to deal with the language and imagery of empire as a vehicle of the Christian faith. The

9 Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 2001), 53: “Matthew’s Gospel is . . . a counternarrative, a work of resistance.” Carter’s several studies have helpfully illuminated the numerous contacts that Matthew’s audience would have made with imperial ideology and theology, while pointing out that “[his] concern is not to argue that imperial theology is the source for or origin of Matthew’s presentation of Jesus [but] . . . one influence among others.”

366 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

fundamental transformation of such language occurred when it was filled with new content by the character of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. There was some variety in the ways various writers handled the details of this transformation, a variety reflected in the NT canon. Mark, for example, represents those early Christian theologians who adopted the language of kingship and Messianism, but balked at the specific title Son of David, which he regarded as too closely bound to the imagery of violence and militarism. In Mark, Son of David language appears on 3 occasions: as an address to Jesus on the lips of a blind person before he is healed (Mark 10:47–48), as the misunderstanding of the crowds who hail Jesus as the coming Davidic king (Mark 11:10), and finally when Jesus himself corrects the view of the Jewish scribes that the Messiah is the Son of David (Mark 12:35–36). Mark accepts Messiah and king, but not Son of David as legitimate christological categories. We have already seen that Matthew is sensitive to this issue. The texts that document the centrality of kingship in Matthew’s Christology simultaneously raise the question of what it means for Jesus to be king. The issue is always whether the titles and categories define Jesus, or vice versa. Matthew makes the Markan narrative basic to his own narrative Christology and incorporates practically all of it. But in the process, Matthew continues the process of reinterpretation Mark had begun to include Son of David, which he made into a major christological category. He identifies the Christ as Son of David in his opening line, and provides Jesus with a royal Davidic genealogy. He takes Mark’s one positive reference to David in Mark, in which David feeds the hungry (Mark 2:25), and the one instance in which the Markan Jesus is addressed as the son of David who acts with mercy and compassion (Mark 10:47–48), and makes this the fundamental meaning of the term. Jesus is recognized as Son of David because he represents the mercy of God (Matt 9:27; 12:3, 23; 15:22; 20:30–31). This is part and parcel of Matthew’s radical interpretation of kingship: Jesus is the promised messianic king, but he operates with the nonviolent, quiet humility of the Servant of the Lord portrayed in Isa 42:1–4. At the crucial point of the narrative, at the conclusion of Part One, Matthew inserts this text—his longest quotation in the gospel—as the summary characterization of the nature of God’s kingship. This is not the introduction of a separate “topic,” as though Matthew now shifts from royal Christology to servant Christology. The whole context has to do with the conflict of kingdoms generated by the appearance of Jesus. Nor is the kingdom of God a distinct topic, separate or parallel to the images of Jesus as Christ, king, Son of David, and Servant. The narrative fuses all these images (and more!) into the one story presenting the incursion of God’s kingdom into the world of human kingdoms.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 367

Kingship, for Matthew, is a term that ultimately points to God. Jesus’ central message of the kingdom of God evokes the mythical picture of the eschatological restoration of the creation to the sovereignty of the Creator. The Messiah is God’s agent, whose kingship comes from and is in the service of God-the-rightful-king. The Christ is the anointed one; the Anointer is God. All NT Christology is theocentric, and Christology is not an alternative or supplement to faith in the one God. The issue of Christian faith is whether God is in fact the One who acted redemptively in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Christology is not oriented to the question, “Who is Jesus?” but “Who is God?”10 For Matthew, this question is not separable from the person of Jesus, who is God-with-us.

10

Schubert M. Ogden, The Point of Christology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982).

Scripture, Hermeneutics, and Matthew’s Jesus F. SCOTT SPENCER Professor of New Testament and Preaching Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond Eschewing a truncated focus on single proof-texts, Matthew’s Jesus interprets Scripture by Scripture across the canon in creative and provocative ways. His hermeneutical methods and aims resist narrow profiling. Above all, Matthew’s Jesus emerges as the church’s authoritative biblical exegete and teacher.

H

ave you not read [the Scriptures]?—a query posed several times by Jesus to various groups of religious leaders in Matthew’s Gospel (12:3, 5; 19:4; 21:16, 42; 22:31)— cuts two ways rhetorically, both as pat on the back and slap in the face. On the one hand, supported by the grammatical construction,1 Jesus affirms a common ground with his interlocutors: “Of course you’ve read the Scriptures, haven’t you?” Jesus appeals to the high degree of biblical literacy and scholarship attained by the Pharisees, scribes, and chief priests whom he addresses. But on the other hand, the polemical context suggests a critical challenge: “While I’m sure you’ve read the Scriptures, you don’t act like you’ve really understood them or grasped their full significance.” Jesus questions the religious leaders’ hermeneutical competency to interpret Scripture rightly. The argument is entirely in-house, in-faith, and intra-canonical. It is a battle for the Bible—the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians came to call the OT—among devout Jews who care deeply about this sacred book. At every turn, Matthew enhances his portrait with a rich scriptural repertoire of “fulfillment citations,” intertextual allusions, and typological models (like Moses).2 Put another way, the Matthean Jesus’ teachings and actions are thoroughly rooted in OT faith and practice (5:17–20). But so, too, are the convictions and instructions of Jesus’ principal disputants among the Jewish religious leaders. Although, according to Jesus’ standard, their interpretation of written Torah does not always measure up (“unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees” [5:20; cf. 5:21–48]), their oral traditions occasionally contravene God’s explicit commandments (15:1–9), and their actions sometimes fall short of their teachings (23:1–3), their commitment to biblical study and authority is unassailable. Even in one of the sharpest polemical sections in the book, where Jesus piles on “woes” against the hypocritical practices of the scribes/Pharisees who “sit on Moses’ seat,” he still begins with a blanket endorsement of their agenda: “Do whatever they teach you and

1 The interrogative construction, “Have you not (ou/ouk)/never (oudepote)?” plus an indicative verb, typically expects a “Yes” answer. 2 See, e.g., Robert Gundry, The Use of the Old Testament in St. Matthew’s Gospel with Special Reference to the Messianic Hope (NovTSup 18; Leiden: Brill, 1967); Dale Allison, Jr., The New Moses: A Matthean Typology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); and Graham Stanton, A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew (Louisville: Westminster John Knox: 1993), 346–53.

OCTOBER 2010

Interpretation 369

follow it” (23:2–3a). The problem, in Jesus’ view, is their poor follow-through (“they do not practice what they teach” [23:3b]), not their biblical foundation. Precisely because Jesus and the religious leaders agree on the Bible’s venerable place as the prime source of divine revelation, their debates over its proper interpretation (hermeneutics) and demonstration (ethics) often rage with hot and heavy intensity. A lot is at stake here—nothing less than learning and living the very word of God. In the modern Christian era, we know all too well how passionately, even bitterly, battles for the Bible are fought within most denominations. So what light does Matthew’s Jesus generate in the heat of biblical-interpretive conflict? In this essay, I consider two test cases where Jesus buttresses his “Have you not read?” challenge with particular appeal to the basic hermeneutical principle of interpreting Scripture by Scripture, that is, reading one passage not in isolation, but in conversation with other passages, indeed, the entire canon. In both cases, Jesus objects to the Pharisees’ preoccupation with applying a single biblical text (or set of texts) to the neglect of other texts that balance or complicate ethical practice in some fashion. But how does Jesus negotiate this tightrope? How does he juxtapose and prioritize texts and traditions? What train of thought does he follow? Is he aiming to expand or constrict the hermeneutical horizon of his Pharisaic interlocutors? In today’s political lingo, does Jesus advocate a more “liberal” or “conservative” intertextual reading of Scripture? These questions guide the analysis below. That does not mean, however, that they will admit to easy, definitive answers. At its best, biblical hermeneutics is as much art as science—a dynamic, Spirit-imbued enterprise as much as a formulaic, technical procedure. And Matthew’s Jesus, the Head Teacher, granted full and final authority to mediate God’s word (7:28–29; 28:18–20), will not be facilely pigeonholed into any pre-set interpretive program.

T H E “ L I B E R A L” J E S U S : I N T E R P R E T I N G S C R I P T U R E O N S A B B AT H A N D W O R K ( M AT T 1 2 : 1 – 8 ) Our first case takes us to the fields of Galilee, where Jesus’ disciples pluck off ripe heads of grain, eat them, and thereby offend the legal sensibilities of some Pharisees who observe this odd outdoor dining scene. To what exactly do the Pharisees object? The problem is not, as we might assume in our capitalist preoccupation with private property, that the disciples appear guilty of both trespassing and stealing. To be sure, they do not own these fields (they had “left everything” to follow Jesus [4:18–22; 19:27–29]) and do not pay the owner for what they take and eat (they carried no money [10:9]). But neither the landowner (absent from the story) nor the Pharisees dispute the disciples’ right to avail themselves of free “walk-through” food service, likely because of the Torah’s

370 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

charitable gleaning legislation, allowing poor itinerants to pick and eat what they need from the edges of others’ fields (Lev 19:9–10; 23:22; Deut 24:19–22; cf. Ruth 2). Matthew punctuates the propriety of the disciples’ action with the significant little note (added to Mark) that Jesus’“disciples were hungry” (Matt 12:1). This was more than an extra snack to tide them over until dinner; in all likelihood, this was dinner or maybe all they would eat that day.3 However, while what the disciples do in the fields conforms to Torah regulations, when they do it is another matter. Here is the rub: it is the Sabbath, the holy day of rest and worship, with deep scriptural roots in the creation and exodus traditions (Gen 2:1–3; Exod 20:8–11; Deut 5:12–15). Daily work—conducting business as usual—is thus generally prohibited on the Sabbath. Beyond that, however, the OT provides few guidelines regarding specific permissible and proscribed Sabbath activities. But it does make clear that plowing and reaping of fields are not allowed, even during harvest seasons (Exod 34:21). It may be that Matthew’s Pharisees subsume the disciples’ gleaning under this broad fieldwork category as labor “not lawful to do on the Sabbath” (12:2). But hand plucking and nibbling a few heads of grain hardly compare with plowing and harvesting a whole crop, normally with the aid of yoked animals. (Jesus and the disciples do not travel with a caravan!) So perhaps the Pharisees have one of their oral interpretations in mind, later codified in the Mishnah. But while one tractate delineates thirty-nine Sabbath work prohibitions, plowing/reaping again prove most relevant to the present case, taking us no further than the written Torah (m. Shab. 7:2).4 Another line of scriptural-legal reasoning might focus on the disciples’ handling and consuming food on the Sabbath. During their wandering period in the wilderness, the ancient Israelites gathered a double portion of manna on the sixth day in order to eat on the Sabbath without having to gather or prepare food (in fact, the Lord provided no manna on the seventh day; Exod 16:5, 22– 30).5 A sectarian Jewish group of Essenes applied this biblical precedent to their community: “No man shall eat on the Sabbath day except that which is already prepared. He shall eat nothing lying in the fields” (CD 10:20–21).6 In Matthew’s story, Jesus’ disciples had evidently not stored up grain the day before. This is hardly surprising, though, since they lived from day to day (“Give us this day our daily bread” [Matt 6:11]), and since gleaning allowed for satisfying immediate needs, not stockpiling leftovers. The disciples would be left then with two alternatives: either fasting or being hosted by a generous household on the Sabbath. But the former option was undesirable and the latter impracticable from time to time. Despite the prejudicial pagan stereotype that Jews regularly fasted on the Sabbath,7 it was in fact a time of celebrating the Creator God’s goodness, with some sources close to Jesus’ time even forbidding fasting on this holy day (Jdt 8:6; Jub. 50:12).8 And in

3 Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2000), 263–64; M. Eugene Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in General Articles on the New Testament, Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of Mark (NIB; 12 vols.; ed. Leander Keck; Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 8:278. 4 See also lists of proscribed Sabbath activities in Jub. 2:29; 50:6–13; CD 10:14–11:18. 5 Likewise, the wilderness community also strictly opposed (on pain of death) gathering sticks, presumably for building a cooking fire, on the Sabbath (Num 15:32–36). 6 Citation from Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (4th ed; London: Penguin, 1995), 109. 7 See the discussion in Louis Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 161–67. 8 See D. M. Cohn-Sherbok, “An Analysis of Jesus’ Arguments Concerning the Plucking of Grain on the Sabbath,” JSNT 2 (1979): 35; W. D. Davies and Dale Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to St. Matthew (3 vols.; ICC; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988–1997), 2:312, n. 35; Ulrich Luz, Matthew: A Commentary (3 vols.; trans. Wilhelm Linss and James Crouch; ed. Helmut Koester; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989–2005), 180.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 371

any case, while the disciples enjoy the blessedness of Jesus’ life and ministry, they have no cause for fasting (Matt 9:14–15). As for eating in others’ homes, Jesus and his followers gladly accept hospitality when offered, but do not impose themselves on unwelcoming hosts (10:11–15). Considerable ambiguity thus surrounds the Pharisees’ legal case against Jesus’ disciples in Matt 12. We are not told, beyond general respect for Sabbath observance, what specific written or oral Sabbath traditions the Pharisees have in mind, or precisely how they judge the disciples’ plucking and eating as unlawful. In the absence of supporting arguments, we should not jump to conclusions about the principled or picayune nature of their case. All we know is that Matthew’s Pharisees regard the disciples’ Sabbath activity as illicit, and that such judgment reflects how seriously most first-century Jews took Sabbath-keeping as a distinctive mark of their religious-ethnic identity and covenant relationship with God.9 But such critical significance guarantees wide-ranging debate about the proper parameters of Sabbath activity, which only intensifies in the face of the Bible’s relative disinterest in micromanaging Sabbath behavior. As the Mishnah acknowledges, “The rules about the Sabbath . . . are like mountains hanging on a hair, for [teaching of] Scripture [thereon] is scanty and the rules many” (m. Hag. 1:8).10 So, when Matthew’s Jesus responds to the accusation of Sabbath misconduct, he ventures into a hermeneutical minefield. Although not personally charged with violating Sabbath law, Jesus is no doubt held responsible for his disciples’ behavior,11 and he does not leave them hanging by a hair. Whereas the Pharisees cite no specific scriptural support in prosecuting the disciples, Jesus mounts a broad-based, three-pronged biblical defense, comprising a) an historical example (1 Sam 21:1–6); b) a legal requirement (Num 28:9–10); and c) a prophetic principle (Hos 6:6). As with the Pharisees, Jesus simply assumes the foundational Decalogue injunction, “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy” (Exod 20:8; Deut 5:12). By no means does Jesus (or Matthew) abrogate the Sabbath;12 the point is clarifying the boundaries of acceptable activity on this sacred day. While on the face of it, Jesus might seem to win the case by a superior range and number of scriptural precedents, thoughtful hermeneutical-ethical reasoning is far from a statistical enterprise. The quality and applicability of the arguments matter most. And even here Jesus’ case remains open to question. First, the appeal to David and his soldiers’ exceptional (unlawful) eating in God’s sanctuary of consecrated loaves—reserved only for priestly consumption—while on an “expedition” (1 Sam 21:5) connects well with the itinerant disciples’ dubious dining while on a “mission” with Jesus. These are extraordinary times calling for extraordinary measures: both David’s and Jesus’ (the son of David) “special forces” are “hungry” while carrying out their duties and thus merit being fed, if need be, by unconventional means. But the analogy breaks down at key points: Jesus’

9

See, e.g., Philo, Mos. 2:209–19; Josephus, Life 159; Ant. 16:42–44; J.W. 2:147; CD 10:14–11:18. Translation from Herbert Danby, The Mishnah (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 212. 11 Frederick Dale Bruner, The Christbook: Matthew 1–12 (Waco: Word, 1987), 547. 12 In the next scene (12:9–14), Jesus follows standard Jewish practice by attending the synagogue on the Sabbath. Although Matthew, no doubt reflecting his own post-70 C.E. context, distances Jesus somewhat from “their synagogue” (12:9) and describes an ensuing conflict over healing a disabled man, he also still portrays Jesus arguing his case within the bounds of Jewish law and acting with explicit purpose “to do good on the Sabbath” (12:11–12). See also 24:20. 10

372 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

disciples are in the grain fields, not God’s house, eating generic heads of grain, not cultic loaves of bread; and most critically, their plucking and eating on the Sabbath—the crux of the Pharisees’ objection—has no clear counterpart in the David story, set on no particular day.13 Of course, by nature analogies offer broad comparisons; they do not have to score at every point. But it is useful if they address the main point, which the David example really does not. But in the second plank of his defense, Jesus cites legal precedent from the Torah regarding Sabbath practice. Direct reference to biblical law would represent the highest court of appeal in Jewish ethics, outweighing idiosyncratic narrative cases like that from David’s adventures.14 But again, Jesus’ use of Scripture confuses as much as convinces. He does not quote a specific text, but rather offers a loose paraphrase—with double reference to the Sabbath—emphasizing that “on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath” with impunity (Matt 12:5). Most scholars agree that Jesus has in mind the Torah passage from Numbers, which stipulates the required “burnt offering for every Sabbath, in addition to the regular burnt offering and its drink offering” (Num 28:9– 10). Though priests are not specifically mentioned, their involvement, as the authorized mediators of sacrifice, would be assumed. In short, Jesus reminds the Pharisees that priests work on the Sabbath and “yet are guiltless” (Matt 12:5). But he actually goes much further to suggest that priests “break” or “desecrate” (bebe3loo3) the Sabbath15 by performing their duties, a viewpoint not remotely intimated in the Torah and hardly designed to persuade his Pharisaic accusers. One suspects Matthew’s Jesus of rhetorical hyperbole here, since, as noted above, he otherwise affirms the law; but the use of Sabbath-breaking language seems deliberately provocative, if not profane. Little wonder that, by the end of this Sabbath, the Pharisees “conspire against him” (12:14). Moreover, emotions aside, Jesus’ logic leaves something to be desired. However he (mis)characterizes priestly Sabbath service in the Torah, it is not at all obvious how this allusion relates to his disciples’ activity. Apart from their not being in the right place (grain field, not sanctuary) to fit the Numbers template, they are not the right persons (disciples, not priests) executing the right practices (plucking/munching grain, not preparing/offering sacrifices) on the Sabbath. Of course, we might summon a doctrine like the “priesthood of all believers” to get Jesus off the hook, thereby anointing Jesus’ faithful followers as “priests” in God’s service. But neither Jesus nor Matthew thinks in such terms (they were not good Protestants), and the Torah’s striking designation of Israel as a “priestly kingdom” at Sinai (Exod 19:5) never authorized anyone but legitimate priests to present holy sacrifices to God on the Sabbath or any other day. At best, Jesus draws another loose analogy: since some persons (priests) can legitimately engage in some activities (sacrificing) on the Sabbath, so can his disciples. 13 Leviticus 24:5–9 stipulates the placement of fresh loaves “before the Lord” by Aaron and his priestly descendants “every Sabbath day,” but it is not clear if they consumed all this bread on that day. While some later rabbinic traditions set 1 Sam 21:1–6 on the Sabbath, Matthew’s Jesus does not make the Sabbath connection. He stresses what David “unlawfully” ate (priestly fare), not when he ate it. See Davies and Allison, Gospel According to St. Matthew, 2:308–9; Cohn-Sherbok, “Analysis,” 35–36. 14 This reflects the distinction in Jewish hermeneutics between prescriptive, legal halakah (Num 28:9–10) and interpretive, narrative haggadah (1 Sam 21:1–6). See David Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (London: University of London Press, 1956), 67–71; Cohn-Sherbok, “Analysis,” 36; John Mark Hicks, “The Sabbath Controversy in Matthew: An Exegesis of Matthew 12:1–14,” RestQ 27 (1984): 83–87. 15 As Vernon Robbins (“Plucking Grain on the Sabbath,” in Patterns of Persuasion in the Gospels [ed. Burton Mack and Vernon Robbins; Sonoma: Polebridge, 1989], 135) observes, Jesus markedly ups the ante of the Pharisees’ initial accusation: whereas they charge the disciples with “doing” or “performing an act” (poieo3) contrary to Sabbath law (Matt 12:2), Jesus appeals to the priests’ “desecrating” or “performing an act that violates the sanctity of a custom or place” (bebe3loo3, 12:5).

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 373

Jesus must be given his full say, however. As a good defense attorney, he builds up to his last and strongest point. Picking up some key threads from the previous two analogies—particularly related to sanctuary and sacrifice—Jesus applies a “lesser to greater” rhetorical strategy, adds a direct scriptural citation from the prophetic canon, and punctuates his closing argument with the solemn introductory formula,“But I tell you” (Matt 12:6; cf. 5:18–44). As if addressing our objection that the disciples’ grain field behavior on the Sabbath has nothing to do with sacred place or cultic practice featured in 1 Samuel and Numbers, Jesus boldly subordinates temple and sacrifice in his double statement: “something greater than the temple is here”; “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” the latter quoted from Hos 6:6 (Matt 12:6–7; cf. 9:13). Following “lesser to greater” reasoning,16 his disciples’ lack of engagement in temple-sacrificial duty, far from being problematic to his case, actually cements it. For in truth, through their plucking and eating on the Sabbath, Jesus’ followers participate in “something greater” than David and his cohorts and the temple priests. But what exactly is that mysterious “something greater”—which must really be something to be greater than God’s holy place and worship rites, of all (some)things? Most interpreters think that Jesus invokes his own personal, God-given authority here, as elsewhere in Matthew and, indeed, in his final statement that “the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath” (12:8).17 Jesus himself personifies the “something greater,” and if he has no problem with his disciples’ Sabbath behavior, then there is no problem. But while not denying that Matthew’s Jesus strongly asserts his personal sovereignty, he does not appear to be the primary referent for the neuter comparative pronoun properly translated, “something greater,” rather than “someone greater.”18 As Ulrich Luz urges, we should not “skip too quickly over the neuter” term here en route to an exclusively Christological conclusion.19 The proper path is clearly marked: “Something greater (meizon) than the temple is here” ? “But if you had known what (ti) this means” ? “Mercy (eleos) I desire, and not sacrifice” (my translation). All the italicized words are neuter in Greek and suggest the equivalence: something greater = what = mercy. And the final focus on mercy is strengthened by its emphatic, first position in the sentence, not to mention its authoritative source from the prophet Hosea. On this mercy principle, closely associated with loving concern for others as a covenantal extension of faithful love toward God, hangs all the law and prophets (cf. 7:12; 22:34–40).20 Jesus thus ultimately calls upon his Pharisaic judges to treat his grain plucking/eating disciples with mercy.21 They are not cavalierly breaking Sabbath law, but rather “working” on this sacred day as poor, hungry nomads (like David and companions) to meet basic needs for survival. Jesus does 16 Or “light to heavy” (qal wahomer) deduction in rabbinic interpretation; see the discussion in Cohn-Sherbok, “Analysis,” 36–40; Hicks, “Sabbath Controversy,” 86–87. 17 E.g., Davies and Allison, Gospel According to St. Matthew, 314; Carter, Matthew and the Margins, 266; Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel of Matthew (trans. Robert Barr; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 112; Daniel Harrington (The Gospel of Matthew [Sacra Pagina 1; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1991], 172) identifies three possible referents of “something greater than the temple”: 1) Jesus himself; 2) the kingdom of God initiated by Jesus; and 3) the community of Jesus’ followers. Harrington grants the plausibility of all three options, but leans toward the last one. 18 “Something/someone greater” are distinguished in Greek by a single letter: either omicron (o) or omega (o3)— meizon (neut.) or meizo3n (masc.). Such morphological precision seems particularly apt in analyzing the words of Matthew’s Jesus who stresses that “not one letter (iota), not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (5:18). 19 Luz, Matthew, 181–83; see also Boring, “Gospel of Matthew,” 278. 20 In the LXX, the Greek eleos routinely translates the Hebrew h9esed with its rich theological-ethical associations of Gods “covenant faithfulness” and “steadfast love” toward God’s needy people. See David Hill, “On the Use and Meaning of Hosea VI.6 in Matthew’s Gospel,” NTS 24 (1977): 107–19; Mary Hinkle Eden, “Learning What Righteousness Means: Hosea 6:6 and the Ethic of Mercy in Matthew’s Gospel,” Word & World 18 (1998): 355–63. 21 Luz, Matthew, 182.

374 Interpretation

OCTOBER2010

not argue for some special dispensation for an elite corps of deputies. His disciples do not function as priests laboring in God’s house (like those in Numbers) and do not receive exceptional permission in the sanctuary for their “unlawful” eating (like David). But so what? All of that is trumped by “something greater than the temple.” In this and all cases, mercy—along with justice and love— shines as the “weightier matter” (Matt 23:23), greater than the sanctuary, its priestly attendants, and even the Sabbath. Such a judgment need not denigrate the law in general or Sabbath observance in particular: on the contrary, what better day to demonstrate the merciful heartbeat of God’s creational/covenantal law than God’s restorative Sabbath?

T H E “ C O N S E R VAT I V E ” J E S U S : I N T E R P R E T I N G S C R I P T U R E O N M A R R I A G E A N D D I V O R C E ( M AT T 1 9 : 1 – 9 ) Before we leap to judgment, on the basis of one case, that Matthew’s Jesus consistently advocates a more “liberal” interpretation of Scripture than his Pharisaic interlocutors, we must test another similar “Have you not read?” exchange surrounding a different, but equally fundamental, issue. And, as we shall see, in the family law case dealing with marriage and divorce (19:1–9), while many questions remain on interpretive fine points, Jesus scarcely advances a freewheeling, freeloving situational ethic. The present debate shifts from Galilee to Judea and follows on the heels of Jesus’ mass healings rather than his disciples’ dining habits (19:1–2). Again the Pharisees initiate the dispute with a point about legality, only framed this time as an open question to Jesus rather than a negative accusation: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?” (19:3). Even with this more inviting approach, however, Matthew’s Pharisees still aim to “test” or “try” (peirazo3) Jesus’ response, that is, put him on trial in a confrontational, prosecutorial manner (cf. 4:1, 3; 12:14; 16:1; 22:18, 35). The key issue now concerns the range of right reasons for which a man may divorce his wife: can he do it “for any/every (pasan) cause?” As presented, the question assumes a man’s basic right to divorce his wife (it does not, regrettably, guarantee the woman’s reciprocal prerogative).22 Controversy swirls not around whether a man may divorce his wife, but why—on any grounds he chooses or a more restricted list? At this stage, the Pharisees cite no contested scriptural-legal tradition underlying their query, but soon they will raise the Deuteronomy 24 “commandment” (as they call it) of divorce for “something objectionable” (24:1), which had become a locus of considerable discussion among Jewish scholars and teachers. Early (proto-)rabbinic disputes around the time of Jesus spanned the more lenient-liberal and stringent-conservative spectrum: the house of Hillel tended toward a loose interpretation of “objectionable” wifely behavior (including poor culinary skills), while the house of Shammai narrowed it to more serious sexual transgressions (including but not

22 Likewise, in Matt 5:31–32, Jesus only considers the option of a man divorcing his wife (cf. Josephus, Ant. 15:259–60). Some contemporary Jewish sources, however, also acknowledge women’s reciprocal rights and duties in matters of marriage, divorce, and sexuality: see Philo, Spec. Laws 3:80–82; CD 5:9–10; 1 Cor 7:2–5, 10–16, and the discussion in Phillip Sigal, The Halakhah of Jesus of Nazareth According to the Gospel of Matthew (SBL 18; Atlanta: SBL, 2007), 127–43.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 375

necessarily limited to adultery).23 But in any case, such debate operated within a broad family value system—shared by Ben Sira, Philo, Josephus and other Jewish thinkers—that accorded husbands a God-given, Scripture-based right, if not responsibility, to divorce their wives for some legitimate cause(s).24 In response, Jesus cuts to the chase and through the thicket of divorce options to affirm an overriding marital principle. Rather than escalating to his clinching argument, as with the prophetic mercy principle in the Sabbath case, this time Jesus begins at the “beginning” with a dual Genesis mandate establishing God’s original will for the permanent,“one-flesh” union between husband and wife (Matt 19:4–6; Gen 1:27; 2:24). In other words,“from the beginning” (ap)arche3s) the God who joined male and female in marriage envisioned no viable reason for divorce.25 Fine and good for the Bible’s first chapters, featuring humanity’s primordial, innocent age involving only the first man and woman (no one to leave each other for yet!); but what about the Deuteronomic regulation for Israel at the end of the Pentateuch where, as the Pharisees remind Jesus, Moses “command[ed] us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her” (Matt 19:7)? Whereas before, Jesus qualified the creational/covenantal principle of Sabbath rest with extenuating circumstantial evidence from Numbers and 1 Samuel, here the Pharisaic teachers qualify creation’s marital principle with Deuteronomy’s allowance for divorce under certain, albeit debatable, conditions. On this occasion, Jesus seems to have little use for exceptions, save one that he will soon announce. But before he broaches the “any cause” matter, he reiterates the primacy of the Genesis marriage principle in relation to the Deuteronomy divorce provision. The crux of his response turns on the language of commandment vs. concession, prescription vs. permission. Matthew’s Jesus corrects the Pharisees’ assessment of the moral force of Deuteronomy’s divorce rulings.26 Where they speak of Moses’ mandating (entellomai) divorce under certain circumstances, Jesus speaks of Moses’ permitting (epitrepo4) such action because of the Israelites’ hardheartedness (Jesus actually refers to “your hardheartedness,” pointedly collapsing the identities of the ancient Israelites and present Pharisees; 19:7–8).27 Conceding the status quo regarding common divorce practice resulting from human selfishness and stubbornness scarcely reflects righteous behavior in Jesus’ book, since, to repeat his starting point: “from the beginning (ap)arche3s) it has not been so” (19:8).28 First principles, rooted in creation, trump secondary provisions, resulting from humanity’s fall. But does Matthew’s Jesus thereby effectively annul Deut 24 on the basis of Gen 1–2 or, in other words, abrogate a later stipulation of the Torah in favor of an earlier precept? If so, this would mark a drastic hermeneutical move, compromising Jesus’ prior claim “not to abolish” even one iota of the Law (Matt 5:17–18), not to mention bowling over tensions in the Torah by striking out or ex-canon-

23 See m. Git. 9:10, which also includes the infamous statement of R. Akiba allowing a man to divorce his wife for the “indecency” that she was not pretty enough. On the whole issue, Sigal (Halakhah of Jesus, 142) aptly states: “In sum, then, the halakhah of divorce practiced by the diverse communities of a many-faceted Judaism was in no way monolithic. There was no orthodoxy and no orthopraxy.” 24 Sir 7:26; 25:24–26; 42:9–10; Philo, Spec. Laws 3:30–31, 80–82; Josephus, Life 426–27; Ant. 4:253; 15:259–60. 25 For other anti-divorce sources rooted in God’s created purpose for marriage in Genesis, see Mal 2:10–16; CD 4:20–5:2; and the discussion in Sigal, Halakhah of Jesus, 112–17, 125, 135–40. 26 See Anthony Harvey, “Genesis versus Deuteronomy?: Jesus on Marriage and Divorce,” in The Gospels and the Scriptures of Israel (ed. Craig Evans and Richard Stegner; JSNTSup 104; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994), 55–65. 27 Matthew also reverses Mark’s language, where Jesus asks about what Moses “commanded” (entellomai) regarding divorce and the Pharisees respond concerning what Moses “allowed” (epitrepo4, Mark 10:3–5). 28 My translation of the perfect tense of gegonen, conveying: divorce was not so from the beginning and still is not!

376 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

izing one passage in the debate rather than seeking some dynamic resolution.29 On closer analysis, however, at least two factors mitigate such a sweeping, simplistic strategy on Jesus’ part. First, Jesus harbors no naïve illusions about the pristine condition of God’s people. They continue to be as “hardhearted” as they were in Moses’ era, inveterate heirs of Adam and Eve’s “fall” from Edenic holiness and bliss, marital and otherwise. As such there will be marital pain and strife, hardship, and hierarchy (Gen 3:12–19), which will tragically lead to divorce from time to time. The law then steps in, as it does in so many other cases of human brokenness and alienation, to offer restraining as well as restorative guidance. Specifically, Deut 24:1–4 steps in a) to protect the divorced wife’s right to remarriage by way of a “certificate” declaring her legitimately released from her former husband; and b) to prohibit the ex-husband, who dismissed his wife, from taking her back again should her second marriage fail. For Jesus’ part, though clarifying that the Torah’s allowance of divorce does not reflect God’s created ideal for marriage, he never disavows that divorce is, in fact, still allowable under the lamentable, but undeniable, condition of human sinfulness and hardheartedness regulated in Deuteronomy. Second, when Matthew’s Jesus takes up (finally) the Pharisees’ original query about acceptable “causes” for divorce, he respectfully responds within the boundaries of Deuteronomy’s framework. To be sure, refusing to take his interrogators’ bait of “any cause,” Jesus strictly delimits the range of “something objectionable” to porneia, related to gross sexual misconduct (19:9). But strict interpretation, far from throwing Deut 24 overboard, demonstrates serious intent to “rightly divide” the text, to ascertain its true meaning. Though not a long laundry list of petty husbandly gripes, one critical thing—namely, a wife’s immoral sexual behavior (porneia)—is objectionable enough to warrant a divorce certificate. While porneia may designate various types of sexual impropriety (e.g., incest [Lev 18:6–23; 1 Cor 5:1] or prostitution [1 Cor 6:13–20]), both the wider and immediate Matthean contexts target the core problem of adultery or sexual intercourse outside the bond of legal marriage (or betrothal). Prior to his angelic enlightenment, the “righteous” Joseph wrestles with this very issue of divorcing his (apparently) adulterous fiancée, who had become pregnant, but not by him (Matt 1:18–20).30 Jesus’ brief discussion about divorce in the Sermon on the Mount, echoing the single porneia exception in our focal text, follows on the heels of warnings against committing adultery (5:27–32); and his final word on divorce explicitly brings adultery into the picture: “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity (porneia), and marries another commits adultery (moichatai)” (Matt 19:9).31 Though Jesus ultimately pinpoints remarriage after an illicit (nonporneia-based) divorce as adultery (moicheia), he implies an overarching porneia/moicheia connection that strains the marital union to the breaking point: 1) if a woman sexually joins with a man

29

See Harvey, “Genesis versus Deuteronomy?”, 55–56. Dale Allison, “Divorce, Celibacy, and Joseph (Matthew 1:18–25 and 19:1–12),” JSNT 49 (1993): 3–10. The catalogue of “evil intentions” in Matt 15:19 lists “adultery” (moicheia) and “fornication” (porneia) adjacently, but separately, prompting Joseph Fitzmyer to posit a strict semantic distinction, where porneia denotes not adulterous liaisons per se, but “illicit marital unions within the degrees of kinship proscribed by Lev 18:16–18” (“The Matthean Divorce Texts and Some New Palestinian Evidence,” TS 37 [1976]: 208–11). But virtue/vice lists routinely collocate a variety of synonymous and similar items. Hence, juxtaposing moicheia and porneia may suggest their close affinity, with the former term (“adultery”) representing a prime example of the latter’s broader category (“fornication”). 30 31

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 377

who is not her husband, she effectively severs her original conjugal bond and becomes liable to divorce proceedings; conversely, 2) if a man dismisses his wife for any reason other than her sexual infidelity (which would break the marital bond), he still remains one with her, regardless what any divorce certificate might say, and thereby himself commits adultery if he remarries another woman. The salient point that emerges stresses the sanctity and inviolability of the one-flesh sexualmarital union between one man and one woman. And with this point—if we are correct that Jesus strictly interprets Deuteronomy’s “objectionable” cause for divorce as adultery (porneia = moicheia) —the beginning and end of the Pentateuch, creation prototype and wilderness proviso, come even closer together. What God has sutured, sealed by the husband and wife’s “one-flesh” sexual consummation, let no one sunder (Matt 19:6). Indeed, no one can sunder, except by inserting another intimate, alien “flesh” partner into the sacred equation. There is no such thing as casual sex in this arrangement. By definition, sexual intercourse melds two body-persons into one (“they are no longer two, but one flesh” [19:6a]). As a result, if a spouse commits adultery with a “third party,” he/she automatically disengages from his/her spouse and becomes “one” with this other person. Adultery is so “objectionable” because it strikes at the heart—or rather, flesh—of the divine-marital creational covenant, ripping it apart. As a tragic consequence, divorce enters human society along with Deuteronomic instruction to guide its practice and curb its damage as much as possible.

D O N O T T R Y T H I S O N YO U R O W N : C O N C L U D I N G O B S E R VAT I O N S Even this brief study of two cases, where Jesus interprets Scripture by Scripture in debates with the Pharisees, sets one’s head spinning. Hermeneutics is not for the faint of heart or feeble of mind. Jesus’ deft selection of and maneuvering among relevant texts to support his position—first, serving the more “liberal” aim of relaxing Sabbath observance in certain circumstances, and second, the more “conservative” interest of restraining divorce practice—defies systematic collation into a neat set of hermeneutical (or ethical) “rules.” And one suspects that investigating the three other “Have you not read?” cases (21:16, 42; 22:31) would only complicate the matter further. For all the talk that Matthew’s Gospel provides something like a “teaching manual” for the early church,32 in the area of hermeneutics at least, Matthew presents lively debates that stir the imagination and serve much food for thought, but hardly a step-by-step, connect-the-dots guidebook. Yet, with this important caveat in mind, we may list (for convenience’s sake) some concluding observations from our sampling of the Matthean Jesus’ interpretation of Scripture to stimulate and challenge our own hermeneutical practice. • First, Jesus’ intertextual approach, interpreting Scripture by Scripture across the canon (“law”

32 E.g., see two works by Paul Minear, Matthew: The Teacher’s Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984); andThe Good News According to Matthew: A Training Manual for Prophets (St. Louis: Chalice, 2000).

378 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

[Genesis, Numbers, Deuteronomy] and “prophets” [1 Samuel, Hosea]) resists truncated arguments and applications from single proof-texts. • Second, what we might call Jesus’ principled approach, stressing the biblical “mercy principle”

in the Sabbath case and the “creation principle” in the divorce dispute, seeks to ground theological and ethical reasoning in the foundational character (mercy) and work (creation) of God revealed in Scripture. Human responses to particular situations must ultimately answer to the overarching will of our merciful Creator in whose image we live and move and have our being. • Third, adopting a more accommodating than procrustean approach to tensions in Scripture,

Jesus leaves in and qualifies rather than lops off and nullifies problematic texts.33 Put another way, he lets canonical tensions stand: a) allowing for certain merciful Sabbath eating practices within, not against, the creational/covenantal law of Sabbath rest; and b) affirming God’s original design of permanent,“one flesh” marital union above, but not abolishing, permission for divorce in the limited case of adultery, which breaks the “one flesh” bond. While Jesus does not hesitate to negotiate the tensions in support of his position (he’s no relativist), he does not bowdlerize the diverse biblical canon to push his narrow agenda (he’s no fundamentalist). • Finally, Jesus’ authoritative “But I say to you” (12:6; 19:9) approach mounts a strong personal

claim to interpret God’s word rightly and definitively. Such bold exercise of hermeneutical authority was not unusual for leading rabbinic and other Jewish teachers in Jesus’ and Matthew’s days, though of course, from Matthew’s and his Christian heirs’ perspectives, Jesus’ authority ranks highest and truest. As Jesus is Lord of Sabbath—indeed, of all heaven and earth (28:18)—he is also Lord of Scripture and the Supreme Teacher of his church. Jesus knows how best to navigate the rapids of biblical instruction, at some points with a more “liberal” aim, at others a more “conservative” one, but in all occasions with a sovereignty and ingenuity that defies rigid labeling and reductionism. So where does this study leave us as Jesus’ followers today, still seeking to interpret Scripture rightly and practice it faithfully? While Matthew encourages us to “take up [Jesus’] yoke . . . and learn from [him]” (11:29), we remain severely limited in our individual hermeneutical competencies, not least because of our own persisting “hardhearted” propensities. But more than that, our main vocation as Christian disciples remains to hear and heed Jesus’ unique lordly voice, his Godbreathed “I say unto you,” regarding not only Sabbath and marital conduct, but also a swath of other contemporary issues Matthew never addressed or imagined. Though providing no neat formula or program for replicating Jesus’ hermeneutics, Matthew does leave us a vital clue to discerning Jesus’ voice: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (18:20); “and remember, I am with you [all] always, to the end of the age” (28:20). Do not try this on your own! With open Bibles and hearts in the community of God’s people now and through ages past, we may encounter the living Emmanuel afresh, continuing to guide us through God’s word into the fullness of God’s truth.

33 See Ellen Davis, “Critical Traditioning: Seeking an Inner Biblical Hermeneutic,” in The Art of Reading Scripture (ed. Ellen Davis and Richard Hays; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 163–80.

Interpretation 379

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

New Testament Studies

The Real Jesus Then and Now GEZA VERMES

“In these essays written for the popular press, Geza Vermes reveals himself as an astute and thoughtful cultural critic. He writes cogently and candidly on Mel Gibson, Dan Brown, Benedict XVI, the scandal of the delayed publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and, yes, the historical Jesus as well. Small bites, but each one nourishing.” —Luke Timothy Johnson 978-0-8006-9763-1 160 pp pbk $19.00

Studying the New Testament A Fortress Introduction BRUCE CHILTON and DEIRDRE GOOD

“Using clear, accessible prose that steers a secure course between the rocks of competing methods and the shoals of conflicting interpretations, Chilton and Good properly challenge those who engage this book to want to learn more.” —Richard I. Pervo 978-0-8006-9735-8 192 pp pbk $20.00

&

Times

Anatomy of the New Testament ROBERT A. SPIVEY, D. MOODY SMITH, CLIFTON BLACK Sixth Edition. Esteemed New Testament scholars provide teachers and students with a reading of early Christian literature that is at once systematic, critical and reliable in its scope and content. “Anatomy of the New Testament has become a classic, and justly so.” —John Meier

978-0-8006-9770-9 544 pp pbk $55.00

Prejudice and Christian Beginnings Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies Edited by LAURA NASRALLAH and ELISABETH SCHÜSSLER FIORENZA

New essays by prominent scholars in the fields of New Testament, classics, and Jewish studies push against the marginalization of race and ethnicity studies and put the received wisdom of New Testament studies squarely in the foreground. 978-0-8006-9764-8 336 pp pbk $26.00

At bookstores or call 1-800-328-4648 fortresspress.com

Which God Is With Us? BARBARA E. REID Professor of New Testament Studies Catholic Theological Union There is a tension in the Gospel of Matthew between two very different images of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, God is portrayed as being boundlessly gracious and forgiving, while in eight Matthean parables, God is seen as vindictive and punitive. This poses an ethical dilemma: which God is with us and whom should we emulate?

TWO IMAGES OF GOD In the Gospel of Matthew, there is a tension between two very different portrayals of God. On the one hand, Jesus speaks of God as all-inclusive in extending graciousness, and bestowing loving kindness on the good and bad alike (5:43–48). This stands in stark contrast to the image of God in eight of Matthew’s parables as one who punishes harshly those who do evil. This contrast poses theological and ethical dilemmas. Which is the God who is truly with us? Is one of these images false? Can both coexist? Is God capricious—sometimes loving and forgiving, and sometimes punitive and vindictive? If so, how can we place our trust in such a One? Whatever images we have of God have important consequences for our responses as disciples. If God extends love and forgiveness to all indiscriminately, then we must try to do likewise. But if the godly way of establishing righteousness is by punishing evildoers, then ought we to do the same? How is a disciple to know which way to apply in what circumstances? In this essay, I will first explore the image of God as allinclusive and gracious, then the image of God as harshly punitive in the parables. I will propose possible explanations for the contrasting images and will offer a way to resolve the ethical dilemma.1

A GOD OF BOUNDLESS GRACIOUSNESS Matthew begins his gospel by calling attention to God’s boundless graciousness and forgiveness, extended to human beings in very difficult and ambiguous situations. The list of Jesus’ ancestors that opens the narrative calls to mind both the saintly and sinful deeds of his forebears. Beginning with Abraham, God has endlessly embraced and forgiven those who miss the mark. Whenever divine love was not reciprocated, the Holy One kept extending it over and over, culminating in the new manifestation of God-with-us in the gift of Jesus (1:21).

1 See Barbara E. Reid, “Violent Endings in Matthew’s Parables and Christian Nonviolence,” CBQ 66.2 (2004): 237–55 for more detailed elaboration of themes presented in this essay.

OCTOBER 2010

Interpretation 381

The response desired to such graciousness is righteousness—a favorite Matthean theme.2 It is first sounded in 1:19–25, where Joseph is presented as a righteous man, who is struggling over what to do in the distressing situation of finding his formally betrothed wife to be pregnant with a child who was not conceived with him. The divine instructions conveyed in a dream are the reverse of what Joseph had planned. The way of righteousness is not through punitive repudiation and public exposure, but with a loving embrace of the one who had seemingly wronged him and then claiming her child as his own. As the gospel continues, Jesus urges his followers toward a righteousness that exceeds that of other religious leaders if they are to be part of God’s realm (5:20). It is something for which they must hunger and thirst (5:6), and for which they will be persecuted (5:10). If they strive for God’s righteousness, however, all will be given them (6:33). As the Sermon on the Mount continues, Jesus instructs his disciples more concretely on how to emulate divine graciousness and righteousness in situations of conflict. Jesus’ guide for righteous living is the Torah. He quotes six different passages from the Law, each time leading his disciples to understand it in a way that requires greater inclusivity and graciousness (5:21–42). It is not enough to refrain from killing; a disciple must take measures to dissipate anger before it becomes murderous. If there is rupture in the relationship with a brother or sister, a follower of Jesus must initiate a process of reconciliation before attempting to offer sacrificial gifts at the altar. If someone initiates legal proceedings against a disciple, they are to do all in their power to settle peaceably out of court. Likewise, disciples must take extreme measures to curtail any actions or attitudes that lead to adultery or divorce. They must refrain from oath-taking, ensuring that their word is always truthful. Finally, in situations where a disciple is a target of verbal or physical violence, they are to respond with nonviolent confrontation that aims to break the cycles of violence and victimization and initiate new cycles of generosity and graciousness. In this way, the intent of the Law to restore righteousness is fulfilled.3 This section of the Sermon on the Mount reaches its climax in 5:43–48, where Jesus provides the motivation for why his followers should respond in these ways to enemies, opponents, and community members who offend them. Because they are children of God, they must emulate God’s ways of making the sun rise on the evil and the good, and sending rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Jesus elaborates further, “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?” (5:46–47). The implication is that when disciples offer indiscriminate love and graciousness to the unrighteous, it has the potential to bring them into right relation by inviting the estranged one out of enmity into

2 It is very difficult to render adequately the Greek word dikaiosyne3. It can be translated as “justice,” but for many English speakers, “justice” means everyone gets what they deserve, either for better or for worse. That is, evildoers get punished in the measure of their wrongdoing, and those who do good are rewarded in kind. Another translation is “righteousness,” but this word often evokes notions of self-righteousness. There is the same difficulty with the translation “justification.” None of these English words adequately conveys the biblical notion of dikaiosyne3, which concerns right relation in every way: with God, self, others, and the whole of creation. Paul’s elaboration in Rom 3:24–26 is most helpful, where he says that this right relation is a free gift from God, effected by Christ, in which we participate through faith. 3 For further elaboration on Jesus’ instructions not to retaliate in kind to evildoers (Matt 5:38–48), see Reid, “Violent Endings,” 242–48; Richard A. Horsley, “Ethics and Exegesis: ‘Love Your Enemies’ and the Doctrine of Non-Violence,” JAAR 54 (1986): 3–31; Luise Schottroff, “Non-Violence and the Love of One’s Enemies,” in Essays on the Love Commandment (ed. Reginald Fuller; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 9–39; and Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992): 175–84.

382 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

the path of forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation. Jesus concludes: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48). The translation of teleios as “perfect” is unfortunate. The Greek word connotes not so much moral perfection, which is unattainable, but more the sense of completeness, maturity, and full development.4 The Revised English Bible captures well this nuance in its translation: “There must be no limits to your goodness, as your heavenly Father’s goodness knows no bounds.” Several of Matthew’s parables portray God similarly, as One who extends bounteous graciousness. The image of the sower, who casts the seed profligately on every kind of soil (13:1–9), speaks of the divine generosity and inclusivity in extending beneficence to all, without discrimination.5 In the parable of the straying sheep, the godly shepherd is one who relentlessly seeks out the lost and ensures that not a single one is ever left to wander (18:12–14). In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the god-like owner repeatedly goes out himself to the marketplace, hiring laborers at all different hours (20:1–16a). At the end of the day, when the payment is given out, all receive a full day’s wage. When one who worked the whole day complains, the owner responds that he is doing him no injustice.6 Divine righteousness ensures that all have enough money to feed their families at the end of the day, regardless of the amount of work they have done. When Jesus enacted such extravagant offers of graciousness, he was roundly criticized as a “glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” He responded to these charges, “Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds” (11:19). The verb edikaio3the3, “is vindicated,” is once again, from the same root as “righteousness,” redefining right relation as that which proceeds from divine boundless graciousness that is extended to all. Rather than root out evildoers, the divine impulse is to seek them out and bring them into reconciled communion with others. The parable of the yeast hidden in the dough suggests that God, like a bakerwoman, deliberately inserts what is corrupt7 into the mix. This action has the effect of transforming the whole loaf. This parable is startling not only for its portrayal of how transformation is effected, but also for its depiction of God in female form. While the image of Father predominates in Matthew’s Gospel,8 there are, in addition to this parable of the bakerwoman, numerous instances in which Jesus is likened to Woman Wisdom, thus revealing the incarnation of God in female form. Jesus’ itinerant mission, with nowhere to lay his head (Matt 8:20) recalls that of Woman Wisdom, who roams over all the earth for a resting place (Sir 24:7), and seeks out those in need of her message in all the streets and village squares (Prov 1:20). Like Woman Wisdom, who invites those in need of instruction, “put your neck under her yoke” (Sir 51:26), so Jesus offers, “take my yoke upon you, and learn from me” (11:29). Just as Wisdom suffers rejection (Prov 1:23–25; Sir 15:7–8; Wis 10:3; Bar 3:12), so, too,

4

This is also the sense of the Hebrew word ta4mîm, as in Deut 18:13. See BDAG, 995; BDB, 1070. This outreach to all stands in tension with Jesus’ instructions to the disciples as they go forth on mission, to go only “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (10:6). Later, Jesus asserts to the Canaanite woman that his own mission includes only “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (15:24). The command to go and make disciples of all nations is given by Christ only after the resurrection (28:20). 6 The Greek verb adikeo3, “to do wrong, act wickedly,” is from the same root as dikaiosyne3, “righteousness.” 7 In biblical tradition, leaven always symbolizes corruption. Exodus 12:15–20, 34 prescribes the eating of unleavened bread for the Passover, which first recalls the Israelites’ hasty departure from Egypt. Later, however, unleavened bread is interpreted as holy (e.g ., Lev 2:11). In Matt 16:6, Jesus cautions his disciples against the “leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees,” which the disciples interpret as false teaching (16:11–12; see also Mark 8:15; Luke 12:1). Twice, Paul issues warnings against corruption using leaven: 1 Cor 5:6–7; Gal 5:9. 8 In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus speaks about or addresses God as “Father” 42 times. 5

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 383

does Jesus. Yet, as Matt 11:19 asserts, Jesus, Wisdom incarnate, will be proved righteous.

A HARSH AND PUNISHING GOD In contrast to these many Matthean texts that offer an image of God as ever-gracious, extending boundless mercy, there are eight parables with vivid depictions of violent consequences for those who do evil. Four of these parables are unique to Matthew: the weeds and the wheat (13:36–43); the dragnet (13:49–50); forgiveness aborted (18:23–35); and the final judgment (25:31–46). In the other four, treacherous tenants (21:33–46); the wedding feast (22:1–14); faithful servants (24:45–51); and the talents (25:14–30), Matthew makes more explicit and intense the evildoing and the ensuing punishments than do Mark and Luke. First, we look at the parables unique to Matthew. In the allegorical interpretation9 of the parable of the weeds and the wheat (13:36–43), the weeds are equated with the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sows the weeds is the devil. While the farmer in the parable first insists on forbearance, allowing the weeds and wheat to grow together, all changes dramatically at the harvest time.10 At the end of the age, the angels of the Son of Humanity collect all evildoers, “and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (13:42). The righteous, on the other hand, “will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (13:43). A similar ending is found in the parable of the net. After the net is hauled ashore with all kinds of fish, the good are put into baskets, while the bad are thrown out. This sorting is likened to the end of the age, when the “angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth ” (13:49–50).11 Another uniquely Matthean parable is that of the slave who has been offered forgiveness for a huge debt, but who refuses to extend the same kind of forgiveness to another who is indebted to him (18:23–35). Like the parable of the weeds and the wheat, which begins with the landowner displaying benevolence and forbearance, so this parable presents first an exceedingly gracious image of the king, who erases the entire debt of his slave. But when the other servants report to him that the slave failed to reciprocate mercy to other slaves, the king rescinds his own merciful action and hands over the first slave “to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt” (18:34). The parable concludes: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart” (18:35). The parable of the final judgment (Matt 25:31–46) ends in similar fashion. The king separates

9 In most gospel parables, Jesus does not give an explanation or interpretation. One of the characteristics of parables is that they are left open-ended, allowing the hearer to wrestle with the meaning. Two exceptions are the parable of the sower (Matt 13:1–9), which is explained allegorically in Matt 13:18–23; the parable of the weeds and the wheat (Matt 13:24–30) is explained in Matt 13:36–43. On the characteristics of parables and methods of parable interpretation, see Barbara E. Reid, Parables for Preachers: Year A (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 2001), 5–26. 10 Harvest is frequently used as a metaphor for the end-time. See Matt 13:8, 30, 39; 21:34, 41; Mark 4:29. 11 The phrase “weeping and gnashing of teeth” is one of Matthew’s favorites. It occurs six times: Matt 8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30.

384 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

people one from another like a shepherd who separates the sheep from the goats. Those on the right are blessed and invited into their inheritance in the kingdom. Those on the left are cursed, and told to depart from the king “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (25:41). Not having given food to the hungry or drink to the thirsty, and failing to welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned, these are sent off into eternal punishment. In the parables that Matthew redacts from Mark or Q, he intensifies the violent punishments for those who do evil. One, the parable of the wicked tenants, is found in all three Synoptic Gospels. The other three come from Q and are found in similar form in Matthew and Luke. In Mark’s version of the parable of the wicked tenants (Mark 12:1–12), after the tenants have seized, beaten, insulted, and killed the slaves, and even the son who had been sent to collect the harvest, Jesus poses the question, “What then will the owner of the vineyard do?” He answers the question himself: “He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others” (v. 9). Luke retains this same wording in his conclusion (20:16). In Matthew’s version (21:33–46), those listening to the parable give the answer: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time” (21:41). Matthew heightens the wretchedness of the evildoers and intensifies the miserable punishment they will receive. In all three versions, Jesus then quotes Ps 118 about the stone rejected by the builders. Matthew and Luke add a further warning: “The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls” (Matt 21:44; Luke 20:18). The parable of the wedding feast is found in Matt 22:1–14 and Luke 14:15–24. In Matthew’s version, the king’s slaves who are sent to tell those invited that the banquet is ready, are seized, treated shamefully, and killed (v. 6). The enraged king then sends his troops and destroys those murderers and burns their city (v. 7). Another group of servants is dispatched to go into the streets and gather all whom they find, both evil and good (v. 10). In Luke’s version, the invitees are not characterized as evil and good. Rather, the emphasis is on compelling all from the highways and hedges to come in. In Matthew’s conclusion (vv. 11–14), the king confronts an improperly attired guest, and commands his attendants: “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (v. 13). In the parable of the faithful servants (Matt 24:45–51), also found in Luke 12:41–48, a slave is put in charge of the household, and is to give the other slaves their allowance of food at the proper time. If he is found at work when the master comes, he is blessed and put in charge of all the master’s possessions. But if he is a wicked slave and beats his fellow slaves and eats and drinks with drunkards, then the master will “cut him in pieces and put him with the hypocrites, where there is

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 385

weeping and gnashing of teeth” (v. 51). Matthew adds the descriptor “wicked” in v. 48 (cf. Luke 12:45) and supplies his favorite phrase, “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (v. 51). Finally, in the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14–30), a man going on a journey entrusts his property to his slaves in varying amounts. In the Lukan version (Luke 19:11–27), the nobleman gives each one pound. Both Matthew and Luke characterize the one who failed to make more money as “wicked” (Matt 25:26; Luke 19:22). Matthew intensifies the condemnation of the slave as “lazy,” (v. 26) and “worthless” (v. 30). In Luke’s version, the slave who did not invest the money simply has it taken away from him, while the nobleman in Matthew orders his enemies who did not want him to be made king over them to be slaughtered in his presence. Typically, in Matthew’s version, the master orders the slave to be thrown “into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (25:30). The punishments meted out to evildoers in these eight parables, where evildoers are thrown into a fiery furnace, crushed, destroyed, put to a miserable death, and cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, present a vastly different image from the boundless, ever-gracious God described in the Sermon on the Mount (5:44–48). Believers are faced with a serious dilemma: which God is with us? The harsh punisher or the all-forgiving giver of grace? In which one do we place our trust? Which one should we emulate?

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS There are a number of ways we can explain these opposite images of God in Matthew’s Gospel. I will offer several different possibilities, evaluate the merits of each, and reflect on the ethical implications they present. 1. Matthew’s misinterpretation. It is notable that the parables that present the image of God as one who punishes evildoers harshly come primarily from Matthew’s hand. Four are unique to Matthew and the four that come from the Q source have details added by Matthew that heighten the intensity of the punishment. One possibility is that Matthew, while preserving in the Sermon on the Mount the teaching of Jesus about an all-gracious God, still finds such an image impossible to embrace fully. Reward and punishment according to one’s deeds is a far easier image of God to accommodate than one whose love is unconditional and boundless. If we accept the latter, then we are not in control and our response to such graciousness is much harder to define. From this explanation, we can derive both comfort and challenge. We can see consistency in Jesus’ teaching about an ever-gracious God and derive great comfort from that. At the same time,

386 Interpretation

OCTOBER2010

it presents us with a challenge, pointing out how difficult it is to accept this image, when even the evangelists could not fully take it in. Matthew is not the only evangelist who depicts God as punitive. For example, in the last three parables we examined, Luke’s conclusions also advance retaliatory punishment for evildoers. 2. Differing strands of tradition. Another possibility is that the divergent images of God come from different strands of tradition. Matthew, like the wise scribe, “brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt 13:52), weaving together various sources with varying theologies. Not wanting to lose anything that has been handed on to him, Matthew preserves both a tradition that portrays God as extending graciousness to the unrighteous alongside other strands in which God violently punishes evildoers. What becomes problematic for the believer is how to know which image of God to emulate in what circumstances. 3. Ethics for beginners and for advanced believers. Another method is to understand Matthew as a wise teacher who offers different scenarios for believers who are at diverse levels of ability to apprehend the gospel. He aims the frightening scenarios of dire consequences for evildoing at disciples who are at a stage of moral development where they are best motivated by reward and punishment. For more mature disciples, he offers the advanced teaching of love of enemies in imitation of an ever-gracious God. One difficulty is that the gospel itself does not clearly distinguish which way is the more advanced. Might one misunderstand that violent punishment is warranted if love of enemies doesn’t work, since that is the narrative sequence of the gospel? 4. False identification of God figures. A different approach is to question whether the kings and masters in the parables are meant to be metaphors for God. In a patriarchal culture, where our dominant image of God is as a powerful male, we tend to presume that these characters in the stories represent God. Another approach is to see these characters simply as human figures, and the parables in which they figure are intended to unmask the violence of the systems they perpetuate. In the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14–30), for example, if the hearer stands with the slave who hides the one talent, and presumes a world view of limited good, rather than a capitalistic system where unfettered increase is possible, then the slave is a laudable whistle-blower. He is only wicked and lazy in the eyes of a greedy, acquisitive master and in the eyes of the fellow slaves who have been co-opted by the system. From this stance, the third slave is the honorable one who unmasks the wickedness of the master. The parable offers a warning to the rich to stop exploiting the poor, and it encourages those who are exploited to take measures that expose the destructiveness of systems that feed on greed. The violent reprisals against the third slave are not punishment for wrongdoing, but a sober reminder of what can happen to those who oppose the rich and powerful.12

12 See Richard L. Rohrbaugh, “A Peasant Reading of the Parable of the Talents/Pounds: A Text of Terror?” BTB 23 (1993): 32–39; William R. Herzog II, The Parables as Subversive Speech (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994): 150–68.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 387

Similarly, the parable of the weeds and wheat (13:24–30) can be read as one that depicts the undoing of an exploitive landowner. From the perspective of the slaves, the landowner, rather than a figure for God, could represent an absentee landowner with little knowledge of farming. The parable does not say whether his plan to let the weeds and the wheat grow together succeeded. Peasant laborers might hear the story as one in which an exploitive landowner makes an unwise decision, thinking that his benefit will be all the greater when he can use the mature weeds for fuel. From this perspective, the parable offers a warning to those of the landed class and hope to slaves, as it depicts the undoing of an exploitive system. In the same vein, in the parable of the king who forgives the debt of his slave (18:21–35), the king can be read, instead of a figure for God, as a calculating monarch, who calls in one of his high level functionaries in order to remind him who has the power. When the servant falls down and worships the king, begging for patience and assuring his loyalty, this is precisely the response the king desires. The king has won the honor and shame game, and decides to retain the servant. The fatal flaw of the servant is that he does not replicate this action with those under him. The king has shown him how to exact loyalty, adulation, and recognition of power. By not imitating him, the slave has shamed the king. In a dramatic reversal, the king metes out the same kind of punishment to the first slave as this one imposed on his underlings. This line of interpretation, which does not identify the kings and masters with God, may be possible on the level of the original parables as Jesus told them. However, in at least two of the parables, Matthew does explicitly equate a landowner with Jesus and a powerful king with God. In the allegorical explanation of the weeds and the wheat (13:36–43), the one who sowed the good seed is explicitly said to be the Son of Humanity (13:37) and the enemy who sowed the weeds is the devil (v. 39). In the parable of the unforgiving debtor, the king who hands over the slave to the torturers is equated with the heavenly Father (18:35). 5. The end-time crisis. Another factor to consider is that the depictions of punitive action by God are set in the moment of end-time crisis. The parable of the final judgment (25:31–46) is clearly a final reckoning. Both the parable of the weeds and the wheat and that of the net speak about the end of the age (13:40, 49). The parable of the wicked tenants is set at harvest time (21:34), a frequent eschatological image. The parable of the wedding banquet (22:1–14) evokes the eschatological banquet envisioned by Isaiah, to which people come from all directions (Isa 25:6–10; Matt 8:11). It also stresses readiness (22:8), an end-time virtue. In addition, there are eschatological overtones in the parable of the faithful servant who is ready for the unexpected arrival of the master (24:50). The settling of accounts by the king (18:23) and the finality of the punishment (18:34) in the parable of the unforgiving slave also evoke end-time reckoning.

388 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

What each of these parables depicts is that there is a finite amount of time to respond in kind to the graciousness and forgiveness that is repeatedly and unconditionally offered by God. The image of God offered in the Sermon on the Mount is what disciples are to emulate in the here and now. As one experiences the unceasing mercy and grace of a God whose love grows ever wider, so one’s capacity to extend such to others expands. If one refuses to let God’s beneficence take effect, and instead perpetuates cycles of violence and victimization, then there will be consequences, and they will be lasting. In the end-time parables, Matthew asserts that there will come a time when the opportunity for setting one’s course in imitation of God’s graciousness will be past and the time of final reckoning arrives. For those who have grown in imitation of the all-merciful One, the end is not a time to be feared, but is rather the culmination of the way of right relation for all eternity. From this perspective, there is no dilemma for believers about which image of God to emulate. The end-time judgment and punishment belong to God alone and is not something to be emulated by human beings. The problem is that all too often Christians are tempted to apply the end-time separation of evildoers from righteous ones in the present time. Most hear in the gospel an assurance that they belong to the saved, while others whom they perceive as evildoers are condemned. Making rigid demarcations between good and evil in the present time does not allow them to face the mix of righteousness and wickedness within each person and in each community. Not perceiving one’s own capacity for evil is one sure step toward being able to regard another as enemy and as the embodiment of evil that must be rooted out, even by violent means, if need be. Reading how God punishes evildoers harshly, human beings in positions of power may falsely abrogate to themselves the power to determine who is an evildoer and to mete out punishment, and even execution. 6. Getting what you choose. Another consideration is that the end-time punishment envisioned by these parables may not represent the desire of God to establish righteousness through punitive measures, but rather, show the unavoidable consequences that people call upon themselves when they refuse to imitate the gratuitous, unearned love of God. Instead, when they choose to act violently and unlovingly toward others, they themselves become, by their own choice, victims of the forces that they unleash. The parable of the unforgiving servant (18:23–35) best illustrates this. When he decides not to emulate the cycle of forgiveness initiated by the king, he sets in motion opposite forces, tit-for-tat calculations, that result in severe consequences for non-payment. The choice made by the slave is not a neutral one. If he thinks he can make his own way without heeding the kings’ manner, he will be brought up short by the effects of his own choices. If he prefers exact accounting and tit-for-tat measures, such will be applied to him as well. Love and graciousness is freely given by God, but those who fail to let their hearts be transformed by divine mercy (18:35), and do not act toward others in the manner they themselves have been treated, will

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 389

find this treatment redounding to them like a boomerang. The vivid language and frightening images in the end-time parables are hyperboles, not to be taken literally as to how God acts, but meant to impress upon the hearer the seriousness with which they must take Jesus’ message. It is not a neutral choice, but one which carries dire consequences if refused.

CONCLUSION In the end, these explanations are not all mutually exclusive. Matthew depicts an evergracious God of boundless forgiveness, love, and patience, whose intent is to be ever with us in ever-widening circles of mercy. This message, however, is very hard to accept. It is so much easier to know how to relate to a God who exacts payment for sin and whose love must be earned. Our sense of right order is deeply challenged by a God who does not repay tit for tat. Not only is this image of God difficult to embrace, but the expectation that we will emulate such a manner in our dealings with others, can seem an utter impossibility. Doesn’t it give free reign to evildoers? This latter question is answered with the end-time parables, where it is not the case that God actively desires a harsh end for those who oppose the divine ways, but such people set in motion cycles of violence that redound upon themselves by their own choices. Matthew portrays the seriousness of one’s ethical response to God’s gracious invitation. The God of mercy and grace remains always with us if we are willing to accept and be transformed by this unmerited gift. One challenge that remains for contemporary believers is the obstacle that is posed when the image of the One who extends boundless favor is set forth as a king, landowner, or master. The kind of power these figures represented in the Roman imperial world of first century Palestine is totally antithetical to the manner of action exercised by the all-gracious and boundlessly loving One. The image of a woman hiding yeast in the bread dough and kneading it until all of it is leavened, may be a much more fitting metaphor for God’s subversive and agitating actions that have the power to transform the whole world. As beneficent as a king may be, he is still a representative of a system of power that rests on violent means of domination and submission. While some of Matthew’s parables offer uncharacteristic images of patriarchal figures, they remain, for the most part, patriarchal at the core, sending a mixed message about a God who is and is not like a king, lord, and master in an exploitative world. The final image in this gospel is that of God-with-us as the One whose power of love overcomes all forces of evildoing, even death, empowering all who believe in him to pass this image on to others. This is the one who is with us til the end of the age (28:20).

“Wherever This Good News Is Proclaimed”:1 Women and God in the Gospel of Matthew DOROTHY JEAN WEAVER Professor of New Testament Eastern Mennonite Seminary A careful examination of Matthew’s narrative reveals a striking portrait of those who in the patriarchal world of first-century Palestine are largely people of little power and low esteem. To bring God into the story of women is ultimately, for Matthew, to grant women extraordinary and unanticipated significance for the life and the faith of the people of God.

T

o speak of “Women and God” within the Gospel of Matthew is to trace a significant yet seldom explored motif within Matthew’s narrative.2 A search of the canonical Gospels for a prominent focus on women leads readily to the detailed and colorful stories of women recounted uniquely by Luke3 and John.4 Matthew’s narrative portrayal of women, by contrast, derives largely from stories found in his prominent literary sources, Mark and Q. And Matthew’s unique additions are few in number and sparse overall in their depictions of women.5 While Matthew’s narrative portrayal of women appears, at first glance, less prominent and vivid than those of his counterparts, a careful examination of Matthew’s narrative reveals a striking portrait of those who in the patriarchal world of first-century Palestine are largely people of little power and low esteem. And Matthew’s corresponding narrative depiction of “Women and God” offers significant food for theological reflection. Matthew’s portrayal of women, set against the backdrop of a thoroughgoing patriarchal context and reflecting Matthew’s own patriarchal worldview,6 lends an undeniable irony to the character of Matthew’s story. This irony is a two-level phenomenon in which the evident realities of Matthew’s narrative world (i.e., the “lower-level” portrait) are frequently subverted by Matthew’s own narrative rhetoric, as he paints for the discerning reader a crucially different “upper-level” portrait.7 1

Matthew 26:13a. All biblical citations are from the NRSV unless otherwise designated. But see Amy-Jill Levine, “Matthew,” in The Women’s Bible Commentary (ed. Carol A Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 252–62; Rosemary M. Dowsett, “Matthew,” in The IVP Women’s Bible Commentary (ed. Catherine Clark Kroeger and Mary J. Evans; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2002), 517–41; Amy-Jill Levine with Marianne Blickenstaff, eds., A Feminist Companion to Matthew (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 2004). 3 Thus, Elizabeth and Mary (1:5–25, 26–38, 39–56, 57–60; 2:1–52); Anna (2:36–38); Martha and Mary (10:38–42); the crippled woman (13:10–17); the woman searching for her coin (15:8–10); the widow seeking justice (18:1–8); the widow with the two coins (21:1–4); and the “daughters of Jerusalem” (23:26–31). 4 Thus, Jesus’ mother at Cana (2:1–12) and at the cross (19:25–27); the Samaritan woman (4:1–42); Mary and Martha (11:1–45); and Mary Magdalene (20:1–18). 5 Thus, the women of Matthew’s genealogy (1:3, 5, 6, 16); Mary and the women of Bethlehem (1:18–25; 2:1–23); the “antithetical” saying on adultery (5:27–30); the prostitutes who enter the kingdom of God (21:28–32); Pilate’s wife (27:19). The one extended story about women unique to Matthew’s narrative is the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (25:1–13). 6 Cf. Janice Capel Anderson, “Matthew: Gender and Reading” in A Feminist Companion to Matthew, 29. 7 Thus, D. C. Muecke (The Compass of Irony [London: Methuen , 1969], 19–20), who depicts irony as a “doublelayered or two-storey phenomenon” in which “the lower level is the situation either as it appears to the victims of the irony . . . or as it is deceptively presented by the ironist” and “the upper level is the situation as it appears to the observer or the ironist.” 2

OCTOBER 2010

Interpretation 391

Thus, to ask about “Women and God” within Matthew’s Gospel is to delineate both the lower-level portrait of women visible within the broad outlines of Matthew’s narrative world and the upperlevel portrait that emerges ironically from Matthew’s surprising subversion of his own story. To bring God into the story of women is ultimately, for Matthew, to overturn conventional social and religious perspectives and to grant women extraordinary and unanticipated significance for the life and the faith of the people of God.

W O M E N I N T H E W O R L D O F M AT T H E W ’ S N A R R AT I V E : T H E L O W E R LEVEL PERSPECTIVE To assess the women of Matthew’s Gospel from a lower-level perspective is to look primarily at their sociocultural status within the world that they inhabit. A primary sociocultural indicator is family relationship. Matthew identifies women largely by means of their relationships or their marital status within family structures. These women are “virgins” who join in the wedding festivities of the village (25:1, 7, 11) and “virgins” engaged to be married (1:23; cf. 1:18). They are “daughters” (9:18; 10:35, 37; 14:6; 15:22, 28) and “sisters” (2:50; 13:56; 19:29), “mothers-in-law” (8:14; 10:35) and “daughters-in-law” (10:35), “wives,”8 “divorced” women (5:31, 32; 19:3, 7, 8, 9), and childless widows (22:23–28). Their most prominent role, however, is to conceive and give birth to children. The women of Matthew’s narrative are those who “come together” with their husbands in sexual union (1:18; cf. 19:5); those “in whom” children are “conceived” (1:20); those who are “pregnant” or “with child” (1:18; 24:19); those with children in their “womb” (19:12); those of whom children are “born” (1:3, 5, 6, 16; cf. 2:1; 11:11); those who “bear” children (1:21, 23, 25; cf. 2:2); and “those who nurse” their infants (24:19; cf. 21:16). Women are frequently associated with their “children,”9 whether “daughters” (10:35, 37; 14:6; 15:22, 28) or “sons” (20:20, 21). These are the “mothers”10 of Matthew’s narrative, a designation occurring almost as frequently as the word “woman/wife.”11 Within the patriarchal worldview of first-century Palestine, the dual roles of “wife” and “mother” are clearly the preeminent and socially sanctioned means by which women participate in the life of the local community and fulfill their destiny within society. Matthew likewise portrays women who live out alternative social/sexual roles, namely as “prostitutes” (porne: 21:31, 32)12 and those guilty of “unchastity” (porneia: 5:32; 19:9). The shame associated with such women is reflected in the colloquial association of “prostitutes” with “tax collectors” (21:31–32), Jewish collaborators with Rome, who have a notorious reputation in their own community (5:46, 47; 9:11; 11:19; 18:17; 21:31, 32). And John the Baptist is blunt and unyielding

8

Thus, 1:20, 24; 5:31, 32; 14:3; 18:25; 19:3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 29; 22:24, 25, 28; 27:19. Thus, 2:11, 13, 14, 18, 20, 21; 14:21; 15:38; cf. 18:25; 19:13, 29. Thus, 1:18; 2:11, 13, 14, 20, 21; 10:35, 37; 12:46, 47, 48, 49, 50; 13:55; 14:8, 11; 15:4, 5, 6; 19:5, 12, 19, 29; 20:20; 27:56. 11 Matthew uses the term “mother” 27 times and the term “woman/wife” 30 times. 12 See also Matthew’s references to women in Jesus’ family line who are viewed as “prostitutes”: Tamar (1:3; cf. Gen 38:1–30) and Rahab (1:5; cf. Josh 2:1–21; 6:22–25). 9

10

392 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

in his legal challenge to Herod, vis-à-vis Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip: “It is not lawful for you to have her” (14:4). Matthew also identifies women in terms of ethnicity, social status, and daily activities. The ethnic profile of the women of Matthew’s narrative is predominantly Jewish, but also includes Canaanite (15:22; 1:5; cf. Josh 2:1),13 Moabite (1:5; cf. Ruth 1:4), and Roman (27:19) elements.14 And according to biblical history, the “queen of the South” (12:42) hails from Sheba deep in the Arabian Desert (1 Kgs 10:1; 2 Chron 9:1). In terms of social status, the women of Matthew’s narrative range from persons of power and privilege—“the wife of Uriah” (1:6); “the queen of the South” (12:42); Herodias and her daughter (14:3–4, 6–8, 11); and the wife of Pilate (27:19)—to young servant girls in the household of Caiaphas (27:69, 71). Women of power and privilege lead lives reflecting their status. Royal consorts give birth to renowned offspring (1:6; cf. 12:42). Queens travel extraordinary distances to “listen to the wisdom” of other monarchs (12:42). Daughters of privilege “dance” before rulers and their guests to celebrate auspicious occasions (14:6). Powerful mothers instigate nefarious plots against political enemies and “prompt” their daughters to enact them (14:8, cf. 14:9–11). Wives of Roman governors “send word” to their husbands on behalf of political prisoners (27:19). And even ordinary women occasionally emerge as people with “very costly” items in their possession and at their disposal (26:7). The majority of women within Matthew’s narrative are ordinary village women from Bethlehem (1:18–25; 2:1–23), Nazareth (13:54–58; cf. 2:23; 12:46–50), and the Galilee.15 Accordingly, women’s activities within Matthew’s story are largely the typical duties of those who maintain village households: “grinding” at the mill (24:41); “mixing” yeast and flour to make bread dough (13:33); “buying” lamp oil from the merchants (25:9–10); “trimming” the lamp (25:7); “lighting” the lamp and “setting” it on the lampstand (5:15); “spinning” wool (6:28); “nursing” their children (24:19; cf. 21:16); and “serving” men (8:15; 27:55; cf. 6:25, 31). These women also participate actively in the celebrations and death rituals of village life, escorting bridegrooms to wedding festivities (25:1–13) and anointing the bodies of the dead for burial (26:6–13). However, beneath all the apparent normalcy and routine of these women’s world lies a profound vulnerability that pervades and shapes their life experiences in crucial, challenging, and sometimes brutal ways. Much of this vulnerability relates to women’s status within a male-dominated society and patriarchal family structures. These women are the objects of “lust” by men who “look at” them with evil intentions (5:28) and the victims of harassment by men who “trouble” them in verbal interactions (26:10; cf. 26:8–9). They are subject to regular and sometimes pro-

13 Tamar (1:3) is a woman whose identity in Gen 38:6 might be “Canaanite” along with that of her mother-inlaw Shua (Gen 38:2). But see Levine’s note to the contrary (“Matthew,” 253). 14 “The wife of Uriah [the Hittite]” (1:6, cf. 2 Sam 11:3; 12:10) is identified in 2 Sam 11:3 as the “daughter of Eliam,” a man with a Hebrew name. Thus, she is evidently Hebrew and not Hittite. Cf. Levine, “Matthew,” 253. 15 Matt 8:14–15; 9:18–26; 14:21; 15:38; 20:20–21; 27:55–56, 61; 28:1–11a. Cf. 19:13, where it seems most likely that mothers have brought their children to Jesus.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 393

longed ritual impurity due to their menstrual bleeding (9:20). Unmarried women run the fearsome risk of being “found . . . with child” and therefore suspected of inappropriate sexual liaisons (1:18). And they face the shame and danger of being “exposed . . . to public disgrace” (1:19) due to such pregnancies.16 Married women are likewise vulnerable. On the one hand, their husbands may save them from “public disgrace” (1:19), protect them from physical dangers (2:13–14, 19–21; cf. 2:22–23), and support them as childless widows through levirate marriage (22:24–28; 1:5; cf. Ruth 3:1–4:15). On the other hand, their husbands may divorce them “for any cause” (19:3; cf. 1:19; 5:31; 19:7, 8). If tragedy strikes, their next of kin may simply abandon them to their fate as childless widows rather than providing them with new husbands (1:3; cf. Gen 38:1–26). Men of power can do as they wish with married women and their husbands (1:6; cf. 2 Sam 11:1–27). Beyond the vulnerability of women’s status within a patriarchal society lies the vulnerability associated with women’s physical and political powerlessness vis-à-vis the forces of violence in the world they inhabit. Women can be thrown into debtor’s prison along with their husbands and children (18:23–25). They are vulnerable to vicious death threats on their children that transform entire families into political refugees (2:13–15; cf. 2:22). They experience the brutal massacre of their infants at the instigation of paranoid tyrants (2:16). They witness the grim horror of public executions, carried out by the occupying powers against their Jewish compatriots (27:55–56). They face the bitter prospect of enduring chaos and suffering as “pregnant” women and “nursing” mothers (24:19; cf. 24:15–22). In the face of all this violence, these women can do nothing more than “weep” for their murdered infants (2:17–18); “look on from a distance” at public crucifixions (27:55); “see” the tombs of those who have been executed (28:1); and, when necessary, “flee to the mountains” to save their own lives (24:16; cf. 24:20). Such is the real world for the women of Matthew’s story, and such is their fundamental vulnerability. Matthew’s narrative paints a compelling and realistic lower-level portrait of women and their secondary, often endangered, status within the patriarchal society and the Roman-occupied world of first-century Palestine.

W O M E N A N D G O D I N M AT T H E W ’ S N A R R AT I V E : T H E U P P E R - L E V E L PERSPECTIVE For Matthew, this lower-level portrait of women serves merely as the backdrop for a narrative in which everyday reality is frequently turned on its head and delicious ironies abound. Matthew’s upper-level portrait of “women and God” is stunning in its impact and far-reaching in its implica-

16 According to Jewish law, such “public disgrace” calls for the execution of the woman along with her sexual partner (Lev 20:10; Deut 22:22–24; cf. John 8:5). But Matthew does not specify the “public disgrace” that Joseph seeks to avoid (1:19).

394 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

tions. This upper-level portrait stretches from the opening lines of Matthew’s narrative (1:1–25) to its concluding scenes (28:1–20). 1. Women, God, and the birth of Jesus (1:1–2:23). Matthew’s narrative opens with the genealogy of Jesus, a patrilineal family line that traces Jewish history from Abraham (1:1, 2, 17) to Jesus the Messiah (1:1, 16, 17). In standard patrilineal fashion, this genealogy proceeds from “father” to “son” (“and _____ was the father of _____”) through forty-two generations neatly subdivided into three fourteen-generation eras of Jewish history: “from Abraham to David” (1:17a; cf. 1:2–6), “from David to the deportation to Babylon” (1:17b; cf. 1:6–11), and “from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah” (1:17c; cf. 1:12–16). The sheer force of verbal repetition, the seemingly endless list of men’s names, and the inexorable movement from Abraham, the “father” of the Jewish people (cf. 3:9, my translation), to his most prominent “son” (1:1), “Jesus . . . who is called the Messiah” (1:16), clearly suggest to the reader that it is men who give Jewish history its meaning and propel history towards its climax. Even more crucially, this genealogy stretching from Abraham (1: 2, 17) to “the Messiah” (1:1, 16, 17) points to the inevitable conclusion that God acts through men—specifically fathers and sons—to accomplish God’s plans for God’s people. But into this undeniably patriarchal genealogy with its unmistakable patriarchal theology, Matthew inserts the names of four women “by whom” sons are born to fathers—Tamar (1:3); Rahab (1:5); Ruth (1:5); and the “wife of Uriah” (1:6)—all of them women whose lives reflect sexual irregularities. Tamar (Gen 38:1–30) poses as a prostitute in order to trap her father-in-law Judah into doing his duty and raising up offspring for her dead husband. Rahab (Josh 2:1; 6:22, 25) is a prostitute by vocation. Ruth (Ruth 3:1–14) presents herself to Boaz at the threshing floor during the night in a manner that “must not be known” (Ruth 3:14) to the people of Bethlehem. And the “wife of Uriah” (2 Sam 11:1–27) is taken from her husband’s house to be the consort of David, King of Israel. With these four female interlopers in his patrilineal genealogy, Matthew alerts the reader to a crucial shift. No longer does the significance of the genealogy lie solely in the fact that “fathers” give rise to “sons” in unbroken lineage from Abraham onward to the Messiah. Instead, the very fact that women’s names break the clearly established pattern of the genealogy suggests that women—and specifically, women of vulnerable reputations—play a crucial role within this patrilineal genealogy. And now it becomes clear that God works not only through men but also through women, even women of vulnerable reputations, to accomplish God’s plans for God’s people. The ultimate significance of these women for Matthew’s genealogy does not become fully visible until the end of the family line (1:16). Here, in a stunning rhetorical move that takes the

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 395

reader by surprise, Matthew breaks the linkage between Joseph and Jesus just at the crucial moment. Having followed the line of “fathers” and “sons” from Abraham onward, the reader anticipates that the genealogy will conclude with the standard formula “and Joseph was the father of Jesus . . . who is called the Messiah.” This is what the story demands, since Matthew has already identified Jesus in 1:1 as “the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The tightly formulaic structure of the genealogy clearly demands an equally formulaic conclusion. Instead, the reader learns that Joseph is merely “the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah” (1:16; emphasis mine). Thus, Joseph is not the father of Jesus. Instead, Jesus’ linkage to the messianic family line depends on Joseph’s relationship to Mary, the fifth and climactical woman in Matthew’s genealogy. The reader now knows that there is far more at stake in Matthew’s genealogy than a simple progression of fathers and sons. In 1:18–25, Matthew expands his oblique reference to “Mary, of whom Jesus was born” into a full-blown narrative. And here the strategic role of the previous women finally comes into clear focus. Tamar, Ruth, Rahab, and the wife of Uriah appear in the messianic family line as women of vulnerable reputations precisely to point the way toward Mary, who shares their sexual vulnerability and faces the “public disgrace” (1:19) that accompanies such a status. Here, the reader learns that Mary, who is “engaged” to Joseph but has not yet “lived together” with him, is “found to be with child” (1:18b), an evident sign of her premarital unfaithfulness. The danger could not be greater for Mary and the child in her womb. Joseph’s response could mean not only “disgrace” for Mary, but also the ultimate failure of Abraham’s family line to reach its God-intended climax in the birth of “the Messiah” (1:1, 16, 17, 18). However, Joseph knows nothing of God’s messianic plans for Jesus. Matthew’s immediate clarification that Mary’s child is “from the Holy Spirit” (1:18c) is clearly information offered to the reader alone and not to Joseph. Joseph responds as he must. While he ponders the unthinkable legal response of “public disgrace” for Mary (1:19b), he is a “righteous man” (1:19a) who opts instead for a private divorce (1:19c). Just as Joseph is about to act (1:20a), an “angel of the Lord” appears to him (1:20b), telling him what Matthew’s reader already knows (1:20c–21). This is a “God thing.” Mary’s child is not the child of her unfaithfulness but, rather, a child “conceived from the Holy Spirit” (1:20c). This child has a divinely-ordained vocation to “save his people from their sins” (1:21c). This vocation corresponds to the name “Jesus,” which Joseph himself must give to the child (1:21b). Accordingly, Joseph must “not be afraid” to marry Mary (1:20b). When Joseph wakes, he responds obediently to the command of the angel. He weds Mary, but does not consummate the marriage until her child is born (1:24–25a). And the messianic crisis introduced in 1:16, where Matthew breaks the

396 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

genealogical link between Joseph and Jesus, now finds resolution as Joseph “names [the child] Jesus” (1:25b) and adopts him into the messianic family line.17 The ironies are multiple and manifest. Matthew sets up a tightly-structured patrilineal genealogy, only to subvert its force and transform its significance through the strategic insertion of women’s names. Even more crucially, Matthew sets up a messianic genealogy intended to climax in the birth of “Jesus the Messiah” (1:1, 16, 18; cf. 1:17), only to break the genealogical linkage between Jesus and his male forebears just at the crucial moment (1:16). On the lower level of the story, Joseph suspects Mary of sexual unfaithfulness, even as Matthew informs the reader in upper-level discourse that the child she carries is “from the Holy Spirit” (1:18, 20). And Joseph, whose first thought is to “dismiss [his unfaithful fiancée] quietly” (1:19), learns from a divine messenger that God is at work within Mary’s womb, carrying out God’s ultimate plan to “save” God’s people (cf. 1:21). Role reversals abound. In spite of his narrative prominence, Joseph’s role in this divine initiative is secondary and supportive as he “takes” Mary as his wife (1:20) and “names” her child (1:21). Mary is primarily the object of others’ actions. But her single act, namely “bearing” the son (1:21, 25) conceived in her womb by the Holy Spirit (1:18), is the crucial “God event” in the story, and consequently, the single event around which all other actions revolve. Matthew confirms the world-transforming significance of Mary’s single act with an ironic upper-level message to the reader identifying Mary, the woman of Joseph’s erstwhile suspicions, with the Isaianic “virgin” who will “bear a son” whose name will be “Emmanuel” and whose life will signify that “God is with us” (1:23; cf. Isa. 7:14). Similar rhetorical irony appears in 2:1–23. Here again, Matthew depicts Mary as the object of others’ actions (2:11, 13, 14, 20, 21), while men play leading roles: King Herod (2:1ff.); the “wise men from the East” (2:1ff.); and Joseph (2:14ff.). But here again, Mary is at the center of the drama, since she is inseparable from her child. When the wise men “enter the house” (2:10–11a; cf. 2:1–2), they encounter “the child with Mary his mother” (2:11b, emphasis mine). When the wise men depart, the “angel of the Lord” appears to Joseph with an urgent message concerning “the child and his mother” (2:13, emphasis mine). And as the story unfolds (2:13–15, 19–23), the focus is on Joseph’s unhesitating obedience to the angel’s repeated commands to “take the child and his mother” to places of refuge safely away from the murderous grasp of Herod and his son Archelaus (2:13/14–15a, 20/21; cf. 2:22a/22b). Thus, once again, Joseph plays a secondary and supportive role, this time to “the child and his mother,” whose urgent need for safety serves as the catalyst for all of his activities. Mary, a powerless “mother” with an endangered “child,” is in the ironic rhetoric of Matthew’s narrative one whose plight, in tandem with that of her child, stirs heaven and earth into urgent and extraordinary action.18

17 Thus, Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke (Garden City, N.Y.: Image, 1979), 139. 18 Nor does Matthew overlook the women of Bethlehem (1:16–18) with his ironic rhetoric. These women have no power to prevent the unspeakable horror that overtakes them. When Herod instigates the massacre of their children (2:16), they can only raise their “voice” in “wailing,”“loud lamentation,” and “weeping” for their murdered infants (2:18). Matthew ironically invests the grief of these powerless women with powerful significance, as they assume the role of their ancestral mother “Rachel” (2:18), fulfill the words of their ancestral prophet Jeremiah (2:17; cf. Jer 31:15), and re-enact the tragic history of their ancestors.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 397

As Matthew reveals through his narrative rhetoric, God is at work in the lives of women in unanticipated and extraordinary ways. Women of vulnerable reputation assume crucial significance within the messianic genealogy. A woman suspected of marital unfaithfulness serves as the maternal agent through whom God comes to “be with” God’s people and “save” them. And an “angel of the Lord” repeatedly summons an ordinary man into extraordinary service to protect a powerless woman and her endangered child. Thus from the outset, Matthew’s story of “Women and God” breaks patriarchal patterns, reverses patriarchal roles, and reframes the patriarchal history of God’s salvific acts among humankind.19 2. Women, God, and the ministry of Jesus (3:1–25:46; 27:55–56). Matthew’s portrayal of women in the opening scenes of his narrative (1:1–2:23) finds a reflection in his portrayal of the women associated with Jesus’ ministry. Since Jesus is, for Matthew, none other than “God with us” (cf. 1:23), to ask about “women and God” is to look above all at the ministry of Jesus and his encounters with women. Jesus’ ministry is clearly an “equal opportunity” outreach involving women and even children along with men. When Jesus engages in large-scale healing and feeding ministries (14:13–21; 15:32–39), Matthew pointedly amends his Markan source to highlight the presence of “women and children” in the crowds along with the “men” (14:21, cf. Mark 6:44; 15:38, cf. Mark 8:9).20 Jesus heals women on his own initiative (8:14–15)21 and at the urgent request of other men (9:18–19, 23–26). Women themselves seek Jesus out to find healing for themselves or others, actively and urgently, often at great personal risk. A woman suffering long-term hemorrhages that have made her ritually unclean and thus untouchable (Lev 15:19–30) approaches Jesus from behind and “touches the fringe of his cloak” (9:20) in her desperate search for healing (9:21). A Canaanite woman in the “district of Tyre and Sidon” makes a public nuisance of herself,“shouting” incessantly at Jesus on behalf of her demon-possessed daughter (15:22, 23) and adamantly refusing to take “no” for an answer (15:25, 27) in the face of Jesus’ initial silence (15:23) and his repeated verbal rebuffs (15:24, 26). Just as striking as the urgent appeals are the responses of Jesus. These responses are highly engaged and active. When Jesus arrives at the home of a synagogue official whose daughter has “just died” (9:18), he discovers that mourning rituals are already underway. So, he first orders “the flute players and the crowd making a commotion” out of the house (9:23b–24), then physically evicts them (9:25a), before he “takes [the girl] by the hand” and raises her out of her “sleep” (9:25; cf. 9:24). Jesus’ responses break crucial boundaries. Jesus does not berate the hemorrhaging woman for violating social norms with her touch or for making him ritually unclean with her bleeding. Instead, he accepts her touch and removes her uncleanness with the words, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well” (9:22).

19 See Dorothy Jean Weaver, “Rewriting the Messianic Script: Matthew’s Account of the Birth of Jesus,” Int 54.4 (October, 2000): 376–85. 20 Similarly, when Jesus “lays his hands” on children (19:15), it seems reasonable to conclude that it is mothers who have “brought” their children to Jesus, although Matthew does not specify this (19:13). 21 But note the Markan parallel (1:29–34), where Simon, Andrew, James, and John “tell” Jesus about Simon’s motherin-law who is sick (1:29–30).

398 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

And Jesus’ responses are highly unexpected. In a stunning scene of reversals, Jesus, who twice rebuffs the Canaanite woman—because his mission is for the “house of Israel” (cf. 15:24) and because the “children’s food” should not be thrown to the “dogs” (15:26)—ultimately loses the battle of words and wits (15:27), acknowledges the “great faith” of the Canaanite woman (15:28a), grants her request (15:28b), and heals her daughter (15:28c). This scene is unprecedented and unparalleled within Matthew’s narrative. No one else accomplishes what this Canaanite woman achieves—debating with Jesus once he has “pronounced” on an issue, winning the debate, and transforming Jesus’ sense of mission and his ministry praxis (15:24; cf. 10:6).22 Jesus is not merely engaged in a healing ministry to women; he also finds himself transformed through this engagement. Jesus likewise reaches out to women through his teaching ministry. To the rich young man who inquires about the “good deed” necessary for eternal life (19:16–22), Jesus commends “the commandments,” including love of father and mother (19:19; cf. Exod 20:12; Deut 5:16). In teaching his disciples (5:1–2), Jesus radically sharpens the force of Mosaic Law (Exod 20:14; Deut 5:18), defining “adultery” in terms of “everyone who looks at a woman with lust” (5:28). And, apart from an exception for “unchastity” (5:32; 19:9), Jesus dismisses outright the Mosaic provision for divorce (5:31; 19:3, 7, 8; cf. Deut 24:1–4). For Jesus, the very act of divorce is tantamount to adultery on all levels: for the divorced woman (5:32a); for the man who marries her (5:32b); and for the man who “divorces his wife . . . and marries another” (19:9). Here, Jesus reaches behind the Mosaic divorce code—granted only as an “allowance” for “hardhearted” humans (19:8)—and invokes the Creator God, who “at the beginning ‘made [human beings] male and female’” (19:4; cf. Gen 1:27) and established marriage as a union in which a man and a woman “become one flesh” (19:5–6a; cf. Gen 2:24). And Jesus concludes, “Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate” (19:6b, emphasis mine). The unprecedented character of Jesus’ sexual and marital ethics is transparent in the words of the men who encounter Jesus’ teachings. The Pharisees ponder a world in which divorce might be legal “for any cause” (19:3). Jesus’ disciples respond to him in stunned disbelief: “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (19:10). Clearly, Jesus’ words transform the social status of women within family structures and, even more crucially, link that transformation to the express will of the Creator God from the beginning of time. While Jesus engages women actively in his healing ministry and transforms their social status through his proclamation, he does not call women into his circle of “disciples.” Instead, this circle comprises twelve men whom Jesus calls to “follow” him (cf. 4:18–22; 9:9) and whom he “sends out” in mission (cf. 10:1–4; 28:18–20). In this regard, Matthew’s story and Jesus’ praxis clearly

22 When Peter attempts a similar feat (16:22), he receives a sharp and instantaneous rebuke (16:23): “Get behind me, Satan!”

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 399

reflect the patriarchal character of first-century Palestinian society. But even here, Matthew offers astonishing hints of a world where women and men serve equally as Jesus’ disciples. Jesus tells parables featuring women who exhibit the characteristics of the “kingdom of heaven” (13:33; 25:1–13). He cites real women—even “prostitutes” (21:31–32)—as positive examples of “faith” (9:22; 15:28) and faithful praxis (12:42; 21:31–32). He expands his circle of disciples exponentially (cf. 12:49) with his pronouncement that “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (12:50). And Jesus portrays women, along with men, facing family divisions on his account (10:35b/c; cf. 10:35a/36), enduring the tribulations of the end times (24:19; cf. 24:17–18), and being “taken” at the Parousia of the Son of Man (24:41; cf. 24:40). Perhaps the most striking portrait of women as “disciples” emerges from Matthew’s depiction of the women who “follow” Jesus (27:55; cf. 20:20) and “serve” him (8:15; 27:55). When Jesus is well on his way to Jerusalem (20:17), “the mother of the sons of Zebedee” shows up in the traveling entourage (20:20). Following Jesus’ crucifixion, Matthew mentions “many women” in the crowd, who have “followed Jesus from Galilee” (27:55). And if women “follow” Jesus, they also “serve” him. When Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law (8:14–15a), she “gets up and begins to serve him” (8:15b). The women who “follow” Jesus from Galilee do so precisely in order to “serve” him (27:55; my translation). The significance of these descriptors is manifest. “Following Jesus” is the defining act by which people become “disciples” (4:20, 22; 9:9; cf.10:38; 16:24). “Serving” is the crucial modality of such discipleship. Just as Jesus has come “not to be served, but to serve” (20:28), so also must Jesus’ disciples (20:26). This “service” is ultimately the basis on which “all the nations” will be judged at the Parousia (25:31–46): “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not [serve] you? (25:44; my translation). Thus, while Matthew does not identify women formally as “disciples,” his narrative rhetoric portrays them as disciples through their deeds. 3. Women, God, and the passion/resurrection of Jesus (26:1–28:20). Matthew concludes his portrayal of women in a mode as sharply ironic as that with which it begins in 1:1–2:23. Here, Matthew not only portrays women as faithful under duress but frequently juxtaposes these women ironically with male counterparts who fail their own fidelity tests.23 Jesus commends the woman who anoints his head with “very costly ointment” (26:7) and credits her with a “good service” (26:10), because she has “prepared [his] body for burial” (26:12). Jesus’ disciples, by contrast, see only “waste” in the woman’s gift (26:8–9). Jesus rebukes them for their lack of insight (26:10–12), and pronounces high praise and unparalleled commendation for the woman’s act (26:13): “Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the

23

But note 27:55–61, where Matthew pairs faithful women (27:55–56, 61) with a faithful man (27:57–60).

400 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” The servant girls in Caiaphas’ household (26:69, 71) exhibit no visible faith in “Jesus the Galilean/Nazarene.” But their persistence in questioning Peter about his own association with Jesus serves ironically to highlight both their truthful proclamation that Peter belongs “with” Jesus (26:69, 71) and Peter’s untruthful denials that he “knows” Jesus (26:70, 72). Pilate’s wife, whose portrait comprises a single verse (27:19), nevertheless stands straight and tall in contrast to her husband (27:1–2, 11–26, 62–66).24 She, like her counterparts Joseph and the wise men, has a “dream” concerning Jesus (27:19d; cf. 1:20–21; 2:12, 13, 19–20, 22) to which she pays heed, “send[ing] word to her husband” on Jesus’ account (27:19b) and pleading for the life of “that innocent man” (27:19c). Although Matthew does not call her a “disciple,” she has, in her words, “suffered” (27:19d) many things on Jesus’ account, just as Jesus’ followers themselves will do (cf. 10:16–23; 24:9–22). Pilate, who knows both Jesus’ innocence (27:23) and the evil motives of Jesus’ enemies (27:18), pays no heed to his wife’s appeal (27:19). Instead, he relinquishes his judicial authority (27:17), proclaims his own “innocence” (27:24), and hands Jesus over for crucifixion (27:26). The women who “follow” Jesus from Galilee and “serve” him throughout his ministry (27:55, my translation) are present at Jesus’ cross (27:55–56) and tomb (27:61), in ironic contrast to Jesus’ male disciples. Judas “hands [Jesus] over” to the Jewish authorities (26:15, my translation; cf. 26:47–49), then “repents” of his “sin” (27:3–4), returns the “blood money” (27:5a; cf. 27:6), and takes his own life (27:5b). The other disciples “desert” Jesus en masse in Gethsemane and “flee” the scene altogether (26:56b). Peter reappears, only to deny that he “knows” Jesus (26:70, 72, 74) and then to “weep bitterly” (26:75). Perhaps most ironic is Matthew’s portrait of the women who “[go] to see the tomb” on the first day of the week (28:1).25 In striking contrast to the Roman guards, these women exhibit total command of their faculties. They maintain open eyes, open ears, and open hearts to the “great earthshaking event” (28:2, my translation) at the tomb and to the divine messenger who communicates its meaning (28:2–3, 5–7). The Roman guards, by contrast, are so “shaken by fear” (cf. 28:4a) that they fall into a “dead” faint, resembling the dead man they have been set to guard (cf. 28:4b). Because the women’s eyes, ears, and hearts are open, they become the crucial actors in the penultimate scene of Matthew’s narrative. Not only do they witness the “great earthshaking event” (28:2, my translation) that reveals the empty tomb (28:2–3, 5–7), they also encounter the risen

24 See Dorothy Jean Weaver, “‘Thus You Will Know Them By Their Fruits’: The Roman Characters of the Gospel of Matthew,” in The Gospel of Matthew in its Roman Imperial Context (ed. John Riches and David C. Sim; New York: T & T Clark International, 2005), 107–27. 25 See Dorothy Jean Weaver, “Matthew 28:1–10,” Int 46.4 (October, 1992): 398–402.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 401

Jesus (cf. 28:8–10). It is only through their obedience, first to the “angel of the Lord” (28:7; cf. 28:8), and then to the risen Jesus (28:10; cf. 28:11), that word of Jesus’ resurrection finally reaches Jesus’ disciples and brings them “to the mountain to which Jesus [has] directed them” (28:16; cf. 28:11). The reunion of Jesus with his disciples (28:16–17) and the climactic and cosmic commission with which Jesus sends them out (28:16–20) are events made possible by the faithfulness of women, Jesus’ first evangelists. Here, at the penultimate moment of his story, Matthew once again reveals through his narrative rhetoric the crucial role of women—even and precisely within a patriarchal world—for the life and the faith of the people of God. Matthew’s narrative concludes as surprisingly as it has begun. And women create the surprise. Let the reader understand.

Coming up next in Interpretation Jan. 2011

Liturgy and Easter third in the church year series

April 2011

Usury

July 2011

Bicultural Perspectives on Reading the Bible

Oct. 2011

Creation Groaning: A Moral and Ethical Issue

Jan. 2012

Liturgy and Pentecost/Trinity Sunday fourth in the church year series

April 2012

The Book of Joshua

July 2012

The Book of Acts

Oct. 2012

Seminary & Church: In This Together

Between Text & Sermon ANDREW FOSTER CONNORS

Matthew 3:13–17

Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church Baltimore, Maryland

IN AN ECUMENICAL EDUCATIONAL EVENT not too long ago, I discovered that many of my colleagues share my weariness with laypeople who just do not understand the sacrament of baptism. We all had stories of people who, despite a demonstrated disinterest in Christian community, somehow felt it critical to “get the baby done” sooner rather than later. Since a significant part of my theological training was spent preparing me to resist this kind of devaluation of sacramental practice, I have upset a few drive-through customers looking to order up this kind of baptism. On those rare occasions when I have given in to these kinds of wrong-headed requests, guilt almost always follows. I find it difficult to participate in a baptism that does not meet the church’s well-defined criteria. I wonder if John felt similarly when Jesus showed up to “get himself done.” I do not mean to imply that the sinless Jesus is somehow equivalent to laypeople looking to check off their child’s holy immunizations. I wish to suggest that we are not the first to have our theological underpinnings for baptism challenged “on the ground.” John lays out a solid theological argument for his own version of baptism only to have Jesus come along and mess it up. John proclaims a baptism of water for repentance—a baptism marked by a decision to turn away from sin and toward God, in preparation for the one ushering in the kingdom of God. Then along comes Jesus, who does not need repentance or the water baptism that marks it, and tells John this water baptism is the way “to fulfill all righteousness.” Our theologians have since worked this out: Matthew’s John the Baptist eliminates Mark’s description of this baptism as efficacious “for the forgiveness of sins.” Jesus does not need this baptism, but chooses it in order to lead others to its waters. To repent means to turn toward God and does not have to imply that Jesus is not already oriented in the correct direction. Yet, I wonder if in all of our theologizing we miss a central truth of Jesus—that while he comes to us in religious categories that have significant meaning to us and for our tradition, he is always disrupting those meanings in shocking, remarkable, and life-giving ways. I was reminded of this recently when a group of new members joined the church. As is customary in my Presbyterian tradition, this group of new members met with our congregation’s governing body to share their faith. A middle-aged lesbian was telling her story, which seemed to fit the typical pattern of a liberal urbanite—raised in the church, followed by a period of anger toward the church, followed by departure from the church. I was expecting her to tell the usual story of how she had overcome her anger or discovered that not all churches have to be exclusionary or hurtful. Instead, she said, “I was walking down the street and someone handed me a fundamentalist religious tract. And I was reading it over and was going to throw it away, but I just kept reading it. And I found myself praying the ‘sinner’s prayer,’ asking Jesus to come into my heart. And he did. I felt this overwhelm-

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 403

ing presence, and I knew that Jesus was with me, calling me to follow him again. And that’s how I ended up in this church.” Looking around the room, I could see the shock on the faces of our leadership. Jesus had disrupted our expectations. John the Baptist’s expectations are disrupted, too, which is somewhat surprising, given that he has just preached to the crowd that the kingdom of heaven has come near. One would think that John, of all people, would not be surprised that the Messiah might actually come near. Here again, even those who handle claims of God’s presence should expect to be caught off guard by the disruptive arrival of Jesus. John, at least, is up front about the shock of Jesus’ baptismal request and the trouble that it causes for his well-designed religious program: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” (v. 14). Jesus’ response only deepens the mystery—“Let it be so for now; for it is proper for us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he consented” (v. 15). Righteousness and fulfillment can be tricky terms, recurring several times in Matthew’s Gospel. In Matthew, Jesus speaks of fulfilling words of the Lord spoken through the prophets, fulfilling the law, and fulfilling all righteousness. He tells his followers that their righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees if they are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (5:20), and that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled (5:6). Drawing from these and other instances (5:10; 6:1, 33), interpretation seems simple enough: “to fulfill all righteousness” means simply to do what is required by God; to do God’s will. Yet, even though the concept is straightforward, this way of baptism chosen by Jesus is a bit of a disappointment. Like many of us who follow Jesus, John has been waiting for the coming of salvation—for the coming of justice and righteousness, for the transformation of the world. For him and for us, it is hard to believe that God’s kingdom can be ushered in with this plain old water baptism. It is hard to believe that his backyard ministry is going to do anything for the God who promises to usher in a new heaven and a new earth. Yet this water baptism is what Jesus chooses, and it is what he intends for his followers to choose as well. It is almost as if Jesus wants us to see—right from the beginning—that we have no idea what we are doing when we come to the font or bring our children to its plain old waters. We have no idea what it will mean for our futures, no idea of how it will affect our lives. Like John, we have no idea how this simple event will bring truth and justice, or help usher in the kingdom, or bring God’s reign a little closer here on earth. We have no theology that has parsed it all out neatly. We have no way to put it in a theological box that comforts us with the details about what we can expect from God and what God expects from us. We have only the assurance that when Jesus, or the Spirit that he sends, shows up, this plain old water baptism really is the way to fulfill all righteousness. Three years ago, a member of my church came to share with me her “trouble with Jesus.” Her problems seemed to be theological in nature, and it was clear she had given those problems some deep and courageous thought. Jesus seemed to be a problem for her. We talked it through, and over the next several months, we read some Christology together and discussed our common study. She proved to be more than competent as a theologian. Then she almost died. A serious

404 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

infection put her in the hospital, and she fell into a coma. She was unconscious for a week. For several days, we kept vigil with her children. One day the medical team almost lost her. Then, as she tells it, she chose to come back. She had not seen any bright lights or walked with Jesus through any tunnels of light, but she had been able to feel, had actually touched, the love of God. She had communed with all the people who had lifted her up in prayer. Today, this disciple is on fire with faith, leading multiple ministries of outreach, justice, and peace. I am familiar with the theological problems involved in attaching God’s name to medical events. I know it is dangerous to open the door to the suggestion that this individual’s illness was anything other than an illness. I profess some discomfort with making these kinds of pronouncements. What I can and do say, is that I have given up trying to exhaust the church’s confession on what happens in baptism. I explain what I know, but I expect God will rock my world with another kind of surprise that does not fit those categories. Perhaps this is part of the reason why Jesus favors a simple water baptism. It is not the water that is unusual. It is not the fancy things that we do or the fancy words that we say that makes it anything special. It is not even the preaching, however rightly the good news is proclaimed, that should cause us to gird up and get ready when the font comes into view. It is, rather, what God can and is doing with ordinary folk who come to be dipped in that plain old water that draws from us, as from John, consent and following. In and from such waters, the kingdom of heaven has come as near as Jesus’ life, and, therefore, ours. Thanks be to God.

Interpretation 405

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Evangelically Rooted.

Critically Engaged.

New from IVP Academic

Reclaiming the Old Testament for Christian Preaching Edited by Grenville J. R. Kent, Laurence A. Turner, Paul J. Kissling Based on the conviction that the Old Testament texts are pertinent to Christian practice, this volume offers guidance for expository preaching. Contributors include: David G. Firth, Tremper Longman III, R. W. L. Moberly, Christopher J. H. Wright and others. 978-0-8308-3887-5, $23.00

“We are fortunate to be studying and preaching on the Old Testament at a time when critical study has produced many approaches to the Old Testament that will aid the preacher. This volume is a most useful guide to the way those approaches resource preaching on different kinds of texts in the Old Testament.” —John Goldingay, Fuller Theological Seminary Follow us on Twitter

Images of Salvation in the New Testament Brenda B. Colijn Brenda Colijn draws on New Testament theology and literary criticism to uncover how New Testament images provide the building blocks of the master story of redemption. 978-0-8308-3872-1, $25.00

“[Brenda Colijn] refuses to flatten images and metaphors into propositions, but rather seeks to unleash afresh their power to transform our experience.” —David A. deSilva, Ashland Theological Seminary

Join us on Facebook

The Drama of Ephesians Timothy G. Gombis Combining elements of commentary and specialized studies in Ephesians, Timothy Gombis has rediscovered Ephesians as a dramatic text that follows the narrative arc of the triumph of God in Christ. 978-0-8308-2720-6, $20.00

“Timothy Gombis has written an eloquent and compelling engagement with Ephesians as an invitation to participate in God’s subversive, dramatic rescue mission. . . . Those who read it will see Ephesians—and themselves—in a whole new light.” —Michael J. Gorman, St. Mary’s Seminary and University

800.843.9487

ivpacademic.com

406 Interpretation

Matthew 11:2–24

OCTOBER 2010

CHARLES H. TALBERT Baylor University Waco, Texas

MATTHEW 11:2–24 IS THE FIRST OF THREE CYCLES lodged in chs. 11–12. Each cycle begins by telling who Jesus is (11:2–15 = the Christ; 11:25–30 = Son; 12:17–21 = Servant). Each then depicts the rejection Jesus meets (11:16–19; 12:1–14; 12:22–24, 38–39). The first and last cycle end with warnings about the consequences of the rejection of Jesus (11:20–24; 12:31–32, 34–37, 39–42, 43–45). Taken together, chs. 11–12 show how the teaching (chs. 5–7) and mighty deeds (chs. 8–9) of Jesus have opened up a division within Israel, a division Jesus reflects upon in ch. 13. Matthew 11:2–24, then, raises two questions for the original auditors of Matthew, questions that are appropriate for today: 1) Do you know with whom you are dealing? and 2) Do you think that how you deal with this one will make any difference for you? Exactly with whom are Jesus’ contemporaries dealing? Matthew 11:2–15 breaks into two segments: 11:2–6 focuses on who Jesus is, and 11:7–15 centers on who John the Baptist is. The latter is no distraction from the former, because who John is becomes part of the answer to the question of who Jesus is. Segment One begins with a question of John the Baptist, in prison since he was arrested by Herod Antipas (4:12) because John had told Herod his marriage to Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, was unlawful (14:3–4; Lev 18:16; 20:21). John sends his disciples to Jesus with the question, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (11:3). Why would he ask such a question? He had recognized Jesus as the coming one (3:11–12, 14) and had heard the audition from heaven declaring Jesus as God’s beloved Son (3:17). It was surely because of John’s preconception of the coming one. John conceived of that one as the Judge of the Last Day (3:11–12). Jesus, since ch. 3, certainly does not fit this expectation. The Romans still dominate the Jews; Herod, who put John in prison, is still on the throne; the religious establishment that resisted John’s baptism (21:25–27) is still in place; the people are divided about Jesus’ leadership (11:16–19); the final judgment still remains only a future hope (chs. 24–25). Jesus’ response is simply, “Go and tell John what you hear and see . . .” (11:4). What had they seen and heard? The list that follows echoes chs. 8–9: the blind see (9:27–30); the lame walk (9:2–8); lepers are cleansed (8:2–4); the deaf hear (9:32–33); the dead are raised (9:18–19, 23–25); and the poor have good news brought to them (9:35). The list also echoes OT prophecy (the blind see [Isa 35:5; 29:18; 42:7]; the lame walk [Isa 35:6]; the deaf hear [Isa 35:5–6; 29:18]; the dead are raised [Isa 26:19]; and the poor hear good news [Isa 61:1; 29:19]). The list also echoes post-biblical Jewish belief. Qumran, 4Q521 (Frag. 2, Col. 2), associates the poor getting good news, the blind seeing, and the dead living with the coming messianic figure. In 2 Bar 73:1–2, we hear that when the Messiah comes, health will descend and illness will vanish.

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 407

From what the disciples of John have seen and heard, the Baptist should be able to infer that the messianic times have arrived, but the final judgment is still future. As Aristotle said, the best recognition is based on “that which arises from the actions alone” (Poetics 1452a, 1454b–55a). So who is Jesus? He is the anointed one. How do we know? By his deeds! Adapting J. B. Phillips’ Your God Is Too Small (Touchstone, 2004), we may say that John’s conception of the coming one was too small. The coming one will be the final judge, but before that he is the gracious Messiah. In God’s salvific plan, grace precedes demand. Preconceptions that prevent recognition of all that Jesus is are not unknown even in our time. Segment Two (11:7–15) has Jesus speaking to the crowds about John. They knew the Baptist was no representative of vacillating, soft royalty (11:7–8). They recognized John as a prophet (11:9). Their view of John, however, like John’s view of the coming one, was too small. Jesus says John was more than a prophet (v 9). “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John came” (v 13). John stands at the end of prophecy and at the beginning of fulfillment. He is the fulfillment of Mal 3:1. Note the distinctive form of this prophecy in Matthew. The NRSV translates Mal 3:1 as follows: “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (italics added). The NRSV of Matt 11:10, however, renders the text of Mal 3:1 like this: “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you” (italics added). The Matthean Jesus reads Mal 3:1 in two distinctive ways. First, the messenger prepares the way for Jesus, not YHWH. Jesus stands in the place of God. This fits together with Matthew’s view of Jesus as “God with us” (1:23). Second, the messenger of the covenant in Mal 3:1 is identified with Elijah, mentioned in Mal 4:5–6 (“Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents. . . .”). In 11:14, the Matthean Jesus says, “. . . and if you are willing to accept it, he [John] is Elijah who is to come” (cf. Matt 3:4 with 2 Kgs 1:8; Matt 17:12). So Jesus says John is more than a prophet. He is Elijah who has come to prepare the way for Jesus in fulfillment of Scripture. If John is more than a prophet, one whom Scripture says prepares the way for Jesus, what does that make Jesus? The exaltation of the Baptist to high status (“. . . among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist,” 11:11) at the same time elevates Jesus to a position even higher! Who Is Jesus? He is “God with us.” Do you know with whom you are dealing ? Matthew 11:2–6 and 11:7–15 give us an answer. Jesus stands in the place of God. He is God’s vice-regent. In 11:16–19, a parable and its interpretation provide a glimpse into the rejection of John and Jesus. The scene is that of two groups of children in the marketplace. One wants to play. The other does not. The group that wants to play suggests playing wedding, to no avail. “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance (11:17a).” So they suggest playing funeral instead, to no avail. “[W]e wailed and you did not mourn (11:17b).” It is a typical scene in antiquity. Epictetus (Diatr. 24.20) mentions children who say “I won’t play any longer” when the game does not please them. It is a parable of arbitrary rejection. “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” (11:19a). This generation is interested

408 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

in neither an ascetic nor a world affirming approach to religion. It is merely disinterested in any form of religion. This generation is unable to see with whom it is dealing. In the face of such dismissive rejection, Jesus says, “Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds” (11:19b). Wisdom’s deeds are here the ministries of John, Jesus, and possibly Jesus’ disciples. The deeds of these three, carried out in the face of rejection, show God to be faithful and vindicate God’s salvific plan. Unable to see who Jesus is, this generation does not think that how it deals with this one makes any difference for them. The cycle (11:2–24) ends with a prophetic oracle of doom directed to “the cities in which most of his deeds of power had been done, because they did not repent” (11:20). Woe to Chorazin and Bethsaida. “On the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you” (11:22). Woe to Capernaum. “On the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom than for you” (11:24). Why? It is because Jesus has been present manifesting deeds typical of the messianic era in Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, but to no effect. Note that the rejection is collective! John and now Jesus have challenged the assumption that the way things are is the way they have to be to no avail. Merely having Jesus and his deeds in their midst is not salvation. “The point is: Have we changed as a result?” (F. D. Bruner, Matthew [2004], 1.521). If not, then final judgment is the result. “Jesus is Judge only for those who in his presence are not making any decision to repent, to be changing their whole way of living” (Bruner, 1.522). Promise: Life is being restored, renewed, and reoriented for “anyone who takes no offense at me,” the Matthean Jesus declares (11:6). Warning: There is a cosmic accountability to which all are subject.

Interpretation 409

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Feminist Mysticism and Images of God: A Practical Theology by Jennie S. Knight Feminist theologians often claim that “women’s experience” is their starting point. However, feminist theology is remarkably void of analysis of particular women’s experiences of imaging God. Knight provides practical recommendations to help people transform images in the context of religious practices. Paper, 192pp, 978-08272-10509, $24.99 (Available Spring 2011)

The Nature of Love: A Theology by Thomas Jay Oord If God is loving, why can evil persist? Oord contends that self-emptying kenosis love is essential to God’s character. What are the implications of the divine necessity to give human freedom and not retract it? Paper, 208pp, 978-08272-08285, $24.99

INVITE Q EQUIP Q SEND

Print and e-books at www.ChalicePress.com, or wherever books are sold

410 Interpretation

Matthew 26

OCTOBER 2010

DAVID RENWICK First Presbyterian Church Spartanburg, South Carolina

TIME FOR A PARTY? OR, MORE LIKELY, A PITY-PARTY? Need a drink? It can be tough being a pastor. The work never stops. Others take the weekend off, but we pastors have to kick into high gear as each Sunday approaches, often after yet another week when “Sabbath” was stolen by a fiveminute phone call that lasts two hours, or by an email to which we do not know how to respond. Family time disappears again, even as we help others celebrate family at baptisms and weddings. Crises arise out of the blue, at the worst of all possible times. Some involve genuine tragedy, and call for the energy to rouse and blend skill, tact, and genuine compassion. Others revolve around events that seem so trivial to us, but are clearly not trivial to those involved. And, on top of all this, once in a while there is genuine persecution to face, and not just from someone mad at us, but often mad at us because, in reality, they are mad at someone else (and we have to figure out “who” it is . . . most probably God). It can be tough being a pastor. Without a call from God who would do this? But with a call from God, who would not, or could not? Of course, we are not alone. If it has always been tough to be a follower of Jesus, it was surely just as tough or tougher being Jesus himself. Matthew tells us that on the evening of his betrayal and arrest, as Jesus moved to an isolated spot to pray in a place called Gethsemane, he was: • “grieving” (NRSV; NIV, KJV have “sorrowful”; Gk = lupeo3) • “agitated” (NRSV; NIV has “troubled”; KJV has “very heavy”; Gk = ade3moneo3); • and, more intensely, his “soul” was “deeply grieved” (NRSV; Gk = perilupos, a word

used in the LXX to describe the condition of the psalmist’s “soul”; translated by and KJV as “cast down” in Pss 42:5, 6, 11; 43:5).

NRSV

The anguish felt by Jesus is heightened by the fact that it is described as “unto death” (Dale Allison, Jr. and W. D. Davies, The Gospel According to Matthew, T & T Clark, 2004, 3: 496). But why this intensity of emotion? Jesus’ reference to the cup, one that he does not want to drink, provides the key. This “cup” is clearly unpleasant and unwanted, and connected with Jesus’ awareness of his death. Betrayal, suffering, and death have been repeated themes earlier in the gospel (16:21; 17:22–23; 20:18), and are reemphasized in the “Last Supper” sections of this same chapter (26:2, 12, 24, 28, 31): “this cup,” says Jesus to his followers, “is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many (pollo3n, 26:28) for the forgiveness of sins.” The cup becomes the image that conveys the bloody (let us not coat the reality in the sanctity of liturgy just yet) but salvific (for the forgiveness of sins) purpose of Jesus’ impending death. It is surely no coincidence that this same term, “cup” (pote3rion), has also been previously

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Interpretation 411

connected with two of the three disciples now called to remain close to Jesus as he prays in the garden. In Matt 20:22–23, James and John (initially through their mother) have a conversation with Jesus, seeking to secure a prominent place in the future kingdom that they confidently believe Jesus will establish. Jesus, however, stops them in their tracks, and reminds them that the blessings of this kingdom (a cup that overflows? as in Ps 23:5) lie only on the other side of a “cup” that he must drink. In the following explanatory section (20:24–28), the drinking of this cup is implicitly linked with Jesus’ willingness to face difficulty (becoming like a servant or slave), and even death (giving his life as a ransom [lutros, see LXX Isa 51:11; 52:3] for many [pollo3n, see 26:28, above]). The word “cup” is also used in a similar metaphorical sense in the Jewish Scriptures. Sometimes it is seen positively as a cup of “blessing” or “salvation” (as in Pss 16:5, 116:13; or 23:5, “my cup runneth over”), but this sense does not seem to illumine our immediate passage (though it surely impacts the broader context, see 26:29). On the other hand, the cup-image is also related to God’s judgment (as the cup of staggering, or of God’s wrath, poured out on humanity in general, including faithless Israel; see Pss 11:6; 75:7–8; and especially Isa 51:17, 22). While Ulrich Luz denies any association of the cup with soteriology (an “over-interpretation” of the text, stemming from Reformation eisegesis [Matthew 21–28: A Commentary, Augsburg/Fortress, 2005, 396]), I find the verbal similarities between our chapter as a whole (Matt 26 includes the Lord’s Supper and the garden) and the LXX of Isa 51:16–23 too strong to be coincidental. The Greek words for “get up,” “sleeping,” “grieve,” and “cup” are present in both passages. The context of Isa 51 (specifically the following chapters, 52–53) is clearly salvific: The cup of God’s wrath, a cup of staggering in Isa 51:17, 22, is a cup that will one day be graciously taken away from God’s people, wayward as they are, once it has been fully drunk. It is not made explicit in Isaiah 51 as to who will drink the cup on behalf of the people, though it is reasonable to think that the one drinking it is the servant described in Isa 52–53: the one for whom suffering (and through suffering, bearing the consequences of the sins of many (pollo3n, pollois, LXX Isa 53:11, 12; cf. Matt 20:28, 26:28 above) lies perplexingly, but clearly, within the will of God (Isa 53:4, 6, 10; cf. Matt 26:39, 42: “your will be done”). (Luz, Matthew 21–28, 396)

The cup that Jesus is about to embrace, but wants removed, therefore involves the anticipation of two types of pain: physical and spiritual. But there is more pain than this in the garden. Just as troublesome to Jesus is the behavior of the three disciples (James, John, and Peter) who have been especially invited to leave the other eight and go with him to pray. These same three had been selected previously to witness Jesus’ “transfiguration” and to hear God’s declaration that Jesus is the “beloved son” (17:1–13). Much good it seems to do them! This special revelation and proximity to Jesus marks them out as leaders, pillars of the church-to-be; yet, despite the privileges, despite so much time with Jesus, their “flesh is [remains] weak” (26:41): they remain slow to get it. Indeed, this same unexpected weakness in church leadership has already been mentioned (James and John in 20:20–28, as above) and will be mentioned again (Peter’s denial in 26:31–35, and 69–75). These three misunderstand both the nature of the path they are to follow (cf.16:22–23) and the cost involved in keeping to the same path on which Jesus him-

412 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

self is called to walk (16:24–26). “Sleep”—that is, being oblivious to, or seeking to escape the significance of the moment and the importance of simple, faithful, staying-close-to-Jesus prayerfulness—is ever at the door of Jesus’ disciples, and especially, indicates Matthew, at the door of their leaders. To which Jesus, when he sees it, responds by calling out to them, and surely to us too: STAY AWAKE WITH ME! STAY AWAKE AND PRAY! GET UP! (egeiresthe: the word for resurrection—Rise! Or “Be resurrected!”) Deeply troubled as Jesus is in this scene, this is not a scene of hopelessness or despair. Not only is Jesus’ confident leadership reasserted at the end of the passage, with his challenge to the disciples to “get up,” but the reference to the timing (“the hour is at hand”—a curiously Johannine sounding phrase; cf. John 2:4; 13:1, and elsewhere) is also an affirmation that Jesus believes that God remains in charge, and that God’s will is being done. Furthermore, some translations obscure the presence of significant faith in the midst of Jesus’ emotional turmoil. In 26:39, NRSV states that Jesus “threw himself on the ground,” and NIV that he “fell with his face to the ground.” The KJV, on the other hand, translates literally and preferably: Jesus “fell on his face.” This is not a position of despair. Rather it is the traditional Hebrew position of respect and reverence, of humble but confident expectation before the awesome presence of the divine (e.g., Abraham, Gen 17:3,17; Moses, Num 16:22, 45; Joshua, Josh 5:14; Ezekiel, Ezek 1:28 and 3:23; the people, 1 Kgs 18:39; angels, elders, and creatures, Rev 7:11 and 11:16). Tough being a follower of Jesus? Tough being a pastor? Time for a pity-party? Feel as if you need a drink? I know how you feel, says Matthew, but I am not going to leave you to wallow. Instead, Matthew seeks to lead us out of our darkness to Jesus’ darkness, to his profoundly emotional condition and struggle-filled prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane in the moments before his arrest. There he shows us both through the presence of “the pillars of the church” (Peter, James, and John) and through the dramatic imagery of the “cup,” that no matter how high up (or is it “down”?) the ladder of Christian leadership we climb, we have all been called to share the same cup as Jesus . . . whether at a party that never ends (26:29), or in a tough time of doubt and darkness that never seems to end: a time filled with struggle, difficulty, failure, and rebuke (26:40,45). Indeed, as Jesus himself reminded those pillars (20:20ff), it is a package deal: you cannot have one cup without the other. And so he reminds, us, as those who are invited by Matthew into the garden with Jesus: STAY AWAKE WITH ME! STAY AWAKE AND PRAY! GET UP, LET US BE GOING! Let us take whatever cup God gives us!

Interpretation 413

P E R S P E C T I V E S F R O M T H E G O S P E L O F M AT T H E W

Hermeneia on CD-ROM Now available in separate Old Testament and New Testament collections!

On sale now through December 31, 2010! Hermeneia on CD-ROM* OLD TESTAMENT Regularly $599.00 On Sale! $299.00

Hermeneia on CD-ROM* NEW TESTAMENT Regularly $599.00 On Sale! $299.00

978-0-8006-9780-8

978-0-8006-9779-2

• Featuring all the powerful research tools you’ve come to expect from Libronix. • Each collection includes all previously published Hermeneia volumes and Continental Commentaries from that testament, plus all the published Hermeneia volumes on noncanonical texts.

Order online, or visit Fortress Press at Booth 506/507 at SBL!

*Hermeneia testaments on CD-ROM use the Logos Bible Software 3.0 platform. They are also available on the Mac-compatible Logos Software 4.0 at logos.com.

414 Interpretation

Major

OCTOBER 2010

Reviews Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology by Michael J. Gorman Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2009. 394 pp. $24.00. ISBN 9780-8028-6265-5. Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision by N. T. Wright InterVarsity, Downers Groves, Ill., 2009. 279 pp. $25.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8308-3863-9. The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul by Douglas A. Campbell Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2009. 1,248 pp. $60.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8028-3126-2. ONE WOULD THINK THAT ALL that needs to be said about the ancient doctrine of justification has been said. After all, did Luther not get it right when he posited this doctrine over against sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism? And yet, we have three major works by prominent NT scholars that offer fresh light on this old doctrine. Michael J. Gorman, dean of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, follows up on his earlier work, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Eerdmans, 2001). In Inhabiting the Cruciform God, he stresses the notion of justification as participation in the crucified Christ. As such, it can be defined as “the establishment or restoration of right covenantal relations—fidelity to God and love for neighbor—with the certain hope of acquittal/vindication on the day of judgment” (p. 53), but this is possible only in terms of the participant’s co-crucifixion with Christ.

One new slant Gorman brings to the understanding of justification draws from the experience of Paul. Prior to the Damascus road event, Paul believed that his righteous zeal would contribute to the purification of Israel and would bring about his own justification before God. His goal was to destroy the fledging Jesus-as-Messiah movement, using violence as needed. Gorman projects that the pre-converted Paul likely had as his spiritual hero Phinehas

REVIEWS

Interpretation 415

(Num 25:10–13) in his heroic violent zeal and that his encounter with the resurrected Christ led him from being a violent excluder of non-Jews into what Miroslav Wolf calls “a catholic personality, a personality enriched by otherness” (“Exclusion and Embrace: Theological Reflections in the Wake of ‘Ethnic Cleansing,’” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 29 [1992]). The resurrection then reveals the cross as a divine act of inclusion and embrace. This puts Gorman at odds with Robert Hamerton-Kelly (who attributes religious zeal to a Torah-centered Judaism) and John Gager (who denies that Paul became a convert to non-violence). Furthermore, Gorman deals helpfully with the concept of holiness or sanctification. It is not an addition to justification but its actualization or embodiment. Justification is more than a forensic declaration; it includes a social face and does something about injustice, making justice both possible and real. Both in 1 Thessalonians and in 1 Corinthians, holiness is the call of God, a kinetic, not a static reality. At the beginning of four of his letters, Paul addresses his readers as “saints” or “holy ones,” and refers to them as such on twenty other occasions. The entire letter to the Galatians says that the salvation process is holiness, i.e., crucifixion to the flesh, to the world, and with Christ. N. T. Wright is certainly the best known of the three contributors and is a busy churchman as the Anglican bishop of Durham. His book is a sharply polemical response to an attack on him by John Piper, a conservative scholar, who has been critical of Wright and other members of the so-called “new perspective” (mainly J. D. G. Dunn and E. P. Sanders as well as Wright). Wright responds to the traditional conservative position by contending that it is individualistically oriented. It is focused on “going to heaven when I die” and “my relationship with God.” This occurs when the individual has faith that God will impute to him or her the righteousness of Christ, apart from any works one might do. What Wright objects to is the de-Judaizing and thus the de-covenantalizing of the process of justification. For example, there is Gal 3:15–18, where Paul stresses the covenant God has established with Abraham and his family, and so we have “the-single-plan-of-the-creator-throughAbraham-and-Israel-for-the-world” (p. 97), which is fulfilled in the Messiah. “Righteousness denotes a status, not a moral quality. It means membership in God’s true family” (p. 121). This becomes evident in Gal 2, when Peter supposed for a moment that “righteousness” was defined by Torah and rebuilt the wall of the Torah he had formerly torn down by separating himself from table-fellowship with Gentiles. Righteousness denotes the status enjoyed by God’s true family, now composed of Jews and Gentiles who believe in Jesus the Messiah. It results from God’s faithfulness to the single plan he promised to Abraham and realized in the coming of Jesus to rescue the world from sin and death. In the last half of the book, Wright deals with the passages in the Pauline letters that mention righteousness, and concludes that it is not something imputed to humans because they believe, but rather God’s own faithfulness to the covenant established with Abraham in Gen 15:6. The third contributor to the recent discussion on justification is Douglas A. Campbell, a young New Zealander on the faculty of Duke Divinity School, who has written a massive treatment (240 pages of footnotes!) entitled The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. While in agreement in many ways with Wright, Campbell’s subtitle, An

416 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul, represents his distinctive view of Paul. Following the work of Ernst Käsemann and Lou Martyn, Campbell contends that Christ has delivered humans who are at war with the evil dominion and has brought for them a new age in which they are freed to live responsibility by the power of the Spirit. In their freedom, they must resist the temptation to lapse back into their old evil, but strangely comfortable, reality from which they have been delivered. At key points, apokalyto4 is used in connection with the gospel (Rom 1:17 and Gal 1:6). At this point, Campbell presents a much stronger case over against the typical justification theory of Piper et al. than does Wright. Not only does Campbell highlight the individualism of the traditional interpretation, but he points to the retributive justice that determines God’s ways with humankind for the traditionalist. Justification theory posits a God of strict justice who holds all people accountable to a standard they are intrinsically unable to attain, and then it does not explain why Christ has to atone for the sins of the people. Why could the established temple cult not suffice as it had in the past? Romans 5–8 relates the oppressive slavery from which humankind has been liberated and the new, benevolent slavery to which it is called. The unconditional, revelatory, transformational, communal, and liberational aspects of the Christ event mean that it is appropriately described as “apocalyptic.” What about “faith”? As Rom 6:8 suggests, “faith” refers to the theological journey people make once they have died with Christ. But the word pistis also indicates faithfulness and expresses the faithfulness demonstrated through sharing the suffering of Christ (Rom 8:17). The pistis Christou occurrences should be read as the faithfulness of Christ and not as faith or acceptance of Christ. God’s fidelity is intrinsic to any act of salvation; however, Campbell contends that righteousness is not to be equated with covenant (as Wright tends to do), since it may denote a saving act in defiance of Israel’s repeated violations of the covenant. One needs contextual connotations to equate righteousness and covenant. Campbell devotes 363 pages to the study of Romans alone, since he is convinced that the traditional views of justification come exclusively from Romans. One has the feeling, however, that his case may have been stronger had he begun with Galatians and clarified the role of the “teachers” and of Paul’s objections to their form of evangelism. This, however, is a small complaint over against a major contribution to our understanding of justification in Paul. Charles B. Cousar, Professor Emeritus COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY DECATUR, GEORGIA

Interpretation 417

REVIEWS

Six Ways to Study the Bible by Trent C. Butler Noted biblical scholar Trent C. Butler provides accessible guidance to textual, historical, literary, exegetical, theological, and devotional approaches to study of biblical text. Provides applied examples and processes for each approach, with guidance on the use of supplemental tools and resources. Paper, 168pp, 978-08272-34703, $16.99

Interpreting the Psalms for Preaching and Teaching edited by Herbert W. Bateman, IV, and D. Brent Sandy Lays the foundation for interpreting and proclaiming the psalms as it considers fifteen representative psalms from the five books of the Psalter, providing models of interpretation along with suggestions for how to teach and preach the psalms. The book closes with four chapters on how the psalms apply to the Christian life with respect to devotional reading, incorporating the psalms into worship services, teaching, and preaching. Paper, 304pp, 978-08272-16358, $34.99

Isaiah: God’s Poet of Light by Carol J. Dempsey Literary and hermeneutical presentation of “Isaiah” as a literary character who recites/sings a ballad that spans time and space, includes various literary forms, styles, techniques, and genres, and which features multiple voices, all combined together to form a poetic masterpiece of events foreseen and events envisioned. Paper, 224pp, 978-08272-16303, $24.99

Print and e-books at www.ChalicePress.com, or wherever books are sold

INVITE Q EQUIP Q SEND

418 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus; Vol. 4: Law and Love by John P. Meier Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009. 735 pp. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-300-14096-5. ALTHOUGH THE PRESENT VOLUME stands on its own as a treatment of its stated topic—Jesus and the Law—the book constitutes vol. 4 of John Meier’s magisterial evaluation of the historical Jesus. Quite helpfully, Meier provides an introductory “roadmap” through the volume as well as a summary discussion of his methods. The main contents of this hefty tome include six chapters, numerated 31 to 36 (in thoroughgoing sequence from the previous volumes). The first of these (ch. 31) grapples with the complicated challenge of defining “the Law,” as the term is used in the Gospels and as the concept was understood by ancient Jews. The subsequent chapters focus on distinct aspects of Jesus’ legal teaching: divorce (ch. 32), oaths (ch. 33), Sabbath (ch. 34), purity (ch. 35), and, finally, love (ch. 36). As readers of Meier’s earlier volumes will have come to expect, each chapter is followed by hundreds of endnotes. The numbered chapters are followed by a conclusion, and appended with helpful maps, charts, and nearly fifty pages of indices (author, subject, and ancient sources). Anyone looking for a sound and comprehensive scholarly survey of Jesus and the Law need look no farther. Now and then throughout the tome, Meier addresses his “patient reader.” Indeed, despite the clear prose and helpful summaries, readers of this volume should be warned that they will face some challenges, beyond the length and weight of the volume. Bibliographic data is buried in extensive endnotes, with dozens or more items presented together in lengthy paragraphs, in chronological (not alphabetic) order. Other endnotes are discursive—essays in and of themselves ready to be discovered and studied by those who flip back to them. In short: the endnotes are encyclopedic, but not reader-friendly. Even so, Meier’s latest volume is fascinating and important, and this reviewer urges readers to err on the side of patience, and give Law and Love the time and effort these topics deserve. The main thesis—and a common refrain throughout the book—is that “the historical Jesus is the halakic Jesus” (p. 1; cf., e.g., pp. 8, 297, 528, and 648): Jesus was informed of, concerned with, and indeed something of an authority on, Jewish law. Yet Jesus was not someone who simply followed Jewish law of his day as taught and understood by other authorities, without question or qualification. To be sure, Meier’s chapters on Sabbath (ch. 33) and purity laws (ch. 34) assert that the historical Jesus kept “kosher” and refrained from business on Shabbat. Therefore the more provocative Gospels’ statements regarding these topics and questioning the value of

REVIEWS

Interpretation 419

these laws are either ahistorical (purity) or less controversial (Sabbath) than other writers believe. However, the historical, halakic Jesus as Meier understands him articulated novel—and indeed, controversial—teachings regarding divorce (ch. 31) and oaths (ch. 32), in both cases prohibiting what was previously permitted. When it comes to love (ch. 36), what is distinctive about Jesus’ teaching is his elevation of the biblical love commands within the halakic hierarchy. Jesus does not reject law in favor of love. Jesus, rather, legislates love, authoritatively prioritizing certain biblical commandments (Lev 19:18 and Deut 6:5) above other commandments in the Torah (Mark 12:28–34). Meier’s halakic Jesus is, therefore, a rather complicated enigma. Those who have tried to simplify Jesus’ legal teaching by focusing on a single slogan or a common denominator will inevitably fall short. The distinguishing characteristic here is neither liberalism or conservatism. Law is not replaced by love, and morality is not elevated over ritual. Nor is it sufficient to say, without qualification, that Jesus was law-observant. The distinctive characteristic of Jesus’ halaka, as understood from those traditions that survive Meier’s heavy sifting, is that they represent Jesus’ own approach—neither Sadducean, nor Pharisaic; neither biblical nor rabbinic. Meier’s halakic Jesus is not a systematic one: his legal positions emerge, rather, ad hoc, colored by his charisma, and shaped in response to specific challenges. And this is the enigma of Meier’s volume: like many historical Jesus “questers,” he prioritizes discontinuity over coherence, yet unlike many others, he ends up with a halakic Jesus whose general positions are mostly commensurate (i.e., “continuous”) with ancient Judaism while at times inconsistent (i.e., not “coherent”) among themselves. This somewhat dissatisfying conclusion is persuasive nevertheless, primarily because Meier’s general argumentation is thoroughly compelling. There can be little doubt now that the historical Jesus operated within Jewish law, not against it. But debates about the specifics of Jesus’ historical legal teachings—including divorce, oaths, purity, and love—are sure to continue. To take one example—in order to illustrate the difficulties—Meier accepts the historicity of Jesus’ prohibition of divorce, giving the Gospels’ traditions high marks for their multiple attestation, as well as for their striking discontinuity with early Judaism and the later church. But can a halakic Jesus prohibit divorce when the Torah itself—in Deut 24:1—explicitly permits it? Yes, because Jewish halaka develops in ways that cannot be predicted based on any single passage from the Torah. So, as Meier correctly asserts, Jesus here articulates a new and otherwise unattested halaka, even while he maintains fidelity to the Torah. Although the plain sense of Deuteronomy is rejected (Matt 5:31), the plain sense of Genesis is elevated: “the two shall become one flesh” (Gen 2:24, quoted in Mark 10:8). So Jesus’ teaching on divorce does not reject the Law. Rather, “Genesis trumps Deuteronomy” (p. 123). My quibble with Meier’s treatment of divorce is minor, but not insignificant: Meier remains emphatic that, in this case, Jesus startlingly prohibits what the law explicitly permits. I am less startled than Meier. Josephus repeatedly reports on the celibacy of the Essenes (e.g., War II.121). Although we don’t know how the Essenes would have formulated their halaka, it would seem to me that their position is more radical than Jesus’, not less: their practice trumps not only Deuteronomy’s prohibition of divorce but also Genesis’s command “to be fruitful and multiply”(1:28). Yet the celibate Essenes are placed by Josephus within the realm of accepted Jewish thought and practice, scholarly efforts to marginalize them notwithstanding. Jesus’ prohibition of divorce, therefore, fits safely within a broad

420 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

realm of ancient Jewish halakic dispute on marriage and divorce, being somewhat less “discontinuous” than Meier asserts. For readers of Interpretation, perhaps the greatest challenge raised by Meier will be his provocative assertion that “relevance is the enemy of history” (p. 75). It is natural that readers and preachers will want to know how to make the Jesus of history relevant to the modern day. Meier is not against drawing lessons from the past, but he is concerned enough with the dangers to be cautious: “Are we,” he asks “drawing our lessons from a past that really existed or one that we prefer to make up?” Some recent conjurings of the historical Jesus—especially those that pit a liberal, love-oriented Jesus against corrupt priests, conservative Sadducees, hierarchical Pharisees, or the like—seem more in line with contemporary political correctness than they do with ancient Judaism’s beliefs and laws (p. 648). What Meier asks of his readers is to separate these endeavors as much as possible. If we are interested in the historical Jesus, we must engage that quest prepared to absorb results that may not be simple or easily preachable. Not surprisingly, good portions of this book are neither. And yet, although I am no homilist, I can imagine many a fine sermon that begins and ends with some of the enigmas that are front and center in Meier’s volume. Perhaps above all is his conclusion that the historical Jesus taught that love of God and humanity were not better than the Law, but the best two commandments to be found within the Law. What’s next? I think Meier might agree that we could follow the advice attributed to Hillel in a very rough and rather late rabbinic parallel to the Gospel tradition (b. Shabbat 31a): “Go and learn” (pp. 555–56). There is plenty to be gained from the scholarly quest for the historical Jesus, and John Meier’s Law and Love is a masterful guide. Jonathan Klawans BOSTON UNIVERSITY BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

Interpretation 421

REVIEWS

Society of Biblical Literature The First Volume in SBL’s New Online Open Access Series

Global Hermeneutics? Reflections and Consequences Knut Holter and Louis C. Jonker, editors The Bible is studied and interpreted in Jewish and Christian communities all over the world. Within this enterprise there are various centers and margins, and it can be difficult for scholars from different parts of the globe to understand one another. In addition, the printed scholarly literature is often expensive and inaccessible. This collection of essays—the first volume in a new online open access series started by the International Cooperation Initiative of the Society of Biblical Literature—hopes to stimulate and facilitate a global hermeneutic in which centers and margins fade. It explores the global context within which biblical studies and interpretation take place and includes three case studies from different regions, reflections on the consequences of global hermeneutics on biblical interpretation and on translation, and an afterword.

Table of Contents Introduction Geographical and Institutional Aspects of Global Old Testament Studies, Knut Holter Hermeneutical Perspectives on Violence against Women and on Divine Violence in German-Speaking Old Testament Exegesis, Gerlinde Baumann Land in the Old Testament: Hermeneutics from Latin America, Roy H. May Jr. Reading the Old Testament from a Nigerian Background: A Woman’s Perspective, Mary Jerome Obiorah The Global Context and Its Consequences for Old Testament Interpretation, Louis C. Jonker The Global Context and Its Consequences for Old Testament Translation, Aloo Mojola When Biblical Scholars Talk About “Global” Biblical Interpretation, Knut Holter 978-1-58983-477-4 104 pages, 2010 Code: 063801 International Voices in Biblical Literature 1 AVAILABLE FREE at http://ivbs.sbl-site.org/home.aspx

4PDJFUZ
PG
#JCMJDBM
-JUFSBUVSF
t
10
#PY

8JMMJTUPO
75
 1IPOF

UPMMGSFF
PS

t
'BY


422 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology by David H. Kelsey Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 2 vols., 1,092 pp. $79.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-664-22052-5. FEW THEOLOGICAL BOOKS HAVE been more eagerly anticipated that David Kelsey’s theological anthropology, and Eccentric Existence amply justifies this expectation. Given the size and scope of the book, perhaps the most significant thing to be said about it is that it is a profoundly modest work. This modesty makes the book supremely (and, among the many contemporary Christian anthropologies on offer, uniquely) magisterial, though it is also arguably the basis of its one structural weakness. The modesty of Eccentric Existence is not primarily a matter of tone, though Kelsey is attentive to an enormous range of theological concerns and consistently generous in his treatment of his many interlocutors. It is, rather, a theological characteristic, reflected in carefully measured judgments that are at every point weighed against the rich complexity of the biblical witness. Although the title identifies the book’s foundational anthropological claim—that human lives are “grounded outside themselves” in God and are therefore fundamentally “eccentric” (p. 1,008)—this grounding is for Kelsey irreducibly multiple in a way that renders “eccentric existence” less a master metaphor defining human being than an index of the impossibility of any such all-embracing definition. Kelsey roots this impossibility in the life of the Trinity, whose mystery is both the formal and material launching point for his anthropology. Kelsey argues that Scripture depicts the triune God relating to humankind in a threefold way: unilaterally to us as the utterly free ground of our existence, circumambient in drawing us to eschatological glory, and incarnate among us in overcoming our estrangement from God. This threefold pattern of relating, in turn, makes for three distinct perspectives on what it means to be human: as created, as destined for eschatological glory, and as reconciled. Although theologians have tended to interpret these perspectives as successive episodes of a single narrative (e.g., in nature-grace and law-gospel frameworks), Kelsey suggests instead that they be conceived as distinct threads winding about each other in a triple helix to form an “unsystematically systematic whole” (p. 11): systematic in that it is the same God relating in all three strands of the helix, but unsystematic in that God’s relating to humankind takes different form in each strand. Each of the book’s three parts focuses on one of these modes of divine relating, and within each part, the individual chapters examine its implications for human ontology, identity, and ethics—the “what,”“who,” and “how” of our existence. This pattern provides a clear template for tracking the contours of Kelsey’s proposal, though its effectiveness is compromised by the book’s

REVIEWS

Interpretation 423

one unfortunate structural feature. In just under half the chapters, Kelsey separates out the more technical historical and exegetical material intended as “backup” for his substantive arguments into a supplemental (“B”) chapter, paired with the main (“A”) chapter it is designed to support. Although meticulously presented, the “B” chapters represent the one point where Kelsey’s modesty arguably does him a disservice: as extremely detailed expositions of other scholars’ work, they add considerably to the book’s length (their removal would reduce the text to one volume) and exert a corresponding drag on its rhetorical momentum without paying corresponding dividends in strengthening what is apart from them an extraordinarily careful and precise argument. Kelsey’s analytic presents him with the challenge of securing a coherent anthropology without eliding the differences between his three helical strands. Kelsey concedes that there are significant logical interrelations between the three narrative strands he identifies (e.g., consummation and reconciliation both presuppose creation), but he also insists that there are limits to such interrelations (e.g., neither creation nor reconciliation implies consummation). When these limits are disregarded, he argues, the result is a false harmonization of Scripture that, in its failure to do justice to the complexity of the biblical witness, invariably glosses over important dimensions of human being. In a particularly striking example of his desire to resist such temptations, Kelsey frames his discussion of God’s creative relating to human beings not by turning to Gen 1–3 (which, by exegetical consensus, is part of the larger story of God’s deliverance of Israel and thus “bent” by the narrative logic of reconciliation), but to Wisdom literature, which displays the character of our existence in its quotidian dignity and ambiguity apart from any idea that human life is oriented to any transcendent goal. The extraordinary scope of Kelsey’s exposition—as thoughtfully engaging in its details as in its overall architecture—eludes any easy summary, but it is possible to get a sense of some of the more salient qualities of his position by noting what he does not do. For alongside Kelsey’s threefold analytical framework, perhaps the most striking feature of his proposal is his avoidance of some of the more typical conceptual anchors of Christian anthropology, including “personhood,” “original sin,” and “the image of God.” Kelsey’s treatment of each reflects his deep appreciation of and yet freedom from conventional categories. Although the category of “person” has figured prominently in much recent theological anthropology, Kelsey finds it unhelpful for two reasons. First, he argues that efforts to deploy the term in theological anthropology are invariably distorted by its multiple uses in contemporary English. Second, he notes that use of the term in theological anthropology tends to focus on particular qualities that may well be shared by non-human entities (e.g., angels or dolphins) rather than on the concrete reality of human beings. He therefore prefers to use the adjective “personal” to describe the way in which God relates to human beings (viz., in the mode of address) while bracketing ontological questions about the creaturely conditions of the possibility of such relating. In this way, Kelsey’s terminology is consistent with his understanding of humanity’s eccentricity: “person” is unhelpful because its turns attention to some set of intrinsic human qualities rather than to God’s relating as the ground of human dignity. Kelsey’s avoidance of the category of original sin also reflects a mixture of rhetorical and conceptual concerns. It is partly rooted in the close connection between the concept and particular

424 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

claims about sin’s origin (viz., the fall) that are no longer credible; but he is happy to affirm other features of the doctrine. For example, Kelsey agrees that humans are so afflicted by profound distortions of identity that we are unable to heal by our own power, which he interprets as the consequence of humans living against the grain of the three basic modes of divine relating to humankind. It is precisely in this context, however, that he thinks it unwise to name this state as original sin, because the language of original sin suggests this distortion is a single root condition shared by all people, whereas it is crucial to Kelsey’s project that each form of divine relating is met by a range of corresponding forms of human resistance. In other words, the irreducibly diverse forms of God’s relating to humankind creates the ground of an equally irreducible diversity of forms of resistance to that relating that cannot be limited to any single concept. Unlike “person” and “original sin,” the category of the imago Dei does play a significant role in Kelsey’s thought. Nevertheless, his mode of deploying it is quite distinct. Whereas it is customary to make the divine image the starting point of Christian anthropology, Kelsey introduces it only at the end, as a means of defending the fundamental coherence-in-difference of the three dimensions of human being explored in the body of the book. Moreover, although (in common with many contemporary writers) he takes the phrase christologically as referring properly to Jesus, he parts company with others who do so on the grounds that their interpretations of the divine image presuppose a unified reading of Scripture that is inadequate to the distinct narrative logics of creation, consummation, and reconciliation. For Kelsey, these three ways in which God relates to humankind hang together because the different aspects of human being they describe are all reflected in the life of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). Christ is the focal point of Christian anthropology because the NT depicts him as the agent both of humanity’s eschatological consummation and of its reconciliation; and because the God active in Christ to glorify and reconcile humankind is also understood to be the Creator; Christ’s human life also exemplifies God’s creative relationship to us. In this way, the Trinitarian framework that grounds Kelsey’s triple helix is also the basis for viewing Christ as the point where the helix’s three strands intersect; yet, because Jesus’ story links up with each mode of divine relating differently, the irreducibly different character of each strand is preserved. The resulting anthropology is profoundly Christocentric, but not Christomonist, because Christ does not exemplify some one foundational principle of human life. Christ does not somehow encapsulate in his person the full content of humanity; rather, his story, by providing the pattern of God’s mode of relating to human beings in creation, consummation, and reconciliation, serves as the necessary reference point for Christians’ ongoing reflection on what it means to be human. And because his humanity cannot be captured in any one system of propositions, in his centrality, he bears witness to the inexhaustible mystery of all human life. In this concluding judgment, as throughout the book, it is precisely by eschewing any grand synthesis that Kelsey manages to create a truly sweeping account that will be a reference point for Christian reflection on human being for years to come. Ian A. McFarland CANDLER SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Interpretation 425

REVIEWS

R E C E N T B O O K S from EERDMANS EXODUS Eerdmans Critical Commentary Thomas B. Dozeman In this volume Thomas Dozeman presents a fresh translation of the Hebrew text of Exodus along with a careful, critical interpretation of its central themes, literary structure, and history of composition. He explores two related themes in the formation of the book of Exodus: the identity of Yahweh, the God of Israel, and the authority of Moses, the leader of the Israelite people.

)3".    sPAGESsPAPERBACKs JOSHUA The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary J. Gordon McConville and Stephen N. Williams “What a marvelous book! Many commentaries on Joshua are disappointing and dispiriting; after using them, you wonder what the point was. This one helps you understand the book, helps you see the point, and sets you thinking energetically and constructively on the theological issues it raises.” — JO H N GO L D INGAY

)3".    sPAGESsPAPERBACKs INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORICAL BOOKS Strategies for Reading Steven L. McKenzie “More than simply an introduction to the historical books, this compact and very readable volume also opens a window into biblical scholarship as currently practiced in leading seminaries and universities — methodologies used, issues debated, and recent trends. An extremely good work!” — J. MA X WE L L MIL L E R

)3".    sPAGESsPAPERBACKs !TYOURBOOKSTORE ORCALL   WWWEERDMANSCOM

0021

426 Interpretation

Shorter

OCTOBER 2010

Reviews

Ministry by the Book: New Testament Patterns for Pastoral Leadership by Derek Tidball InterVarsity, Downers Grove, Ill., 2009. 277 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-8308-3859-2.

PASTORS LONG FOR BIBLICAL and theological perspectives to complement the contextual, cultural, and secular resources that fill leadership bookshelves in the marketplace. Derek Tidball’s systematic analysis of the books of the NT provides substantial insights into models of ministry that responded to particular needs of communities of faith in that era. Through his analysis, he hopes to offer “a far richer understanding of the multivaried forms of ministry than is customary among most churches today” (p. 15). Clearly, he accomplishes his goal. This book is well structured and clearly written. The first fourteen chapters set the context of the faith community, describe the nature of ministry required, and identify an appropriate pastoral response. The context of Matthew’s Gospel, for example, is described as “Ministry in a Divided Church.” The corresponding model of leadership provided is the ministry of wise instruction. As he works his way through the texts of the NT, Tidball clusters the writings of Paul in three categories: ministry in an infant church, a maturing church, and an aging church. A review of the book’s subject index identifies three primary clusters that seemingly provide the thematic core of Tidball’s biblical and theological understanding of pastoral ministry. First, wise pastoral leaders are grounded in and draw upon the resources of a rich tradition. Second, these leaders understand that they are teachers who serve with authority. Third, they discern the art of ministry in contexts where the church exists as a community of faith and in relation to the kingdom of heaven. In his fifteenth and final chapter, Tidball examines the implications of the models of ministry described in previous chapters for the unity of the NT, individual ministers, denominational understandings of ministry, and an ecumenical

understanding of ministry. This chapter is less effective than preceding ones. After defining the unity of diverse ministry models in the gospel, Tidball notes that contemporary models often suffer from being more rooted in culture than in Christ. This is an appropriate critique. However, his description of the implications of these models for ministers, denominations, and the ecumenical movement opens significant topics for reflection and discussion that are insufficiently developed. As a result, they come across as tangential thinking and reflect an unhelpful “edge” to an otherwise excellent book.

KENNETH J. MCFAYDEN UNION PRESBYTERIAN SEMINARY RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Sacred Scripture: A Short History of Interpretation by Richard N. Soulen Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 216 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23246-7.

THIS SHORT HISTORY OF interpretation by the Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at the Virginia Union University School of Theology is fresh and accessible. It draws upon Richard Soulen’s many years of seminary teaching, his pastoral ministry in Methodist parishes, and the extensive research that underlies the Handbook of Biblical Criticism he coauthored with his son Kendall (3rd ed., revised and expanded, Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2001). Soulen observes in the book’s introduction that “[m]uch doctrinaire foolishness results from not being humbled by the lack of certainty about the biblical text” (p. xiii). He demonstrates that mystery lies at the heart of sacred narrative, that there has never been total agreement among Jews or Christians about which writings are to be viewed as sacred, and which manuscripts are to be followed when ancient copies differ. The chapter titles are all questions commonly posed to Bible teachers, and Soulen gives solid help to anyone who has wondered how to deal with them.

REVIEWS

The main focus of the book, however, is not on uncertainty and arguments, but on features that characterize a family resemblance of faithful interpretation within the Christian exegetical tradition. These features, spelled out in an epilogue, include the conviction that the Scriptures (including the OT) are directly or indirectly about Christ, and that apart from the faith that the ground and source of all being is God and that Scripture is revelatory of that God, “all other interpretation of Scripture is simply autopsy” (p. 191). Purely academic approaches to Scripture are numerous and indispensable to contemporary faithful interpretation but “they cannot understand Scripture on its own terms as the living Word of God” (p. 192). Soulen’s chronological “post-hole” approach to his subject, beginning in ch. 5, bears out the observation that church history is the history of the interpretation of the Bible. His treatment of that stormy history is lucid, reliable, and instructive. He has produced a resource that will be welcomed by college and seminary professors and students, diligent ministers of the Word, and intelligent lay leaders hungry for substantive reading on significant issues of faith and reason. The delineation of postmodern (John Frank Kermode), liberation (Jon Sobrino), and postcritical (Hans Frei) approaches in the final chapter (on contemporary biblical interpretation) is particularly helpful. LAMAR WILLIAMSON, JR., Professor Emeritus UNION PRESBYTERIAN SEMINARY RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

The Goodly Fellowship of the Prophets: The Achievement of Association in Canon Formation by Christopher Seitz Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, 2009. 144 pp. $19.99. ISBN 978-0-8010-3883-9.

CHRISTOPHER SEITZ’S PERSPECTIVE on the formation of the OT canon is similar to that of Brevard Childs and Roger Beckwith, namely, that the scope of the Jewish Scriptures (OT) was complete well before the time of Jesus. He argues well that “the Twelve” (or Minor Prophets) were associated with the three Major Prophets and the four Former Prophets, and all likely circulated in Israel before the second century B.C.E., but strangely argues from

Interpretation 427

the association of the Law and the Prophets for the early canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures. He also advocates an early formation of the NT canon (ch. 3). His equating of the authority of Scripture with canon represents an important confusion in canonical studies today (introduction and ch. 1). Seitz recognizes the importance of examining the tripartite (Law, Prophets, Writings) and quadripartite (Law, History, Poetry, Prophets) collections of OT scriptures (ch. 2), but wrongly assumes that the early Christians followed the tripartite HB model in establishing their NT canon. With only one exception (Jerome), there is no evidence of a three–part OT canon in the early church. Because Seitz does not find the later four–part OT canon in the early church, he assumes that they accepted a tripartite canon, but ignores the important role of the Septuagint in early Christianity and the evidence from Christian OT Scripture catalogues. His discussion of the influence of the order of books in the HB, especially the Writings, is confusing and suggests unfamiliarity with both ancient Judaism and the history of early Christianity. Seitz’s argument that the church’s “rule of faith” is rooted in the Law-Prophet model is difficult to find in the NT or church fathers. What drove the early churches, rather, was God’s activity in Jesus rooted in an encounter with the risen Lord (1 Cor 15:5–8; Gal 6:14–16). This “rule of faith” gave rise to Christian faith in the second century and the NT canon, and it focuses more on the identity, activity, and mission of Jesus than on an exegesis of the HB books. Seitz is right, however, that the NT writers and early churches recognized the authority of Jewish Scriptures, but which books is not always clear. He does not deal with the influence of noncanonical writings in early Judaism or early Christianity. He also does not explain why Christians, who inherited both the notion of Scripture and a collection of Jewish Scriptures, included noncanonical literature in their sacred collections. If the HB canon was already closed before the time of Jesus, it is not clear why rabbinic Jews were still debating the sacredness of canonical and noncanonical books as late as the fifth century C.E. (e.g., Ezekiel, Esther, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom of Sirach, and Wisdom of Solomon). Seitz also seems unaware of the reception of apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings by western Jews well into the eighth and ninth

428 Interpretation

centuries C.E. (e.g., the Cairo Geniza), even though he rightly sees that the Twelve was a fixed collection before the second century B.C.E. However, this does not address the matter of other books subsequently informing Jewish and Christian faith. Seitz also wrongly attributes views to scholars (Sundberg, Allert, Sanders, Barton, Barr, and McDonald; cf. pp. 20, 21, 129–30, passim), such as claiming that they do not recognize the authority of OT writings before their canonization. This highlights Seitz’s misunderstanding of canon scholarship. Nevertheless, he rightly acknowledges the authoritative function of OT literature in early Judaism and Christianity.

LEE MARTIN MCDONALD ACADIA DIVINITY COLLEGE NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA

The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus by Dale C. Allison, Jr. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2009. 136 pp. $16.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-6262-4.

DALE ALLISON IS A JESUS SCHOLAR of some note, best known for his arguments in support of viewing Jesus as an eschatological and somewhat ascetic prophet. This book, however, does not seek to further knowledge of the historical Jesus, but rather engages in sober reflection on issues that have been raised by Jesus research. One such issue involves the disparity of Jesus portraits that have emerged: it is now possible for theologians, pastors, and teachers to authenticate their work via reference not to the canonical Jesus but to somebody-or-other’s reconstruction of the actual (historical) Jesus—and the availability of such reconstructions is sufficient to support any number of theological preferences. Accordingly, this book offers a call to humility, for scholars and those who depend on them, to recognize the tenuous nature of their conclusions. Allison illustrates this in a somewhat surprising way: rather than deconstruct the work of predictable easy targets, he reflects on his own work in a disarmingly honest way, admitting that some of the things for which he has argued are less than certain and acknowledging that even points that seem most certain sometimes correlate suspiciously with his predilections. What, then, should be done? Chastened schol-

OCTOBER 2010

ars may continue the quest for Jesus with a more generic focus on the “sorts of things” that Jesus said and did. They should look for the big picture, as presented in repeating patterns that characterize the sources as a whole. It is often impossible to know details or the original intent of individual sayings or actions, but trustworthy general impressions about Jesus may be obtained, and these are often sufficient for reigning in the most extreme tendencies of theological speculation. For example, Jesus was imbued with eschatological hope for life in a better world and yet was grateful for life in the present world and committed to its improvement. He believed in God as inexorably gracious and loving and yet was well aware of the power of evil and the reality of inexplicable suffering. The volume is written in an engaging style that is easy to read, often witty, and appropriately provocative. Anyone who is curious or puzzled about the significance of historical Jesus studies for theology and mission will find here a concise description of the problems that must be addressed, along with some responsible guidelines for how to proceed.

MARK ALLAN POWELL TRINITY LUTHERAN SEMINARY COLUMBUS, OHIO

Death and Resurrection: The Shape and Function of a Literary Motif in the Book of Acts by Dennis J. Horton Pickwick, Eugene, Ore, 2009. 136 pp. $17.00. ISBN 9781-60608-290-4.

CORRECTING A COMMON, one-dimensional understanding of the triumphal progress of early Christianity in Acts, Dennis Horton stresses death-andresurrection as a complex literary motif woven throughout Luke’s second volume. In terms of theory and method, it draws on William Freedman’s model of motifs as recurrent, coherent, avoidable (surprising) elements presented from multiple perspectives at both critical junctures and unexpected places in a narrative. This book explicates this pervasive and variegated presentation of death-and-resurrection across Acts in 1) direct and indirect proclamation (“telling”) about Jesus’ execution-and-exaltation by both narrator and characters; and in 2) actual

Interpretation 429

REVIEWS

and symbolic demonstration (“showing”) of dying-and-rising by both major and minor figures. On the “showing” side, Tabitha and Eutychus experience literal death and resuscitation at the hands of Peter and Paul, respectively (Acts 9:36–42; 20:7–12), both of whom function not only as agents of the crucified-risen Christ, but also as mimetic followers undergoing their own Jesus-like, virtual death-and-resurrection. This identification is especially prominent in the language and plot of Peter’s eleventh-hour angelic “raising” and escape from a high-security, death-row prison cell (12:1–19) and Paul’s “rising” from a three-day fog of blindness and deprivation to a new vision and vocation devoted to the suffering-and-glorified Christ through baptism (9:1–19). Along with highlighting these primary, positive parallels to the dying-and-rising Christ, Horton also uncovers a secondary, contrasting pattern of death and decay in Acts, which supports the main motif by showing how the glorious goal of overcoming death through resurrection only works for those rightly related to Christ. Negative examples of Christian opponents (Herod [12:20–23]; Elymas [13:6–11]) or apostates inspired by Satan (Judas [1:16–20]; Ananias/Sapphira [5:1–11]; Simon Magus [8:9–24]) end with the reality or prospect of grisly, putrefying death with no (explicit) hope of redemption. A less extreme contrast also emerges in Christian preaching between the venerable King David who, though blessed by God, still remains in death’s corrosive clutches, and Jesus the Messiah whom God raised from the dead and “experienced no corruption” (13:37; cf. 2:25–36; 13:16–47). This concise, well-written book provides an illuminating treatment of a dominant motif in Acts. Though chiefly a literary study, it bears important theological and pastoral implications, especially in terms of balancing the sacrificial and beneficial poles of Christian faith and practice, which can so easily be skewed in either direction. Here, through the lens of Acts, we find a satisfying integration of a theology of cross (crucis) and glory (gloria).

F. SCOTT SPENCER BAPTIST THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY AT RICHMOND RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Seeing Things John’s Way: The Rhetoric of the Book of Revelation by David A. deSilva Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 393 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-664-22449-3.

THIS BOOK IS NOT A COMMENTARY but rather a study of Revelation from the standpoint of rhetorical criticism. Understanding rhetoric as basically the art of persuasion, deSilva analyzes the text of Revelation in terms of the goals of the author and the literary means used to achieve those goals, asking what John of Patmos was trying to persuade his readers to believe and do, and what techniques and strategies he employed to accomplish those goals. In carrying out this analysis, deSilva draws upon ancient handbooks on rhetoric from the Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. For readers not familiar with the terminology and approach of rhetorical criticism, deSilva provides a brief, helpful excursus on classical rhetorical criticism at the end of ch. 1. Thus, even though many readers may not be conversant with Greco-Roman rhetorical theory, deSilva has successfully made his study accessible to the non-specialist. Congruent with the majority of recent scholarly readings of Revelation, deSilva understands the main purpose of John’s writing to be to encourage Christians in western Asia Minor to resist the idolatrous claims of the Roman Empire. While participation in the imperial cult was a part of John’s concern, the entire Roman domination system—social, political, economic, and religious—was a threat to Christian faithfulness because it was a threat to the sovereignty of God. Through careful examination of the text, deSilva demonstrates the various ways John attempted to convince his readers to resist the lures of the Roman imperial system, including emotional appeals, argumentation, establishing credibility and authority, and discrediting his opponents and their views. To demonstrate that Revelation uses the techniques called for in ancient rhetoric does not necessarily mean that John formally studied ancient rhetorical techniques or explicitly attempted to follow the rules of rhetoric. Rather, rhetorical methods would have been a part of the culture in which John lived and communicated. DeSilva’s careful analysis of Revelation convincingly reveals the ways in which John’s message

430 Interpretation

would have been persuasive to his original hearers/ readers. This book is a clear, well-written analysis of Revelation that would be an excellent resource for use in the classroom or for private study. Whereas most of the book is concerned with showing how John addressed the situation of his day using methods consistent with techniques of ancient rhetoric, in the last chapter, deSilva provides an insightful application of John’s message for the modern reader.

MITCHELL G. REDDISH STETSON UNIVERSITY DELAND, FLORIDA

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009. 253 pp. $28.00. ISBN 978-0-3000-11190-3.

THIS IS BOTH AN INTERESTING and timely book. The first line informs the reader that the book before them “is in no sense an impartial work of history” (p. ix). Instead, David Hart provides an apologia for Christianity, not merely as a religion, but as a cultural system. The effort is set against the backdrop of the current resurgence of anti-religious polemics, as exemplified in the work of the “new atheists,” such as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. These authors tell tales of religious intolerance, ignorance, and violence. In the face of this assault, Hart pauses to re-examine the role of Christianity in Western culture and society. The book corrects common (and unfair) misreadings of Christianity and its influence on society. The book’s first section offers a quick dismissal of the current critics as lacking intellectual substance and moral rigor. The new atheists function here not to provide a serious argument against religion, but as an occasion for a revision of the history of Christianity. The real enemy is not the new atheism, but the broader inclination of modern interpreters to read Christianity’s history in a negative register. And what is at stake may be nothing less than the future of Western civilization, since a society that does not appreciate its history cannot value itself.

OCTOBER 2010

The second part of the book (“The Mythology of the Secular Age: Modernity’s Rewriting of the Christian Past”) captures the book’s fundamental concern. It describes the familiar telling of Christianity’s history as a modernist fable that goes like this: Once upon a time . . . Western humanity was the cosseted and incurious ward of Mother Church; during this, the age of faith, culture stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity labored in brutish subjugation to dogma, superstition, and the unholy alliance of church and state. (p. 33) Only the Enlightenment saved Western societies from this dark age of Christianity, setting us on the path to freedom, democracy, and moral development. Hart scoffs at the naïveté of this story, and demonstrates through a variety of examples that Christianity was not the enemy of modern thought, but its parent, insisting, for example, that “Christendom fostered rather than hindered the development of early modern science . . . modern empiricism was born not in the so-called Age of Enlightenment but during the late Middle Ages” (p. 100). In the third section of the book (“The Christian Invention of the Human”), Hart argues that not only science, but humanism itself, is the progeny of Christianity, which first articulated the conviction that every human life is distinct and worthy of dignity and protection, each self a vessel of the divine, regardless of station or ethnicity. The seeds of universal humanism were planted by a first century Nazarene, signaling a cultural revolution. We still live in the shadows of it. As a good apologist, Hart does more than play defense. He goes on the offensive as well, arguing that the secular account of Christianity is better understood as the expression of secularism’s own shadow, concluding, “if ever an age deserved to be thought of as an age of darkness, it is surely ours” (p. 107). It is secularism and not Christendom that represents the true Dark Age, and leaves Hart worried that a failure to understand the sources of modern society’s virtues may lead to their loss. In other words, we have had the wrong defendant on the stand, and it is time, Hart suggests, to honor Christianity and to put its secular critics on trial instead.

REVIEWS

Interpretation 431

432 Interpretation

No doubt, Hart’s book does provide a necessary corrective and nicely flips the intellectual tables. Without Christianity, there is no modern civilization. However, I was struck by a fundmental irony in the book; namely, his description of secular society suffers from the same lack of complexity, nuance, and generosity that he finds in secularist accounts of Christianity. As an apologia, the book is combative in tone, displaying acrimony towards its opponents (who are described as “shrill,”“petulant,” and “moral idiots,” and their work as “inconsequential” and “embarrassing”). Modernity is portrayed as an age of violence, ignorance, and injustice, and its secular thinkers as purveyors of death. This seems likewise lacking in fairness and nuance. However, if a good fight is what you are preparing for, nuance may not be the weapon of choice. Indeed, in a culture battle, pitting religion against secularism, Hart may be the best “corner man” in the business, providing would-be Christian pugilists with a better understanding of both their own strengths and their opponents’ weaknesses.

GRAHAM RESIDE VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY DIVINITY SCHOOL NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

Calvin by Bruce Gordon Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009. 398 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-300-12076-9.

CALVIN BIOGRAPHIES KEEP showing up, and this may be the best. Bruce Gordon, who teaches Reformation history at Yale Divinity School, has given us a remarkably realistic account of the very “human” Calvin. He does so with appropriate attention to the theological motivations that galvanized Calvin. Gordon has a wide grasp of sources, so he is able to convey the ways in which Calvin’s theological vision was enacted in the midst of the rough and tumble of life in Geneva. Here, he navigated local politics, church reform, and a radical involvement in the lives of citizens and of refugees who swelled the city size as they fled persecutions throughout Europe. This is to say nothing of Calvin’s other activities in preaching, writing theology, commenting on Scripture, maintaining an international correspondence, and seeking to close wounds in the body of

OCTOBER 2010

Christ. Gordon builds gratefully on the results of Calvin scholarship to indicate what is most important about Calvin in these areas. The result is a panoramic view of a man driven by the sense of his divine vocation so that all his time and energies were expended for the glory of God. But a primary strength of this book is its “on the ground” coverage of the swirling waves within Calvin. These led him to be passionately committed to his special work while also exhibiting the very creaturely attitudes and actions that are the lots of “common” saints and which should keep us from seeing Calvin only in “stained glass.” He was, says Gordon, “a complex, volatile man who found relations with others troubling, if not a burden” (p. x). Calvin could “accept error and ignorance, but never opposition” (p. xi). His words and writings sought to vindicate his understandings. Yet, “what made Calvin Calvin, and not another sixteenth-century writer, was his brilliance as a thinker and writer, and, above all, his ability to interpret the Bible” (p. viii). For Gordon, Calvin saw himself as “the prophet who makes the eternal prophecies speak to contemporary society” (p. 330). The power and influence of Calvin’s work is displayed in his own time and in our own. Assessments of Calvin’s life and legacy have been many. But Gordon’s book is now the “musthave” source for a fair and accurate account of Calvin as a human being, a truly remarkable one, but a real person.

DONALD K. MCKIM WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS GERMANTOWN, TENNESSEE

Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times by Jeffrey C. Pugh T & T Clark, Harrisburg, Penn., 2009. 171 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-567-03259-1.

INTEREST IN DIETRICH Bonhoeffer and his legacy remains keen, particularly in America, where in some circles, the German theologian enjoys a celebrity that is reserved elsewhere for politicians and entertainers. Across the spectrum of religious identity—from liberationists to the emergents— Bonhoeffer is admired, invoked, and repeatedly cited. This makes the job of the serious Bonhoeffer

Interpretation 433

REVIEWS

scholar both easier and more difficult—easier because Bonhoeffer’s relevance is generally assumed; more difficult, in the view of Jeffrey C. Pugh, because Bonhoeffer has become misused by American Christians to justify things he most likely would have opposed, including “their particular response to the ‘war on terror’” (p. 128). In Religionless Christianity, Pugh attempts to demonstrate that Bonhoeffer’s theology holds a two-fold significance: first, we live in the very midst of the post-Christian world whose arrival Bonhoeffer perceived from his prison cell in 1944 as he sought to come to terms with a “world come of age”; second, the excesses of American empire mirror what the Nazis brought to the world, “even if they do not have the specific personality of Hitler at the controls” (p. 10). Pugh is not the only Bonhoeffer scholar to identify similarities between Germany in the 1940s and America in the early twenty-first century (Charles Marsh’s Wayward Christian Soldiers is a prominent example). But Pugh generally restrains himself in the interest of making a larger point about the secular economic and political assumptions that dominate the landscape of western culture. The implications Pugh draws from Bonhoeffer’s life and theology can be “profoundly disturbing” (p. 11) for those of us who are unreflective about the “fascist architecture of the soul” that undergirds our world. In this sense, Bonhoeffer’s discussion of a “religionless Christianity” that must reshape itself in a radically secular world is eerily relevant. Unfortunately, the book is somewhat dated by Pugh’s repeated references to the “war on terror” as a self-evident justification for American foreign policy; yet, even American Christians who feel that a new administration has gifted us with a softer, gentler empire have much to learn from a theologian who came to believe that true patriotism required him to oppose his own government. Pugh’s question, “how can one remain a Christian and not be connected to the cultural clothing it drapes us in?” (p. 89), remains as pressing as ever. Pugh is particularly effective at developing the Bonhoefferian concern with knowing when “faith has passed over into the realm of religion” (p. 91). Pugh makes a powerful appeal for the church to embrace Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity, “which is subversive to the arrangements of contemporary existence” (p. 115), as a way of saving

itself from irrelevance and apostasy.

STEVE HAYNES RHODES COLLEGE MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

A Primer on Christian Worship: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, Where We Can Go by William A. Dyrness The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2009. 164 pp. $18.00. ISBN 9780-8028-6038-5.

CHRISTIAN WORSHIP IS A multivalent topic. A primer introducing it might very well look through any number of lenses: the biblical ground and precedent for Christian worship, systematic themes implicated therein, its historical development, its normative practices (e.g., the four-fold ordo for weekly worship on the Lord’s Day), or contemporary forces and cultural contexts. William Dyrness, a theologian at Fuller Seminary, chooses none of these—or rather, he chooses all of them, for in this book, he deftly maneuvers within each of these fields of vision, producing along the way a remarkably rich and engaging picture of Christian worship. Dyrness’ primary argument is that worship expresses Christian spirituality and does so in many and varied ways. Yet spirituality is not merely an individual matter of the heart. It is necessarily embodied in and mediated by particular religious forms. Alas, in our consumerist culture and what Dyrness calls its “functional literalism,” many of those classical forms have become empty of meaning, “barren and opaque”—no longer “transparent to their ground in God” (p. 15). What is needed, then, is a renewal in both the understanding of worship—why we do what we do—and a renewal in its practice, where the aesthetic, symbolic, and material dimensions of worship can shape people in ways that resonate with the gospel. There is much here to commend. Dyrness resists the Protestant inclination to skim over the history of worship (or any history of the church), flitting quickly from the apostles to Augustine to the medieval abuses that prompted the Reformation. Thus, even in his strikingly brief historical exploration, he appreciatively discusses worship practices from the “dark” ages: mystery plays, cathe-

434 Interpretation

dral space, the elements of the Mass, and artistic expressions of the pietà motif. His treatment of contemporary contextual pressures, framed as “styles of spirituality,” largely avoids the polemical terminology of “contemporary” and “traditional,” while offering more nuanced, accurate, and memorable ways of understanding the current landscape. His two primary theological excursuses, one on the Trinity and one on narrative, connect with important academic conversations while simultaneously offering some fundamental teaching about worship basics. Dyrness is not breaking new ground here, and he does not purport to. What he does provide is a winsome and wide-ranging introduction to this vibrant area of study and practice. His style is very accessible for pastors and worship leaders, clergy or laity. The inclusion of discussion questions and lists for further reading at the end of each chapter make it particularly useful for classroom or small group conversations. Even in seminaries, where curricula too often rely on only one course to view the whole field of worship—biblical, systematic, historical, cultural, and practical—this book would serve as an excellent guide, providing a view both kaleidoscopic and coherent.

RON RIENSTRA WESTERN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY HOLLAND, MICHIGAN

The Early Preaching of Karl Barth, Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by Karl Barth and William H. Willimon; translated by John E. Wilson Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 171 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23367-9.

FOR TEN YEARS (1911–1921), Karl Barth was pastor of the Reformed congregation in Safenwil in the Aargau region of Switzerland. During that time, he preached even as he struggled with the impossibility of preaching. This collection of fourteen sermons (with commentary by William H. Willimon) bears witness to the remarkable discoveries Barth made during those years. The sermons, from 1917 to 1920, reveal a young preacher straining to describe the “strange new world of the Bible” for those who were used to

OCTOBER 2010

much more conventional fare. One can see here the emergence of certain themes that Barth would make more widely known in his Römerbrief and Church Dogmatics. Yet even here, it is clear that Barth is focused on God, reporting week after week to the often baffled or bored Safenwilers Scripture’s stunning witness that God is present, subversively and actively present, in this world. Three other points are worth making. First, Barth’s words, which often stretch language to the breaking point, have been felicitously translated by John E. Wilson. These sermons are a great read. Second, Willimon’s introduction to the book and brief commentary after each sermon serve to place Barth’s words in the context of the day, and also help contemporary readers to see some of the more striking ways these words continue to challenge us. Willimon rightly sees the task of preaching as central not only to Barth’s development as a theologian but to Barth’s whole theology. Reading these sermons, we are reminded that “all theology worthy of the name is tested in the pulpit” (p. xiv). Finally, these sermons reveal in several places how much Barth’s mind would later change. However, in one sermon, delivered on December 26, 1920, Barth sounds a theme, later picked up by Bonhoeffer, that was a constant throughout his life: Where Jesus Christ is not known or where he has been forgotten, there life is easy, comfortable, and simple, and human beings think they know all sorts of means, bridges, and pathways to get from the world to God. . . . Where Christ is not known or has been forgotten, God is made accessible, inexpensive, cheap. With Christ, God is inaccessible, expensive, costly. . . . Between God and those who say, “It is possible,” stands the crucified Christ, and he says, “Yes, it is possible, but through God alone.” (p.146) This book of sermons will encourage those who read it to risk preaching the gospel today.

THOMAS W. CURRIE UNION PRESBYTERIAN SEMINARY CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA

REVIEWS

Interpretation 435

GOOD PREACHING TRANSFORMS LIVES Doctor of Ministry in Biblical Preaching

, )+ & * /- . i[(n] ^ 'f l k a m p e

436 Interpretation

God Knows There’s Need: Christian Responses to Poverty by Susan R. Holman Oxford University Press, New York, 2009. 206 pp. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-19-538362-1.

IN THIS RATHER UNCOMMON but provocatively thoughtful book, Susan Holman draws on extensive historical research as well as her own personal experience in order to explore and reflect on a range of (primarily ancient) Christian attempts to respond to poverty. Some of the literature Holman explores is well known (e.g., from the Cappadocians and John Chrysostom), but other texts and stories she explores (e.g., from John of Ephesus and Jacob of Sarug) have been relatively inaccessible to non-specialists. As a result, most Christians concerned with responding to concrete situations of poverty have not had access to these resources that, for Holman, have much to offer today. One of the strengths of this eight-chapter book is the conscientious and straightforward manner in which the “essays” reflect on and address methodological challenges that confront any attempt to make connections between ancient texts and modern circumstances. First, Holman employs a reading strategy she describes as “empathic remembering” (p. 7), illustrating by means of narrative how early Christians dealt with issues of “need, justice, relief, and poverty” in order to link such concerns “with modern responses to those issues in Christian tradition today” (p. 2). Next, Holman articulates—and the rest of the book is framed around— “three interpretive paradigms” (“sensing need,” “sharing the world,” and “embodying sacred kingdom”) that she argues can help us utilize “early Christian narratives on social issues . . . as constructive cross-disciplinary and ecumenical bridges” (p. 15) between ancient and modern discussions. By eschewing an arm’s-length analytical posture characteristic of traditional academic research, Holman allows her own concerns and experiences to be engaged and, in effect, interrogated by the Christian narratives she explores. The result is a complex but revealing picture of diverse responses to poverty—ancient and modern—with all of the wisdom and shortcomings that we might expect to find in them. The stories Holman tells are often

OCTOBER 2010

fascinating, and the insights she distills from them can challenge and energize contemporary attempts to “embody” the gospel message of service to, and identification with, the poor. She points in particular to “three common themes in contemporary relief rhetoric that might be enriched by integration with early Christian examples, namely, “justice and ‘the common good’ in human rights language, the generosity of poverty, and hospitality” (p. 140). Given the complex themes and varied historical contexts Holman brings together, God Knows There’s Need may, at points, feel a bit less focused than more traditional scholarly works. Yet careful readers will find much worth pondering in this book thanks to Holman’s articulate, personallyengaged historical study.

MICHAEL BARRAM SAINT MARY’S COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA MORAGA, CALIFORNIA

Saving Creation: Nature and Faith in the Life of Holmes Rolston III by Christopher J. Preston Trinity University Press, San Antonio, 2009. 243 pp. $25.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-159534-050-4.

HOLMES ROLSTON III’S NAME may not be familiar, but his lack of notoriety should not dissuade one from reading his many books, or this excellent biography of his life and work. Selected in 1997 to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures, and in 2003, awarded the Templeton Prize for his pioneering work in science and religion, Rolston is one of the most important philosophers of science and environmental ethicists living today. His 1987 volume, Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (Templeton Press), is still one of the best books of its kind, and his 1988 book Environmental Ethics: Values in and Duties to the Natural World (Temple University Press) is hands down the best book on environmental ethics written in the last forty years. His Gifford Lectures, published in 1999 as Genes, Genesis, and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History (Cambridge University Press), is one of the most informed and sophisticated discussions of the topic named in the subtitle ever written. Christopher Preston, a philosophy professor at the University of Montana, Missoula, has written a

Interpretation 437

REVIEWS

superb biography of this important contemporary thinker. Preston engagingly tells the story of Rolston, from his childhood in the Shenandoah Mountains to his brief Presbyterian pastorate in Virginia to his long and distinguished career as a philosopher at Colorado State University. As the story of a human life, it is an interesting read, but along the way, Preston also adroitly interweaves the story of the rise and development of environmental ethics as an academic discipline. Thankfully, Preston writes like a biographer and not in the manner of many philosophers or ethicists. In other words, this book is very readable. It is not (only) for specialists but is written so that the proverbial “person in the pew” can understand it. Technical terms are carefully explained and complicated issues are dissected and presented with care and insight. Non-specialists need not fear that the book is beyond them. While I have a number of bones to pick with the book (e.g., there are no footnotes or endnotes, even for quotations, and no bibliography beyond that of books and articles by Rolston), this is an impressive work overall. If you are interested in natural science and Christian theology, this is a book for you. If you are interested in environmental ethics, this is a book for you. Or, if you are just interested in a fascinating human story, well told, this is a book for you.

STEVEN BOUMA-PREDIGER HOPE COLLEGE HOLLAND, MICHIGAN

For God Alone: A Primer on Prayer by Bonnie Thurston University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 2009. 227 pp. $18.00. ISBN 978-0-268-04233-2.

IN HER INTRODUCTION, Bonnie Thurston states that she wanted to write a how-to book on prayer that would be “homey and comfortable in tone” (p. 4). She has succeeded in doing just that. Her book is a helpful and welcome blend of the theology and the practice of prayer. Although she writes from her Christian perspective, she also draws from other traditions including Sufism, Islam, and Buddhism. The subtitle, A Primer on

Prayer, captures the gift this volume is to those who consider themselves beginners in prayer as well as more seasoned pray-ers who need to have their pumps primed. Thurston examines three traditional trajectories of prayer. Her chapters on oratio, or verbal prayer, include refreshing suggestions for praying the Lord’s Prayer and the psalms. The chapters on meditatio, prayer of thought and intellect, provide an excellent summary of lectio divina as well as suggestions for praying with the body. For the latter, Thurston also offers variations for those who may be confined to wheelchairs or limited in movement. Both of these trajectories are directed toward the third, contemplatio, the prayer of waiting. Thurston’s description of this prayer type is especially inviting for readers who have not always felt at home in this style of praying. Each chapter includes a variety of ways to practice the particular type of prayer as well as extensive lists for further reading and exploration. Interspersed throughout the book are more theoretical discussions of the definition, anthropology, and cosmology of prayer. These provide excellent foundations for each of the trajectories. However, she gives permission for readers to skip these chapters should they seem too “burdensome” (p. 9). This book is very user friendly. While encouraging readers to try methods of prayer that may be new to them, Thurston also cautions that no one should use a type with which they are deeply uneasy: “Our prayer is as individuated as we are. When we deeply and sincerely want to pray, we will find the way that most suits us and our relationship to God” (p. 175). There is much grace in this book. With insight and winsomeness, Thurston invites everyone to a deeper prayer life. It is a book that can be used in small groups, in spiritual formation and seminary classes, and for individual study.

EDNA JACOBS BANES UNION PRESBYTERIAN SEMINARY RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

438 Interpretation

Book

OCTOBER 2010

Notes

New Perspectives on the Nativity edited by Jeremy Corley T & T Clark, London, 2009. 215 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0567-62904-3.

This book offers a wide variety of “new perspectives”—literary, socio-political, feminist, theological, poetic, Islamic, and liturgical—on the familiar stories of Jesus’ birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Among the diverse approaches and viewpoints of collected essays, a shared theme is the inadequacy of critical historical study to do justice to the message of the nativity stories. Indeed, because these stories include miraculous elements such as the angels and the moving star, historical investigation can only produce limited results. Hence, other approaches can be more fruitful. Barbara Reid, Warren Carter, Ann Loades, Benedict Viviano, and Henry Wansbrough are among the fourteen contributors.

The Faith of Jesus Christ: Exegetical, Biblical, and Theological Studies edited by Michael F. Bird and Preston M. Sprinkle; foreword by James D. G. Dunn Hendrickson, Peabody, Mass., 2009. 350 pp. $19.95. ISBN 978-1-59856-429-7.

This volume wrestles with one of the enduring discussions in NT scholarship, namely, the pistis christou debate. Should key phrases in the Pauline letters be translated as “faith in Christ” or the “faithfulness of Christ”? How does this debate relate to the wider NT and what does it matter theologically? This collection of essays aims to help others to understand more properly what the debate is about, what the main options are, what is at stake, and why there is a debate in the first place. It does not propound any single view, but provides a survey and analysis of the various issues, factors, and arguments that have shaped the discussion. It presents rigorous exegetical studies from both sides of the debate, brings creative new proposals to bear on the problem, and

orients the discussion in the wider spectrum of historical, biblical, and systematic theology. Francis Watson, Douglas Campbell, Stanley Porter, and David deSilva are among the eighteen contributors.

The Historical Jesus: Five Views edited by James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy InterVarsity, Downers Grove, Ill., 2009. 288 pp. $27.00. ISBN 978-0-8308-3868-4.

Noted scholars of the “third quest” for the historical Jesus—Robert M. Price, John Dominic Crossan, Luke Timothy Johnson, James D. G. Dunn, and Darrel L. Bock—come together for the purpose of dialogue about the historical Jesus. Each brings to the table a different set of methodological lenses, and thus arrives at a different reconstruction of the historical Jesus than the others. Each major essay is followed by a set of responses from the other four contributors. The editors also provide a 44-page introduction that sketches a helpful overview of the quest for the historical Jesus and the contours of the “third quest.”

Jesus Research: An International Perspective edited by James H. Charlesworth and Petr Ppokorný Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2009. 307 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-6353-9.

This collection of essays (from the first PrincetonPrague Symposium on Jesus Research in 2005) assesses the present state of historical-Jesus research. Key insights that emerge: the quest for the historical Jesus has been enriched, and sometimes replaced by, Jesus Research; the new research is improved by the inclusion of all relevant methodologies; perceptions have been clarified and errors are more obvious, and often corrected; Jesus Research is enriched by fresh sources; and scholars are beginning to recognize the fundamental importance of topography and archae-

Interpretation 439

REVIEWS

ology. The contributors concur that a sketch of Jesus is beginning to appear that is both increasingly reliable, historically, and helpful, theologically. Gerd Theissen, Stanley Porter, Craig Evans, and Ulrich Luz are among the twelve contributors.

The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity edited by Margaret D. Kamitsuka Fortress, Minneapolis, 2010. 356 pp. $35.00. ISBN 9780-8006-9667-2.

Christianity, from its origins, has been intensely body focused, and Christian texts and traditions can be implicated in many contemporary societal struggles and injustices related to human gendered and sexual embodiment. The essays in this volume assay the Christian tradition’s classic and contemporary understandings of sex, sexuality, and sexual identity. An historical section provides an overview of the persistent anxiety in Christianity regarding eros; a second section reflects theologically on bodies, desires, and sexual identities in a range of modern cultural attitudes and practices; and a final section offers theological reconstructions of five traditional doctrinal loci: creation, incarnation, ecclesiology, eschatology, and pneumatology. Serene Jones, William Stacy Johnson, Mark Jordan, David Jensen, and Paul Capetz are among the eighteen contributors.

Building Bridges, Doing Theology: Constructing a Latino/a Ecumenical Theology edited by Orlando O. Espín Orbis, Maryknoll, N.Y., 2009. 204 pp. $28.00. ISBN 9781-57075-825-6.

The essays in this volume represent a dialogue on Latino/a theological identity between Protestant and Catholic Latino/a theologians. Eleven contributors present what, in their views, needs to be said on various important theological topics in order to achieve a Latina/o ecumenical theology. Among the themes discussed are God, the Holy Spirit, Mary, the Bible and tradition, grace and justification, and ecclesiology.

The Renewed Homiletic edited by O. Wesley Allen Jr. Fortress, Minneapolis, 2010. 141 pp. $22.00. ISBN 9780-8006-9656-6.

Three decades after a major shift in the study and practice of preaching labeled the “New Homiletic,” its leading framers—David Buttrick, Fred Craddock, Eugene Lowry, Henry Mitchell, and Charles Rice—rehearse the core contribution or perspective of their homiletical approaches; describe their understanding of how the cultural, religious, theological, and liturgical contexts have changed since they first developed that approach; and name how they would reshape or nuance their core contribution for the future, given the shifts identified. Two younger scholars from diverse backgrounds respond to each of these distinguished homileticians, whose sermons are featured on an accompanying DVD.

Living Well and Dying Faithfully: Christian Practices for End-of-Life Care edited by John Swinton and Richard Payne Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2009. 311 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-6339-3.

This volume explores ways in which Christian practices such as love, prayer, lament, and compassion can contribute to the process of dying well. Working on the premise that one dies the way one lives, twelve writers present a constructive dialogue between theology and medicine as two complementary modes of healing. Contributors include Stanley Hauerwas, Amy Plantinga Pauw, Karen Scheib, and Allen Verhey.

Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games with God edited by Craig Detweiler Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2010. 248 pp. $19.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23227-1.

These essays explore the spiritual and theological implications of video-gaming, examining both the medium and the message of one of the most influential popular culture phenomena ever. Contributors consider the complex narrative aspect of video-gaming, the power of gaming to

440 Interpretation

build virtual communities, the ways games can help children develop virtues, and the myriad ways religion is portrayed. The volume takes the video-gaming experience seriously and focuses on divine footprints found in virtual worlds. This book is for gamers, parents, pastors, media scholars, theologians, and anyone else who wants to consider the ramifications of modern society’s obsession with video games and online media.

A Reader’s Guide to Calvin’s Institutes by Anthony N. S. Lane Baker, Grand Rapids, 2009. 176 pp. $16.99. ISBN 9780-8010-3731-3.

This guide includes annotations to selected readings of Calvin’s Institutes (keyed to the McNeill/ Battles translation) that offer a streamlined introduction to the heart of Calvin’s theology. Dividing the Institutes into thirty-two portions, Anthony Lane has chosen an average of eighteen pages to be read from each portion. These selections are designed to cover the whole range of the Institutes and cover all of Calvin’s positive theology, while missing most of his polemics against his opponents and most of the historical material.

To Be a Presbyterian, Revised Edition by Louis B. Weeks

OCTOBER 2010

An Introduction to Catholicism by Lawrence S. Cunningham Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. 296 pp. $27.99. ISBN 978-0-521-60855-8.

This down-to-earth introduction goes back to the early Christian creeds to uncover the roots of modern Roman Catholic thinking. It avoids getting bogged down in theological technicalities and throws light on aspects of the church’s institutional structure and liturgical practice that even Catholics can find baffling: Why go to confession? How are people made saints? What is “infallible” about the pope? Topics addressed include Scripture and tradition; sacraments and prayer; popular piety; personal and social morality; reform; mission; and interreligious dialogue.

Theological Interpretation of the Old Testament: A Book-by-Book Survey edited by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Craig G. Bartholomew and Daniel J. Treier Baker, Grand Rapids, 2008. 336 pp. $19.99. ISBN 9780-8010-3624-8.

Theological Interpretation of the New Testament: A Book-by-Book Survey edited by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Daniel J. Treier, and N. T. Wright Baker, Grand Rapids, 2008. 270 pp. $19.99. ISBN 9780-8010-3623-1.

Geneva, Louisville, 2010. 118 pp. $12.95. ISBN 978-0664-50301-7.

This updated study, first published in 1983, is a lay-friendly primer on the life, history, tradition, and beliefs of the Presbyterian Church. New chapters and sections address spiritual practices, “hot-button” issues among Presbyterians, changes in hymnody, and respect for God’s creation. The adoption of a Presbyterian Brief Statement of Faith, the growth of newer Reformed churches worldwide and their influence on Christian worship and work in the United States, and the growing importance of other world religions also receive attention.

These two volumes feature key articles from the Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Baker, 2005), providing a comprehensive, book-by-book theological reading of the OT and NT. The chapters focus of the message rather than the historical background or process of composition. Each contributor addresses something of the history of interpretation, the theological message of the book, its relation to the whole canon, its unique contribution to the people of God, and provides a brief bibliography for readers who wish to probe further.

Interpretation 441

REVIEWS

New Jesus and Gospel Studies Jesus An Historical Approximation José A. Pagola This bestselling and controversial book was greeted with both enthusiasm and controversy when first published in Europe. Criticized by some of depicting an all too human Jesus, biblical scholar José Pagola presents a lively and passionate narrative of Jesus of Nazareth within the social, economic, political, and religious contexts of the first century. He offers a scholarly and accessible reading of the life of Jesus. 978-1-934996-09-6 560 pp quality paperback, French flaps $49.99

A New Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels Roland Meynet Meynet offers an entirely new perspective on the study of the Synoptic Gospels, adding further insights within the growing body of modern research into the meanings of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Utilizing the rhetorical method of analysis, of which he is a leading proponent, Meynet studies the composition of the Gospels and makes it possible to understand them in systematic and until now unexpected ways. 978-1-934996-11-9 440 pp quality paperback, French flaps $43.99

Embracing fraternity and justice among persons, cultures, and religions www.conviviumpress.com [email protected] Phone: (786) 866-9718 Fax: (305) 887-5463

442 Interpretation

IndexVolume

OCTOBER 2010

64

January 2010 Liturgy and Lent Turning and Returning to God: Reflections on the Lectionary Texts for Lent, Marianne Meye Thompson, 5–17 Lenten Practice in a Musical Mode, Frank Burch Brown, 18–29 Ashes, Shadows, and Crosses: Visualizing Lent, Robin M. Jensen, 30–42 Poetry as a Resource for Worship in the Lenten Season, Richard Griffiths, 44–58 Preaching in the Half-Light of Lent, Paul Simpson Duke, 60–71 April 2010 The Book of Ruth Narrative and Poetic Art in the Book of Ruth, Tod Linafelt, 117–29 The Iconography of the Book of Ruth, Martin O’Kane, 130–46 More than the Love of Men: Ruth and Naomi’s Story in Music, Helen Leneman, 146–60 From Ruth to the “Global Woman”: Social and Legal Aspects, Athalya Brenner, 162–68 July 2010 Scandalous Particularities: Jews and Christians in Conversation Principle, Story, and Myth in the Liturgical Search for Identity, Lawrence A. Hoffman, 231–44 A Christian Ordo?, Martha Moore-Keish, 246–56 Religious Identity in the Public Square, Paul D. Hanson, 258–68 Judaism, Multiculturalism, and the Power of Politics: Reconsidering Judaism’s Role in the Public Square, Randi Rashkover, 270–83 October 2010 “God With Us”: Perspectives from the Gospel of Matthew God in the Gospel According to Matthew, Benedict Thomas Viviano, 341–54 Matthew’s Narrative Christology: Three Stories, M. Eugene Boring, 356–67 Scriptures, Hermeneutics, and Matthew’s Jesus, F. Scott Spencer, 368–78 Which God Is With Us?, Barbara E. Reid, 380–89 “Wherever this Good News Is Proclaimed”: Women and God in the Gospel of Matthew, Dorothy Jean Weaver, 390–401 BETWEEN TEXT AND SERMON Ruth 1:6–22, Jessica Tate, 170–72 Ruth 2, Martha Moore-Keish, 174–76 Ruth 4, Thomas W. Mann, 178–80 Isaiah 11:1–11, Christopher Leighton & Adam Gregerman, 284–89 Isaiah 65:17–15, Tremper Longman III, 72–73 Matthew 3:13–17, Andrew Foster Connors, 402–4 Matthew 11:2–24, Charles H. Talbert, 406–8 Matthew 26, David Renwick, 410–12 Luke 24:13–35, E. Harold Breitenberg, Jr., 74–77 Philippians 3:17–4:1, Timothy Matthew Slemmons, 78–80 Hebrews 1:1–4, Carol Steele, 290–93

INDEX

Interpretation 443

AUTHORS Boring, M. Eugene, Matthew’s Narrative Christology: Three Stories, 356–67 Breitenberg, Jr., E. Harold, Luke 24:13–35 (Between Text and Sermon), 74–77 Brenner, Athalya, From Ruth to the “Global Woman”: Social and Legal Aspects, 162–68 Brown, Frank Burch, Lenten Practice in a Musical Mode, 18–29 Connors, Andrew Foster, Matthew 3:13–17 (Between Text and Sermon), 402–4 Duke, Paul Simpson, Preaching in the Half-Light of Lent, 60–71 Gregerman, Adam & Christopher Leighton, Isaiah 11:1–11 (Between Text and Sermon), 284–89 Griffiths, Richard, Poetry as a Resource for Worship in the Lenten Season, 44–58 Hanson, Paul D., Religious Identity in the Public Square, 258–68 Hoffman, Lawrence A., Principle, Story, and Myth in the Liturgical Search for Identity, 231–44 Jensen, Robin M., Ashes, Shadows, and Crosses: Visualizing Lent, 30–42 Leighton, Christopher & Adam Gregerman, Isaiah 11:1–11 (Between Text and Sermon), 284–89 Leneman, Helen, More than the Love of Men: Ruth and Naomi’s Story in Music, 146–60 Linafelt, Tod, Narrative and Poetic Art in the Book of Ruth, 117–29 Longman III, Tremper, Isaiah 65:17–15 (Between Text and Sermon), 72–73 Mann, Thomas W., Ruth 4 (Between Text and Sermon), 178–80 Moore-Keish, Martha, A Christian Ordo?, 246–56 Moore-Keish, Martha, Ruth 2 (Between Text and Sermon), 174–76 O’Kane, Martin, The Iconography of the Book of Ruth, 130–46 Rashkover, Randi, Judaism, Multiculturalism, and the Power of Politics: Reconsidering Judaism’s Role in the Public Square, 270–83 Reid, Barbara E., Which God Is With Us?, 380–89 Renwick, David, Matthew 26 (Between Text and Sermon), 410–12 Slemmons, Timothy Matthew, Philippians 3:17–4:1 (Between Text and Sermon), 78–80 Spencer, F. Scott, Scriptures, Hermeneutics, and Matthew’s Jesus, 368–78 Steele, Carol, Hebrews 1:1–4 (Between Text and Sermon), 290–93 Talbert, Charles H., Matthew 11:2–24 (Between Text and Sermon), 406–8 Tate, Jessica, Ruth 1:6–22 (Between Text and Sermon), 170–72 Thompson, Marianne Meye, Turning and Returning to God: Reflections on the Lectionary Texts for Lent, 5–17 Viviano, Benedict Thomas, God in the Gospel According to Matthew, 341–54 Weaver, Dorothy Jean, “Wherever this Good News Is Proclaimed”: Women and God in the Gospel of Matthew, 390–401

BOOK REVIEWS Allen, Leslie C., Jeremiah (Mark E. Biddle), 86–88 Allen Jr., O. Wesley, Determining the Form (Paul Scott Wilson), 218 Allison, Jr., Dale C., The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Mark A. Powell), 428 Barnes, H. Craig, The Pastor as Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in the Ministerial Life (Michael L. Lindvall), 332 Barth, Karl, and William H. Willimon, The Early Preaching of Karl Barth, Fourteen Sermons with Commentary (Thomas W. Currie), 435

444 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

Bauer-Levesque, Angela, The Indispensable Guide to the Old Testament (John Herbst), 316–18 Beale, G. K., We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (Gary Parrett), 326–28 Blount, Brian K., Revelation (Mitchell Reddish), 306–8 Bouteneff, Peter C., Beginning: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Mary Berglund), 99–100 Boyce, Richard N., Leviticus and Numbers (Melinda L. Thompson), 199 Braaten, Carl E. , That all May Believe: A Theology of the Gospel and the Mission of the Church (David Grafton), 216–18 Brennan, Patrick M., The Vocation of the Child (Karen-Marie Yust), 194–96 Bridges, Linda M., 1 & 2 Thessalonians (John B. Miller), 90–92 Brown, Frank Burch, Inclusive Yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (Alan Barthel), 95 Bunge, Marcia J., The Child in The Bible (Karen-Marie Yust), 194–96 Butler, Trent, Judges (Richard G. Bowman), 315–16 Campbell, Douglas A., The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Charles B. Cousar), 414–16 Carroll, M. Daniel, Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church, and the Bible ( Samuel Cruz), 328–29 Cavanaugh, William T., Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Michael Barram), 329–30 Church, Richard P., First Be Reconciled: Challenging Christians in the Courts (Greg Randall Lee), 220 Coleman, Monica, Making a Way out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Cheryl Kirk-Duggan), 323 Collins, Adela Y. and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Greg Snyder), 206–7 Collins, Raymond F., The Power of Images in Paul (Jennifer McNeel), 322–23 Conway, Colleen M., Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity (Wendy Cotter), 204–6 Davis, Ellen F., Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Jacqueline Lapsley), 95–96 Davies, Philip R., Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History—Ancient and Modern (John Herbst), 98–99 Davis, Thomas J., This is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought (Paul Galbreath), 94 Delio, Ilia, Christ in Evolution (Ronald Cole-Turner), 321–22 deSilva, David A., Seeing Things John’s Way: The Rhetoric of the Book of Revelation (Mitchell G. Reddish), 430–31 Dunn, James D. G., Christianity in the Making, Vol 2: Beginning from Jerusalem (Michael J. Gorman), 302–4 Dyrness, William A., A Primer on Christian Worship: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, Where We Can Go (Ron Rienstra), 434–35 Ferrell, Lori Anne, The Bible and the People (Joe Coalter), 202 Fishbane, Michael, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (Bernard M. Levinson), 294–300 Fredriksen, Paula, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (Sandi Goehring), 104–6 Gaillardetz, Richard R., Ecclesiology for a Global Church: A People Called and Sent (Mary McClintock Fulkerson), 324–25

INDEX

Interpretation 445

Garrett, Susan R., No Ordinary Angel: Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims About Jesus (Jerry Sumney), 190–92 Gench, Frances, Faithful Disagreement: Wrestling with Scripture in the Midst of Church Conflict (Tom Hay), 323–24 Giles, Terry and William J. Doan, Twice Used Songs: Performance Criticism of the Songs of Ancient Israel (Mark Throntveit), 316 Gillingham, Susan, Psalms Through the Centuries, Vol. 1 (J. Clinton McCann), 200–202 Gordon, Bruce, Calvin (Donald K. McKim), 432 Gorman, Michael J., Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Charles B. Cousar), 414–16 Gossai, Hemchand, Barrenness and Blessing: Abraham, Sarah, and the Journey of Faith (Beth Tanner), 198 Gregory, Eric, Politics & the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chris Helton), 214–15 Haber, Susan, “They Shall Purify Themselves” Essays on Purity in Early Judaism (Alan J. Avery-Peck), 312 Harrell, Daniel M., Nature’s Witness: How Evolution can Inspire Faith (Morton Harris), 219 Hart, David Bentley, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (Graham Reside), 431–32 Hicks, Douglas A. and Mark Valeri, eds., Global Neighbors: Christian Faith and Moral Obligation in Today’s Economy (M. Douglas Meeks), 214–15 Highfield, Ron, Great is the Lord: Theology for the Praise of God (Ronald P. Byars), 328 Hill, Jack A., Ethics in the Global Village: Moral Insights for the Post 9-11 USA (Jen Ayres), 325–26 Holman, Susan R., God Knows There’s Need: Christian Response to Poverty (Michael Barram), 436 Horsley, Richard, Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All (Marty Stevens), 330 Horton, Dennis J., Death and Resurrection: The Shape and Function of a Literary Motif in the Book of Acts (F. Scott Spencer), 428–30 Jenkins, Willis, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Bill Greenway), 82–84 Johnston, Derek, A Brief History of Theology: From the New Testament to Feminist Theology (Tom James), 210–11 Keller, Catherine, On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process (Craig Stein), 212–14 Kelsey, David H., Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Ian A. McFarland), 422–24 Kim, Seyoon, Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke (Art Wright), 100–102 Kirk, J. R. Daniel, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God (James Miller), 102–3 Kloppenborg, John S., Q the Earliest Gospel: An Introduction to the Original Stories and Sayings of Jesus (Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre), 100 Knight, Jonathan, Christian Origins (George L. Parsenios), 314 Kugel, James L., How to Read the Bible: A Guide to the Scripture, Then and Now (Tom Mann), 96–98 Levering, Matthew, Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (Eric Douglass), 210 Lewis, Jacqueline J., The Power of Stories: A Guide for Leading Multi-Racial and Multi-Cultural Congregations (Deborah Kapp), 106

446 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

Liew, Tat-Siong B., What is Asian America Biblical Hermeneutics? Reading The New Testament (Yung Kim), 107 Lopez, Davina C., Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission (Jennifer McNeel), 208 Lovin, Robin W., Christian Realism and the New Realities (Jen Ayres), 108 Maier, Christl M., Daughter Zion, Mother Zion: Gender, Space, and the Sacred in Ancient Israel (Amy Merrill Willis), 98 March, W. Eugene, God’s Tapestry: Reading the Bible in a World of Religious Diversity (Hampton Deck), 312–13 Marohl, Matthew J., Faithfulness and the Purpose of Hebrews: A Social Identity Approach (Patrick Gray), 103 McCann Jr., J. Clinton, Great Psalms of the Bible (Jerome Creach), 314–15 McConville, J. G., God and Earthly Power: An Old Testament Political Theology (Paul Hanson), 310–11 McFague, Sallie, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming (Bill Greenway), 82–84 McFayden, Kenneth J., Strategic Leadership for a Change: Facing Our Losses, Finding Our Future (Anthony B. Robinson), 331 McKeown, James, Genesis (Andreas Schuele), 198–99 Meier, John P., A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus; Volume 4: Law and Love (Jonathan Klawans), 418–20 Noll, Mark, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Ben Conner), 325 Orobator, Agbonkhianmeghe E., Theology Brewed in an African Pot (Cassily Essamuah), 211–12 Perdue, Leo G., The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires (Christine Yoder), 182–84 Peterson, Eugene H., Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Alyce M. McKenzie), 207–8 Preston, Christopher J., Saving Creation: Nature and Faith in the Life of Holmes Rolston III (Steven Bouma-Prediger), 436–37 Pugh, Jeffrey C., Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times (Steve Haynes), 432–34 Ramshaw, Gail, Christian Worship (Paul Galbreath), 188–89 Raschke, Carl, GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn (Richard Haney), 216 Reinders, Hans S., Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics (Deborah Creamer), 221 Riches, John, Galatians Through the Centuries (Tatha Wiley), 319 Robinson, Anthony B., Changing the Conversation: A Third Way for Congregations (Charles Summers), 219–20 Rolnick, Philip A., Person, Grace, and God (Lea Schweitz), 103–4 Rowe, C. Kavin, Early Narrative Christology: The Lord in the Gospel of Luke (John Carroll), 203–4 Satterlee, Craig A., When God Speaks Through Worship: Stories Congregations Live By (Mark Oldenburg), 94–95 Schuele, Andreas and Gunter Thomas, eds., Who is Jesus Christ for Us Today? Pathways To Contemporary Christology (Paul DeHart), 320–21

INDEX

Interpretation 447

Seitz, Christopher, The Goodly Fellowship of the Prophets: The Achievement of Association in Canon Formation (Lee M. MacDonald), 427–28 Shults, F. LeRon, Christology and Science (B. Andrew Lustig), 319–20 Soulen, Richard N., Sacred Scripture: A Short History of Interpretation (Lamar Williamson, Jr.), 426–27 Spence, Alan, Christology; A Guide for the Perplexed (Edwin Chr. van Driel), 207 Spencer, F. Scott, The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles (Greg Perry), 318 Swedish, Magaret, Living Beyond the “End of the World”: A Spirituality of Hope (Douglas J. Schuurman), 215–16 Sweeney, Marvin A., Reading the Hebrew Bible After the Shoah: Engaging Holocaust Theology (Brooks Schramm), 202–3 Tan, Jonathan Y., Introducing Asian American Theologies (Grace Kim), 211 Thurston, Bonnie, For God Alone: A Primer on Prayer (Edna J. Banes), 437 Tidball, Derek, Ministry by the Book: New Testament Patterns for Pastoral Leadership (Kenneth J. McFayden), 426 Thompson, James W., Hebrews (David Bauer), 204 Vinson, Richard B., Luke (Sharon Ringe), 186–87 Weeks, Louis B., All for God’s Glory: Redeeming Church Scutwork (David Trickett), 107–8 Wills, Lawrence M., Not God’s People: Insiders and Outsiders in the Biblical World (Adele Reinhartz), 313–14 Wilson, Paul S., Setting Words on Fire: Putting God at the Center of the Sermon (Sam Wells), 332 Work, Telford, Deuteronomy (Richard D. Nelson), 199–200 Wright, N. T., Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Charles B. Cousar), 414–16

448 Interpretation

OCTOBER 2010

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION (Act of October 3, 1962: Section 4369, Title 39, United States Code) 1. Title of publication: Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology; Publication No. 267800 2. Date of Filing: September 15, 2010 3. Frequency of Issue: Quarterly (January, April, July, and October); Annual Subscription Price: $29.00 Domestic, $40.00 Foreign, $48.00 Library Domestic, $55.00 Library Foreign 4. Mailing Address of Office of Publication: 3401 Brook Road, Richmond, Virginia 23227 5. Mailing Address of Headquarters: 3401 Brook Road, Richmond, Virginia 23227 6. Publisher: Union Presbyterian Seminary, 3401 Brook Road, Richmond, Virginia 23227 Editor: Samuel E. Balentine, 3401 Brook Road, Richmond, Virginia 23227 Managing Editor: Debra Reagan 7. Owner: Union Presbyterian Seminary, a Virginia corporation, nonprofit, nonstock, 3401 Brook Road, Richmond, Virginia 23227 8. Known Bondholders, Mortgages and Other Security Holders or Holding 1% or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None Average Preceeeding 12 Months

Single Issue Nearest to Filing Date (July)

9. Circulation Total No. Copies Printed Sales Through Dealers, etc. Free or Other Distribution Mail Subscriptions Total Distribution Copies Not Distributed Return from News Agents Total Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation

4,250 n/a 1,175 2,210 3,385 865 0 4,250

4,000 n/a 1,099 2,219 3,318 682 0 4,000

91.8

93.5

I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete: (s) Debra Reagan