Whoops! I'll get back to Matthew in a while, but first I owe Charlie Cosgrove an essay on hermeneutics. That one begins along the following lines:
There are at least two leading questions in the study of hermeneutics and the ethics of interpretation. The first is the more familiar: How are we to understand texts? and its concomitant How shall we know whose interpretation is right (or “true” or “legitimate”)? This question has motivated most studies of hermeneutics, and a moment’s reflection reveals the reason such studies often evoke a fervor that far outweighs the extent of their contribution to a debate whose broad outlines have remained largely constant for decades. After all, once a scholar has figured out how to reach true understandings, the unwillingness of recalcitrant colleagues to adopt that true approach threatens the very structure of knowledge, the academy, even the Church’s teaching.
Thus scholars have long sought the right answer to this urgent question. They have offered accounts of insight, understanding, empathy, intention, and various other features of legitimate hermeneutics. I will call this search for correct interpretation “integral hermeneutics,” as it poses for itself (and for the domain of all meaning, over which it usually claims dominion) the task of articulating the positive characteristics of unitary interpretive truth. Periodically, some critics pose a serious challenge to this enterprise. They argue, for instance, that “the author’s intention” is unsuitable as a criterion for assessing interpretations; perhaps it is unavailable, or insufficiently distinct. The practitioners of integral hermeneutics then develop an account of their field that accounts for and overcomes the critics’ objections, refining their account of their criteria, or defining those criteria more precisely, so as to reinstate a positive account of legitimate interpretation.
posted by AKMA at 2:21 PM
The discussion with Steve Webb having settled down, I thought I'd try working on my boook about Matthew's Gospel on blogline. As DAvid Weinberger says, "Let's just see what happens."
Chapter Two: Matthew and Judaism
¶ 2.1 In the first chapter, I asserted a number of times that Matthew is a faithful follower of the God of Israel; in contemporary language, he is a Jew. While this point seems painfully self-evident to me, wiser readers than I have questioned that premise. Indeed, some of the leading interpreters of Matthew's Gospel have supposed that Matthew was himself a Gentile. Since much of the rest of my picture of Matthew depends on my claim that Matthew operates squarely within the traditions of Judaism (as he construes them), this chapter will explain why, in the face of learned dissent, I imagine a Judaic Matthew.
The case for a Gentile Matthew has positive and negative sides. On the positive side, Matthew's Jesus shows a high regard for the various Gentiles he encounters in his ministry. Several of the explicit theological assertions in Matthew compare Gentiles favorably to the people of Israel. The treachery against Jesus arises in Judaic circles, whereas Pontius Pilate and his wife try to distance themselves from what they take to be an injustice. Assuming that Matthew copied from Mark, he seems to have omitted a number of Aramaic expressions found in Mark, possibly to accommodate readers who would not understand Aramaic. Finally, the Great Commission in Matthew 28 seems to culminate the whole Gospel in a command to include "all the Gentiles" in the Matthean community.
The negative case for thinking of Matthew as a Gentile observes that the unfavorable comparisons to Gentiles imply that Jesus' Judaic neighbors lack even Gentile-quality faith. At one point, Matthew treats the Pharisees and Sadducees as a united front, not differentiating these divergent parties. Matthew's Gospel features numerous withering attacks on Jesus' opponents among the Pharisees and scribes; Jesus describes his opponents as snakes, hypocrites, exploiters of widows and orphans, murderous conspirators. In Matthew's Gospel alone, the hostile crowd demands Jesus' execution with the cry, "His blood be on us and on our children"--a call whose echoes have resounded in the voices of generations who perpetrated atrocities against Jews.
In short, scholars have inferred that no one who belonged to the people of Israel could have pictured Jesus as so fiercely antagonistic a critic of Judaism. The best explanation they can offer for Jesus' critical tone over against his contemporaries is that a Gentile Matthew envisioned Jesus as "one of us [Gentiles]," and imagined that Jesus shared the Matthean community's hostility to Judaism.
While several important critics hold firmly to the Gentile-Matthew perspective, the preponderance of Matthean interpreters have supposed that Matthew was a Christian convert from Judaism, whose angry writings reflect the hostilities between Judaism and its offshoot, Christianity. On this account, the conflicts between Jesus' followers and their neighbors in synagogues had reached a point of no return, and now Jesus' disciples had been barred from participating in the synagogue community. This proposal often follows a common supposition that after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce, the Judaic leaders gathered in Jamnia (sometimes spelled "Jabneh") of Galilee and determined many of the constitutive practices that identify post-Temple Judaism. Among these was the adoption of a daily prayer, the "Eighteen Benedictions," one clause of which (known as the birkat ha-minim , the "blessing of the sectarians") thanks God that one is not a heretic or a Nazarene. On this account, the surviving leaders of Judaism devised this ingenious prayer, reasoning that Christians would not be able to repeat that clause, and hence would voluntarily exile themselves from the community that used the prayer. Scholars who adopt this hypothesis explain Matthew's anger against scribes and Pharisees and their adherents as the mirror-image of rabbinic hostility to Christian faith.
Scholars who propose a hostile "parting of the ways" between Matthew's friends and the synagogue from which they emerged can thus explain the acrimony of Matthew's rhetoric. Embroiled in a divisive conflict, expelled from their faith community, Matthew's colleagues used Jesus' words to fight back against the synagogue that rejected them. Many readers of Matthew have noticed that Matthew persistently refers to "their synagogues," as though to mark Judaic congregations as "over against us." Perhaps Matthew was like the ideal disciple described in chapter 13: "a scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven," thus a disciple with Judaic training, who has turned from his former adherence to synagogal, proto-rabbinic Judaism in favor of the gospel of Jesus Christ--incurring the enmity of those whom left behind.
The problems with this model are manifold, and an increasing number of scholars have found this approach deeply misleading. To start with the most detailed aspect of the theory, many students of first-century Judaism doubt that the birkat ha minim can be securely dated to the 80's of the common era. Even if, however, one were to demonstrate that the birkat belongs to the 80's, one may doubt whether it was specifically directed against Christians; why would the prayer characterize its objects so obliquely? Would a Christian necessarily think of himself as one of the minim in question? The hypothetical meeting at Jamnia, too, has come into question. Most comprehensively, though, the notion that any gathering could promulgate teachings authoritative for all of Judaism misreads the social and cultural texture of Judaism in this period. Apart from the Temple, Judaism had no over-arching principle binding all its adherents to a given structure of authority. Nothing supports the notion that a congress of leaders who might have gathered at Jamnia would have had the stature to bind synagogues to a code of worship and theology. Different congregations ("synagogues") will have adopted different attitudes to Jesus' followers at different times, without any magisterial instruction.
Matthew's use of "their synagogues" may be no more illuminating than are hypotheses about Jamnia and the birkat ha-minim. The preponderance of the times when Matthew uses this phrase, he refers to the places that Jesus' pharisaic debaters gather. Under the circumstances, how else might one imagine Matthew identifying these assemblies? Certainly not as "our synagogues," and a simple "the synagogues" would neglect to specify the connection between the congregations to which Matthew referred and the Pharisees who gathered there. The passages in which the expression "their synagogue(s)" appears could conceivably be recast to read "nearby synagogues" or "the synagogues from which they came"--but these circumlocutions would be more cumbersome and less obvious than the simpler expressions Matthew uses.
If Matthew wrote as a rebuttal to synagogal Judaism, as a rationale for having left the fold, we might expect him to criticize Judaism as a social system. Whenever Matthew wrote, there will have been people of Israel who didn't identify strongly with any of the parties whom Matthew excoriates; if Matthew finds the entire business unsatisfactory and inhospitable, he expresses that dissatisfaction by criticizing only partisan subgroups of the greater whole.
Finally, it may also be the case that millennia of custom have ingrained the separation of Christianity from Judaism too deeply for readers of Matthew to un-think. If one approaches Matthew with the assumption that Judaism and Christianity are different religions, then Matthew's rhetoric will certainly tend to confirm that assumption. Nonetheless, the possibility that the separation that seems so obvious in retrospect need not have seemed equally inevitable to Matthew; indeed, an increasing body of scholarly opinion suggests that Judaism and Christianity do not constitute distinct categories until well after Matthew was written. Whatever exegetical and historical reasons one may cite for attributing Matthew to either a gentile author or a Judaic author who "converted," those reasons should be tested carefully against the possibility, perhaps the likelihood, that the reasons derive inappropriate force from retrospect.
If on the other hand Matthew writes not as a Gentile, nor as a convert from Judaism to Christianity, but as an unwavering devotee of the God of Israel, what signs indicate his allegiance to his ancestral faith? I take as my cornerstone texts two sayings that bookend the first discursive portion of the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished" (5:17-18) and "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (5:48). These texts, when read in tandem, articulate Matthew's fundamental reliance on the Torah and its enduring role for Jesus' followers.
Take, for example, the fundamental question for Judaic (male) identity. Scholars have often noted Matthew's silence on what was for Paul a burning issue: do male gentile adherents to Jesus' movement need to undergo circumcision? Was the issue settled by the time Matthew write (about twenty years after Paul's death, according to the standard chronology of New Testament texts)? The shift from Paul's fervent insistence that this question struck to the heart of faith in Jesus, to Matthew's hypothetical "no big deal" seems surprising, especially over a relatively short interval, especially again since Matthew demonstrates no hesitation to set Jesus over against Judaic opponents. If Matthew writes at a time when circumcision no longer constitutes an open debate for followers of Jesus, we lack any convincing way to account for that decision reaching finality, spreading across the regions and varieties that separated the scattered, small congregations that honored Jesus.
