FEBRUARY 2006 - ISSUE 6 - ISSN 1448 - 6326

Methodological Belief in Reading Matthew 23   Adrian Jones

Abstract

Narratives in scripture can be read simply as story, with the story world, its characters and events, taken fairly much at their face value.  But we know there is more to the story than that.  We know that, like any text, biblical stories are told, and later written, in a given context, for an intended audience and with a primary purpose.  So what do we make of a partly narrative, partly expository text like Matthew 23?  I have attempted to approach this text from the perspective of trust – that what Matthew has recorded is what in fact occurred.  Nevertheless, I am unable to detach myself from my position as one outside and, in a sense, “above” the text, viewing it from a position of privilege, informed by scholars and commentators.  However, I do not see the movement of embrace and detachment as opposing hermeneutics, but rather as the choreography of interacting and mutually enriching methodologies of belief and doubt.

Introduction

If one wishes to approach Matthew 23 as story, critically, but without, at least initially, the assistance of the scholarly commentators, one can benefit from the advice of teacher and writer, Peter Elbow, in reference to critical reading and thinking:

My claim is that methodological doubt is only half of what we need.  Yes, we need the systematic, disciplined and conscious attempts to criticize everything no matter how compelling it might seem – to find flaws or contradictions we might otherwise miss.  But thinking is not trustworthy unless it also includes methodological belief: the equally systematic, disciplined and conscious attempt to believe everything no matter how unlikely or repellent it might seem – to find virtues or strengths we might otherwise miss.  Both processes derive their power from the very fact that they are methodological: artificial, systematic, and disciplined uses of the mind.  As methods, they help us see what we would miss if we only used our minds naturally or spontaneously.[1]

With this claim in mind, then, I shall interact with the text as a participant in it as story, as literature, or perhaps theatre.  I shall take Matthew’s recount at its face value, as if that is how it happened.  I shall try to exercise methodological belief in order to enter into the story world of the writer, as if it were the real world.  However, as a real reader and, to some extent, a critical reader, I must ask some pertinent questions – questions that will help me to participate better in the story world while wondering and forming hypotheses as to what was really happening.  I have read the recommended commentators, but have tried not to engage the text from their point of view.  Of course, I’m sure their influence comes through, but it is not intended.

Having established a platform from which to proceed and a framework within which to make sense of Matthew 23, let us open the curtain, but first with a brief prologue.

Prologue

Jesus has left Galilee some time earlier and made a roughly 200-kilometre journey from Caesarea Philippi (16:13) to Jerusalem via Jericho.  Along the way he has instructed the Pharisees on divorce, compared the possessors of the kingdom of heaven to little children, sent the rich young man away disappointed, spoken of the virtual impossibility for one who loves his possessions to enter the kingdom of heaven, foretold his death and resurrection, healed two blind men, cursed the fig tree and entered Jerusalem, where he has been teaching and admonishing in the temple.  He is in Jerusalem for the Passover festival.  His arrival has been marked by public acclaim.[2]

The drama unfolds

On his first day in the temple, Jesus caused considerable consternation among the temple authorities by driving out the merchants and money sellers and overturning their tables.  The following day, he was greeted by a delegation of chief priests and elders who quite understandably asked him by what authority he acted as he did.  He then told them three parables, all of which challenged the legitimacy of the temple incumbents and religious leaders of Israel, suggesting that they were neither faithful nor obedient servants.  He challenges their knowledge of the scriptures and their understanding of the real intent of the law (to love God absolutely and your neighbour as yourself).  He has humiliated them in the temple before the people.[3]

It has been necessary, in order to understand the unfolding significance and immediate impact of the denunciation in chapter 23, to review the events that lead up to it.  The pace has quickened.  The comparatively leisurely and peripatetic mission to the Galileans is behind him.  Jesus is now in the heart of Israel and not only contesting Israel’s spokesmen, but confronting them verbally and physically (overturning the tables and upsetting the merchandise essential to the temple cult) on their home ground, at the height of the Jewish year, accompanied by crowds of sympathetic and potentially inflammatory witnesses.  And now Jesus launches a full-scale attack.  But on whom and to whom?

The audience

Up to this point, Jesus has directed his challenge at the chief priests, elders, Sadducees and Pharisees and, as far as I can see, he has addressed his remarks directly to those groups together or separately, but now, at the beginning of chapter 23, he addresses the crowds and his disciples, and the targets of his wrath are the scribes and Pharisees.  Why is this?  Why not speak to the scribes and Pharisees directly?  (The denunciations are in second, not third person, but the story audience is the crowd and disciples.)  Why not denounce the temple authorities and religious leaders as well, especially as they had institutional power and leadership?  I can only suggest that Jesus perceived that the institutional authority of the chief priests and elders (who were of the Sadducean party) did not extend to the hearts of the people.  They filled a cultic and politico-legal function at some remove from people’s daily lives.  The Pharisees, however, and the scribes who applied Pharisaic teaching, were widely admired for their knowledge of the laws and traditions and their fastidious obedience to all of the laws as they understood them.[4]  However, their attention to detail and, in Jesus’ mind, inability to discern the real intent of the law, in addition to their unwillingness[5] to acknowledge the Messianic nature of Jesus’ mission, has made them the real threat to that mission.[6]

The denunciations

Chapter 23 is built around seven specific denunciations (the ‘seven woes’).  The entire chapter is a speech (a diatribe) in which Jesus cautions and commands his listeners, denounces his rivals, predicts their come-uppance, laments the plight of ‘Jerusalem’ and foretells his own withdrawal.  It is followed by Jesus’ intended exit from the temple, interrupted by the disciples’ wish to point out to him the different buildings in the compound.  This may indicate that Jesus was not familiar with the temple; in fact less familiar than his disciples.  As a Galilean, he may not have made regular trips to Jerusalem; indeed, he may have been inattentive to the requirement to be in Jerusalem for annual Passover ceremonies.[7]  If this were the case, he would have had little contact with Pharisees, as they were not very active in Galilee prior to 70.[8]  Has he recently become fully conscious of Pharisaic teaching and activities?  Are they fresh in his mind and is he intensely aware at this time of the danger to his message of their exemplary piety, obedience and respect for tradition?  Not according to the Gospel, as the first disputes with the Pharisees occur in Galilee as early as chapter 9 (9:11) and Jesus becomes aware of their plot to destroy him in chapter 12 (12:14).  However, the Pharisees’ challenge to Jesus in chapter 9 is simply a query and the threat in chapter 12, though much darker, does not indicate an intent to physically destroy him.  Certainly, from that point on, though, at least some Pharisees regarded Jesus as a magician, moved by demonic power (12:24).  They also saw him as one who was lax in obedience to the law.  So he has had some disputes with Pharisees before his arrival in Jerusalem, but their formidable and urbane presence in the temple, where Jesus as a Galilean may well have felt uncomfortable and alien, could have heightened his consciousness of them and their challenge to his message of the Kingdom and reinterpretation of the law.

He begins by acknowledging the authority of the scribes and Pharisees as interpreters and teachers of the law (v.2, they ‘sit on Moses’ seat’), but admonishes the audience not to follow what they do.  Why?  Because they honour law in its details and external expression, expecting others to follow, but this is too much for ordinary people to bear and the Pharisees do not support them.  In any case, the Pharisees (I shall use the term now to include scribes) are really motivated by desire for recognition and status, in the synagogue and the marketplace.  They love to be called Rabbi, Father or Teacher.  Those who follow Jesus, however, are not to be given titles that are due only to their heavenly father.  They are to be equal in rank and recognition.  Indeed they should strive to be self-effacing.  (v. 12 “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”)

And then Jesus launches his denunciation of the Pharisees in the form of ‘seven woes’.  There are three groups.  Woes 1 and 2 address the question of what constitutes the covenant community and its attainment (or denial).  Woes 3 to 5 deal with issues of cultic obligation and ritual piety.  Woes 6 and 7 denounce the Pharisees for their venality, hypocrisy and persecution (including murder) of the prophets past and to come.

As I read these denunciations, I have Peter Elbow’s counsel in mind.  First, I give credence to the author’s representation of Jesus’ evaluative point of view.  Clearly, the Pharisees present a model to the people of how one must be obedient to the law which Jesus finds unwholesome.  He sees their emphasis on detail as a distraction from the core values underpinning the whole of the law; that is, the commandment to love God wholeheartedly and one’s neighbour as oneself (22: 34-40).  On the other hand, however, I ask myself whether such a sweeping judgement can be justified unless the Pharisees are in fact attractive to the people and therefore a real threat, not because of their malevolence, but because of their goodness.  Does a diatribe of this nature tell us as much about its target as it does about its author?  And if the Pharisees were in fact good and diligent men of religion, why would Jesus be affronted by them?  Presumably because there’s something about their program that threatens to obscure Jesus’ program.  And what can that be?  It is that Jesus is trying to inaugurate a new Kingdom, not a political one (‘not of this world’) and not based on legal prescriptions and relationships, but one in which only God is our Father, we are all as brothers and sisters to each other and our social ethos is based on self-sacrifice, altruism and the priority of love over legalism.  But were the Pharisees really preventing this from occurring?  To the extent that (a) they were attractive to the people and (b) they had decided to oppose Jesus, then yes, they were.  And by the time Jesus arrived in the temple, his mission had become a matter of urgency.  Whether justifiably or not, Jesus had perceived that the Pharisees and, therefore, eventually, the Herodians, were not going to allow Jesus’ mission to continue.  Like John the Baptist, Jesus knew that he would before long be imprisoned and that that would most likely, as with John, lead to death.[9]  He had to make a strong impact now, while the focus of the Jewish world was on Jerusalem, on the temple, and, for the moment, on him.

So what else did he say about the Pharisees?  In woes 3, 4 and 5 he accuses them of confusing the details and externals of the law and devotional practice with the sacred foundation on which the law and practices rest.  They confuse accident with essence.  It is not the fact that the holy places are made of gold that counts but that God has sanctified these places.  They confuse peripherals with essentials.  Diligence in respect to tithing herbs is all very well, but peripheral in comparison with the centrality of justice, mercy and faith.  Being attentive to form is not of much use if one ignores the things of substance.  Likewise, observing the rules of external cleanliness is not sufficient in the eyes of God if one is not pure of heart. [10]

In woes 6 and 7, Jesus goes further.  Whereas in 3, 4 and 5, Jesus simply denounces the Pharisees as blind and negligent, reiterating the probably uncontested point that obedience to the law, though necessary, is not sufficient for justification in the eyes of God, in the last two woes his attack is ad hominem to an extreme.  Not only does he accuse them of hypocrisy, inferring that within they are ‘full of …filth’ (v. 27), he actually says they are ‘lawless’ (v. 28).  How would this have been received by his audience, by anyone who would have heard this at second hand or by the Pharisees themselves?  Obedience to the law, even to an excessive degree, was the hallmark of Pharisaism.  Nobody, whether they liked them or not, would have accused the Pharisees of neglect of the law.  So what did Jesus hope to achieve by such a sweeping and apparently unfair public judgement?  Hopefully he had some time to explain what he meant; that the speech recorded in Matthew was not the entirety of Jesus’ address in the temple.  If he had, I assume he would have explained that the Pharisees were missing the point in their observance of the law, that their undiscerning attention to peripheral features had obscured for them the underpinning essentials.  And it was close attention to the essentials that was necessary for Israel to be renewed, for God’s kingdom to be established.

As for the accusation of murder (woe 7), Jesus here takes on the ancient and traditional role of the prophet in attacking, in hyperbole if it helps to get the point across, the religious or other leaders of Israel where he believes they are acting unworthily of their commission and/or leading the people astray.[11]  Perhaps with a view to his own precarious position, Jesus reminds the Pharisees of ancient religious leaders and their persecution of the righteous and challenges them, rhetorically, to finish what their forefathers had started[12] (with persecution, perhaps, murder of himself and his followers). 

The lamentation

The chapter ends with a brief lament.  Using Jerusalem as a metonym for Israel, Jesus in his prophetic role speaks with the ‘voice’ of God, expressing God’s sorrow that Jerusalem, the holy city, so often needs to be taken under God’s wing, but must be allowed to choose her own destiny.  However, God will abandon Jerusalem/Israel now until such time as she recommits herself to God through the Messiah.

The urgency

The stridency of Jesus’ diatribe in chapter 23 suggests a heightened urgency.  Time and opportunities are running out for Jesus to make his mark and turn the tide in favour of his kingdom, his message of renewal.  Jerusalem is about to punish Jesus for his potential destabilization of order and tradition, hard won by compromise with the occupying authorities.  The chapter reflects perhaps the final thrust of Matthew’s community to win back their fellow Jews who had followed the ways of the post-70 Pharisees.[13]  It seems a desperate one, in which the ad hominem rhetoric overshadows and impedes the religio-legal purpose.  Like Jesus’, Matthew’s outrage did not succeed in the short term.  As Jesus was led away to his execution only two days later (in story time), so Matthew’s community in its Jewish Christian form became effectively extinct not very long after the Gospel’s composition, caught between the two stools of rabbinic Judaism and Hellenistic Christianity.[14]

Epilogue

Doubt and belief – the figure and ground of faith; they are also methodological perspectives that enable the critical reader to both penetrate scriptural text and to stand apart (perhaps ‘askance’) from it.  Only by embracing Matthew’s story, almost as an act of love, can we fully enter into its world and participate in it, not as an actor, but an “inside observer”.  And yet, we are “here”, not “there”.  We are privileged observers in that we know more about some critically relevant things than Matthew’s intended audience, or Jesus’ audience in the story.  Hence, we exercise, if not methodological skepticism, at least a degree of implied doubt through our critical questioning, informed by scholarship.  I have found the interacting application of belief and doubt, viewing the story from both inside and outside the text, helpful in understanding and coming to terms with scriptural narratives, in this case, Matthew 23.

References

Elbow, P. Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 

Mohrlang, R. “Law” in  Matthew and Paul: A Comparison of Ethical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Ryan, M. Reading the Bible. Tuggerah, NSW: Social Science Press, 2003.

Saldarini, A. J. “The Gospel of Matthew and Jewish Christian Conflict” in Social History of the Matthean Community: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches, D. L. Balch (Ed.). Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. 

Saldarini, A. J. “Matthew Within First-Century Judaism” in Matthew’s Christian Jewish Community.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Sanders, E. P. “The Pharisees II: Theology and Practice” in Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE – 66CE. London: SCM, 1992.

Vermes, G. The Changing Faces of Jesus. London: Penguin, 2000.

Vermes, G. Jesus in His Jewish Context. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.