Book of Matthew

Why would a course on the history of political thought need to include the Book of Matthew?  

First it is addressed to the Jewish community, which lived in the larger context of the Roman empire. So, there is the first point of interest. What is the relation of a religious community with peculiar laws in the larger context of empire with other laws. 

In this doubled context, we double the discomfort with Jesus.  He broke the Jewish laws, went against those authorities; but he was ultimately sentenced by a Roman judge so he must have not sit well with those authorities either. 

It seems like the question of the gospels is trying to give us a picture of who Jesus was, but instead of answering, the question just gets thrown back at his audience and the reader who do you think Jesus is/was? 

To understand how Jesus’s life could have changed our calendar, been the big before and after; we will have to figure out how his contemporaries thought about time.  The Book of Matthew is alive with this expectation/hope attitude we get the idea that everyone is hoping for the coming Kingdom. What did that mean? Turns out, meant different things to different groups. 

First Temple proto-eschatology, prophetic literature

Prophets such as Ezekiel, first and second Isaiah 

Second Temple Rise of apocalyptic literature. 

Academic Articles that can contextualize the Book of Matthew

Neusner, Jacob. “Messianic Themes in Formative Judaism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 2 (1984): 357–374.

Collins, John J. “The Heavenly Redeemer in Second Temple Judaism.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2 (1988): 3–20.

Chester, Andrew. “The Messianic Idea and Late Second Temple Judaism.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 13, no. 42 (1991): 47–81.

Horsley, Richard A. “Popular Messianic Movements around the Time of Jesus.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1984): 471–496.

Knibb, Michael A. “Eschatological Expectations in the Second Temple Period.” Journal of Jewish Studies 40, no. 1 (1989): 1–12.

“Temple and Cult in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha: Future Perspectives – Michael A. Knibb -Theological Developments, Sectarian Debates, Liturgical Transformations, Messianic Expectations, Apocalyptic Visions, Priestly Traditions, Angelology, Esoteric Cosmic Temple Imagery -RARE PAPERS EDITION -.” This Chapter Appears in the Book Flores Florentino: Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Early Jewish Studies in Honour of Florentino García Martínez, Pages 509–527, Published by Brill , n.d.

Edited volumes

Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era (ed. Jacob Neusner, William S. Green, and Ernest Frerichs; Cambridge University Press, 1987).

The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls by John J. Collins (Eerdmans, 2010 / Yale / Anchor Bible).

Who’s coming and what is he going to do? There were various answers to this question. 

OK but what were people thinking about when they were interested in this type of apocalyptic literature? 

One answer is that some people felt put upon by Roman taxation, so the coming Kingdom would throw off the authority of the Roman empire to tax. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is really the Kingdom of God and the story goes that God is coming in to break the time of crisis and begin His Reign. 

So what were people doing in response to this expectation or anticipation in the air? 

Apocalyptic sectarians: This people are looking for to a great big conflagration where God is going to come and get rid of the imperial powers and corrupt priests. 

Other people (Pharisaic tradition) sit around trying to be as obedient as possible so God will come and redeem them. 

Finally, the resistance figures looking for a leader for a physical liberation from rule. 

One of the big issues is that the leader turns out to be Jesus, but he doesn’t exactly overthrow the Roman empire or stop taxation. 

The larger thing to take from this is the challenge to the reader is not only Who is Jesus? But also how do I respond to eschatological literature?  

People want God to come because they are mad about injustice then they get their hopes up. 

This is based on such and so texts of the Old Testament, this is based on the socio-political circumstance of the age, both. 

For political philosophy reasons we have the issue of justice.  And the question of revolution or crisis –or the coming of justice in time, mapped onto time. 

The signpost words that are over-broad, yet necessary that we are going to use first and interrogate later are Greek, Roman, Christian.  So, Greek culture was highly valued by the Romans. The Old Testament translated into Greek was a literary context of those confronted with the gospels, so how can you separate Greek and Christian? And of course the story takes place in the Roman empire so how are we separating out Roman and Christian?

Greek is the history of the demos, while Rome is associated with the republic. 

Greek has sacrifice to the gods as a motor of history, Christianity has a different take on sacrifice. 

Roman vs. Christian — Roman believes in a demi god or Prometheus, vs the Christian as a guilt wallower or sheep. 

So, its hard to make the signposts due to their overbroad character,  not hermetically sealed. At the same time we are trying to make pictures in our minds  of the themes both where they overlap and where they differ. 

We have to get ready to read Nietzsche and also respond to Strauss.  

How does Greek philosophy make its way into each gospel? 

The Book of Matthew approaches the question of justice with a hard case example, one that is also described in Plato’s Euthyphro.  

Matthew 22:13 depicts a scenario that Socrates finds himself addressing in Plato’s Euthyphro. So we know that the knowledge producers working on the book of Matthew knew this Platonic dialogue. 

Matthew, like the Euthyphro, approaches questions of ethics and justice.

The book of Matthew is about Jesus’ place in the Jewish tradition.  The book begins with an ancestral lineage, which is the rhetorical organizational clue to know its addressed to a Jewish audience.  If you want to know who Jesus is, you may want to trace his ancestral lineage. 

We have the political context of Rome on the one hand, becoming a multicultural empire. 

Then we have the tribes of Israel who have a different relation to a different law, different commander but somehow coexist with and within the larger political state, whose laws must also be obeyed. 

This question of a variety of smaller ethno-groups within a larger political organization comes back with multiculturalism debates of contemporary political philosophy.  

Finally, of interest in the book of Matthew is the third layer, the individual.  The direct address to the disciples regarding their choice about their life. 

In the gospels, we have the question that keeps coming up Who is Jesus? There are at least three questions here. Who is he to the Romans? Who is he to the Jews? and who is he to the individual.  

These are contexts of ethical inquiry, — how must I treat myself, others in cultural community, and other in political community.

We can see the study of ethics began before and has gone on since in an academic way, and Christian belief is not required for ethical behavior.  My approach is not apologetic.  Its is more to approach the Synoptics and the Book of John from the perspective of how they intersect with the Greek and Roman political thought. 

These terms have to be simply signposts, because they are over-broad. Nevertheless, they function as  directional references.

The approach I’m taking is to ask is how do each text raise the questions raised in the Western tradition of political thought, and, then, when I link the pages to one another, we will be able to see how various texts or themes are braided together. 

The early modern period comes back to the covenant as one model of political agreement, the invocation of Moses as lawgiver.

So we have Jerusalem as one of the signposts, and Jesus is out of this tradition, Christianity comes up in the Jewish community in the larger political context of Rome.  

We have all of the models of law and political authority in Roman history known to this point. 

Why does the confluence of Jewish and Roman traditions of power and authority concern us?

This mix of 

Because I put Hobbes’s Leviathan at the center of the blog.  Part of an early modern tradition of imagining the foundation of the modern state in the model of a covenant. Moses is an archetype of a lawgiver mentioned by nearly all political philosophers in this tradition. 

Secondly, the presence of Roman law. Students of the history of political philosophy can mine Roman history for lessons of power and authority all night long, as did Machiavelli. 

In the King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorwicz explores how concepts in Roman law came to permeate early modern law. For example, the idea of a corporate body that does not die, the metaphor of the body for a polity the body politic and with corporation also the concept of personhood. The idea of office and office holding and the fiscus. 

Another wrench thrown by the Gospels is the universality of the message. 

How could a message so personal, known by direct experience also be universal? 

16:24-26  This passage is important for the history of political thought intersecting with Biblical studies because it concerns life, and saving one’s life later becomes part of sovereign legitimation discourses. 

Matthew 16:24–26 (NRSVUE)

24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”