Book of Matthew

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

First, since it covers the same ground as Mark, we will be looking for all of the themes we find there. 

Second, we have a clear inheritance from the Greek tradition in Matthew 22:13 of a scenario set up in Plato’s Euthyphro. So we know that the knowledge producers working on the book of Matthew knew this dialogue. 

Matthew like the Euthyprho text approaches questions of ethics and justice.

Next, the book of Matthew is about Jesus’ place in the Jewish tradition.  The book begins with an ancestral lineage addressed to a Jewish audience. 

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.  

And 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 some sort of belief is not required for ethical behavior or investigation. 

So we now have multiple models of law and authority. We have the example of Moses as a response to the problem of the lawgiver, which is odd since he was more a law receiver. 

And the covenant as one model of political agreement, and the other examples of leadership in the pentateuch. 

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

The Western tradition is stacked with tradition and we are only on the first century.

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

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?”