18 July 2014
Christianity and Antisemitism: Part Three


In my previous post, I explained how exploring the text of the Gospel of Matthew had resulted in a clearer understanding of sources used in its composition and of characteristic tendencies that helped identify its original composer. Toward the end, I noted my eventual recognition that some passages seemed to reveal the presence of another writer with an entirely different personality. More examples of that continue here, beginning with one of the most significant, involving a parable about a wedding feast, found in the Q Gospel source.



1.
The kingdom of Heaven is like this. There was a king who prepared a feast for his son's wedding; but when he sent his servants to summon the guests he had invited, they would not come. He sent others again.... But they took no notice; one went off to his farm, another to his business. Then he said to his servants, "The wedding-feast is ready; but the guests I invited did not deserve the honour. Go out to the main thoroughfares, and invite everyone you can find to the wedding." The servants went out into the streets, and collected all they could find, good and bad alike. So the hall was packed with guests.

Technically, that was a trick -- without warning, I supplied the parable in edited form, to give a fresh idea of what the original might have been like. (The omission after "He sent others again" was solely to save space, as its details added little to the meaning.) Here is the version in the Gospel of Matthew 22:1-13 in the New English Bible, with curious parts in bold:
Then Jesus spoke to them again in parables: 'The kingdom of Heaven is like this. There was a king who prepared a feast for his son's wedding; but when he sent his servants to summon the guests he had invited, they would not come. He sent others again.... But they took no notice; one went off to his farm, another to his business, and the others seized the servants, attacked them brutally, and killed them. The king was furious; he sent troops to kill those murderers and set their town on fire. Then he said to his servants, "The wedding-feast is ready; but the guests I invited did not deserve the honour. Go out to the main thoroughfares, and invite everyone you can find to the wedding." The servants went out into the streets, and collected all they could find, good and bad alike. So the hall was packed with guests.    (Matthew 22:1-10)

'When the king came in to see the company at table, he observed one man who was not dressed for a wedding. "My friend," said the king, "how do you come to be here without your wedding clothes?" He had nothing to say. The king then said to his attendants, "Bind him hand and foot; turn him out into the dark, the place of wailing and grinding of teeth."'    (Matthew 22:11-13)

It may be recalled from a previous example that "out into the dark, the place of wailing and grinding of teeth" was a good spot to "fling" someone who was thought of as "useless." Now it's recommended for an infraction for improper dress. The gratuitous quality of the addition should also be noted; its relevance to the parable's main story is nearly unaccountable other than the venue where it (supposedly) took place. Again, one has to wonder at the mind that was concerning itself about such things.

The importance of this parable would be hard to overstate.[1] According to scholarly reconstruction, it occurs in the earliest layer of the text of the Q Gospel, which implies an origin extremely close to if not directly from Jesus himself. The context is a wedding for the son of a king, whose servants are rebuffed by those previously invited to the feast. As a result, anyone off the street can come, no matter what kind of person they are. Apart from those radical social implications, the parable seems very neutral without the passages set off in bold. There is no stated penalty for declining to come, at the time it occurred or at the end of the story. And no further explanation of "what the parable means" was given, as was done for other parables of Jesus in the Gospels. It seems likely to me that it was those qualities of being left hanging that could have set off a troubled mind, in this case inspiring pronounced tendencies to share with everyone lurid imaginings of pain and punishment. (A way to fill the void, as it were.)

From a Christian perspective, of course, the most important thing is the parable's long-standing theological interpretation and application to Jesus, seen as one of many instances that he talked about himself as the Messiah and Savior, the Son of God. I'm lucky once again to not have to address a highly complicated subject to any great extent, other than to note that in the Johannine literature (the Gospel and Letters of John, the Book of Revelation), the parable's theme developed into the most sublime and lyrical symbolism, in which Jesus is the Bridegroom and the Church is the Bride in a grand eschatological Wedding representing the ultimate reconciliation and union of God with humankind. And the only thing relevant about that to the inquiry here is that the scribe in question was not that kind of thinker.


2.

In my initial exploration of this issue, the hardest part was trying to determine where one source ended and another "voice" made its appearance. The distempered scribe was easy to recognize most of the time due to his unoriginal choice of words (reciting pet phrases and taking his cue from isolated terms used by prior sources) and his apparent inability to add much (beyond a good deal of venom) to what saner minds had said before. But in many cases, it was hard to be sure of the identification. A few of the more pertinent examples are listed here.


1.  Immediately after the Lord's Prayer, someone was under the impression that clarification might help:
For if you forgive others the wrongs they have done, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, then the wrongs you have done will not be forgiven by your Father.    (Matthew 6:14-15)

2.  The first sentence of Matthew 10:28 is purportedly from the earliest layer of the Q Gospel:
Do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.
The next sentence in the same verse:
Fear him rather who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

3.  Warnings about the potential return of unclean spirits appear in the second layer of the Q-source (Matthew 12:43-45), to which a final sentence was added: "That is how it will be with this wicked generation."


4.  There is a parable about a fishermen's net unique to the Gospel of Matthew (13:47-48), the only issue being whether the parable itself was created by the easily recognizable writer of what followed.
Again the kingdom of Heaven is like a net let down into the sea, where fish of every kind were caught in it. When it was full, it was dragged ashore. Then the men sat down and collected the good fish into pails and threw the worthless away.

That is how it will be at the end of time. The angels will go forth, and they will separate the wicked from the good, and throw them into the blazing furnace, the place of wailing and grinding of teeth.    (Matthew 13:49-50)


3.

Someone reading this might have thought by this point that all this had nothing to do with antisemitism. That's true. But antisemitism is deeply bound up with Christian beliefs about Jesus of Nazareth and his being "the Messiah rejected by the Jews." As opposed to, let's say, his being executed on orders from a Roman governor, in a manner known as the Roman method of choice in those cases where Roman authorities wished to emphasize a point about their attitude toward the party they had found guilty. Even some two thousand years later, it may make for much easier thinking to believe that a limited number of Jews in the first century CE should bear responsibility on a grand historical (even cosmic) scale for failing to "accept" Jesus of Nazareth. That's much, much easier than being honest and looking at things realistically.

The other thing, as noted by John Dominic Crossan, is that in-fighting among Jewish sects in the first century and the propaganda that came with it lent itself to this development. Christian ideas that "the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah," and that this meant God's promises and God's love should now be the exclusive property of Gentiles who did accept him as such (in their hearts and in their minds), didn't happen overnight. Meditation on the wedding-feast parable might have helped, especially if its humor and social implications were long gone, and it became an allegory about how "the Jews" rejected God's servants because they didn't want to go to the Wedding of the Lord Jesus.

In another case, even a Q Gospel passage whose allusion to including Gentiles in feasting alongside Jewish patriarchs could push the development along, especially if its ambiguous quality left too much of a void to fill.[2] It wouldn't seem to take much to ignite another brief blast of angry retort, this time accompanied by an incoherent idea about the kingdom of Heaven somehow being identical to ancient Judaea.
Many, I tell you, will come from east and west to feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of Heaven.    (Matthew 8:11)

But those who were born to the kingdom will be driven out into the dark, the place of wailing and grinding of teeth.    (Matthew 8:12)

Sometime later, the geographical confusions continue, as at the end of Matthew's version of a parable in Mark about the tenants of a vineyard. The poor fellow even forgot to follow Matthew's preferred terminology for the kingdom of Heaven:
Therefore, I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you, and given to a nation that yields the proper fruit.    (Matthew 21:43)

Far more important for this development would be something like Matthew's 23rd chapter, which also happened to be crucial in my detection of the angry scribe. Due to the method I used (of identifying Matthew's various sources by marking off sections in colored pencils), I saw that passages from the secondary layer of the Q Gospel source appeared to form the chapter's foundation. And then, the distinctive contributions of the scribe in question stood out in the form of brief comments directly after Q passages.

The chapter's main distinction lies in being a proclamation of extensive complaints about "the doctors of the law and the Pharisees [who] sit in the chair of Moses" (Matthew 23:2), religious authorities represented in the Synoptic Gospels as the primary opponents of Jesus during his career.[3] It seems to be built around a few sets of such grievances from the Q Gospel (which in turn seem to have served as models for writing later ones), culminating in a general indictment at Matthew 23:34-36. This was the evident outcome of severe disputes between the Pharisees of a later period and people who presumably considered themselves first and foremost as followers of Jesus.[4] The general complaint was about the superficiality and hypocrisy of the Jewish clergy, plus their perceived obstruction of a righteous path.
Alas, alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites that you are! You shut the door of the kingdom of Heaven in men's faces; you do not enter yourselves, and when others are entering, you stop them.    (Matthew 23:13)

In some versions of Matthew's text, this is followed at verse 14 by a Mark-parallel, a grievance passage of the same model and identical beginning ("Alas, alas...."). Then a lengthier set of verses begins, the first of which is not clearly identifiable except possibly in its mention of hell and its somewhat unoriginal and pointless insult.
Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You travel over sea and land to win one convert; and when you have won him you make him twice as fit for hell as you are yourselves.    (Matthew 23:15)

The identification is more secure in subsequent verses (Matthew 23:16-22) due to the initial appearances of what will shortly become variations on a common theme ("Alas for you, blind guides!" "Blind fools!"). The next three (of five) Q Gospel grievance passages follow (with the added commentary from a now-familiar voice in bold).
Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin; but you have overlooked the weightier demands of the Law, justice, mercy, and good faith. It is these you should have practised, without neglecting the others. Blind guides! You strain off a midge, yet gulp down a camel!    (Matthew 23:23-24)

Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You clean the outside of cup and dish, which you have filled inside by robbery and self-indulgence! Blind Pharisee! Clean the inside of the cup first; then the outside will be clean also.  (Matthew 23:25-26)

Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You are like tombs covered with whitewash; they look well from outside, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all kinds of filth. So it is with you: outside you look like honest men, but inside you are brimfull of hypocrisy and crime.    (Matthew 23:27-28)

A brief comment with another favorite phrase serves as a bridge between the last of Q's grievance passages (beginning at verse 29) and the closing statements of the indictment.[5]
You snakes, you vipers' brood, how can you escape being condemned to hell?    (Matthew 23:33)

In closing this out, I should probably emphasize that what I've presented are examples, not a complete list, and only the more relevant and harsher ones at that. The scribe in question might have had his good days as well as his bad, so it's unclear how much of the text of Matthew could have changed in more subtle ways in relatively more lucid moments. It does seem clear -- to me, at any rate -- that this writer could not possibly have been the original composer of the Gospel.



NOTES

1.  For a few reasons, most of which are irrelevant to my main focus. But, in terms of originality, the story's conclusion seems consistent with a trait often seen in other parables of Jesus: an unexpected twist at the end. (A familiar example: a farmer whose method of sowing is little better than throwing seed in the wind would be considered an idiot by any farmer in any age. The practice should produce little if any yield, not amazingly abundant ones.)
   There are also numerous implicit critiques of human nature and society. People directly invited by a king would be the most important in society. After apparently not bothering to RSVP, they blew him off at the last minute. People off the streets could be of any social status or moral character. There may be a critique of "The Establishment" in all that, but much of the humor lies in the idea that a king (of all people) should have to take such extreme measures for a big social occasion -- with his apparent priority being to avoid the embarrassment of a thin crowd. (So, in other words, he got what he needed, despite how it looked: "the hall was packed with guests" -- the king shrugs and says, "It's the best we could do, son. Enjoy your party.")
2.  For instance, it could imply that large numbers of Gentiles will convert to Judaism, or simply that Jewish people will be living in widespread parts of the world.
3.  The editor's note for Matthew 23:1 in the New English Bible (1976), p. 31, reads: "The fact that the Pharisees appear as Jesus' chief opponents in the synoptic Gospels -- and especially in Mt. -- probably reflects the situation after 70 A.D., when Pharisaism was the form of Judaism which the Church normally confronted. In the very old traditions of the passion (beginning with ch. 26 [of Matthew] and its parallels [in Mark and Luke]), not the Pharisees, but the politically important priestly and Sadducaic elements seem to be most prominent in the fateful final conflict [leading to Jesus' death]."
4.  Exposure to the Dead Sea Scrolls in my study of John the Baptist would lead me to suggest that these specific accusations and the general outrage against the Pharisees may have a less "Christian" origin than we assume, but that's well beyond the scope of my arguments here.
5.
I send you therefore prophets, sages, and teachers; some of them you will kill and crucify, others you will flog in your synagogues and hound from city to city. And so, on you will fall the guilt of all the innocent blood spilt on the ground, from innocent Abel to Zechariah son of Berachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Believe me, this generation will bear the guilt of it all.    (Matthew 23:34-36)
That may sound familiar, given the anger and the irrationality. (A single generation of people assigned guilt for all the innocent blood spilled from the killing of Abel to the otherwise unattested murder of Zechariah, the [last?] Hebrew prophet). But according to our scholarly reconstruction of the Q Gospel, this indictment occurs in its secondary layer. If so, obviously, our scribe was not the only source of trouble.



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