The Method and Message of Matthew

449 Pages·1994·27.912 MB·English

by  Augustine Stock

The Method
and
Message of Matthew
Augustine Stock, D.S.B.
A Michael GlazieR. Book
I
THE LITURGICAL PRESS
Collegeville, Minnesota
Ignacio R. Garcia, Attorney At Law
A Michael Glazier Book published by The Liturgical Press
Cover design by David Manahan, O.S.B.Illustration: St. Matthew, from the Gospel
Book of Ebbo, Bibliotheque Municipale, Epernay.
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible,
e 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the USA. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Copyright c 1994 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping,
or any retrieval system, without the written permission of The Liturgical Press,
Collegeville, Minnesota 56321. Printed in the United States of America.
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stock, Augustine.
The method and message of Matthew I by Augustine Stock.
p. cm.
A Michael Glazier book."
U
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8146-5022-8
1. Bible. N.T. Matthew-Criticism, interpretation, etc.
I. Title.
BS2575.2.S79 1994
226.2'077-dc20 93-19236
CIP
Contents
Abbreviations ................................................. iv
Introduction ....- ........................................... .
1 Narrative Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2 Parts of Narrative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 3
3 Structure of Matthew's Gospel. .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . .. 6
4 The Sacred Canopy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5 Sectarian Language and Procedures ....................... 10
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . .. 16
Text and Commentary
Part I: The Figure of Jesus Messiah (1:1-4:16) ............... 19
Part II: The Ministry of Jesus Messiah to Israel
and Israel's Repudiation of Jesus (4:17-16:20) ........ 59
Part III: The Journey of Jesus Messiah to Jerusalem
and His Suffering, Death. and Resurrection
(16:21-28:20) ..................................... 269
Index ...................................................... 442
Abbreviations
UAkolouthein .. J. Kingsbury, "The verb Akolouthein ('to follow') as
an Index of Matthew's View of His Community," JBL
97 (1978): 56-73
Bauer D. Bauer, The Structure of Matthew's Gospel
BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
Daube The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism
Hill D. Hill, The Gospel of Matthew (New Century)
ETL Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanenses
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
LN J. Louw and E. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the
New Testament
Luz U. Luz, Matthew 1-7
Matthew J. Kingsbury, Matthew, (Proclamation Commentaries)
Meier J. Meier, Matthew (New Testament Message)
"Miracle J. Kingsbury, "Observations on the 'Miracle Chapters'
Chapters" of Matthew 8-9," CBQ 40 (1978) 559-73
NJBC New Jerome Biblical Comentary
NRSV New Revised Standard Version
NS B. Newman and P. Stine, A Translator's Handbook
on the Gospel of Matthew
Overman J. Overman, Matthew's Gospel and Formative Judaism
Passion D. Senior, The Passion of Jesus in the Gospel of
Matthew
Powell M. Powell, What is Narrative Criticism?
Parables J. Kingsbury, The Parables of Jesus in Matthew 13
Story J. Kingsbury, Matthew as Story
Structure J. Kingsbury, Matthew: Structure, Christology, King
dom
iv
Introduction
(1) Narrative Criticism
The dominant mode of biblical studies for more than a century has been
the historical-critical method. Through a variety of approaches (source,
form, redaction) this method seeks to reconstruct the life and thought of
biblical times through an objective, scientific analysis of biblical mate
rial. This analysis is meant to shed light upon significant periods in the
transmission of the Gospels: the period of the historical Jesus, the period
of oral tradition in the early Church, and the period of the final shaping
of the Gospels by the evangelists. The accomplishments of historical criti
cism have been great and are of permanent value. But among historical
critics (and others) the conviction arose that something was being left un
said. It fell to Hans Frei to lay his finger on the trouble. In his The Eclipse
of Biblical Narrative (1974), Frei asserted that the historical approaches
failed to take seriously the narrative character of the Gospels. He empha
sized that the gospels "are stories about Jesus, not compilations of mis
cellaneous data concerning him. They are intended to be read from
beginning to end, not dissected and examined to determine the relative
value of individual passages. In focusing on the documentary status of
these books, the historical-critical method attempted to interpret not the
stories themselves but the historical circumstances behind them" (2).
Other questions arose out of this rediscovery. If the Gospels are sto
ries, should they not first be comprehended on their own terms before
they are treated as evidence of something else? And if the evangelists are
authors, then must they not be studied as other authors are studied? It
was out of such questions that Biblical Literary Criticism (Narrative Criti
cism if it is concerned with stories) arose.
Biblical Narrative Criticism borrows some concepts from secular liter
ary scholarship, such as story and discourse, implied author and implied
reader. These concepts will be touched on briefly here and then applied
2 Introduction
in this work. A fuller explanation can be found in M. Powell, What Is
Narrative Criticism? (1990).
Much can be learned from noting the major differences between liter
ary criticism and historical criticism:
1. Literary criticism focuses on the finished form of the text. It is not
the objective of literary-critical analysis to set forth the process through
which a text has come into being but to study the text that now exists.
Literary criticism does not deny the findings regarding the development
of the text made by source, form, and redaction criticism, but it does ignore
them. "Ultimately, it makes no difference for a literary interpretation
whether certain portions of the text once existed elsewhere in some other
form. The goal of literary criticism is to interpret the current text, in its
finished form" (Powell, 7).
2. Literary criticism emphasizes the unity of the text as a whole. Liter
ary analysis does not dissect the text but strives to discern the connecting
threads that hold it together. The Gospels are viewed as coherent narra
tives, and individual passages are interpreted in terms of their contribu
tion to the story as a whole.
3. Literary criticism views the text as an end in itself, while historical
criticism treats the text as a means to an end. This end is a reconstruction
of something to which the text attests. Historical criticism regards the text
as a window through which the critic hopes to learn something about an
other time and place. The immediate goal of a literary study, on the other
hand, is to understand the narrative itself-the story that is told and the
manner in which it is told. So literary criticism, in contrast, regards the
text as a mirror; the critic is set upon looking at the text, not through
it, and whatever insight is obtained will be found in the encounter of the
reader with the text itself.
Literary criticism deals with the poetic function of a text. Literary crit
ics are able to appreciate the story of a narrative apart from considera
tion of the extent to which it reflects reality. Historical criticism, on the
other hand, deals with the referential function of a text and evaluates every
thing in terms of historicity.
The objection most frequently made against the use of literary (narra
tive) criticism in biblical studies is that the method is somehow antihistor
ical and so undermines the historical grounding of Christian faith.
Actually, nothing in the assumptions or presuppositions of narrative criti
cism calls into question the legitimacy of historical investigation. There
is no reason why a text that is examined with regard to its poetic function
cannot also be examined by a different method that concentrates on its
referential function. "Although the two methods cannot be used simul
taneously, they can be used side by side in a supplementary fashion. They
Introduction 3
might even be viewed as necessary complements, each providing infor
mation that is beneficial to the exercise of the other" (Powell, 98).
"By using such methods as source criticism, form criticism, and redac
tion criticism, scholars have been able to learn about the life and teaching
of Jesus of Nazareth and to gain insight into the interests and concerns
of the community that produced Matthew's Gospel. In the 1980s, how
ever, the interests of scholarship expanded to include inquiry into the func
tion of Matthew's Gospel as literature." So writes Mark Allan Powell in
the fall 1992 issue of Interpretation. This issue is the first in a new series
on the Gospels-the first since 1975. The number also includes articles
by the two other authors most frequently quoted in this book-Jack Dean
Kingsbury and David R. Bauer. Powell's article, "Toward a Narrative
Critical Understanding of Matthew," is preceded by this superscription:
"A scant decade ago, virtually anyone studying Matthew's Gospel ap
proached it from'the standpoint of redaction-critical method. Today, stu
dents of Matthew increasingly approach it from the standpoint of
narrative-critical method," Interpretation 46 (October, 1992) 341.
(2) Parts of Narrative
If Matthew's Gospel is a narrative and Matthew is an author, there is
no reason why he cannot be studied in the same way that secular literary
criticism studies an author and his work. As narrative (the story of Jesus'
life with beginning, middle, and end), Matthew can be studied employing
the standard concepts used in narrative theory: story and discourse, real
and implied author, narrator and narratee, real and implied reader.
If the "story" of a narrative such as Matthew is "what" is told (the
life of Jesus from conception and birth to death and resurrection), the
"discourse" is "how" this story is told, the means the author uses in order
to put the story across. Each narrative has two parts: a story, the content
or chain of events and a discourse, the expression, by which the content
is communicated. The story is the what in a narrative that is depicted,
discourse the how. This kind of distinction has been recognized since
Aristotle"s Poetics (cf. Chatman, Story and Discourse, 19).
Discourse selects which story elements to incorporate in the narrative
and in what order. We can call these two features, common to all narra
tives, selection and order. Selection is the capacity of any discourse to
choose which events and objects actually to state and which only to imply.
Order refers to the order of the appearance of the events in the work it
self. A narrative is a communication, and so presupposes two parties, a
sender and a receiver. Each party involves three different personages. On
the sending end are the real author, the implied author, and the narrator
4 Introduction
(if any); on the receiving end, the real audience (listener, reader, viewer),
the implied audience, and the narratee.
"The 'real author' of Matthew is the historical person who created this
narrative, the one scholars call the first evangelist. In the act of creating
this narrative, the first evangelist also created a literary version of him
self, a second self, which the reader comes to know through the process
of reading the narrative. This second self is the 'implied author'"
(J. Kingsbury, Matthew as Story, 31).
The phrase "literary version" also appears in Chatman's treatment of
the •' implied author." The real author creates an implied version of him
self as he writes. This entity is "implied," that is, reconstructed by the
reader from the narrative. He is not the narrator, but rather the principle
that invented the narrator, along with everything else in the narrative. Un
like the narrator, the implied author can tell us nothing; he, or better,
it has no voice, no direct means of communicating. It instructs us silently,
through the design of the whole. "We can grasp the notion of implied
author most clearly by comparing different narratives written by the same
real author but presupposing different implied authors" (Chatman, 148).
For example, Henry Fielding was the real author of Tom Jones, Joseph
Andrews and Amelia, but in those three novels he created three clearly
different implied authors.
Just as there are three different personages on the sending end of a nar
rative, so there are three different personages on the receiving end: the
real reader, the implied reader, and the narratee. The "real reader" de
notes any flesh-and-blood person who has actually heard it or read it, or
hears or reads it today. This person may be the Christian of the first cen
tury for whom the gospel was originally written or anyone in the twen
tieth century who takes it to hand. By contrast the term "implied reader"
denotes no flesh-and-blood person of any century. It refers rather to an
imaginary person who is to be envisaged as responding to Matthew's story
at every point with whatever emotion, understanding, or knowledge the
text ideally calls for. The implied reader is that imaginary person in whom
the intention of the text is to be thought of as always reaching its fulfill
ment. The implied author is counterpart of the implied reader-not the
flesh-and-bones you or I sitting in our living rooms reading the book, but
the audience presupposed by the narrative itself. Like the implied author,
the implied reader is always present. In one way or another the author
imparts to the implied reader the desired audience stance, which Weltan
schauung to adopt. In so doing, he informs the real reader how to per
form as implied reader.
Kingsbury uses these concepts to explain an important aspect of Mat
thew's Gospel, a phenomenon which we shall call "speaking past." Hav-