Scholars pay attention to the history of interpretation of biblical texts and of their reception for multiple good reasons. This essay urges that, in addition to the reasons typically offered, careful
Navorsers skenk aan die interpretasiegeskiedenis van bybelse tekste en die ontvangs van die verskillende tekste om verskeie redes aandag. Hierdie artikel toon aan dat, behalwe vir redes wat normaalweg aangebied word, ’n noukeurige ‘
The history of interpretation, by which is meant the study of the interpretive history found in formal exegetical and theological works, and its relative, reception history, by which is meant the study of the construction and application of texts beyond formal theological and exegetical work, are quite the fashion these days. Examples of these are a journal entitled
Why the history of interpretation and reception history are so popular today is an interesting question. Part of the truth may be that, on some level, we fear or suspect that old-fashioned historical-criticism is nearing exhaustion, and so we must find something else to do. Another motivating factor is surely the postmodern proclivity to recognise that different historical and different personal contexts generate different readings of texts, and that texts accordingly have multiple meanings. Many of us are no longer hypnotised by the quest for some recommended original and so authoritative sense, whether of an author or of an author's first audience. We are keenly aware of the plasticity of texts, and how easily and thoroughly they succumb to interpretive agendas, conscious and unconscious.
A technological factor is also at work here. Whilst there is no denying the current proliferation of books and articles that highlight the history of interpretation and reception history, there is also no denying the proliferation of books and articles on just about every other subject under the sun, within biblical studies as well as without. There is more of everything. Of this the explanation is not ideology but technology the means of production. We can produce more than in the past and are doing so. On top of this, there are far more New Testament scholars today than in the past as well as many more publications for what those scholars produce today than in the past; and in a publish or perish academy, it does not surprise that just about every subject is, in comparison with the past, thriving.
Whatever the reasons for the current interest in what the Germans call
Before the editors of De Gruyter's
Moving back to the 19th century, the exegesis in the commentary on the Sermon on the Mount of August Tholuck’ s (
One might of course expect this given the authority of tradition for their ecclesiastical tradition. Earlier Protestants, however, also minded the past to support and illuminate their own exegetical aims. The Puritan Thomas Manton (1620–1677), in his great commentary on James (1653), cites with profit texts from Tertullian, Eusebius, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, Epiphanius, Ambrosiaster, Socrates Scholasticus, Bernard of Clairvaux, Ludolph of Saxony, Erasmus, Luther, and Beza. Even more noteworthy is the fascinating work of the French Huguenot polemicist Jean Daillé (
I could of course keep moving back further in time until I arrived at the obvious, which is that, ultimately, all this attention to the history of exegesis had its birth in the traditional catenas, in the pre-Reformation commentaries that collected the opinions of predecessors, commentaries such as Aquinas’
The fact matters because it is all too easy to overvalue the present moment, to take all the credit for ourselves, to imagine that we perceive what everyone before us failed to see. Privileging recent work to the neglect of earlier work is, in my judgement, an unfortunate habit. Much that we think of as new, including the history of interpretation, is really old.
All interpreters, moreover, including modern historical critics, belong to a centuries-long, unfinished history of effects. We do not somehow stand outside of that history, and we are no more its end than we are its beginning. Further, we should not presume that our own agendas and perspectives – which will soon enough give way to different agendas and perspectives – are in every way superior to all that has come before us.
Important as these points are, however, I wish in this article to focus on something else. It is my conviction that the history of interpretation is important not only because it bestows upon us some humility and perspective by putting us in a large historical context, but because it can profoundly inform our own exegetical and historical judgements. The rest of this article is an attempt to establish and illustrate this claim from my own study of Matthew. What I wish to do, is reflect on the decades during which I have worked on and written about this Gospel and share some ways that the history of interpretation has served me to numerous good ends.
My first proposition is that careful attention to older writings sometimes allows one to recover exegetical suggestions and profitable lines of inquiry that, from an historical-critical point of view, should never have dropped out of the commentary tradition but have done so. I offer in evidence four illustrations.
My first example of this phenomenon has to do with Matthew 5:21–26, where Jesus says:
If then you are offering your gift upon the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.
I remember distinctly, when I was first working my way through the Sermon on the Mount, that I was at the same time going through the old volumes in the Ante-Nicene Fathers series, looking for whatever might illumine Matthew. Volume 5 had Cyprian in it, and I ran across two passages that grabbed my attention. The first was in Cyprian's treatise on
And so, if a person comes to the sacrifice with strife in his heart, he [
The second passage was in Cyprian's work on
God does not receive the sacrifice of a person who is in disagreement, but commands him to go back from the altar and first be reconciled to his brother, so that God also may be appeased by the prayers of a peacemaker. Our peace and brotherly agreement is the greater sacrifice to God … For even in the sacrifices which Abel and Cain first offered, God looked not at their gifts, but at their hearts, so that he was acceptable in his gift who was acceptable in his heart. Abel, peaceable and righteous in sacrificing in innocence to God, taught others also, when they bring their gift to the altar, thus to come with the fear of God, with a simple heart, with the law of righteousness, with the peace of concord … The quarrelsome and disunited and he who has not peace with his brothers. (23–24)
I had never before linked Matthew 5:21–24 with Cain and Abel and Genesis 4:1–16. But as I thought about the possibility, it came to appeal to me more and more. The two texts share several thematic and verbal links. If Matthew 5:21–24 opens by raising the subject of murder, Genesis 4 recounts the Bible's first murder. If Matthew 5:21–24 focuses on anger, Genesis 4:5 says that ‘Cain was exceedingly angry’ at Abel or on his account. If Matthew 5:21–24 addresses the relationship between
This intertextual reading was further attractive because the story of Cain murdering Abel has never been obscure. It rather belongs to Israel's foundational, primeval history, and ancient Jews and Christians must have known the stories in that portion of Scripture as well as any part of the Bible. So this is the sort of text readers might readily have called to mind with just a little prompting. Matthew 23:34–36 refers to ‘the blood of Abel the just’ without elaboration or explanation. Clearly the evangelist assumes an audience familiar with the story in Genesis, an audience that can easily call it to mind.
I began to think, then, that the image in Matthew is not of someone in the Jerusalem temple offering a gift at the altar and calling a halt to the official proceedings, as the modern commentators all assume even as they concede that such a circumstance would be peculiar.
Then Noah built an altar before the Lord – it is the altar which Adam built at the time he was banished from the Garden of Eden and on which he offered an offering, and upon which Cain and Abel offered their offerings. But when the waters of the flood came down it was destroyed. Noah rebuilt it.
Now I will not bother to outline further reasons for reading Matthew 5:21–24 in the light of Genesis 4:1–16. What I want to stress is that after I first found this reading in Cyprian, I went looking for it elsewhere. Initially I came up empty. This was because none of the many modern commentaries then in my personal study seconded Cyprian's interpretation.
So I had to leave my study and look through larger libraries in order to discover whether Cyprian was alone or not. I then discovered that he was not alone, but only because I went back in time, because I closed the covers of the contemporary volumes and travelled to the past. I discovered that Cyprian had company. Like-minded readers include the scripturally-saturated Tertullian as well as Chrysostom, Chromatius, Geoffrey of Babion, Paschasius Radbertus, Rupert of Deutz, Hugh of St-Cher, Albert the Great, Hugo Grotius, and Matthew Henry (full documentation in Allison
I have no idea, let me add, and still have no idea, why Matthew Henry appears to be the end of the line for this interpretation. The disremembering of the traditional reading is all the more puzzling because Henry himself was such an influential commentator. One expects that, when sensible proposals appear in his exposition, they will live on. From what I have been able to learn, and for whatever reason, this reading did not.
I come now to a second discovery. This one I missed when I worked my way through Matthew for the first time, writing my commentary. I learned of it only years later. It has to do with the notice, found twice in Matthew, once in Mark, and once in Luke, that people were healed by touching the fringe of Jesus’ garment (Mt 9:20; 14:36; Mk 6:56; Lk 8:44).
Once, after finishing a lecture on Matthew, a student asked me to listen to a tape of sermons by his former pastor. I did not want to stifle his enthusiasm, so I thanked him and kindly indicated that I would give a listen, not really intending to do so. But I did end up listening to a few minutes of each side of the tape. All of it was forgettable, except for one thing. The pastor shared what was to me a novel explanation of why the synoptics claim that people were healed by touching ‘the hem’ of Jesus’ garment. Jews, the pastor explained, can refer to the fringes of their garments, or to the edge to which those fringes are attached, with a word,
I had never before run across this idea, which I knew was not in any of the modern critical commentaries. Yet I did not pursue the matter any further until, a bit later, I happened to be reading the so-called
This was enough to motivate investigation, and soon enough I found the following in Photius (p. 505b.3), the 9th-century lexicographer: ‘“For”, it says, “the sun of righteousness will arise upon you who fear my name, and healing will be in his wings”. The sun of righteousness is the Lord of good things, and the wings are the tassels of his garment.’ This is exactly the equation that explains Pseudo-Epiphanius’ proof-texting five centuries earlier, and exactly the interpretation of my student's former pastor 1000 years later.
I did not think it likely that a modern pastor, a medieval philologist, and the unknown author of an obscure, uninfluential 4th-century testimony collection all worked upon the same exegetical idea independently of each other. I deemed it much more likely that there was some sort of interpretive tradition here, and I imagined that, if I looked hard enough, I would be able to uncover it. Here follows what I found.
This same reading of Malachi and the relevant synoptic verses appear in a Byzantine text of uncertain date falsely assigned to Chrysostom as well as in a sermon on Mary, also of uncertain date, attributed to Hesychius of Jerusalem.
As with Matthew 5:21–24 and Cain and Abel, I have not been able to learn why this old intertextual linking of Malachi 4:2 to the synoptics fell out of favor. I find it truly puzzling given that its proponents include four major exegetical players, namely Photius, Grotius, Poole, and Henry. I have also been unable to document its existence before Ps.-Ephraem's
I am, furthermore, inclined to suppose that this interesting reading was first made in a Jewish Christian environment, where someone familiar with Jewish customs could think of the tassels of a garment as its
Now whether or not Matthew, Mark and Luke had Malachi in mind, surely this is a reading that should be returned to the commentaries (cf. further Allison
My next example of a suggestive reading that modern Matthean exegesis has forgotten, concerns the missionary discourse in Matthew 10 and its parallels in Mark 6 and Luke 9 and 10, where Jesus forbids his disciples to take several items with them.
Matthew says that the disciples should not take gold, silver, copper, wallet, two shirts, sandals, or staff. Mark says that they should not take bread, wallet, copper, or two shirts (he allows the staff and sandals). Luke 9 and 10 together disallow taking staff, wallet, bread, silver, or purse. No synoptic theory can explain all of these variants; they remain puzzling on any account. For my purposes, however, that does not matter. What I wish to stress here is that the list of items prohibited in Matthew is strikingly reminiscent of one aspect of the biblical story of the exodus from Egypt. Exodus 12 recounts that Moses commanded the Israelites to eat the Passover hurriedly, with sandals on their feet and staff in hand, and that they went forth with bread, with silver, with gold, and with clothing (Ex 12:11, 34–36). Deutoronomium 8:4 and 29:5, moreover, relate that the Israelites’ clothing was indestructible, so that they only needed one pair of sandals and one set of clothes. Is it only coincidence that Jesus’ disciples are similarly in a hurry but still more so and that they take even less than the fleeing Israelites? Maybe implicit in Matthew is a contrast: what Moses allowed, Jesus prohibited. Certainly elsewhere the first Gospel is much interested in drawing parallels and emphasising contrasts between the history of Jesus and the history of the exodus (Allison
If I were the only one in exegetical history to set Jesus’ prohibitions to missionaries over against the story of the exodus, the exercise would not be worth much. But I did not invent this intertextual proposal. I found it in the church fathers. Here follows Tertullian:
When the children of Israel went out of Egypt, the creator brought them forth laden with their spoils of gold and silver vessels, and with loads besides of raiment and unleavened dough; whereas Christ commanded his disciples not to carry even a staff for their journey … Consider the difference presented in the occasions and you will understand how it was one and the same power that arranged the mission of his people according to their poverty in the one case and their plenty in the other. Even shoes he forbade them (the disciples) to carry. For it was he under whose protection the people wore out not even a shoe (Deut. 29:5), even in the wilderness for the space of so many years. (
Ambrose (
The God of Genesis commanded Moses in the going up from Egypt saying, ‘Make ready with loins girded, having sandals on feet, staffs in your hands, and traveler's bags upon you. Carry away the gold and silver and all the other things of the Egyptians’. But our good Lord, sending his disciples out into the world, says, ‘Neither sandals on your feet, nor traveler's bag, nor two cloaks, nor money in your belts. See how clearly the good one opposes the teachings of that one’. (quoted in Van de Sande Bakhuyzen
This is a very suggestive comment, and I think there may be something to it. But when one leaves the church fathers, the movement from Matthew 10 or its parallels to the exodus all but disappears, at least to the extent of my researches. (It has recently reappeared, independent of my own work, in Marcus
I now come to a fourth example of exegetical amnesia. It has to do with Matthew 22:34–40, where a lawyer asks Jesus the following:
‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ Jesus’ answer is: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.’
In his review of the history of interpretation of this passage, Luz (
Luz's answers to these questions are instructive and insightful, and I do not wish in any way to detract from what he has to say. But his
All these regard the imperative to love God and neighbour as the Decalogue in brief. From this cloud of witnesses let me quote the old
Question: You said that your Sponsors did promise for you, that you should keep God's Commandments. Tell me how many there are?
Answer: Ten.
Question: Which are they?
Answer: The same which God spake in the twentieth Chapter of Exodus, saying, I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. (p. 579)
There follows a recitation of the ten commandments, after which is this exchange:
Question: What dost thou chiefly learn by these Commandments?
Answer: I learn two things; my duty towards God, and my duty towards Neighbour.
Question: What is thy duty to God?
Answer: My duty towards God is To believe in him, to fear him, and to love him with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength (cf. Dt 5, 6).
Question: What is thy duty to thy Neighbour?
Answer: My duty towards my Neighbour is To love him as myself (cf. Lv 19, 18) … (p. 579).
How old is this idea? It appears already in the fourth century, in the
Luz's surprising failure to call attention to this ubiquitous tradition is mirrored in the silence of the other modern commentaries on Matthew (although since the publication of Davies & Allison 1988–1997, 3:238, this may be changing; cf. Marcus
However that may be, the omission bothers me because I think it is possible that the old ecclesiastical idea would not have been foreign to Matthew or his first readers, that the double commandment to love might have struck the ancients as a conventional summing-up of the 10 commandments. Philo believed the Decalogue to be a sort of abstract of the entire mosaic legislation, and he also thought that the Decalogue itself can be summarised, that the ten words can in fact be reduced to two. As have so many since, he divided the ten commandments into ‘two sets of five, which he [
Philo's twofold division, likewise attested in Josephus, is more than formal. The partitioning is also thematic. The first set of injunctions are, he says, ‘more concerned with the divine’ (sec. 121). The second set has to do with ‘the duties of individual to individual’ (sec. 106). This twofold explication, with its focus on duty to God and to humanity, brings us near Matthew's Jesus.
But there is more. Philo summarily characterises the two chief duties in terms of love (
I cannot here introduce the additional reasons for inferring that others beside Philo might have understood Matthew 22:23–30 along the lines indicated. I trust, however, that I have said enough to demonstrate that here is yet one more example of something one finds in old books that should also be in the newer books.
If the history of interpretation has been a bit of a fad over the past 25 years or so, the same is true of work on New Testament intertextuality. Books and articles on how the New Testament quotes and echoes and alludes to the Old Testament have multiplied during that time. Now there is no necessary connection between these two approaches, and I suppose that, in most people's minds, they are independent disciplines. For me, however, the one is indispensable for the other. Let me explain.
Richard Hays (
Yet Hays finds the history of interpretation less than reliable. Hays’ (
Gentile Christian readers at a very early date lost Paul's sense of urgency about relating the gospel to God's dealings with Israel and, slightly later, began reading Paul's letters within the matrix of the New Testament canon. This criterion should rarely be used as a negative test to exclude proposed echoes that commend themselves on other grounds. (p. 31; yet contrast Hays
I am of another mind. It is true enough that Christian commentators have always moved from one New Testament text to other New Testament texts. Thus Luke 10:21–22 (‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son’) has most often been linked with verses from John (e.g. 1:18: ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son … who has made him known’); and the text most commonly called upon to elucidate Matthew 24:40 (‘one will be taken and one will be left’) has been 1 Thessalonicense 4:17 (‘Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds’). It is equally true, however, that many Christian exegetes have lived and moved and had their being in the entirety of the Bible, that they have known the Scriptures inside out. In some cases, moreover, ecclesiastical circumstances have encouraged Christian readers to search for First Testament parallels to Second Testament texts. Thus Tertullian, in his implacable opposition to Marcion, who denied that the New Testament deity is the Old Testament deity, became one of the most accomplished, astute intertextual readers in Christian history. It was in Tertullian's theological interest to find as many correlations as possible between the two Testaments.
In my own intertextual work on Matthew, I have in fact come to rely on Tertullian a great deal. I have also come to trust Albert the Great, whose commentaries on the gospels are unparalleled treasure troves of possible intertextual connections (cf. Geyer
I can illustrate how this works by reverting to some of the interpretive suggestions I made earlier in this article. Regarding the proposal that Matthew 5:21–24 alludes to the story of Cain and Abel, all three of my intertextual guides here find Genesis in the Sermon on the Mount. The upshot is that I have a great deal of confidence that I am right about this. It is otherwise when it comes to associating the hem of Jesus’ garment with the end of Malachi. It is only Grotius who hears a prophetic echo in the synoptic phrase, so here my confidence is lessened. Having Grotius on my side is encouraging, but the silence of Tertullian and Albertus gives me pause. Things are even worse with respect to the possibility that Jesus’ prohibition of gold, silver, copper, wallet, two shirts, sandals, and staff in Matthew 10 reverses an event in Exodus. I have been unable to find this exegetical idea in Tertullian, Albertus, or Grotius. So my sense is that, however intriguing and otherwise inviting this possibility is, it remains nothing more than a possibility. If my three witnesses do not see what I see, I asume that it is not really there.
Before moving to the next section, I would like to qualify my enthusiasm for using the history of interpretation as an aid in determining the presence or absence of intertextuality. Although I am more enthusiastic about the utility of earlier interpreters than is Hays, my enthusiasm is not unqualified. There are times when I think it possible that Matthew intended an intertextual link that the commentary tradition has missed. I offer two illustrations.
The first has to do with Matthew 5:1–2. I am quite confident that, when Matthew made Jesus sit on a mountain before delivering the great sermon in chapters 5–7, he intended a parallel with Moses. Not only do the previous four chapters develop an extensive Moses typology (Allison
But whilst this thought is at home in the commentary, nobody to my knowledge associated Jesus’ sitting with the posture of Moses on Sinai. There was, however, a Jewish tradition that Moses sat on the mountain. It was based upon Deuteronomium 9:9, where Moses speaks these words:
When I went up the mountain to receive the tables of stone, the tables of the covenant which the Lord made with you, I remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water.
The Hebrew here translated as
Now what matters for Matthew is that the tradition that Moses sat on Sinai was established in pre-Christian times. The proof of this I have detailed elsewhere (Allison
My second illustration of the limits of the history of interpretation for intertextual investigation has to do with Matthew 16:13–20, the episode of Peter's confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God. Years ago I began to toy with the notion that the Peter of Matthew 16 can be profitably understood as a sort of new Abraham. Of the Old Testament figures who receive a second name, the most memorable are Abram and Jacob. The former was given the new name Abraham to signify that he would be the father of a multitude (Genesis 17:1–8), and the parallels between Genesis 17 and Matthew 16 are quite intriguing. In both cases we are witnessing the birth of the people of God, the Jews in the one case, the church in the other. In both, that birth is associated with one particular individual – Abraham, then Peter. And in both that individual has a name which symbolises his new crucial function. Abraham is taken to mean ‘father of a multitude’, Peter to mean the ‘rock’ on which the church is founded.
I was encouraged in this inference by Isaiah 51:1–2:
Hearken to me, you who pursue deliverance, you who seek the Lord; look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were digged. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for when he was but one I called him and I blessed him and made him many.
Here Abraham, like Peter, is a rock. So just as the Old Testament figure whose name was changed in order to signify the coming into being of the people of God was likened to a rock, so too in Matthew is the birth of the church accompanied by Simon gaining the new name, Peter.
I was also encouraged by a passage in a very late Jewish text,
The history of interpretation, however, is here disappointing. I did find a few patristic texts that mention the switch from Simon to Cephas or Peter alongside the switch from Abram to Abraham (e.g. Origen,
One of the two who heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. He first found his brother Simon, and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (which means Christ). He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him, and said, ‘So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas’ (which means Peter).
This explains the remark of Matthew Poole (
In John's Gospel, Peter receives his new name at the very beginning of the public ministry, and without any connection to Jesus founding the church. So if, with the older, harmonising exegetes such as Poole, one reads Matthew 16 within its broader New Testament context, one does not associate the birth of the church with Peter receiving his new name; the two events remain separate. This, then, might be the reason why there appears to be no precedent in exegetical tradition for the proposed parallel between the Peter of Matthew 16 and the Abraham of Genesis 17.
So far I have recounted how attention to the history of interpretation has both acquainted me with interesting readings absent from our contemporary literature and given me guidance when I have been exploring intertextual connections. I now come to my third point, which is that
When I was in graduate school, I learned historical-critical methods. I was given the tools by which to understand, in its original
Early on then I picked up the habit of sorting through exegetical proposals, trying to figure out which one was correct, that is, which one was most likely to occur to a first-century author or audience. Soon enough, however, I did learn how old-fashioned this was, at least as an exclusive pursuit, in terms of modern hermeneutics and modern literary theory. Yet given my history, I was resistant. The idea of that a text might have indeterminate meaning or multiple meanings seemed to place a large question mark over how I had been accustomed to do business.
Two things gradually lead me to modify – not give up, but to modify – the view I had when I left graduate school. One was the experience of writing a commentary and, on various occasions, discovering that more than one interpretation made sense to me and, secondly thinking that more than one interpretation might have made sense to an ancient author or audience. For example, when I studied the debate as to whether the beatitudes in Matthew 5 are implicit imperatives and so moral – you should be meek, you should pure in heart, and so on – or whether they are promissory and conciliatory – you will be comforted, you will see God – I saw no need to make a choice. Why not both at the same time, or one or the other depending upon a hearer's immediate circumstances?
Again, when looking at Matthew 28:9, where Mary Magdalene and the other Mary grab Jesus’ feet, I discovered several exegetical options. Some took the woman's physical act to be a sign of their joy and affection. For others it betokened submission. For others it was an act of worship. For still others – the majority view – the act carried apologetical meaning: if Jesus had feet, he could not have been a ghost (just as he cannot be a ghost at the end of Luke and at the end of John, where he invites others to touch him). But it seemed to me that more than one of these readings might naturally occur to someone at the same time. Why, then, choose one over the other if all make good sense in the literary context?
The other thing that helped me modify my quest for the one true meaning was the slow realisation that the older commentators were quite often content not to choose. I do not refer here to the classical idea of the four-fold meaning of Scripture – literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. I refer rather to older writers who sometimes list the various interpretive options and deem them all appropriate. Consider for instance what the old Baptist theologian John Gill (
They threw themselves prostrate at his feet, in token of reverence and humility; and they laid hold on his feet, that they might know, and be assured that he was really risen, and that it was not a spirit, or a mere phantom and appearance; and they held him in affection, and as desirous of his continuance with them. (p. 303)
Here are the several meanings I listed above, presented not as alternatives but compliments (note also Sedulius Scottus,
Contrast this with what one finds in Luz’ s (
Gill did not know about this law, and I suggest that we should not feel compelled to choose between the several interpretations of Matthew 28:9. Affection, submission, and worship readily belong to one and the same act; and that the notice of people grasping Jesus’ feet could additionally serve an apologetical end is scarcely far-fetched.
Let me offer one more illustration of a text which I think should send us in several directions at once. When Jesus dies in Matthew 27, the sun goes dark, from the 6th until the 9th hour. In addition to the several intertextual and intratextual possibilities here, one finds the following five ideas in the commentary tradition: the darkness is the proof of divine judgement; is a sign that God and/or nature mourns the crucifixion of God's Son; indicates that Jesus’ death is the end of the world in miniature or a proleptic anticipation of the end; show us that nature was so ashamed of the cross that it refused to behold the sight; and communicates the cosmic scope of Jesus’ death. So which reading is correct?
None of them seem antagonistic to me; that is, I see nothing in one idea that disallows another. On the contrary, they seem closely related. For example, the theme of judgement hardly crowds out the theme of mourning or vice versa; and cosmic meaning scarcely cancels the eschatological reading; in fact, the latter seems to imply the former.
The commentary tradition comes to our aid here, because exegete after exegete refrains from insisting on finding a single connotation here. Even Calvin (
… hiding its face, and refusing to afford its comforting light and heat to him [
I have come more and more to think that this sort of nonexclusive interpretation often corresponds to how a text was intended to be heard and was heard from the beginning.
I now come to my last major point, which is that paying attention to older commentaries often helps us to see how our own presuppositions get in the way of reading texts from 2000 years ago. Here I offer in illustration my work on the star of Bethlehem.
When I began, many years ago, working on Matthew's infancy narrative, Raymond Brown’ s (
Even more important was my experience with the star of Bethlehem in Matthew 2. Brown devoted a couple of pages to discussing the historical issue. He asked, if there is some memory here, what real-life event might have inspired Matthew's story? He dutifully catalogued the three common modern explanations. Maybe Matthew's star was really a supernova, or maybe it was a planetary conjunction, or maybe it was a comet. Now as I pondered these options, none of them made much sense. The text relates that the star ‘went before’ the magi, and likewise that ‘it came to rest over the place where the child was’ (Mt 2:9). This is beyond peculiar if the object is astronomical. Comets of course traverse the sky, and supernovas and conjunctions, because of the earth's motion, at least appear to move. But that a lighted object high in the sky above could guide someone on the earth below to a precise location just does not compute.
I do not know what I would have thought unless I had come upon a passage in Chrysostom (
… did not, remaining on high, point out the place, it being impossible for … [
This set me to thinking, because Chrysostom is right – ‘by reasons of its immense height, it could not sufficiently distinguish so confined a spot, and reveal it to those wanting to see it’ – and this made me wonder what exegetical history might have to say. Soon enough I ran across this, in the
The 3rd text I ran across was in the so-called
And it came to pass, when the Lord Jesus was born at Bethlehem of Judea, in the time of King Herod, behold, magi came from the east. And there were with them gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And they adored him [
I no longer remember in what order I discovered the other relevant sources, but what I learned was this: The notion that the star actually left its distant abode and descended to earth, and thereupon led the way straight to the infant Jesus, until it entered the stable in which he was and came to rest right over his head, is all over the pre-Renaissance literature. It is in Irenaeus, Origen, Ephraem the Syrian, Augustine, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Peter Chrysologus, Ishodad of Merv, Fulgentius, Dionysius Bar Salibi, Theophylact, and a host of others, up to and including Luther and Calvin (full documentation in Allison
… it was not a natural star, but extra-ordinary, for it was not of the order of nature to disappear at certain times, and afterwards suddenly to shine again. Further, that it led in a straight path to Bethlehem, and at length stood fixed over the place where Christ was. None of this accords with natural stars. (p. 83)
As late as the early 17th century, Lapide (
I further discovered that the
What I realised after learning all of this – of which there was no trace in Brown's seemingly comprehensive commentary – is that this is quite a plausible reading of Matthew's text, certainly far more plausible than trying to tie Matthew's language to a comet or planetary conjunction or a supernova. In the biblical tradition, angels ascend and descend. They are bright. They can serve as guides. And in many texts, stars are indeed angels, which is why, in the Old Testament, the phrase, ‘hosts of heaven’ sometimes means stars, sometimes angels (cf. Allison
To sum up, I had found an interpretation that seemed, at the very least, worth mentioning, but neither Brown nor any of the recent commentaries mentioned it. To find it, I had to go back to the 17th century and earlier.
How could I explain this; explain the fact that a perfectly plausible interpretation of a gospel passage, an interpretation that was once everywhere, was now nowhere? I eventually discovered that the commentary tradition reflects two wider cultural developments. The first was the condemnation of Origen. Following Plato and Philo, who taught that stars were rational souls; and in their desire to discredit astrology, Jerome and those representing the so-called orthodox churches determined that this was a bad idea, and that it would be better if the heavens were not alive. The Second Council of Constantinople (553
This obviously discouraged the angelic interpretation of Matthew's star. It did not, however, eliminate it, for it was possible to regard Matthew's guiding light as angelic yet deny that the ordinary stars of heaven were angelic. Theophylact (
When you hear ‘star’, do not think that it was a star such as we see, but a divine and angelic power that appeared in the form of a star. The magi were astrologers, and so the Lord used what was familiar to them to draw them to himself. That the star was an angelic power is apparent from the fact that it shone even by day, and that it moved as they moved, and stood still as they rested; also, that it moved from Persia in the north to Jerusalem in the south. For a star never moves from north to south.
Bar Hebraeus, without censorship, or fear of the same, wrote: ‘Some say that it was an angel that appeared to them like a star’ (quoted by Carr
It is evident from many things that it was not a real star, nor an imagination, nor a fantasy, nor an automaton, but an angel who shone like a star from Persia to Bethlehem. It was not a natural star, but a starry likeness. (sec. 26–27)
So the old view, with a slight revision, lived on until the Renaissance, for it was then that every vestige of the old notion of an animate heaven was finally abandoned and the way was prepared for Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler to create the modern science of astronomy. The result of their astronomical revolution could have been predicted. Commentators were moved to read their old texts in the light of the new knowledge. And so began the modern debate over whether the star was a comet or planetary conjunction or, most recently, a supernova. The upshot is that, as one moves from Calvin to Brown, from the 17th century to the 20th century, the idea of the star as an angel recedes until the major commentaries no longer speak of it.
My larger point, however, is that modern commentators interpret Matthew 2 with modern presuppositions. They speculate about supernovae, planetary conjunctions, and comets in terms of modern science. It seems never to occur to them that maybe the author of Matthew had very different ideas about the lights in the sky.
In an essay of reflections on writing a large commentary on Matthew (France
France views interaction with the history of interpretation of Matthew as an option, not a necessity. For me, it is the other way around. If one is looking for help in reflecting on one's own modern presuppositions, or in pursuing intertextual questions, or in looking for fresh ideas – and what commentator should not be looking for these things? – the supposedly outdated volumes always repay attention. Further, the appeal to Luz cannot serve as a good excuse to ignore
Of course I do not wish to claim too much. I freely concede that, in some important ways, the old commentaries are not very helpful. If one is interested in whether or not some event recorded by Matthew really happened; or if one is concerned about the textual variants for a certain verse; or if one is trying to understand some theme in Matthew within the context of 1st-century Judaism, the old books will disappoint. Nonetheless, the value of the premodern volumes more than compensates for these limitations.
There is a temptation, as the literature in the field of biblical studies continues to grow at a dismaying rate, to hope that we can ignore old books and old articles. How can one keep up with what is going on now if one is still catching up with what went on then, if one is spending time, let us say, with books from the 4th, 16th, or 18th centuries? The temptation is all the greater if one's education left the impression that anything of real importance said once will be said again and so not forgotten, or if one has learned that exegesis progresses like the hard sciences, so that today's work makes yesterday's obsolete. But it is not so, and the exegetical past continues to be highly instructive. We should not regard the history of interpretation as a passing fad, or as the sort of thing one can leave to others because it is a luxury. The old volumes hold treasures waiting to be discovered.
The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationship(s) that may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.
As I once observed: The action depicted by Matthew's words is ... arresting because one cannot really imagine someone doing it. Could one, without causing offence or disturbance, really leave a sacrifice in the hands of the priest or on the altar and go (perhaps to Galilee) and make search for a brother and then, some time later, return to the temple and pick up where one left off, with everything in order and the priest waiting? (cf. Davies & Allison1988–1997, 1:518)
It later showed up in Betz 1995:219 n. 163: ‘the great example’ in the biblical tradition of anger leading to murder ‘is the brothers Cain and Abel: Gn 4:5’; 224 n. 205: if ‘1 Sm 29:4 shows David taking the initiative in getting reconciled with the angry Saul’, then ‘the opposite is Cain in Gn 4:5–8’; 230: ‘the source of murder is a broken relationship with the brother. The famous case of Cain's murder of his brother Abel (Gn 4:8–16) comes to everyone's mind [
Ps.-Chrysostom states: Concerning the sun of righteousness, Isaiah [
Hesychius of Jerusalem declares: Malachi [