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From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
Pharisees of course are mentioned throughout Matthew’s gospel. After Jesus’ scathing denunciation at the temple (Matthew 23), they disappear for most of the rest of the gospel. They appear one last time, along with the chief priests, asking for a seal on Jesus’ tomb (27:62).
It’s fitting: The last time we saw Pharisees Jesus was denouncing them for “building the tombs of the prophets and adorning the monuments of the righteous,” while confessing they are sons of those who murder prophets (23:29). They prove they are sons of prophet-murderers once again. They want to seal the tomb (taphos) of Jesus, proving that they are whited sepulchers (taphos) themselves (23:27).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 11:21 am
Joseph places Jesus’ body in a “new tomb.”
New wine cannot be contained in old wineskins. The new wine of the new covenant, the wine that Jesus will drink new in the Father’s kingdom, cannot be contained in old wineskins. So too, a new kind of body requires a new kind of tomb, and Jesus’ body is definitely a new sort of body. It’s not surprising that Matthew uses the word “tomb” (mnemeion) seven times, and the seventh instance of the word refers to an inverted tomb, a tomb opened from the inside.
And what does this do to memory? Tombs are “memorials,” mnemonic devices for the dead. But what of an empty tomb? How can you memorialize a tomb that’s been cleared out? We memorialize the resurrection, but that’s only to say we memorialize what has begun to happen but hasn’t been completed. We memorialize the future.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 10:19 am
My colleague Jonathan McIntosh writes the following in response to my post quoting Aristotle’s statement about wonder as the beginning of philosophy:
“on your quote from Aristotle on wonder, I like to juxtapose this with another passage from a little later in the Metaphysics in which he writes: ‘It is necessary, however, for the possession of it [i.e., knowledge] to settle for us in a certain way into the opposite of the strivings with which it began. For everyone begins, as we are saying, from wondering whether things are as they seem, such as the self-moving marvels, or about the reversals of the sun or the incommensurability of the diagonal… But it is necessary to end in what is opposite and better, as the saying goes…’ (i.2.983a, Joe Sachs translation). In other words, philosophy may begin in wonder, but for Aristotle the goal is ultimately to transcend this wonder and exchange it for something ‘opposite and better,’ namely knowledge that is less human and more divine, fixed, and ‘certain.’ The Christianized Aristotelian tradition of Aquinas, of course, by seeing all things as having their origin in a God who can never be fully known, succeeds in prolonging and even perpetuating the sense of wonder that Aristotle admitted only at the beginning of the philosophical enterprise, as when Aquinas, for example, famously writes ‘all the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.’”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 8:54 am
Three women are mentioned in Matthew 27:56: Mary Magdalene, another Mary, identified as “the mother of Jakobos and Joses,” and the unnamed mother of James and John. Who is the second Mary?
Matthew 13:55 is the only other reference to these names, Jakobos and Joses, and their mother. There, the mother Mary is clearly Jesus’ mother: “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, Jakobos and J0ses and Simon and Judas?” We know from John 19:25 that Mary the mother of Jesus was at the cross. It’s likely that the other Mary (called “the other Mary” in Matthew 27:61 and 28:1) is Jesus’ mother. The woman who bore Him – the womb that gave Him birth and the breasts He sucked – are present at His death. Her presence gives a maternal spin to His resurrection; the tomb becomes His new womb.
Why then is she called “the mother of Jakobos and Joses” instead of the mother of Jesus?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 7:45 am
The women who come from Galilee minister to Jesus along the way (27:55). They take the place of angels, who minister to Jesus after the devil has tempted Him (4:11). They are daughters of Peter’s mother-in-law, who rises and ministers to Jesus and the disciples (8:15).
They are among the sheep, who see Jesus hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, imprisoned, and serve Him (25:44).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 7:06 am
The women of Matthew 27 are the only ones in Matthew’s gospel to behold (theoreo) anything (27:55 and 28:1 are the only uses of the verb).
Women theorists. What will Matthew think of next?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 7:01 am
Magdalene has plausibly been linked with Migdal-el (Joshua 19:38), one of the fortified cities in the tribal area of Naphtali. Migdal-el means “Fortress” of God. Mary from Magdala is a tower of God.
What does that mean? Perhaps many things, but it puts one in mind of the descriptions of the Bride in the Song of Songs (4:4; 7:4; 8:10).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 4:59 am
Where’d the Galilean women of Matthew 27:55 come from? The only other references to a group of women, the only uses of the plural of gune occur in Matthew 14:21 and 15:38. They are the women included among the 5000 and 4000 who are fed in the “desolate place” near the sea of Galilee. In both cases, the women are associated with children, and in both cases Matthew includes them as an apparent afterthought: “besides women and children.” He’s setting us up: The women are not an afterthought at all, but at the climax take a central place in the story.
The hint that the women began following Jesus since those meals is strengthened by Matthew’s reference to “Magadan” or “Magdala” in 15:39, the hometown of Mary.
What does this mean? Several things seem to be going on.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 4:52 am
A group of women from Galilee suddenly appears in Matthew 27:55. They are “beholding from a distance” (makrothen), having “followed” Jesus (eklouthesan).
This is precisely the description given of Peter in 26:58: When Jesus is arrested, he too “follows Him at a distance” (ekolouthe auto apo makrothen). The women have not only taken up the place of the disciples in general, but specifically of Peter, who had confessed Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God.
In fact, the women are the ones who have been following Jesus throughout the gospel.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 4:38 am
Near the beginning of the Metaphysics, Aristotle notes that “it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about greater matters. . . . A man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders). . . . For all men being, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 1:42 pm
“All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses.” So Aristotle. Jonathan Lear glosses: “That we take pleasure in the sheer exercise of our sensory faculties is a sign that we do have a desire for knowledge.”
Obviously, Aristotle is talking about the pleasures we derive from beautiful landscapes, sunsets, paintings; the ecstasies of listening to a string quartet; the transport of aroma; the sensuality of taste and touch. Our most common and basic knowing of the world is all bound up with delight.
Isn’t this reason enough to be suspicious of – if not to reject outright – any epistemology that puts desire and pleasure on the back burner?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Frank Smith (Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms
So, begin with eschatology.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 1:33 pm
The Targum on the Song of Songs, deftly translated and annotated by Philip Alexander (The Targum of Canticles: Translated, With a Critical Introduction, Apparatus, and Notes (Aramaic Bible)
Augustine would have approved the gloss on the white teeth of the bride, which are “the Priests and Levites who offer up your offerings, and eat holy flesh, tithe and heave-offering, which are pure from any violence or robbery.” The temples like pomegranates are like the “King, who was their head” and “as full of precepts as a pomegranate” – understood, I expect, to mean “as a pomegranate is full of seeds.” The eighty wives and sixty concubines inspire an allegory of a Greek invasion and siege of Jerusalem: “the Greeks arose and gathered together sixty kings from the sons of Esau, clad in chain-mail and mounted on horses, and cavalry, and eighty commanders from the sons of Ishmael, riding on elephants, not to mention the rest of the nations, peoples and tongues that were without number, and they appointed the wicked Alexander as head over them, and they came to wage war against Jerusalem.”
A number of the basic moves in the Targum, though, are defensible and illuminating. For instance:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 6:56 am
In an 1837 exchange on the interpretation of the Song of Songs in The Congregational Magazine, one James Bennett argued that the Song had to be interpreted allegorically because a literal interpretation made the woman sound immodest: “What writer, with the feelings, or the reason, of a man, would begin a poem on his fair one by describing her as courting him?” This is not a cultural bias, he insisted: “It would be more abhorrent from the secluded, submissive character of Eastern brides to ask a gentlemen to come and kiss them, than it would be from the dignified confidence of British women.”
This is not cultural but natural: “Though men like to court, they do not like to be courted; and while they think it cruel to be rejected when they could, they without mercy reject her who courts them. . . . No man, therefore, in his senses, would think to compliment his fair one by writing of her, to her, as if she had lost her retiring modest, her female dignity, and degraded herself by doing that for which every man would despise her . . . . Till fishes mount to sing with larks on the shady boughs, and nightingales dive to the ocean’s depths to court the whales, no man, of any age, of any clime, of any rank, can be supposed to write ordinary love-songs in such a style.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 8:06 am
Stephen D. Moore (in an essay on “The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality”) notes that the shift from allegorical to literal/sexual interpretations of the Song is connected to shifts in understanding of male love. Patristic and medieval commentators on the Song easily took the feminine voice of the Song as the voice of their own usually male souls, with results that often leave modern reader queasy. Moore puts it in a typically provocative form, but the point stands: The allegorical interpretation thrusts into plain view a relationship ordinarily closeted. It ‘outs’ the male believer.”
Nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators, working from the sharply defined sexual roles of the Victorian era, recoil against the confusions of the allegorical method, and turn the Song into a celebration of heterosexual love. Moore nicely shows, however, that this quickly turns into a new allegorism of its own, as each metaphor is unpacked as a euphemism: “these ‘new’ allegorists give a sexual reading even to details that are ostensibly nonsexual.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 7:55 am
Levin again: “Since, for Descartes, the senses are nothing but a source of deception and the body is nothing but perishable matter – that is to say, they are challenges, in both cases, to the power of the ego cogitans, the ego must ‘abandon’ them; the Cartesian ego is a cogito which has dissociated, split off, from its embodiment and taken itself as the object of its ‘love.’ In order to possess absolute certainty and security, Descartes undergoes a process of separation and withdrawal, methodically abandoning all the ‘objects’ of the body’s desires and taking himself, as purely thinking substance, for ‘object.’ This is the narcissistic process, homologous to the process clinically recognized as the defensive comportment of severe depression. In the isolation of human beings from each other and the separation of human beings from Being, there is indeed cause for deep depression. Without astonishing prescience, Nietzsche could already see the depression and interpret it as a signifier or nihilism.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Levin interestingly explores the question of whether human beings are completely determined by history by emphasizing human embodiment. He plays off of Heidegger, who abandoned the “analytic of Dasein” in his later work because he had come to see it as a continuation of the metaphysical tradition he was trying to escape. What Heidegger missed was the notion that “the human body [could be] an organ of Being” or the ”primal medium into which this pre-understanding of Being is always first inscribed.”
“By grace of the ‘flesh,’” he argues, Being is always sensed prior to any clear theoretical ontological understanding. A “felt sense” provides “our pre-ontological attunement.” As a result, “we are never completely ‘in the dark’” as regards Being. This sense is not complete: It “calls for a deep commitment to questioning and exploring its implicit potential: it needs to be recognized, made explicit, conceptually articulate, and clear.” But our embodiment means that we always already have a sense of Being and of transcendent being, and therefore “our pre-ontological understanding . . . is not totally reducible to the understandings imposed by our historical life.” Heidegger could have seen this had he not overlooked “the natural body, the wild body of metaphorical existence.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Merleau-Ponty asks, in Humanism and Terror, “What if it were the very essence of history to impute to us responsibilities which are never entirely ours?”
A very Augustinian, covenantal question.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 12:34 pm
False subjectivity has led to nihilism. To combat the nihilism of modernity, Levin says that we need to challenge the “timeless” Cartesian self by affirming a “self open to changes in itself; a self which changes in response to changes in the world; a self capable of changing the conditions of its world according to need.” In short, “I am not what I am and I am what I am not.”
That last sentence seems to me a fine way of stating the Protestant doctrine of justification. And I cannot see how Levin’s is/is not self can be anything but another, more intense form of nihilism, unless it is an eschatologically shaped doctrine of justification. That is: I am declared to be, and therefore I am, what I’m not yet.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 11:52 am
In his The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation
Essentially, subjectivity inverted into objectivity, and objectivity meant the destruction of subjectivity:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 11:25 am
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