In Tents #72, How Infancy Narratives Behave Rhetorically, part 1

Here’s the beginning of a story. It takes place at Halloween, but think of All Hallows Eve as a prelude to la Nochebuena.

The Wanderer

If you chart the course of the planets through the stars there’s a point during the year when they start to move backwards. You can look at the whole history of physics as an attempt to solve this riddle, the retrograde motion of the wanderers. That’s what planet means, wanderer. That was what the branch president told me not long after we met.

But he wasn’t an astronomer. He was a retired English teacher and he had come down to the care center to help the residents write poems, to listen to the way people talked and write their words down as poems. Then he was called as branch president.

Now, if you’re not from Utah you probably think the branch president is the guy who sits in the corner office over at Wells Fargo. I got out one time. Went down to the corner, crossed State St and went a couple of blocks down Main street, past the city park, and Smith Brothers grocery, and then I stopped because it stopped looking familiar. The branch president across the street at Wells Fargo happened to see me, saw me standing there, saw me unable to go forward or back, and brought me back.

But our branch president wasn’t a banker, he was a poet who used to come down and help people write their memories as poems. One woman would listen to people’s sacrament meeting talks and turn them into poems. Sacrament meeting, now there’s another Utah term. It’s our worship service. We have two wings in the building, but just one meeting–in the locked wing–so the wanderers can’t get out. There’s a dining room for each wing, but we have our sacrament meetings in the alzheimers ward so the wanderers won’t wander away.

Hey, what a great title for a book. Now I just have to write the stories to go with it. So, a couple of years ago at the branch leadership Christmas social our host read us a passage from Joseph Fielding McConkie’s Witnesses to the Birth of Christ. He started by saying it was time we took a more adult view of the Nativity. The shepherds were keepers of the temple flocks, the sacrificial sheep; the wiseman were Melchizedek priesthood holders, prophets; and Herod couldn’t see the star because it could only be seen by revelation.

Looking for this passage recently I came across another one, even more interesting, where McConkie comments on Matthew’s division of the generations into 3 sets of 14. He points out that to make it fit into that pattern Matthew has to telescope some generations and expand others. It’s bad history and bad math. So what good is it? It’s good gematria.

McConkie explains that the letters in ancient alphabets had numeric values, and these values were very important. Matthew’s purpose is to trace Jesus’s descent from David, to present him as the rightful heir to David’s throne. The three letters transliterated as D-V-D (Daleth-Vav-Daleth) have the numeric value 4+6+4, or 14, so the gematria equivalent of three sets of 14 is David, David, David. Matthew is reinforcing through gematria what he’s establishing through lineage.

(Incidentally, gematria is still important, as witness the sabbath gematria contest when Danny invites Reuven to his father’s synagogue in chapter 7 of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. For something related to gematria see this example concerning the date of creation. And Jews aren’t the only ones to play with numeric values. Forty years ago I saw a clip from a documentary of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, where people were running the names of world leaders through a computer to find out whose name had the value 666 in various alphabets. Think of gematria as analogous to the game Toula’s father plays in My Big Fat Greek Wedding of deriving all words from Greek, like Mormon, More + mon (good) = More Good.)

Matthew’s insistence that Jesus is the new David adds a political dimension to the story, as if Matthew is telling us that right from the start the political leaders tried to destroy Jesus, and succeeded. And failed.

Many scholars feel that because there’s no other record of a massacre in Nazareth the story of Herod’s attempt to destroy Jesus is a fable or parable. Palestinian Lutheran pastor Mitri Raheb sees it differently. In Faith in the Face of Empire he says “Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, inquired of them diligently what time the star appeared” sounds like euphemism for ‘had his soldiers haul them in to interrogate them at length about why they were going around asking about a new king of Israel.’  For Raheb Herod’s reaction is typical of how the empire strikes back at whatever threatens it. As for there being no record of a massacre, how many massacres in small villages have gone unreported?

But Matthew isn’t writing a political document, and Jesus refuses a political approach every time he’s presented with one: all the kingdoms of the world . . . denounce Caesar and his taxes . . . let us fight off your captors . . . tell me you’re the king of the Jews. To this last question Jesus answers, “Thou sayest,” which Joseph Smith emended as, “Thou sayest truly; for thus it is written of me.” The New International Version agrees with that sentiment, “Yes, it is as you say,” Jesus replied.

But there’s another way to expand Jesus’s two word reply: “That’s what you say.” Jesus’s reply is ambiguous. That king can’t mean the same thing to someone who governs by persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness and meekness, and (of course) love unfeigned that it means to someone willing to publicly proclaim a man innocent then torture him to death, so a yes or no answer won’t mean the same thing to Pilate that it means to Jesus. Hence the ambiguity of a two-word reply: “You say” (the same ambiguity as in “Render unto Caeser the things that are Caeser’s and unto God the things that are God’s”).

Let me restate what I think is happening in Matthew’s Nativity narrative this way. A couple of years ago at our Christmas Eve gathering my brother Dennis read this narrative and asked, “What’s missing?” We puzzled. “Jesus is missing.” We never meet Jesus as we do in Luke’s narrative, where Anna and Simeon take him in their arms and prophesy.

We don’t meet Jesus in Matthew’s narrative, Dennis explained, because the narrative isn’t about Jesus. It’s about how people in power react to Jesus. Jesus’s teachings are a greater threat to the empire than if he were to lead a violent overthrow of the empire, or attempt a violent overthrow, like Barabbas.

Parenthetically, one of the delights of Mahonri Stewart’s Yeshua: A Gospel Play in Two Acts is when Bar Abba instructs Yehuda Sicari to infiltrate Yeshua’s inner circle and turn him to Bar Abba’s use or destroy him. (Sicari because if you move the first vowel from before the consonant *SC*R*-ot to after, and discard the Greek -ot suffix you get a word that describes a revolutionary or assassin.)

Seeing Yehuda as part of a group of terrorists who wants Yeshua dead because he won’t join the revolution is a brilliant way of suggesting why a group of Jews would be clamoring for their oppressors to torture a dissident and beloved rabbi to death.

There’s another dimension to the political reaction to Jesus. Matthew’s gospel opens by tracing 42 generations of one family back to the founding grandfather of the House of Israel, and closes with a command to Abraham’s seed to go and bless all the families of the earth.

Paralleling this covenant blessing is a covenant curse: the Roman puppet king of the Jews first seeks to destroy Jesus, then the governor of the gentile empire succeeds in destroying him. If we take that movement seriously we can’t easily blame the Jews for Jesus’s death and exonerate the gentiles: because Pilate stands in for the gentiles, all of us. We all would do what Pilate did, the structure says.

It’s in Luke’s Nativity narrative that we meet Jesus, and it’s tempting to combine the two narratives. It’s common to combine them, but we’ll look at Luke’s Nativity separately next month. Though it might be worth asking in the meantime whether there’s a political dimension to Luke’s Nativity. It’s common for scholars to point out that a massive census like the one Luke claims would have been difficult to pull off, not to mention terribly disruptive–having people travel all over the empire back to their native cities. This is one reason the story must be allegorical, or fictional anyway.

That allegorical reading has rattled around in my mind for a few years. Then it occurred to me while preparing this column to ask, ‘Weren’t there pilgrimage festivals that would have that would have brought people to Jerusalem?’ What if the Roman governor took advantage of a pilgrimage festival to levy some taxes?’

If so, perhaps the claim being made in Luke’s statement about a tax/census on all the world is a figure of speech, exaggeratio (the preceding word is not a typo). If so, if Cyrenius is taking advantage of a pilgrimage festival to get a census of the Jews, it could be that Luke is exaggerating the scope of the census to make the point that Romans think they control the whole world, but their world is about to be overturned by this child.

It’s also a commonplace to say that Matthew’s genealogy represents Joseph’s line, and Luke’s Mary’s (or vice-versa).

But such comments might miss the point. Luke was a gentile writing to gentiles, probably a traveling companion with the Jew who cautioned other Jews about foolish genealogies. So what was his interest in Jewish genealogy? We’ll talk about what I think was his interest next month.

Your turn.