Sometimes it can be useful to read things in a new form, format, or translation. For some reason my MP3 player treats anything after the first digit as a decimal, following the order 1, 10, 100, 101, 102, . . . 11, 110, 111, 112 . . . 2, 20, 21, und so weiter. So last year year I decided to listen to the Doctrine & Covenants in that order, and it was interesting to hear the early and late sections juxtaposed.
Later, when I got to the Tanakh I decided to listen in the Jewish order rather than the Christian. Tanakh is an acronym for Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim:
- Torah (Instruction): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
- Nevi’im (Prophets):
- (Former) Joshua, Judges Samuel, Kings
- (Latter) Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel
- (The Twelve) Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi
- Ketuvim (Writings):
- (Poetical Books) Psalms, Proverbs, Job
- (Five Rolls–Hamesh Megillot) Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Esther, Ecclesiastes
- (Historical Books) Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles
According to Wikipedia the order of the Ketuvim has never been quite set, but this is the most common. Harold Bloom says in Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine that the Ketuvim ends with Chronicles because Chronicles ends with the rebuilding of the temple and the invitation to return to the temple. Christians changed the order, elevating Daniel to a major prophet and giving Malachi the last word, because Daniel was so important to Christian eschatology and Malachi prophesied about their Lord’s forerunner.
That is, Bloom says, the ordering of scripture is not simply a matter of preference, but a political statement, a statement of how the body politic expresses and composes itself. Placing Chronicles last also gives the Tanakh a narrative arc that starts with the creation of heaven and earth and ends in the temple, the gateway between heaven and earth, the meeting place.
About the time I was approaching the temple I was wandering around the Habitat for Humanity Re:store looking for a bathroom vanity (Ham, narrator of Stephen Minot’s Surviving the Flood calls the latrine “the place of truth” and is shocked when his father tells a lie there) and I wandered past the used books (words of truth for the place of truth?). Look, Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone, Doug Thayer’s second collection, and The New International Version New Testament, with a full cast and cheesy Hollywood biblical epic music, 18 hours on 12 cassettes. I couldn’t find the vanity of vanities but the cashier threw in the NIV, only charging me for Thayer (ah, what joy in Mudville to find it).
Matthew. Mark. Thinking about Luke it occurred to me that Luke mirrors Chronicles in the same way Chronicles mirrors the Tanakh in arcing from Adam, Sheth, Enosh to the temple. Luke begins in the temple, proceeds to the genealogy, and ends with the Ascension and the disciples “continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.”
Wait a minute. Here I am at the end of Chapter 2, and no genealogy. I don’t completely trust the NIV–too much of what Robert Alter calls “the heresy of explanation,” explaining rather than translating, such as substituting abstractions for images derived from the body. (To study, for example, how Isaiah uses the body figuratively see Avraham Gileadi’s “Index of Terms” at the end of The Book of Isaiah: A New Translation with Interpretive Keys from The Book of Mormon) But surely they wouldn’t have left out the genealogy? Check the KJV. It’s at the end of Chapter 3, so it’s not after the Nativity, but after Jesus’ baptism, after the voice from heaven says, “Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.”
And with that statement the genealogy forms an envelope structure, Alter’s name for an episode which comes back to its starting point, the return to the beginning signalling the end of the episode, the chapter break as it were, “Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.”
So where Matthew’s genealogy serves to validate Jesus as the rightful heir to David’s throne, Luke’s validates the statement “Thou art my beloved son” by tracing Jesus’ lineage back to God. Luke’s vision is wider than Matthew’s. Where Matthew’s genealogy traces a single family back to the family’s founder, Luke’s traces lineage back to the creator of all families. Where Matthew ends with the commandment to take the good news to all nations Luke begins by addressing the nations in the person of “most excellent Theophilus.”
But there’s something very strange about Luke’s account. What is a gentile (or as Robin Griffith-Jones points out in The Four Witnesses, possibly a Jewish servant/slave/clark attached to a gentile household) writing to a gentile audience, doing validating Jesus’ claims through Jewish genealogies and type stories involving barren women who give birth to prophets, as if the gentiles have the interest and background to understand the stories?
Maybe the Jewish context is Luke’s way of acknowledging the Jews as God’s representative sample of the human race, the exemplars of the covenant–Luke’s way of saying that his most excellent gentile readers need to understand the Jewish roots of their new faith.
And perhaps they do have the background to understand the Jewish context. Griffith-Jones reminds us there were a fair number of gentiles attached to any synagogue, people who loved the law and Jewish ways. Indeed, Luke introduces us to one early on, the commander of a hundred Roman soldiers whose beloved servant lies ill. In presenting the centurion’s plea for healing, Jesus’ disciples,
besought him instantly, saying, That he was worthy for whom he should do this:
For he loveth our nation, and he hath built us a synagogue.
—Luke 7:4-5
Luke takes up the story where Chronicles ends, in the temple, continuing the story as Jesus continues the covenant. But isn’t that Matthew’s purpose, to show Jesus as the new Moses, the embodiment and continuation of the covenant? Partly, though Luke may have a different reason for showing the continuation of an ancient tradition.
In his commentary for The Five Books of Moses Robert Alter points out each genealogy and shows how the genealogy serves to announce a new part of the story, or move the narrative from one major section to another, for example how “the book of the generations of Adam” in Genesis 5 serves as a transition from Adam’s story and era to Noah’s. So it’s fitting that Matthew begins his gospel–a new chapter in the story of Israel’s family–with a lineage report that ties the main character of that story into the family line. Indeed, since Jesus is the seed that will bless all the nations of the earth Matthew takes the genealogy beyond Israel to his grandfather, who received the promise that his seed would bless all the world. (The heresy of explanation would render that body image as offspring, since seed may be too unsophisticated, or too bawdy.)
But at the same time Matthew is validating the Jewish character of the Jerusalem church, Griffith-Jones says, he is also trying to separate the Jerusalem church from the synagogue–hence the ferocious attack on the leaders of the synagogues in Chapter 23 (p. 161-2) (That may be the use Matthew is making of Jesus’s words. I’m not sure Jesus had the same purpose. Griffith-Jones sidesteps the question of whether Jesus actually said the words in that sermon or if Matthew just put them in his mouth, though it sounds like he believes the latter. It’s important to distinguish between what Jesus said and what his words may have come to mean to his followers. Willis Barnstone does not make that distinction and it weakens his lovely work. But that’s a subject for another post.)
Matthew is also asserting the primacy of the Jerusalem church, which Paul rejected. (See Griffith-Jones’ reading of Galatians 1:11-12 on p. 184, and Reza Aslan’s account of Paul’s conflict with the Jerusalem church in the last chapter of Zealot.) Luke clearly admires Paul, may have been his traveling companion, and probably was on his side of the conflict. So why does he take so much care to present the gospel through a Jewish lens? If, as Paul told the Galatians, the gospel was revealed directly to him and didn’t come through the Jerusalem church, why is Luke so careful to present the gospel to gentiles in a way that validates its Jewish character?
Griffith-Jones finds a reason in “the distaste, widespread in the ancient world, for new rites and religions and for shallow, disloyal desertion of the old” (p. 199). So the chronicler of taking the gospel to the gentiles validates his message for the gentiles by emphasizing the Jewish continuity of the gospel, while the defender of the Jewish character of the gospel–writing to console embattled messianic Jews–seeks to separate them from the synagogue, to assure them that everything they go to the synagogue for is available in the Church.
And if that sounds curiouser and curiouser, consider how Matthew and Paul mirror each other. Matthew asserts the Jerusalem church’s independence from the synagogue in the same way Paul asserts his independence from the Jerusalem church.
My word counter reads 1501, and though we’ve briefly set the political and social milieu for Luke’s infancy narrative, we haven’t said much about how the narrative functions rhetorically, or whether Luke or Matthew left any clues that might answer the assertion that they were writing parables, and never expected their audiences would take the stories as historical records.
Well, there’s always next month.
Your turn.