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Locating Matthew in Israel

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Locating Matthew in Israel Locating Matthew in Israel by Roy Allan Fisher A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the Graduate Theological Union in Near Eastern Religions in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Daniel Boyarin, Chair Professor Paul Rabinow Professor Margaret Conkey Professor Jean-François Racine Spring 2018 © Copyright 2018 Roy Allan Fisher All Rights Reserved. Abstract Locating Matthew in Israel by Roy Allan Fisher Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the Graduate Theological Union in Near Eastern Religions University of California, Berkeley Professor Daniel Boyarin, Chair “Locating Matthew in Israel” renders visible the Second Temple Jewish ethos of Matthew’s gospel, while at the same time producing a more ethical contemporary scholarly reading of the First Gospel. This inquiry is undertaken without recourse to the arborescent and epochal framings that characterize most scholarly inquiries of Matthew. Drawing on an eclectic mix of conversation partners – including the works of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Bertolt Brecht – this reading begins the progress of remediating the epochal blockage pervasive in Matthaean studies through the introduction of the off-epochal. By off-setting epoch, new possibilities and space are opening in this reading. “Locating Matthew in Israel” demonstrates that Matthew’s composition is best described as Torah-formed. Additionally, this close reading centers on three key divine presence passages (Matthew 1:23; 18:20; 28:20) to provide an alternative non- incarnational figuration of Jesus. Functionally, Matthew’s bricolage presents Jesus as Torah-transfigured not as the incarnate logos. 1 Chapter One: Towards an Off-Epochal Reading תוֹשֲׂע רָפְס םיִ רַה הֵבְּ ןיֵא ץֵק גַהַלְו ֵבְּרַה ה֖ תַעִגְי רָֽשָׂבּ - Qoheleth1 1.1 A Second-Order Participant Observer This present work is neither dispassionate nor disinterested; it is the result of a life-long love affair, including all the complexities that such a description suggests.2 I am "a twenty-first century Western-educated queer Christian intellectual" and the inquiry into τὸ κατὰ Μαθθαῖον εὐαγγελίον3 that follows, is openly informed by that cultural knowledge and subject-position. Such an orientation places me at the intersection of overlapping and often conflicting domains. On the one hand, the texts of the New Testament are not only the texts of my youth, numerous passages of which I have committed to memory,4 but they continue to be the scriptures that I celebrate each Sunday morning. On the other hand, these are not texts that I can merely read; they are voices with which I, as a gay scholar, find myself perpetually wrestling and arguing. Unlike Saint Paul, it seems that I am unable (or perhaps willing) to put away childish things, continuing as I do, to seek a stance vis-à-vis the New Testament that is both faithful to the texts, but also fully present in a secular Western world. This present inquiry, to be clear, is not 1 Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. (Qoheleth 12:12, personal translation). Unless otherwise noted all translations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. 2 Daniel Boyarin’s autobiographical note in the opening of Border Lines, “As long as I can remember I have been in love with some manifestation of Christianity (not always ones that my Christian friends would themselves love or even approve)” has always resonated with me in a way that only an illicit and exiled lover of the New Testament scriptures can properly understand. I am deeply indebted to Boyarin’s bold articulation of the situatedness of his own work and take it as an encouragement to do likewise in my own work. 3 “The Gospel According to Matthew” is the traditional appellation. Davies and Allison, among others, have persuasively argued that the opening lines of the gospel, Βίβλος γενέσεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ Δαυὶδ υἱοῦ Ἀβραάµ, should be understood to function as the actual title for the work. See W.D. Davies and D.C. Allison, Matthew 1-7, ed. J.A. Emerton, C.E.B. Cranfield, and G.N Stanton, The International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (New York: T&T Clark Int'l, 2004), 153. See also Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7: A Commentary, ed. Helmut Koester, trans. James E. Crouch, 3 vols., vol. 1, Hermeneia: A Critical & Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 69-70. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the author and text of the first gospel as ‘Matthew’. For the same reason, I will use the generic masculine singular pronoun. In doing so I am not suggesting any connection between the apostle so named in the gospel and the actual author(s) of the text. 4 The version playing in my head being the immortal and majestic King James Version. 1 speculative, but consciously directed at myself. 5 The stakes are high and they are personal. To borrow the words of Hans Frei, “I am ethnographer and native at once.”6 This anthropological inflection situates my present inquiry within a minority cadre of contemporary New Testament scholarship.7 While not always explicit, an anthropological second- order inflection is a constant thread weaving throughout my inquiry into τὸ κατὰ Μαθθαῖον εὐαγγελίον. As a second-order participant-observer, I am particularly attentive to the ways in which sacred texts, especially those of the New Testament, are taken up in modern and contemporary forms of scholarly discourse with their respective technologies of power relations (including the interplay and interference with knowledge relations in the present). 8 Thus, in my reading, I seek to both engage traditional questions of the historical-critical and literary variety; and render visible the ways in which various anthropoi of the biblical studies persuasion continue to grapple with the logoi of the New Testament.9 Such considerations, anthropos inextricably- intertwined with logos, are what one might generally expect of an ethnographer not scholar of religious texts, but they nonetheless occupy a privileged place in my reading. Throughout this project, I have attempted to conceptualize this anthropological inflection of my inquiry in terms of, what Hans Blumenberg has called, a movement-space10 (Bewegungsraum), in which, “both the subject conducting inquiry and the objects and objectives of inquiry are in motion.”11 Such a priming, openly acknowledges the challenges of reading 5 The challenge is described by Tom Burke, as the attempt to explain, “experience as situated” not “situations as experienced” where “situations are bounded by the reach, scope or content of a living creature’s experience.” Tom Burke, Dewey's New Logic : A Reply to Russell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 37. Discussed at length in Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, "Movement Space: Putting Anthropological Theory, Concepts, and Cases to the Test," HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 (2016): 417. 6 Cited in Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), ix. 7 This aspect to my work is due to the influence of Paul Rabinow, whose encouragement and guidance has been one of the true joys of my graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley. The credit for whatever success may result from this inflection is his, while I accept full responsibility for the shortcomings. 8 Here I draw on the concept of the second-order participant-observer following the work of Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (Stanford University Press, 2000). For a fuller discussion of the work of Luhmann and its significance for anthropology see Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, Designs on the Contemporary Anthropological Tests (Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). 9 For a more exhaustive exploration of the interplay of anthropos and logos as the grounds for a contemporary conceptualization of anthropology as both a discipline and problem space for inquiry. see Paul Rabinow, Marking Time : On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); also Rabinow and Stavrianakis, "Movement Space: Putting Anthropological Theory, Concepts, and Cases to the Test." 10 For a discussion of Hans Blumenberg’s Bewegungsraum, see Anthony Stavrianakis, Gaymon Bennett, and Lyle Fearnley, eds., Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 28-29. 11 Here following the definition given in Rabinow and Stavrianakis, "Movement Space: Putting Anthropological Theory, Concepts, and Cases to the Test," 404. 2 Matthew from within a topological field, encompassing both reader and text, that is neither well- defined nor stable. “Locating Matthew in Israel” renders visible the Second Temple Jewish ethos of Matthew’s gospel, while at the same time producing a more ethical contemporary scholarly reading of the First Gospel. As the reader will soon note, this inquiry cannot be characterized by any one particular method or theory, nor do I propose to offer one.12 At most, the assemblage offered in this reading can be said to result from a mode of inquiry that resembles both bricolage and braconnage.13 It is arguably eclectic, but not random. The rationale guiding the selection of my disparate band of conversation partners in this inquiry is a consequence of embracing Max Weber’s observation that it is not a factual interconnectedness of things, but rather a conceptual interconnection of problems that forms the basis for inquiry.14 Thus this reading claims no “factual connection” between the Gospel according to Matthew and any of my various interlocutors, only a certain conceptual interconnectedness, even perhaps of my own creation.
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