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Midrash and the New Testament: a Methodology for the Study of Gospel Midrash

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Midrash and the New Testament: a Methodology for the Study of Gospel Midrash MIDRASH AND THE NEW TESTAMENT: A METHODOLOGY FOR THE STUDY OF GOSPEL MIDRASH Miguel Pérez Fernández Universidad de Granada Midrash is creative interpretation of the Holy Scriptures of the kind most typically found in rabbinic literature. The present paper starts from the premise that this type of interpretation is found also in the New Testament and other early Christian literature, where it has a special purpose of its own. In our view, early Christian midrash is not concerned with a neutral or open inquiry of the Scriptures, but is conditioned by the prior assumption that all Scriptures bear witness to Jesus Christ. This assumption appears in the epistolary writings—in the form of dialectical exegesis with a rabbinical flavour; in the apocalyptic writings—extended allegorical exegesis; in didactic writings—a kind of homiletic exegesis; and in the Gospels—where it has a singular character we want to deal with here. The aim of this paper is to show how this singular character can often be detected in the Gospel narratives. In such cases, these narratives reproduce Old Testament scenes as a theatrical representation, generally with Jesus as central actor. It also happens that the Gospel narrative is merely a scenography of a wisdom-sentence or a prophetical word.1 Of course, such scenography could have been intended and even prepared by Jesus himself—think of Jesus entering Jerusalem, reminding us at least of Zech 9,9—but it in other cases such mise-en-scène obviously is a creation of the Christian scribe. Thus Matt 1:20–21, the return from Egypt, represents Moses’ return from Midian (Exod 4:19–20). Also, 1 Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, 246, had already noted that some miracle-stories could have been developed from a sentence, a process also detected in Hellenistic literature: “Dass die Verfluchung des Feigenbaums Mark 11,12–14.20 aus einem Gleichnis entstanden sei (vgl. Hos 9,10.16; Mi 7,1), ist mehrfach vermutet worden.” Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching, 267 records a kind of miracle “due to a wish to fulfil some statement in the Old Testament or to imitate some Prophet”; the re-edition by Jesus of the miracles of Elijah and Elisha is noteworthy. 368 miguel pérez fernández many details in the narrative of Jesus’ death are a mise-en-scène of texts from the Prophets and Psalms.2 These observations suggest we should follow a methodology which can be summarised as follows: (1) determining the biblical source-texts of the Gospel narrative; (2) showing their interpretation in the Gospel and how the Christian writer arrived at such an interpretation; (3) considering the interpretation of the source-texts in Jewish tradi- tion (the rabbis, Qumran, or other); (4) comparing the different exegetical traditions in the NT (even in the NT there are different interpretations of the same biblical texts) and in Jewish tradition. Some further preliminary comments are in place. Occasionally there is not a single source-text, but various sources. Sometimes a biblical text does not work as a model but as a source of inspiration for the NT writers. On the other hand, the Gospel scene may take into account not only the OT source-texts but the whole of Jesus’ teaching and other parallels from the NT traditions. In this way the midrashic development of the Gospels becomes a biblical theology of its own.3 It is obvious that parallels of the Gospel narratives may exist—and indeed do exist—in extra-biblical literature, e.g., in the classical and Hellenistic literature (cf. Crossan’s works). However, it is just because both rabbinic literature and the NT are interpretations and/or re- readings of the ancient biblical texts that the one is able to explain and evaluate the other.4 An advantage of this reading of both literatures is 2 A question we can pose about some Gospel scenes is whether the interpretation of the source-texts belongs to the Christian scribes or if Jesus himself could have performed some scenes as a theatrical and impressive midrash. No hypothesis can be rejected a priori. In a paper written many years ago (Pérez Fernández, M., “Lectura del Antiguo Testamento desde el Nuevo Testamento. Estudio sobre las citas atribuidas a Jesús en el Evangelio de Marcos,” 449–474), my conclusion was that Jesus seems to have used the Scriptures less than the Gospels show. I wonder if the marked midrashic character of the Gospel can be attributed to a large extent exclusively to the art of the scribes. 3 This also happens in the rabbinic midrash, as the meaning taken from the biblical text is enriched and completed by other traditions and by the Oral Torah. 4 “Parallels to the NT may be found in worldwide literature of all times. There are plenty in Cynic and stoic literature. Sometimes they are trans-cultural borrowings that cross borders inadvertently. In other cases, they are absolutely independent and prob- ably originate in the sapient and prophetical background common to the best spirit of all cultures and periods of human history. In order to have significance and clarify the .
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