DERACIALIZING THE MATTHEAN JESUS: “KING OF THE JUDEANS” ON TRIAL By Gideon Wongi Park Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Religion May, 2016 Nashville, TN Approved: Fernando Segovia, Ph.D. Kathy Gaca, Ph.D. Jaco Hamman, Ph.D. Tat-Siong Liew, Ph.D. Herbert Marbury, Ph.D. Daniel Patte, Ph.D. Copyright © 2015 by Wongi Park All Rights Reserved ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 4 Chapter I. IDENTIFYING THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE OF MATTHEW 26-27: NON- RACIAL READINGS AND READING STRATEGIES IN THE WORLD OF PRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 6 The title in the Gospel of Matthew ................................................................................. 7 Religious-theological readings of the title ...................................................................... 9 Socio-political readings of the title ............................................................................... 15 Dominant reading strategies of Matthean studies ......................................................... 23 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 41 II. SITUATING THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE: DERACIALIZED READERS AND READING LOCATIONS IN THE WORLD OF CONSUMPTION ................................ 43 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 43 Deracialization as white invisibility: A discursive approach ........................................ 44 Deracialized critics in the world of consumption ......................................................... 52 Deracialized criticism in the world of consumption ..................................................... 68 Deracialized representations in the world of consumption ........................................... 78 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 88 III. CONSTRUCTING AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH: MINORITIZED READERS AND READING STRATEGIES ....................................................................................... 90 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 90 The black Jesus and mestizo Jesus ................................................................................ 93 Deracialization as dominantization: A dialectical approach ......................................... 98 The Historical Jesus and white Jesus .......................................................................... 105 Moving beyond the impasse? A post-theory proposal ................................................ 115 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 130 IV. PROPOSING AN ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE OF MATTHEW 26-27: MINORITIZING JESUS IN THE MATTHEAN PASSION NARRATIVE .................. 132 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 132 The dominant-minority dialectic in Matthew 26-27 ................................................... 136 Minoritizing Jesus in the Judean court ........................................................................ 140 Minoritizing Jesus in the Roman court ....................................................................... 149 Minoritizing Jesus in the popular court ....................................................................... 165 Minoritizing Jesus in the divine court ......................................................................... 173 Divine strangers or strangers in the divine? ................................................................ 189 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 192 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 201 iii INTRODUCTION In the Matthean passion narrative, questions surrounding the identity of Jesus come into sharp focus. The repetition of the title ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων in the trial scenes that comprise the passion narrative accents its pivotal role: the Matthean Jesus’ ethnoracial identity as a marginalized Judean is reiteratively cited at key points, serving as the basis for his interrogation before the Roman governor Pilate (Matt 27:11-14), torture by the Roman soldiers (Matt 27:27-30), and mockery from the Judean leaders (Matt 27:41-43). The title is also publically displayed as a formal charge above the cross—a detail that is attested in all four Gospels (Matt 27:37; Mark 15:26; Luke 23:38; John 19:19). Made to hang from a Roman tree under an ethnicizing banner—Οὗτός ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων (“This is Jesus: King of the Judeans” [Matt 27:37])—the gruesome execution of the Matthean Jesus by the Roman authorities is fraught with racializing implications. Yet despite the explicit citation of ethnoracial terminology, previous scholarship has understood the title curiously in non-racial ways.1 1 In this dissertation, the terminology of race-ethnicity (e.g., race, racial, racialization, ethnicity, ethnic, ethnicization) is used interchangeably to signify dynamic, dialectical, and performative processes—not static concepts that refer to biological essences or material entities. The primary advantage of this approach, as will be developed in Chapters 2 and 3, is to situate the discourse of race-ethnicity within a dialectic of power relations, namely, of dominant-selfing and minority-othering. Suffice it to say at this point, the phenomena of “race” (typically understood as physical or phenotypical differences) and “ethnicity” (typically understood as cultural differences), while not identical, have histories that are very much intertwined. For example, during the latter part of the twentieth century, “race” fell out of favor as “ethnicity” became the preferred term in anthropological and sociological study. This terminological change, however, does not imply material or essential differences between the two, but a conceptual shift away from essentialist (biological) to constructivist (social) understandings of race-ethnicity. Therefore, hyphenating race-ethnicity in this project, or combining them—i.e., race-ethnicity, racial-ethnic, or ethnoracial—is an attempt to mark 1 The present project takes this peculiar omission in the history of interpretation as its point of departure. But rather than merely filling the lacuna of a racial reading, which this project nevertheless intends to do, it is also necessary to pose a more fundamental ideological question that interrogates the pattern of non-racial readings in the broader context of modern biblical scholarship. The central question of the project, therefore, is: How and why are dominant interpretations of Jesus’ identification as ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων in Matthew rendered in non-racial, non-ethnic terms? To develop an answer, the present project is organized in two parts. The first half of the project (Chapters 1-2) offers a deconstructive analysis that traces the dominant narrative surrounding the interpretation of the title both in the world of production and in the world of consumption. To that end, Chapter 1 begins by identifying the readings and reading strategies that effectively render Jesus’ identity as ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων as a non-racial, non-ethnic entity. As we shall see, the exegetical history of non-racial readings is intimately tied to the non-racial reading strategies that produce them. Paying close attention to the link between the two, then, underscores how the underlying problem of the dominant narrative is methodological through and through. After establishing the trajectory of non-racial readings and reading strategies, Chapter 2 turns to an ideological assessment of the readers and reading locations in the world of consumption. My argument is that the pattern, however subtle, of bypassing race-ethnicity, of effectively marginalizing its importance, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is rather predicated on and produced by deracialized readers and reading locations in the world of consumption. The argument from Chapter 2 to Chapter 3, in their overlapping histories. For further discussion, see Steve Fenton, Ethnicity: Key Concepts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 51-72. 2 other words, is that the dominant narrative is articulated in and through the dialectic of dominant interlocutors. The pattern of non-racial readings cannot be viewed apart from the deracialized reading locations from which it stems. However, when contextualized within a broader perspective that spans the world of production and the world of consumption, the pattern of non-racial readings can be seen as merging two dominant discourses of modernity that represent Christianity and whiteness in similar terms as