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Anger, Emotion, and Desire in the Gospel of Matthew

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Anger, Emotion, and Desire in the Gospel of Matthew Anger, Emotion, and Desire in the Gospel of Matthew By Erin Roberts B.A., Centre College, 1995 M. Div., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1999 A.M., Brown University, 2004 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Integrative Graduate Studies at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2010 © Copyright 2010 by Erin Roberts This dissertation by Erin Roberts is accepted in its present form by the Program in Integrative Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date ________________ _______________________________ Stanley K. Stowers, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date _________________ _____________________________________ David Konstan, Reader Date _________________ _____________________________________ Ross Kraemer, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date _________________ _____________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA Erin Roberts was born on April 18, 1973, in Cincinnati, OH. She completed her undergraduate studies at Centre College in Danville, KY, with a double major in Anthropology/Sociology and Religion. Awards and honors received at Centre College include the Prize in Biblical Hebrew, the Samuel Robinson Award, and the Max Cavnes Award. Erin then completed the M.Div. degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, NJ, receiving the Maitland Prize in New Testament Exegesis. In 2004, she earned her A.M. in Religious Studies at Brown University in Providence, RI; her thesis, Philo, Paul, Stoic Paradox, was advised by Stanley K. Stowers. During her studies, Erin served as an Associate at Brown University’s Writing Center, was a Graduate Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, and coordinated a research workshop, Theorizing Religion within the Human Sciences, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was an adjunct professor at Quincy College in Quincy, MA, and at Massachusetts Bay Community College in Wellesley Hills, MA. Beginning in August 2010, Erin will be Assistant Professor of Early Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have contributed to the completion of this dissertation. Stanley Stowers, David Konstan, and Ross Kraemer deserve my heartfelt thanks. They have been extremely encouraging and insightful mentors, and I have learned much from their devotion to their students and to their own research. I am similarly grateful for Gail Tetreault, the Department Manager of Religious Studies, whose kindness and patience have sustained many graduate students over the years. Faculty who have contributed indirectly to the dissertation by generously offering their guidance and expertise throughout my coursework and exams include Mary Louise Gill, Joseph Pucci, and Gisela Striker. I also benefited from and will always value the enthusiastic group of graduate students and faculty who met weekly throughout 2009-2010, through the sponsorship of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: Niki Clements, Matthew Duperon, Jennifer Eyl, Paul Firenze, Timothy Freiermuth, Alissa MacMillan, Pneuma McNulty, Jeffrey Neilson, Paul Robertson, Stanley Stowers, Lori Veilleux, and Heidi Wendt. Special thanks also should go to Niki Clements, Jennifer Eyl, and Heidi Wendt, my dear friends and colleagues who saw me through the final stages of writing. Heidi’s stylish and eloquent re-working of difficult sections of the manuscript, as well as her willingness to be awake at all hours, was an invaluable help. v My deepest thanks, however, go to my family. My brother, Jon, has been a caring and loyal friend through the entire process, and I am glad that we will be seeing more of each other now that this project is complete. My best friend and life partner, Oleg, deserves many thanks for standing by me during the difficulties and frustrations that graduate school and dissertation-writing can bring, and also for his sharp-eyed scrutiny of nearly every footnote in the entire manuscript. Finally, my parents, Mary Jane and Carroll, have been the most generous, kind, and supportive parents anyone could ask for. I gratefully dedicate this project to them. vi CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction 1 The Troubled History of Emotion in the Gospels 8 Emotion and the Academic Study of Religion 28 Outline of Chapters 30 Chapter Two: Anger and Ethics in Greek and Roman Philosophy 33 A History of the Study of Emotion and Anger 35 Aristotle and his Followers 38 Epicurus and the Epicureans 44 The Stoics 48 An Anger Schema 54 Conclusion 72 Chapter Three: Moral Instruction about Human Anger in Matthew 5 73 Matthew 5-7 and a Judean Context 75 Interpretations of Matthew 5.21-26 98 Matthew 5.21-26 and the Anger Schema 107 Conclusion 122 Chapter Four: Anger and the Kingdom of Heaven 123 History Writing, Rhetoric, and Matthew’s Parables 124 An Anger Schema in Matthew 18.21-35 and 22.1-14 135 Anger in the Kingdom of Heaven 149 Conclusion 160 Conclusions 161 Bibliography 166 vii LIST OF TABLES Table One: Proposed Descriptive Anger Schema with Prescriptive Variations 60 Table Two: Stoic Strategies for Disrupting the Provocation-Desire-Response Process 67 viii ABBREVIATIONS Const. Seneca, De constantia sapientis (On the firmness of the sage) DL Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum (Lives of Eminent Philosophers) Fin. Cicero, De finibus (On Moral Ends) Ir. Philodemus, De ira (On Anger) Ira Seneca, De ira (On Anger) Lk Luke Matt Matthew Mk Mark NRSV New Revised Standard Version Nic. Eth. Aristotle, Ethican nicomachea (Nichomachean Ethics) LXX Septuagint NT New Testament OT Old Testament PS Cicero, Paradoxa stoicorum (Stoic Paradoxes) Rhet. Aristotle, Rhetorica (Rhetoric) Sera Plutarch, De sera numinis vindicta (On the Delay of Divine Justice) Tusc. Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes (Tusculan Disputations) ix CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION On December 13, 1999, a debate among the Republican Presidential Candidates was held in Des Moines, Iowa.1 In attendance were the then-Governor of Texas, George W. Bush, the evangelical politician Gary Bauer, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the businessman and politico Steve Forbes, Former Ambassador and political activist Alan Keyes, and the senior Senator from Arizona, John McCain. Near the end of the debate, moderator John Bachman asked a question that had been submitted by a citizen of Iowa. The question was this: “What political philosopher or thinker ... do you most identify with and why?” Steve Forbes started things off by answering that his choices were John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Alan Keyes chose the drafters of the United States Constitution, Orrin Hatch went for Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, and John McCain chose Theodore Roosevelt. The answer, though, that silenced the audience and surprised viewers, commentators, and scholars of religion alike, came from George W. Bush, who responded by saying, “Christ, because he changed my heart.” In the days and weeks following the debate, commentators considered whether his answer breeched the separation clause of the First Amendment. Leaders of religious organizations puzzled over whether Bush really meant what he said or whether it was a well-timed attempt to strengthen the Christian base, while an article in the Los Angeles 1 Full transcript may be found at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76120. Accessed by Erin Roberts, 10 November 2009. 1 2 Times identified points of contention between some of the teachings attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew and aspects of Bush’s platform.2 What surprised me, however, as I watched this debate nearly ten years ago, was the un-argued and un-questioned historical claim that Jesus was in fact a philosopher. The 1990s were rife with theories about the historical Jesus, and the ones that I was familiar with at the time claimed that Jesus was a prophetic social revolutionary, a magician, a Galilean peasant, an apocalyptic prophet advocating a kind of “interim” ethics, or a spirit- possessed healer.3 Bush’s claim that Jesus was a philosopher did not align with my idea of what a philosopher looked like, and his reason—that Jesus had changed his heart—did not make sense to me because I was not aware that philosophers were in the business of changing people’s hearts. But now, nearly ten years later, I have a much clearer picture of what a philosopher in the time of Jesus may have looked like, and I think that it coheres with the depiction of Jesus elaborated in the Gospel of Matthew. As I will explain in more detail, Greek and Roman philosophers in antiquity were teachers of morality who dealt in the same kind of ethical currency attributed to Jesus by the author of the Gospel of Matthew. I want to be clear, though, that this resemblance does not lead me to conclude that the historical Jesus was a moral philosopher, or if by chance he were such philosopher, that we could claim this with any type of academic responsibility. Secure and non- contradictory historical evidence for the details of Jesus’ life is scant, and even our earliest sources—the letters of Paul and probably the Gospel of Mark—do not indicate 2 Madison T. Schockley, "A Closer Walk with Bush and Jesus; Politics; Teachings from the Bible Don't Match Up with the Politics of Texas Governor," Los Angeles Times, January 3, 2000. 3 At the time, I did not know about the “Cynic-hypothesis.” 3 that moral philosophy, understood as that activity among whose concerns is
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