No. 2

Why Does Matthew Not Overtly Criticise the Roman Occupation?

An exchange with John Riches who was
Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism
at Glasgow University.
He is now Emeritus Professor.

Professor Riches argues that the absence in Matthew’s Gospel of overt criticism of Rome should be put down to the writer’s understandable trepidation. However, is this notable absence of overt criticism – occurring not just in Matthew’s gospel but the New Testament as a whole – to be explained by fear? Should it not rather be understood as largely stemming from the Bible’s god-of-the-marginals strategy in which Israel was supposed to operate as God’s light to lighten the Gentiles? In such a context Rome, as the civilisational (Gentile) power in place, was an irrelevance pertaining to the problem rather than its solution. This being the case is it surprising that Jesus is described as strategically ignoring Rome and that the New Testament writers followed suit?

In a correspondence about Jesus’ remark ‘I was not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ which Matthew adds as a rider to Mark’s story of the Syro-Phoenician woman John Riches made this particular point:

‘… one wants to pick up the perhaps quite subtly stated critique of Empire that’s to be read between the lines in Matthew. For, as a Jew post 70 you knew what Romans did to rebellious Jews and it wasn’t nice. So maybe you spent a lot of time showing that Jesus was basically only interested in intra-Jewish matters (not dangerous unless leading to serious unrest) and then slipped in a bit at the end (by which stage the censor had given up?) about all authority on heaven and earth being given to Jews!’

I replied to John in the following terms:

I am happy for the purposes of this discussion to go along with your idea that a critique of Empire may exist in Matthew’s Gospel. However, I can’t for the life of me see how this particular phrase ‘I was not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ can be explained by such an hypothesis. The phrase certainly constitutes a Matthean addition included for the benefit of his readers since it would have meant nothing to a foreigner like the Syro-Phoenician woman. To Jewish readers of Matthew’s Gospel it would have been full of meaning. They would instantly have seen ‘lost sheep’ as referring to the majority in Israel who, as a result of God’s delay in bringing in the kingdom, had begun to despair and forsake the covenant. And they would have perfectly understood that Jesus, as one who had taken on the job of leading Israel to fulfil her role as the light to lighten the Gentiles would have had to begin by concentrating exclusively on leading this majority back to the grind-stone. Given this situation it seems to me clear that Matthew is using Mark’s story to make the very same point about Jesus’ light-to-lighten-the-Gentiles strategy that Mark himself had sought to make. All he does in adding the phrase about lost sheep is to highlight this point for his own Jewish readers.

Given that Mark’s story and Matthew’s explanatory ‘lost sheep’ phrase together offer a perfectly straightforward and powerful expression of Jesus’ intra-Jewish ‘light to lighten the Gentiles’ strategy I cannot for the life of me see why you should find it necessary to undermine this strategy by trying to make out that, reading between the lines, one can see that Matthew was also using the whole scenario for his own secondary and somewhat complicated, anti-Empire, strategic purposes. I say this not only for textual reasons but also as a grass-roots militant. The fact is that if as an ideological militant you start worrying about censors you never get anywhere since you find yourself hiding precisely what you wish to reveal (see Jesus’ stricture about lighting a lamp and then hiding it under the bed!). History shows that the only militants who get anywhere are those who are brave and who are prepared to confront the storm … without taking unnecessary risks of course. If you will forgive me for saying so your Matthew appears to me to be the creation of a comfortable, liberal academic who has no experience of what ideological militancy is like in the raw. He is someone who in real life would never have got anywhere. The early Christians proved remarkably effective not because they worried about Roman censors but precisely because they didn’t, often losing their lives as a consequence, or so the story goes!

No. 2

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