Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Important Questions about Matthew and Paul Answered by Bart Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth Here are some intriguing questions I've received about Matthew and Paul with my best attempt at brief responses.
[00:00:17] I've been debating my adult son on the tie between Jeremiah 7:11 has this house which is called by my name become a den of robbers in your sight and what Jesus said in the Gospels in Matthew 21:11 it is written, my house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers, which are translated to robbers or thieves, depending on the translation.
[00:00:44] Is there a consensus among scholars on what the term used in the original Hebrew of Jeremiah 7:11 meant prior to the later translations into Greek Lestis and English robbers?
[00:00:58] Also, is there any other verse in the Hebrew Bible where that term was used for comparative analysis of meaning?
[00:01:04] Thank you for your insight response.
[00:01:08] The Hebrew uses a kind of unusual word that means something like person of violence, which can be used of a murderer or robber. So literally, I guess place of violent people.
[00:01:23] It is also used in Deuteronomy 11:14, Psalm 17:4, Isaiah 30:5, 9 and Ezekiel 7:22 and 18:10, but nowhere else. I believe the Greek translation, the Septuagint, translates it in Jeremiah 7:11 as a den of robbers, using the term lestice.
[00:01:46] One problem is that lestis sometimes means the robber who breaks into your house, and sometimes it refers to insurrectionist gorilla. The only way to know which it means is by carefully looking at the context in which it is used, as is true of most words, so that one might disagree what it means in one verse or another.
[00:02:06] In both Jeremiah and Matthew, it does seem to be connected to financial rather than military activities.
[00:02:14] What is your opinion about the apparent overlap between what happens in the temptation and crucifixion narratives in the Gospel of Matthew, particularly regarding the possibility of conscious mirroring of the two narratives? It is theorized that Matthew4.6 and Matthew 27:40 act as mirrors of each other, with Satan's call for the Son of God to leap from the temple to show his power, echoed by the enemies of Jesus at the scene of the Passion, in which they mockingly call for Jesus to descend from the cross to display his claimed authority as Messiah, Son of God.
[00:02:50] It seems to my untutored view that Matthew may be developing the limited Mark and temptation narrative in order to connect the words of Satan in the desert to the bystanders of the Crucifixion. If I may ask, do you believe that this is a genuine connection mirroring in the narrative of the Gospel? Or am I perhaps reading too much into the text?
[00:03:14] Interesting idea. I'm not sure I've heard it before.
[00:03:18] You do get that kind of mirroring phenomenon sometimes in the Gospels, for example in Mark, with the baptism recorded in 1:10 and the crucifixion in 15:38. 39 In Mark's case, the connection between the two events is made particularly evident because both passages use the unusual word schizo, that is ripping open at the baptism of the heavens where God dwells, and at the crucifixion of the curtain in the temple where God dwells on earth.
[00:03:48] The word is found only in these two places in Mark, and in both places a voice declares Jesus to be the Son of God.
[00:03:56] Your idea about a similar connection between Matthew's temptation narrative and crucifixion does seem plausible to me at first glance.
[00:04:05] Among other quotes from Papias, Eusebius has Papias saying something that I see translated in English as so Matthew arranged the oracles in Hebrew dialect, and each interpreted them as he was able.
[00:04:20] In English. This is ambiguous, similar to how he beat his son because he was drunk. Doesn't pin down whether the father or the son was drunk. To wit, whether in Hebrew dialect was about the oracles which Matthew arranged or about Matthew's arrangement of the oracles.
[00:04:39] Is it ambiguous in the original, or is it clear in Greek that being in a Hebrew dialect referred to the work product and not to the original oracles?
[00:04:50] In my edition of Papias in the Loeb Classical Library, The Apostolic Fathers, Volume 2, I provide a different translation that I believe is more accurate.
[00:05:01] And so Matthew composed or compiled, there are differences in the manuscripts, the sayings of the Hebrew tongue and and each one interpreted them to the best of his ability.
[00:05:14] Whether Papias originally said, composed or compiled the sayings, the Greek word is logia. In either case, what he wrote down was in Hebrew. Other writers or readers, at least according to this passage, translated or interpreted them as best they could.
[00:05:32] The word for interpreted can also mean translated.
[00:05:38] In your opinion is 1 Thessalonians 2:14, 16 a non Pauline later interpolation. The passage in the NRSV reads, For you, brothers and sisters became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out.
[00:06:03] They displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath has overtaken them at last.
[00:06:20] The person asking the question is noting that some scholars claim the passage was not originally in 1 Thessalonians, but was inserted by someone much later.
[00:06:29] But since it is in all of our surviving manuscripts, it is not a textual variant, since the texts don't vary, they all have it, but would be an interpolation, that is a passage inserted by someone before any of our surviving copies were produced.
[00:06:45] And this person wants to know if I think so as well.
[00:06:49] My view is I don't think it's an interpolation. The reason people argue that it was inserted later by someone else into the letter is that the phrase the wrath of God has come upon them sounds like he's referring to the destruction of the temple Jerusalem. But I don't think he means that. In Romans 1:18 he says the wrath of God has come upon pagans too.
[00:07:14] It just means that God is showing his anger at them in one way or another.
[00:07:19] Even though that's the argument that is often used. I've always thought that in most cases the people scholars who advance the argument do so because they don't want Paul to be seen calling Jews Christ killers.
[00:07:33] My view is that the verse doesn't teach that either. He is indicating in the passage that just as the Thessalonian followers of Jesus were persecuted by other Thessalonians, the Judean followers of Jesus were persecuted by other Judeans.
[00:07:48] The word translated into English as Jews and Judeans is the same Greek word, and here, in my view, should be rendered Judeans.
