This Tuesday, November 29th is — (on the Old Calendar) — Tuesday, November 16th, the feast day of the holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew. I’d like to mark the occasion by looking at what I wrote to introduce my seminary thesis project way back in the spring of 2006. My thesis was a study guide for the text of Matthew’s Gospel, a thoroughgoing fractal outline, material I adapted for my website here. As I say on my website, Matthew was the first book of Scripture in which I saw a fractal structure. I feel like this evangelist taught me how to read biblical words. By this point in time I had not yet seen the fivefold pattern I wrote about recently in “The Cosmic Chiasmus”; that would come later that summer when studying Genesis. So what is seen on my website is only the beginning of adapting my work on the Gospel. There is much more detail and interpretation to mine, but let’s start here by looking at the introduction.
{ A Way into Christ through Matthew }
{ Introduction: A Search for Meaning }
It is commonly held, and taught, that one should read Scripture. What is more rarely shared, and more rarely known, is how one is to do so. For some this can be quite puzzling: Scripture is completely unlike anything else we read. For those of us in the Church, the writings of the Fathers are an immense help in interpreting Scripture properly, but there is still a fundamental hermeneutical problem, even with the writings of the Fathers. In a materialistic world with a sickening proliferation of words and images, the faith that such words and images can bear any meaning, let alone eternal meaning, is seriously damaged. How then can we read the Bible? And yet as strongly as ever many feel the desire for meaning, meaning on the level of the soul, yes, but through that, meaning beyond the soul, meaning eternal and divine.
The progeny of our age need to be educated as to how words can bear meaning to their souls. How can these sensible images, either heard through the air or seen depicted on a page, become the bread of life for the invisible soul? Well they can, and by application of the self to the ways and writings of the Church, souls can ever be transformed in the light of Christ, even through material images. All that is needed is a kernel of belief in the face of unbelief. Such are among the chief concerns — not only that we have — but that Christ had when delivering His message, concerns that the Evangelist Matthew especially heard, comprehended, and shared when relaying that message to a global audience.
The Gospel according to St. Matthew is highly formalized. By studying this form we can begin to receive knowledge of its spiritual content — and in a way more palatable to the modern mind. It can be hard for us to relate flimsy words to some solid, immutable, absolute meaning, like relating leaves to rock. But comparing words to other words, like leaves to leaves, is an eminently conceivable task. Then by comparing the leaves one to another, we can begin to see that there is something more to them. This is the first step in achieving the goal of the Gospel: to know Christ, that leafy Rock, the eternal God who became temporal flesh so that that which is relative can become absolute. The carnal words of Scripture already share in this deification by His grace. By studying them, so too can we.
Thus we come to the literary principles of parallelism and symmetry employed by Matthew when scripting his Gospel. Chiefly, the parallelism is inverse; the symmetry is rounded. A glance at the main outline shows that the entire Gospel can be divided into eleven parts, the last five parts reflecting as in a mirror the first five parts, the whole Gospel thus hinging on the sixth part. Similar inverted structures govern each of the individual parts. The term most commonly used to describe this type of arrangement is chiasmus.
‘Chiasmus’ the word comes from the Greek letter chi (Χ) because it can be seen that if a chiastically arranged text were spelled out in two lines, the paths of correlation between words cross each other. An X-shape, however, is not frequently employed when conceiving the shape of such a text, which seems rather circular or spiral — or perhaps a conical helix: a coil, that is, that rises to a point. By having a center, this literary form has a means of gathering all its content and pointing it towards an emphasized meaning.
This center, however, need not be an exclusive entity. In the Gospel text that follows, bullet points have been used to identify central elements, but these labels should not deceive the reader into thinking that the other portions are not central in meaning. The parallel segments on either side of a center, for example, can just as easily be conceived as parts of the center, a three-piece center as the case may be. This logic proceeds to the outermost boundaries of the structure. Thus, with biblical chiasmus, everything becomes central by virtue of its having a center, for everything participates in the center. And thus by way of relations and comparisons, everything points toward meaning.
Use of form, moreover, should not become an idol, and for Matthew when selecting the words and works of the Messiah to represent His Coming accurately, it is not. When reading a text for literary form, then, one should avoid the temptation to make everything conform to mathematical precision. Something creatively written must needs be creatively read, and a creatively written text calls for an equally creative analysis. Otherwise the teacher would feel that he has failed. At the conclusion of the central part of Matthew is the image of the student of the Gospel as an able scribe fruitfully bringing forth his own parables (cf. 13:52).
The rules of arrangement and nomenclature, therefore, used to identify the form of the Gospel’s text — are fluid, and they cannot be mastered but by reading and studying the text (the whole purpose anyway). As labels, the letters a, b, c, etc. are used to show continuity of thought, the letter a being used specifically to show the beginning and end of such continuity. There have been other students of Scripture who have used the letter x to mark the center of a chiasmus; the letter x is not used that way here because it implies a disruption of continuity. Rather, the alphabetical numbering proceeds through the center, which is marked, as mentioned, with a bullet point (•). The letter x is used (along with y and z and w if necessary) to denote an alternate path of continuity, or just a layer of skin or shell surrounding the meat of a passage. In this latter sense are used also the terms intro and extro, normally assigned to verses which introduce setting.
Commonly after a symmetrically structured passage there is an independent, punctuating segment, such as a pithy phrase or apothegm. It can serve as a summary of the passage’s message or a counterpoint to its central element. Some writers have used words like ‘epilogue’ to specify this device. Fr. John Breck, a writer on biblical chiasmus, uses the poetic term anacrusis, and the present editor has followed suit. Coming from the Greek verb ‘to thrust off,’ an anacrusis can be any separate element adjoining a coherent parallel structure, before or after.
To anyone with an eye or ear for artistic composition, it is easy to see the appropriateness of such a device as anacrusis, though in critical evaluation it would be equally easy to use this label liberally to explain verses otherwise unaccounted for. The reader of the present text is invited to view its use and all editorial decisions critically. There is an inherently subjective element to the project at hand. Scripture is supposed to be engaged subjectively — with faith, and therefore this is a study guide and not an objective thesis. Of course there is absolute meaning to Scripture (dogmas, for example), the stuff ripe for objective studies and absolute statements, but in order to create such studies and to divide the word of truth correctly, we have to learn how to read Scripture. We have to learn how leaves relate to rock. Thankfully this Gospel teaches us that.
However, as other scholars, drawing on the theoretical models of modern biblical criticism, have found, more than Scripture is needed. Evaluation of the literary form of Scripture cannot be done in a vacuum, but an exegetical method is required in order to determine the content to which is given the sought-after form. Therefore, for proper interpretation the Fathers of the Orthodox Church, via their commentaries and homilies, have been employed throughout and quoted when necessary or beneficial. As for modern scholarship, those writers who have studied the literary patterns of Scripture have been consulted and cited when used, all references being listed in the bibliography.
Form is derived from content. He, then, who already knows the spiritual content of Scripture, will gain nothing in the understanding of Scripture from the study of Scripture’s form. But he might gain a new way to teach the content to others. And if one has not learnt the content of Scripture and is struggling to do so, study of form can be a very fruitful way to begin. Indeed the investigation of form is most successful when it adds absolutely nothing to what the Church already knows about the content, but when it instead adds greatly to our appreciation of the content as the Church understands it.
The Greek text chosen for the Gospel of Matthew, moreover, is that of the Byzantine textual tradition used by the Orthodox Church. The editor, besides trusting the Church’s transmission of Scripture, has found that at points of controversy among the manuscripts, this textual tradition maintains literary coherence, whereas the editions of modern revisers do not.1 For translation, the Authorized King James Version has been used as a basis, for its closeness to the Byzantine text and for its poetic beauty. It has been altered throughout in attempt to reveal more transparently the structure and meaning of the underlying Greek.
As transparent a form as can be achieved has been the constant aim of all editorial evaluation of the text. It would be a simple matter to arrange things to conceal inconsistencies and inaccuracies, dazzling the reader with intricate forms while guarding the knowledge of their deficiencies in accounting for all of the text. Yet the editor in his sinfulness is responsible if the Gospel has been in any way misrepresented, skewed, or twisted, in which case he begs forgiveness of his readers and of the esteemed evangelical authors: God the Word, in His living and speaking as man; the divine Spirit in His abundant grace and inspiration; and of course St. Matthew, in his humble selecting, arranging, and writing, doing all to the glory of God the heavenly Father, who is uncircumscribable and pantocrator, amen.
Yes, so I no longer prefer to mark chiastic structures with alphabetic numbering, choosing symbolic Greek letters instead. Underlying thematic patterns are of more interest to me than surface-level correspondences, which can be depicted just as easily by indentation alone. By means of Greek symbols and indentation, I try to deal honestly with both surface and depth in a way that is clearly legible. And I try not to use the word anacrusis anymore, the meaning of which is not very intuitive to the common reader — ‘coda’ I’ll sometimes use in its place. So much for the development of my style.
As for substance, I think this exposition is still good, though I’ve lacked any substantial feedback on it. I received a lot of positive responses to my thesis at the time, but little indication as to what parts of it worked and what parts could be improved. I can figure out some of that on my own as time goes by, but it’s hard for me to know what really works without seeing it perform as it’s supposed to in the mind of a reader. That kind of feedback doesn’t come easy, as any writer will tell you.
Here’s one last historical image I’ll leave you with, which may or may not be of interest: the general outline and table of contents adjoining my 2006 thesis. I wanted it to look like a tree. There’s no ground, though — as if it never landed.
Places in Matthew’s Gospel which illustrate this claim include: 6:13, 9:8, 15:14, 18:11, 20:16, 23:14, 23:26, 27:24, and 28:9.