Class update: So before getting into the backlog of class summaries, I wanted to offer a quick update on the class and our plans for the last bit of lessons. We will meet three more times, same time, same place: December 7, 14, and 21 in the Relief Society Room at the Stake Center at 7:00 PM. I’ve polled class members as a group and individually about their wish list of topics, themes, questions, and anything else we might cover in these final lessons and received an overwhelmingly common response to give thematic treatments now that we’ve covered the full contents of the four gospels. My plan (with plenty of wiggle room to adapt to our classroom discussions and attendees’ interests) is to discuss the following themes:
Additional narratives by first-generation Christians about Jesus
Women as special witnesses of Jesus’s ministry and resurrection
Jesus’s atonement
Jesus’s personality from the four gospels
Looking back on the Nativity
Looking ahead to the Resurrection
I hope to see you there!
We left off our summaries with Jesus giving his Bread of Life discourse and meeting rejection. Only a few disciples remained with him. Simon may have spoken for the group when he replied to Jesus’s question, “Will ye also go away?” by saying, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.” This exchange sets up one of the more cited dialogues of Jesus: his declaration about the “keys of the kingdom” and his giving Simon the nickname of Peter.
Mark and Matthew say Jesus and these few disciples “went out” and “came into the [towns/coasts] of Caesarea Philippi.” What now is Banias, Israel, Caesarea Philippi was a town about the same latitude as Tyre, and quite inland (not coastal), suggesting the copyists for the Gospel of Matthew may have been turned around in their geography, or probably weren’t familiar with the places they described. Not long after this episode, Jesus would take Simon, James, and John up a “high mountain” where the vision of transfiguration would occur; since Caesarea Philippi lay at the base of the Golan Heights mountain range that slope upward to Mount Hermon (the tallest peak in the region), it’s possible that this was the group’s last residence before Jesus and others ascended the mountain. Some scholars consider Mount Hermon (as opposed to the site of modern tradition, Mount Tabor) as the location of the transfiguration because of the convergence of these geographical references and description of topography in the gospels.
In any event, on the way to Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked the disciples “Whom do men say that I am?” Their replies confirmed how various figures had occupied the apocalyptic expectations of many Judaeans at the time: he was associated variously with John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, and others of the Prophets (most likely Moses or Isaiah). Jesus asked a provocative question for the ages—But whom do you say that I am? Here we get slightly different answers from Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Simon said, “the Christos,” according to Mark; “the Christos, the son of the living God,” according to Matthew; and “the Christos of God,” according to Luke. The use of Christos in the original Greek was likely a translation of the Aramaic Meshicha, what made its way through Hebrew into English as “Messiah.” (Our handy glossary offers more information on the word and concept of Meshicha.) For Simon to say “you are the Meshicha” very likely denoted their own understanding of Daniel’s prophecy and traditions that arose from readings of Isaiah and Micah that a military figure would someday subdue all Israel’s enemies and return Israel to its national glory. Both Mark and Luke say that Jesus responded to Simon’s affirmation by telling the disciples not to mention this association of himself with Meshicha. And the story ends there.
Unavoidable Complications
In Matthew, however, we see a continuation not seen anywhere else in the early Christian historical record. In class we covered these in a bit more detail, but to summarize, here are the known issues with the text of Matthew 16:18–19:
This passage doesn’t appear in any papyri manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew.
It first appears in the Codex Bezae in Greek and Latin, meaning—
it comes from Byzantine bishops
who were Trinitarian, Constantinopolitan, Latin, Roman, and Catholic
who were known to have been actively disputing each other’s ecclesiastical authority.
It is the only instance in all of the four gospels where Jesus is quoted using the word ekklesia (= church in KJV).
It uses “Petros” to name Peter and “petra” to say “rock”—a masculine/feminine grammar that didn’t exist in Aramaic or Hebrew, meaning—
the text introduces two different words with different meanings where Aramaic had only one word.
The phrase “keys of the kingdom” shows up nowhere else in the Christian historical record until the 4th century.
Only the Gospel of Matthew has these words, and only this gospel’s earliest papyri had a different path of production from Antioch to Byzantium, meaning—
only the Gospel of Matthew was directly influenced by Catholic bishops in the copying of the text prior to Codex Vaticanus and Codex Bezae.
Look at all the anomalies of these two verses compared to the other gospels and first-generation Christian texts, with some additional anomalies when even compared to the rest of the Gospel of Matthew! For these (and some additional reasons) historians widely conclude that these words in verses 18–19 aren’t provably original to Jesus; some even argue that there is additional evidence of forgery. (For my part, I find the evidence inconclusive of malicious forgery, but evidence of interpolation looks quite strong.)
Notice the high political stakes for bishops in the fourth century regarding ecclesiastical authority. A primary bone of contention had developed in their fourth-century debates: many bishops in Byzantium claimed their authority to govern the church through Paul; some through Donatus; some through James the brother of Jesus; some through Patrick (of Irish fame); some through Clement of Alexandria; and many through Peter.
The trouble was, the bishops who claimed to be Peter’s successors were from Rome—a place far removed from Galilee and Jerusalem, not immediately associated with Peter, and a community of believers comprised virtually entirely of converts who hadn’t known Jesus personally. Across the Mediterranean, bishops didn’t dispute that Peter had died in Rome, and so the expectation emerged that immediately before his death, Peter had named a successor; and so on, through a chain of bishops until the 300s. A wide contest between the many ekklisies developed over which line of succession reached Jesus himself. Ekklesia leaders ended up settling this logic around a notion of patronage/fatherhood between bishops—which one could be considered the “father” (= papa/pope in Latin) of all the bishops would be the senior-most bishop and agent of Christ on behalf of all the ekklisies.
But now who should be papa became another dispute. Some Christians simply disregarded the issue of apostolic seniority. (Paul, never one of the Twelve, was the most prominent of this crowd.) The Pauline contingent from Ephesus, Corinth, and Thessalonike argued strongly for a succession of bishops through St. Stephen and St. Paul. The Petrine contingent from Rome and Antioch argued for succession through St. Peter. Those two were held up most often in the debate, and the Roman-Byzantine clergy in Constantinople solidified their edict over and against the remaining bishops through the use of a Roman imperial institution: the council. It was the council that operated as a kind of proto-congress, a body that rendered a credo (= creed) that functioned as law and something enforceable by imperial legates.
All of this is to illustrate how plausible and even likely it was that those very same bishops, in the middle of an intense conciliar crisis, inserted words into their copies of the Gospel of Matthew to favor Peter above other apostles and other succession claimants to give him the status of ultimate ecclesiastical authority. The language in this passage in Matthew 16:18–19 matches language in Byzantine conciliar language, suggesting a late authorship and casting doubt on an earlier production, including Jesus himself having ever said it during his lifetime.
Notice the Byzantine character of these words (as they appear in the King James Version):
[Previous verse: And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.] And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
In the Greek, it’s even more suspicious. Here are rhetorical elements that all have parallels in Byzantine Christianity and not the four gospels:
the word ekklēsian (= “church” in KJV)
the phrase pylai hadou (= gates of Hades; “gates of hell” in KJV)
the phrase kleidas tēs basileias tōn ouranōn (= keys of the kingdom of heaven)
the rhetorical figure of syllogism in dēses epi tēs gēs (= bind on earth) and binding in ouranois (= heaven)
the rhetorical figure of syllogism in lysēs epi tēs gēs (= release on earth) and releasing in ouranois (= heaven)
While the “kingdom of heaven” in Matthew is well attested, it’s the subtle difference of “keys of the kingdom of heaven” that moves this into a different frame and a different (more fourth-century) rhetorical style.
As a hypothetical thought experiment, what if we were to put a pause on these two verses? What would we find? The rest of Matthew agrees rather strongly with Mark and Luke. In other words, the textual and historical features of these two verses likely tell us more about Byzantine Catholic bishops in the late 300s and early 400s than they do about Jesus in the year 29.
Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven
There’s a ton we could say about the phrase “keys of the kingdom of heaven” that appears in this passage. I won’t paste a dissertation and melt your eyeballs with technicalities (which I may have done in the previous section!), but I do think it’s valuable to bring in some ancient context for this phrase and its rhetorical connotations.
The word “keys” in this setting had symbolized guardian authority for millennia, going back farther than the Christian era into ancient Roman, Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian mythologies. Divinities associated with protecting the earth from the realms of the dead or with supervising the changes in seasons were said to possess bolts and keys for securing the door of heaven or the gates of death. Isaiah once promised that the Lord would one day replace an unworthy steward of the Kingdom of Judah with another, and then clothe the new steward “with thy robe,” “strengthen him with thy girdle,” “commit thy government into his hand,” and “lay upon his shoulder” the “key of the house of David … so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open” (Isa. 22:20–25). Early Christians equated the door of heaven and the gates of hell with salvation: the possessor of the keys of the kingdom of heaven could unlock one or the other, and in effect, determine the destiny of a soul. Put practically, the exercise keys meant either to banish Christian from fellowship or forgive sin. The predominant definition of the “keys of St. Peter” became the power to excommunicate and absolve sin on behalf of an ekklesia.1
Of course Latter-day Saints take “keys of the kingdom” differently. But for typical interpretations, we see people cite Joseph Smith, particularly some of his revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants. I promised not to dive into the complexities of that setting, but I will suggest for your consideration how Joseph Smith’s notion of “keys of the kingdom” corresponded to an esoteric idea of “mysteries” being sealed up by God, and only through revelation (= keys) could such mysteries be unlocked, decoded, and comprehended. This is why he could tell the founding members of the Relief Society how he was “turning” to them the keys of the kingdom: it was exclusive, hidden knowledge via revelation that he was disclosing to them that remained a mystery to the outside world that they now knew, and by so knowing, possessed “keys of the kingdom,” or revelations of the kingdom. The rhetoric about priesthood keys transformed significantly from this baseline after Joseph Smith’s death in 1844, particularly among men claiming authority to succeed him and lead the church—just like the conciliar debates among fourth-century bishops about Peter, Paul, Donatus, Clement, and others.2
So, in reading the Matthean passage invoking “keys of the kingdom of heaven,” if we keep in mind a closer context to the words on the page, we’d interpret this more as a statement of opening and closing the gates of heaven and hell, or powers to excommunicate and forgive sin, than as an exclusive dispensation to wield general ecclesiastical authority.
Rebukes
Mark has an exchange between Jesus and Peter follow Peter’s testimonial of Jesus-as-Messiah. Because of the context—“he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes”—and the other gospels’ sequencing, there’s a possibility that this episode occurred later during Jesus’s final week in Jerusalem. In any event, Mark has Peter “rebuke” Jesus, as though Jesus shouldn’t speak of being killed, or Peter refuses to believe Jesus will be rejected of the elders and be killed. The word here is epitimaō, which meant “to pay honor to” in classical Greek (at least 300 years and beyond before Jesus), but by the time of Jesus connoted imposing a penalty or finding fault/critiquing/warning/reproving someone. Did Peter reprove Jesus here? I think the nuance of the original text offers a different reading. Because the same word describes Jesus’s reply to Peter, we can see a clear rhetorical figure of repetition for emphasis, a mirroring—Jesus “rebukes” Peter as Peter had “rebuked” Jesus. Matthew offers Peter’s words, which don’t sound so much as a rebuke as they do an insistence that Peter won’t such bad things happen to Jesus. “And Peter took him, and began to stop him. But when he had turned about a looked on his disciples, he stopped Peter, saying…” Or something closer to this effect than the harshness the English word “rebuke” suggests.
Jesus’s reply here has caused some theologians a bit of heartburn. Mark has Jesus saying: “Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.” Had Satan suddenly materialized? Was Jesus calling Peter Satan? Was Jesus treating Peter’s declaration as something satanic, evil, misguided, well-intentioned but ultimately something that would serve the devil’s purposes? What we know from the historical setting and the surrounding context make these questions a bit moot. As we discussed earlier when studying the temptations in the wilderness pericope, the ancient Semitic and Greco-Roman use of śāṭān/satana (and other variants) treated it as a common noun and not a personal name, a word meaning “accuser” or “prosecutor.” The role of “a satan” occurs nine times in the Hebrew Bible, five times in reference to human beings and four times in reference to heavenly beings (not demons or wicked beings), all nine of whom were dispatched to do God’s bidding. In this setting, it makes significantly more sense to translate Jesus’s words differently than 16th-century Anglican priests did, men who had an intense view of the devil that owed far more to medieval lore than to Aramaic speech patterns of the 20s AD. A more literal rendition would look like: “Move aside, you accuser, you. You’re not thinking in God’s terms but in human terms.”
Taking up One’s Cross
Jesus continued teaching the disciples, saying, “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.” When we read cross, and because it’s Jesus saying it, we think of the crucifixion and assume Jesus is referring to an instrument of execution, the Roman crucifix structure. Our iconography gives us the lowercase-t shape as the image and symbol of the word cross, and we often imagine Jesus bearing that heavy wooden device on his way to be executed. In this framing, we imagine needing ourselves to be willing to go toward terrible ordeals to call ourselves Jesus’s disciples. Here’s the trouble with this saying, however: Jesus didn’t say cross. He said something in Aramaic that was translated into Greek as aratō ho stauron, meaning “take down his fence.” And not just any fence, but a particular type of fencing. The stauron was the kind of perimeter wall made up of stakes of timber, like what we see at 1800s frontier forts or medieval European ramparts. This wasn’t a fence drawing a boundary between different properties, like we have surrounding our suburban yards today, but rather the fortification to protect against one’s enemies.
If anyone will follow Jesus, let them take down their ramparts, their defensive walls, their stockades and bulwarks. This suggests becoming totally vulnerable, exposed to attack. Jesus says in doing so, we may lose our lives, but we will find ourselves this way. Luke gives this teaching greater intensity: let down your walls daily and follow Jesus.
So rather than imagining some kind of self-flagellation of inflicting crucifixion-like burdens on ourselves, or rising up to our trials and suffering, we could approximate this teaching more closely by examining our resistance to others, our defensiveness and divisiveness, and our openness to others, our inclusion and forgiveness.
Next Time
In the next summary, we’ll take a look at the Transfiguration and its implications for Jesus being associated with Moses, Elijah, and Messiah.
Eliane Magalis, “Keys,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., 15 vols., edited by Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005), 8:5116–5117; G. H. Joyce, “Power of the Keys,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, edited by Charles G. Herbermann, et al., 15 vols. (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1914), 8:631–633; Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2–7; Gert Haendler, “Power of Keys,” in The Encyclopedia of Christianity, edited by Erwin Fahlbusch, Jan Mili Lochman, John Mbiti, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Lukas Vischer (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 116; John Bowden, “Kingdom of God,” in Encyclopedia of Christianity, edited by John Bowden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 690.
I’ve presented on this in greater detail at the Mormon History Association conference and am happy to relay the receipts and analysis upon request. Interestingly, John Taylor once admitted to having found Joseph Smith’s teachings on “keys of the kingdom” confusing and asked Joseph to sort it out for him; Joseph said “the idea was that [the prophets] should deliver up or give an account of their administrations but they would retain their several positions and Priesthood.” (John Taylor, 31 December 1876 in Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. [London: LDS Booksellers’ Depot, 1854–1886], 18:330.) In other words, the “keys of the kingdom” as “accounts” is much different than keys as ecclesiastical authority to direct the priesthood. The whole inventory of Joseph Smith’s revelations and teachings mentioning “keys” runs along these lines.