Rebekah Eklund - The Beatitudes through the Ages

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

2021 Rebekah Eklund

All rights reserved

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-0-8028-7650-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eklund, Rebekah Ann, author.

Title: The Beatitudes through the ages / Rebekah Eklund.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A reception history of the Beatitudes, from the first century to the present dayProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020046893 | ISBN 9780802876508 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: BeatitudesReader-response criticism.

Classification: LCC BS2575.52 .E39 2021 | DDC 226.206dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046893

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

For Angie

Older Catholic commentaries on the Gospels are often deposits of tradition. Aquinass Catena Aurea is exclusively a catena of excerpts from earlier commentators and theological authorities. Cornelius Lapides endlessly fascinating work, known in English as The Great Commentary, is almost as much a discussion of previous writers as it is a discussion of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Juan Maldonados Commentarii in quatuor Evangelistas is much the same: rare is the page that does not engage with Tertullian, Hilary, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, or some other church father.

The Protestant Reformers and their immediate descendants, when writing commentaries, engaged in a different pursuit. Given their severe criticism of Catholic tradition and their belief in Sola Scriptura, their exegetical works do not pay obeisance to those who came before them.

Indeed, in many respects their commentaries are attempts to overcome the predominant history of interpretation, such as the once-common use of Matthew 5:26 (you will never get out until you have paid the last penny) as a prooftext for purgatory, or the use of 16:18 (you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church) to establish papal primacy. The early Protestants are not beholden to the authoritative past.

Calvin is here typical. He does, in his commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, occasionally refer to interpreters or some or others. Their names, however, are unimportant, and they do not steer his judgments. Calvins goal is to understand what he thinks of as the plain sense of the text, and earlier interpreters are, for this task, not so important.

This sidelining of predecessors recurs in many later Protestant commentaries. Matthew Pooles Annotations upon the Holy Bible and Johann Albrecht Bengels Gnomon novi testamenti are famous examples. So too Matthew Henrys very different Nonconformist work. Yet it was inevitable that Protestants would eventually produce their own exegetical tradition. Thus their nineteenth-century commentaries are full of references to G. B. Winer, F. Schleiermacher, W. M. L. De Wette, D. F. Strauss, H. A. W. Meyer, and A. Tholuck, just as their twentieth- and twenty-first-century commentaries regularly cite J. Wellhausen, J. Weiss, W. Wrede, R. Bultmann, M. Dibelius, E. Lohmeyer, C. H. Dodd, and J. Jeremias. None of these names, however, takes one very far into the exegetical past.

The Protestant rejection of Catholic tradition was only one reason so many exegetes came to pay scant heed to premodern interpretive traditions. Also crucial, beginning in the eighteenth century, was the advent of historical-critical methods. Those methods led to new questions that seemed to make the old interpreters, for so many purposes, obsolete. What did they know? It is not that commentaries from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries altogether forget Origen, Aquinas, and others who wrote before J. S. Semler and J. D. Michaelis. Yet commentators outside the historical-critical stream typically remain of marginal import. The implicit demotion is reflected in the indices to some commentaries, indices that include Modern Authors but not Ancient Authors, or Modern Literature but not Ancient Literature.

The same self-centered constriction was part of my training in biblical studies in graduate school. The history of interpretation played next to no role in my classes. The dominant assumption was that the great bulk of interpretive wisdom lay in my own century. I was not asked to make the acquaintance of any commentator or New Testament critic before David Friedrich Strauss. My education trained me to investigate the New Testament and what lay behind it, not to investigate what came later, at least until modern times. I do recall a professor once telling me that Origen was important. He failed, however, to elaborate, and he certainly did not ask me to read him.

Happily, things have changed since I left graduate school. Wirkungsgeschichte (history of influence or effective history) and Rezeptionsgeschichte (reception history) have become familiar enterprises within the guild. It is true that some contemporary commentators betray no acquaintance with anything written before 1900 or thereabouts. But their day, all signs indicate, is passing.

Why things have changed I am unsure. Part of the reason likely lies in the anxiety that traditional historical criticism may be nearing its useful end. Many or even most of our debates are, if one knows the history of the discipline, reruns of earlier debates, and the returns seem ever smaller (as regrettably do the subjects in many dissertations). So the desire to defeat boredom plays a role here. So too does the postmodern proclivity to be self-conscious, self-critical, self-reflexive, to become cognizant of our own social location and biases and recognize how both affect what we do. To discover what interpreters in other times, places, and contexts did with the biblical texts cannot but help us to gain perspective on the presuppositions and activities of our own time, place, and context.

Yet another factor that has led to the history of interpretation receiving renewed attention is a desire to erase the heavy line often drawn between what a text meant when it first appeared and what it might mean for people today. The library shelves are full of commentators from the last two hundred years who are shy of making any theological, spiritual, or pastoral points. The history of interpretation is a way of reintroducing questions about theology and application, because application and theology were, before the advent of modern historical criticism, the heart and soul of all commentaries.

This, then, is the larger setting for Rebekah Eklunds The Beatitudes through the Ages. It is a delightful and learned exposition of the Wirkungsgeschichte and Rezeptionsgeschichte of the Beatitudes. Before reading it, I vainly fancied that I knew something about the history of the interpretation of Matthew 5:312. This volume has humbled me, leaving me cognizant of how little I really know. I did not, before reading Professor Eklund, know that some octagonal baptisteries are inscribed with the Beatitudes because many, including Gregory of Nyssa, have counted eight beatitudes. I did not know of the long exegetical tradition of linking the Beatitudes with the traditional seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. I did not know that the idea of meekness as a weakness or deficiency first became prevalent in the eighteenth century. I did not know about that artistic tradition that displays the Beatitudes in the shape of a cross. I did not know that a significant number of premodern exegetes understood inherit the earth (Matt 5:5) to refer to receiving resurrected bodies. It would be an affront to say that Eklund has done her homework. She has rather become our teacher.