BIB 300 Transfers Fall 2011: 9/1:Impressions of Matthew, First 4 Literary Devices, Set Theory, "The Rabbi"

Great job on your impressions/outline of Mathew!
For fun, and fir some serious detoxing of false ways to answer the main question of the class, we watched this:

We introduced our first four "Literary devices":
An "inclusio" or "inclusion"
Ever notice Matthew starts with "His name will be called Emmanuel, which means 'God with us.'
And ends...very last sentence...with "I will be with you."?

No accident.
And neither is the midpoint and message of the gospel: "I will be with you" (18:20).
In Jesus, God is with us.
Jesus is the With-Us God.

That's an INCLUSIO.
You knew God was with us in Christ.. But now you see it as you look at Matthew structurally..
Links with more info:
- Inclusio
- inclusio: an intro
A parallelism or :reprise:
ometimes a repetition can be called parallelism..Here is a 5fold structural parallelism in Matthew:

"Jesus is the new Moses."

Matthew could have said that, or even said that five times..but instead he embedded thematically five times in the literary structure/fabric of his book;
It is no accident that 5 times Matthew offers an almost identical sentence to close off his five teaching blocks..

"When Jesus had finished saying these things, he moved on..."
..shows up in
1. 7:28
diagram credit
See page 269 of your Hauer/Young textbook (the three paragraphs underneath the "Higher Righteousness" section) for more on this..
There is huge signicance of fiveteaching blocks in Matthew, how they are identified, and what they likely symbolize.

Why 5?
Jewish people reading Matthew would say
"Oh, I get it. Matthew is trying to tell us (5 times, no less( that Jesus is the New Moses (or the fulfillment of Moses)!"
Why? The answer has to to with the obvious intentionality of the5 "teaching blocks" in Matthew..Five being a hugely significant number for Jews...it's the number of books in the Torah, AKA the Five Books of Moses, AKA The Pentateuch "(Five Books in One.") . Moses=5ness.

More "New Moses" symbolism in Matthew:
- Jesus as the new Moses in Matthew
BTW: Note an inclusio in that the first and last teachings happen on a mountain..hmmmm
Chiasm(definition) ).. once you are attuned to seeing them in Scripture (and most ancient literature) it seems they are everywhere.

Sometimes they are.
Who can argue that "the first shall belast/
the last shall be first" is a chiasm?
A-B-B-A, X pattern.

(and this one, because it's in Matthew [20:16], will be important
for our class.
But often the chiasm is wide enough to spotlight and intended embedded theme in between the endpoints.

And to really help us get what the Spirit is saying...structurally.

People remember how to perform a piece of music by using musical notations on scale. A similar solution to the problem of remembering how to perform a piece of dance has been solved with the use of Labonotation. In antiquity, it seems most written documents were intended to be read aloud, hence to be performed. The purpose of writing was to facilitate remembering how the document went when one read it aloud. But how did one make paragraphs or mark off units in a document read aloud? It seems that the main way to mark off a unit was to use repetition of words and/or phrases at the beginning and end of a unit, either alone (as in Matt 5:3, 10,"...for theirs is teh kingdom of heaven) or in parallel bracketing fashion (as John 1:18). The Greeks called such parallel brackets a chiasm, after one half of the letter "chi" (our 'X"), thus ">."-Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John, p. 295, emphasis mine.. a free read online here.
See also:
- Chiasm led me to Christ"
  (a great story from a recent FPU grad)
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Intertextuality (Hyperlinking):
One of Chris Harrison's projects is called "Visualizing the Bible":

"Christoph Römhild sent me his interesting biblical cross-references data set. This lead to the first of three visualizations. Intrigued by the complexity of the Bible, I derived a new data set by parsing the King James Bible and extracting people and places. One of the resulting visualizations is a biblical social network. The other visualization shows how people and places are distributed throughout the text." Chris Harrison-

But why should I tell you when I can show you?:

"The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect." .More info about this chart, and charts of the Bible as a social network here.
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set theory::
More info:
- Bounded or Centered Set?
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