John Kampen, Matthew within Sectarian Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
Scholarship has long considered Matthew the “most Jewish” gospel of the New Testament. The text’s particularly hostile polemic toward first-century Jewish communities and its especially focused attention to Jewish law have often made Matthew a fascinating comparative partner to New Testament writers like Paul and Luke, among others. John Kampen’s book, Matthew within Sectarian Judaism, pushes this understanding of the gospel further so as to explore Matthew as a Jewish text in conversation not only with New Testament writers but also with the wider Jewish sectarian landscape of the first-century CE. Kampen argues that “we find in Matthew the work of a writer who is advocating a distinctive Jewish sectarianism, rooted in the Jesus movement, probably in Galilee toward the conclusion of the first century” (6). Rather than think of Matthew as a Christian text that reflects certain Jewish qualities, Kampen frames Matthew as a Jewish composition that emerges from within a variegated sectarian environment, and that proposes its understanding of Jewish halakhah as mediated through the messianic figure of Jesus. Using this framework, Matthew’s textual and ideological context must include the arguments and declarations of Jewish groups documented in texts such as those found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Following a brief introduction, Chapter One situates the gospel of Matthew in a late first-century Galilean context. Kampen argues that the text’s narrative demands a bilingual, urban Jewish audience that Galilee is most likely to accommodate “since that is the area which would have had the most proximity to the kinds of sectarian groups mentioned in Matthew and present in Judea in the first century, particularly as they are described in Josephus” (20). This chapter identifies the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and scribes as the primary targets of Matthew’s sectarian antagonism. Josephus relates that the Pharisees became a particularly powerful political group in the first-century BCE, and Kampen suggests that Matthew makes Pharisees the leading voice in opposition to Jesus’s teachings for this very reason. Moreover, the Sadducees and scribes are referred to as generally defined bodies of Jewish society. They emerge in the text as opponents to Jesus’s mission. According to Kampen, these groups provide a proximate other against which Matthew may define the boundaries of its sectarian identity. On the other hand, the influence and organization of first-century rabbis is minimized, and rabbinic material is relegated to historical background information.
Chapter Two traces the contours of Kampen’s subsequent comparative work. He notes that “The task at hand rather is to determine the nature of the Matthean community which made a break with what it understood to be a Jewish parent, but which was not Christian—defined as we know it primarily from other New Testament and second-century sources—and whose major interest was not the status of gentiles among the followers of Jesus but rather the particular type of Jewish community and its practices they espoused” (43). The Dead Sea Scrolls provide a particularly fruitful collection of texts against which to compare the sectarian project this book recognizes in the Gospel of Matthew. Kampen does not draw any literary dependence between the scrolls and the gospel, but evidence from Qumran sheds light on the sorts of disputes and interpretative practices floating around sectarian groups in the first-century. This chapter (and book) argues that Matthew should be analyzed as a part of this sectarian context and read as a work that engages in Jewish boundary building similar to that which is seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Kampen begins his analysis of text in Chapter Three, which focuses primarily on Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. This chapter compares the sermon in Matthew 5 with the Beatitudes (4Q525) discovered at Qumran. Noting compositional and rhetorical similarities, Kampen argues that the author of Matthew depicts Jesus as a character imbued with exclusive wisdom and authority over Torah. In so doing, the regulations stipulated in the Sermon on the Mount assume unique accuracy and bestow a singularly correct degree of righteousness to its practitioners. Kampen then turns his attention to the laws prescribed in the sermon (murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, retaliation, and love of enemies) and argues that the presence of these legal interpretations assumes the existence of antitheses proposed by other groups. In other words, the legal conclusions proposed in the Sermon on the Mount are neither arbitrary nor sweeping universalisms, but rather, they actively engage in study of Torah common to Jewish sects and address specific topics of conversation that come up in debate within other sectarian texts. The Sermon on the Mount, then, represents a foray into the sectarian landscape of the first-century and functions as a boundary defining discourse, not only telling membership what they should do but also condemning others who do otherwise.
The subsequent four chapters address topics of wisdom, communal organization, opposition, and sectarian commissions. Chapter Four explores the way that wisdom, esoteric knowledge, and apocalypticism characterize sectarian groups in ancient Judea. Kampen argues that Matthew equates Jesus with wisdom in a way that is analogous to the characterization of wisdom as Torah in texts like Ben Sira. In doing so, the narrative constructs a path to knowledge and righteousness that invariably derives from Jesus and, more specifically, participation in Matthew’s sectarian community. Yet, Matthew’s primary objective in this interpretive turn is not to accommodate gentiles. On the contrary, Kampen postulates Matthew is a text that directly addresses a Jewish readership in order to convince them of the unique legitimacy of its sectarian interpretations. In this reading, Matthew is not overly concerned with the conditions of life under imperial rule but rather the direction of the Jewish people. The exclusive claim to wisdom, esoteric knowledge, and apocalyptic revelation observed in the text position Matthew in line with Jewish sectarian ideologies witnessed throughout the first century.
Chapter Five dives into a lengthy discussion of the penal codes stipulated in sectarian texts like 1QS. This chapter proposes that deviant organizations are regularly faced with the task of integrating members into their community and wrestling with the appropriate ways to reproach dissension. Kampen argues that the content in Matthew 18, which details instructions for how to deal with transgressing members of a community, represents Matthew’s sectarian perspective on how best to admonish and reintegrate congregants who support or slip into other teachings. He writes, “This passage deals with the problems attendant this new sectarian option within the Jewish community as the sect struggles to identify itself and present a holistic alternative to the other perceptions of Judaism in that community all of which it judges to be inadequate, hence further away from carrying out the will of God for God’s people” (154). In this reconstruction, Matthew establishes criteria by which to discipline and reintegrate members into its sectarian group in a way that mirrors the policies described most clearly in 1QS.
The especially pointed polemic against Jewish groups that appears most prominently in Matthew constitutes one of the main reasons Kampen recognizes a sectarian dimension to the first gospel. Chapter Six examines Matthew 23, which offers a scathing diatribe against Pharisees and scribes as hypocrites and snakes. Kampen argues that this chapter represents a sectarian effort to undercut the legitimacy of competing factions in the first century. Matthew builds a narrative that accentuates the failure of Jewish leadership among the Pharisees and the Sadducees (presumably present as a part of the temple hierarchy at Jesus’s crucifixion) to recognize God’s wisdom in the figure of Jesus. As Kampen notes, the text frames the “competing leadership structures of the Jewish community” as “opponents of the will of God” (178). This marked hostility for contemporary Jewish sects indicates a heightened level of antagonism, which typically characterizes sectarian groups as defined by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge.
Finally, Chapter Seven places its attention on the final paragraph of the gospel, in which Jesus tells his followers to go forth and make disciples of all the nations. Kampen argues that this passage remains consistent with the rest of the book if we are to assume that a sectarian worldview considers even other Jews—that is, Jews of other sectarian affiliations—as non-Jews who require proselytizing. Kampen’s thesis claims that Matthew is less concerned with gentiles and life under foreign rule than it is the status of Jewish livelihood. Rather than think of this commission as a universal message, Kampen adopts a typology of “exclusive inclusivity” from Dalit Rom-Shiloni. The emphasis in this message, as Kampen understands, is not to convert the gentile nations—the group’s apocalyptic worldview suggests that oppressive empires will come to know God’s will in their own time—but rather to reposition the Jewish world in line with Matthew’s specific interpretation of God’s design through the authority of Jesus. As Kampen writes, “This is not universalism but rather an exclusivism redefined” (199).
John Kampen has built a meritorious career in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. In this book he makes an argument in which he deftly weaves together his expertise in each so as to study the gospel of Matthew as the work of a Jewish sect. The data from Qumran illustrates a dynamic sectarian environment and Matthew’s text is well situated into the conversations and questions that come up in the Dead Sea Scrolls as sectarian markers for identity. My only concern regards the theoretical application of sectarianism to Matthew’s gospel, which Kampen himself notes is perhaps tenuous at times. This relationship requires the reader to assume the existence of a distinct, physical, and regulated community of Matthean constituents, particularly when set in comparison to the Dead Sea Scrolls and its sectarian movement. Yet, if that is not found to be the case, some of this book’s arguments, especially those concerning the penal code in Chapter Five, may struggle to convince its readers. Kampen provides his definition of sectarianism in Chapter Two, where he adopts Albert Baumgarten’s framework[1] and Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge’s three-fold typology of sects based on difference, antagonism, and separation.[2] These criteria seem to imply a defined group of people who have organized a movement in opposition to other communities. However, without the idea of a Matthean group well established, these categories can only be examined as discursive tropes and not necessarily real practice. For this reason I think that Kampen’s text at times slips between language of a Matthean community and a nascent Christian community (which, of course, in this case is still a Jewish sect) while talking about the sectarian movement that Matthew envisions. A brief discussion regarding Kampen’s reconstruction of a distinct Matthean sect or the scholarship on early Christian Galileans, where this book situates the Gospel of Matthew, might have aided the reader to think in concrete terms about a sectarian group that would exercise the instructions Matthew has established in its text. Nevertheless, my reading of Kampen’s work in this book is quite favorable. I would recommend this text to any students of early Jewish sectarianism and early Christian/Jewish identity formation.
Giancarlo Angulo is a graduate student at Florida State University.
[1] Albert I. Baumgarten, The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation (Atlanta: SBL, 1997).
[2] Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).