So if your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It’s better to enter eternal life with only one hand or one foot than to be thrown into eternal fire with both of your hands and feet. And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It’s better to enter eternal life with only one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell. (Matthew 18:8-9 NLT)
These two verses are often applied to warn believers about the serious nature of sin. Specifically, they seem to be used to warn against the sin of lust. But, the context suggests that it is not its intended meaning.
Let’s look at the context. The disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” (vs. 1). The following nine verses are Jesus’ response to their question. As many now know well, Jesus turned upside down the conventional understanding of greatness held by the disciples. In short, their understanding of greatness was not different from the one that held by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians, and the Romans. Now Jesus presented a radical understanding of greatness: change and become like little children.
In Jesus’ day, little children did not have any social status or rights. They belonged to their fathers as the livestock would. They could be sold into slavery if their fathers wanted to. They virtually had no power of self-determination. They were vulnerable to be taken advantage of, harassed, or even abused. What Jesus wanted to say was, ‘If you call yourselves the disciples of the kingdom of heaven, forget about enjoying any rights, privileges, or status in this world, just as the little children do not enjoy any rights, privileges, or status.’ Jesus’ warning in verse 10 must be seen in this light as should be with verse 7 through 9.
“Scandalizing” the little children who believe in Christ involves looking down on them (vs. 10). It is about despising them and thinking very lowly of them. In this context, Jesus talked about gouging out one’s eye or cutting off one’s hand and foot. To be sure, Jesus speaks to the seriousness of sin. But, he is not addressing the sin of lust. Rather, he is speaking to the sin of despise. Moreover, he is dealing with the sin of elevating oneself, the hidden motive behind despising the little ones.
By pointing out the seriousness of despising the little ones, and their value in the heavenly kingdom, Jesus presented to the disciples a radically altered idea of greatness.
Gouging out eyes
The argument about not despising those who have no social status is a good one. I would put it more clearly in the context of eschatological transition: if Israel does not choose the path of humility and dispossession, the nation will suffer the judgment of the end of the age, the judgment of gehenna, which was to be the destruction of Jerusalem.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that Jesus uses the same shocking image of gouging out an eye in relation to lust in Matthew 5:28-29.
Re: Gouging out eyes and resurrection
Both passages (Matthew 5:27-30 and 18:1-10) may also be relevant to resurrection - though this is not explicitly mentioned in either text. Loss of limbs through torture of the faithful martyrs was one of the factors that seems to have driven the rise in belief in resurrection in the Maccabeean period. By the 1st century C.E., the resurrection of the dead, and the righteous dead in particular, had become a majority belief in Judaism.
In the light of this background, Jesus turns the proposition around - by saying that under certain circumstances, it might be better to lose a limb, or an eye, through self-inflicted action, not torture, than have the whole body cast into hell. We assume he exaggerates for effect. But instead of the obligation of the covenant to resist pagan compromise, he now brings the obligations of the covenant on character and the inner life into view, and if you like, treatment of children and the socially marginalised (a complex covenant issue where such marginalisation was frequently overturned by Jesus). Jesus’s teaching has both an immediate historical covenant context and a relevance in all times and places - not least because character and the inner life, and social justice, are key new covenant issues.
‘Hell’ is the translation of ‘Gehenna’, from the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, and said to be the place where garbage was burned, where child sacrifices were made, and south of which was traditionally located Aceldama/Hakeldamach, the place of Judas’s suicide. It is more generally taken to be a metaphor of a post mortem place of destruction. In Matthew 10:28, Gehenna becomes a metaphor for destruction of body and soul - ie total destruction of the person, not just a place where the dead might have been flung. This destruction has yet to take place, after the general resurrection at the end of time - Revelation 20:11-14, where another metaphor is adopted for the same event - the lake of fire, and where our ultimate eschatological focus should be. These events are future, though no doubt there was a warning to Israel in Jesus’s time in view of the coming catastrophe of the Jewish wars, the destuction of the temple in AD 70 (and according to Josephus, over a million Jews killed), and the final destruction of Jerusalem in AD 135.
Re: Gouging out eyes and resurrection
That’s an interesting thought about restoration of the body following mutilation, though there doesn’t appear to be anything in Jesus’ argument to suggest that this positive angle was in mind, and it’s a big step from the torture of the martyrs to metaphorical self-inflicted damage. The more substantial problem would be Matthew 18:8-9, where the alternative to the judgment of gehenna is not resurrection to wholeness but entering life maimed. Although the argument is still highly rhetorical, this rather suggests that what Jesus has in mind is the historical continuation of the community into the age that will come after the collapse of second temple Judaism. There is an easy road leading to the destruction of AD 70; there is a difficult road leading to the survival of the community, and it is better to get there maimed than to suffer the appalling destruction of war.
I’m afraid I still see the historical interpretation of gehenna as biblically more coherent. Jeremiah 7:30-33 is crucial for our understanding of Jesus’ warnings (cf. Jeremiah 19:6-8):
The valley of Hinnom / gehenna is the place where Jerusalem’s dead will be piled up when the Babylonians invade. Jesus uses the same image for the same purpose. It signifies the horrors that will attend the seige of Jerusalem; it is an image of God’s judgment on a rebellious people. Josephus records just this state of affairs:
We entirely misrepresent Jesus if we interpret his imagery in terms of a universal post-mortem punishment. Death is the punishment and it is inflicted specifically on 1st century Israel. I would agree, however, that the lake of fire in Revelation 20:14-15 constitutes a final (and still future) judgment, a second death, for those whose names are not written in the book of life. The language of gehenna is not found here because gehenna is so closely associated with judgment on Jerusalem.
In Matthew 10:28 Jesus tells the disciples not to fear their persecutors because they cannot destroy the ultimate integrity of the person who is faithful to YHWH. Rather they should fear, as all Israel should fear, the God who may completely destroy the people in the judgment of gehenna, which would be the destruction brought about by the war against Rome. See further discussion of this verse here.
Re: Gouging out eyes and resurrection
I don’t want to press the association between bodily mutilation in Matthew 5 & 18 and resurrection, but in the light of a rising belief in the resurrection during the Maccabeean period as a result of the bodily mutilation and death of the faithful martyrs, it is not unlikely that Jesus may have had the association in mind. Especially as he was rewriting the narrative for Israel in a way that routinely addressed and rejected their religious/national expectations - which is exactly what he does here - using the covenant to criticise the people of the covenant.
I also don’t want to dismiss the historic association of Jesus’s references to Gehenna with AD 70, but I find it highly unlikely that this is all that Jesus had in mind, or all that we were intended to understand by the author(s) of Matthew. For instance, in what sense could the church’s history after AD 70 be described as ‘entering life’ - as a period qualitatively different from before? Did persecution and oppression cease? What was made available to the life of the church which had not already been available? Far more likely that in ‘entering life’, Jesus is talking about the fulfilment of ‘the age to come’ as the age after the resurrection - not after AD 70.
Pursuing tnis line of thought, ‘enter life maimed’ would not have to be pressed too literally: one would expect the resurrection to have restored the missing limbs!
Likewise, Jesus contrasts ‘entering life’ with being ‘thrown into eternal fire’ - Matthew 18:9. If ‘entering life’ is taken as a past historical event, then in what corresponding sense does ‘being thrown into eternal fire’ have a past historic completion? The line of thought becomes even more bizarre if ‘pyr to aionion’ is interpreted as ‘fire of the age’ (according to Andrew’s previous interpretation of ‘ainion’). In what sense at all is the burial of bodies in a valley, if that was literally the case, maybe having been cremated, a ‘fire of the age’? Rather, the phrase ‘to aionion’ consistently looks forward to a future completion, as in ‘the age to come’ (from the perspective of the text and ourselves), not at a completed past event, as in ‘the fire of the age that will have just passed in AD 70’ (from the perspective of the text).
Future judgement is precisely what is implied in Matthew 10:28 - a total extinction of the person, not a bodily death with a future resurrected judgement of the person. AD 70 was a tragedy predicted by Jesus, a judgement associated with the ‘coming of the Son of Man’, but not the final judgement (of which it was a precursor), and not the final ‘coming of the Son of Man’ (which is yet to be completed).
It is a valid procedure to bring contemporary historical concerns as a grid through which to see and understand the NT, the gospels in particular. However, the procedure must be moderated by the paucity of explicit reference to those particular historic interests in the texts themselves. Other explanations are at hand which have made better sense to the majority of interpreters, and also the judgement in general of the faith community - the original source of the texts themselves, and highly qualified to be the court of appeal for interpretation.
Re: Gouging out eyes and resurrection
Surely the continued existence or life of the people of God in the Spirit is qualitatively different from the destruction of the vessels of God’s wrath? From Jesus’ point of view ‘life’ was simply the alternative to destruction: that is the meaning of the parable of the two roads, one leading to destruction, the other leading to life. I would ask you what positive (rather than speculative) evidence you have for your argument that Jesus is talking about life after a final resurrection. Jesus isn’t talking about the quality of life in these texts. He’s talking about life as opposed to death. That’s why he thinks it preferable to enter life maimed - it still beats destruction.
I don’t follow your argument about entering life and eternal fire. Jesus presents Israel with two options. One is to be thrown into the ‘fire of the age’ - either a fire of judgment that marks the end of the age of second temple Judaism or a fire of judgment that has everlasting consequences for second temple Judaism. The other is to enter, by way of a long and dangerous road, into the life of the age to come. It’s very simple and makes perfect historical sense. For Jesus the phrase to aiōnion consistently looks forward to a future event or perhaps an everlasting state of affairs. But how does that still have to be future for us? You have to give some kind of reason for thinking that somehow Jesus speaks of both an imminent event and a remote event that is still in our future. I don’t see it. He says that the kingdom of God is at hand. He doesn’t say that the kingdom of God is at hand and also will come at the end of history. You’re reading too much into the text in an attempt to preserve the traditional interpretation.
Again this is the product of church tradition. There is nothing in the text that supports this double fulfilment. I don’t think you can have your cake and eat it.
Jesus said to his disciples, ‘when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near’ (Lk. 21:20). How much more explicit does he need to get? He has plenty to say about the coming war, partly by way of direct description, partly through prophetic allusion. He has nothing to say about a secondary fulfilment in the remote and unimaginable future.
Incidentally, we should apologize to calvinkim for having hijacked his post!
Re: Gouging out eyes and resurrection
Apologies to calvinkim.
Andrew said -
“Surely the continued existence or life of the people of God in the Spirit is qualitatively different from the destruction of the vessels of God’s wrath?”
But Jesus is not talking about ‘continued existence’; he is talking about ‘entering life’ - initiation, not continuation. Again, in what sense is this initiation any different from what had preceded it? What was the church granted, in terms of new life, which they did not already have by believing in Jesus?
‘Entering life’: Jesus is anticipating the future life of the resurrection with the life of the kingdom, which is the life of the Spirit, which breaks in on the believer in the present. His eschatological vision anticipates the future kingdom with evidence of it in the present - in the same way that Paul anticipates, for instance, future justification of believers with its appropriation by faith now. Nothing speculative here - it’s just standard New Testament theology for beginners.
You said:
“I don’t follow your argument about entering life and eternal fire. Jesus presents Israel with two options. One is to be thrown into the ‘fire of the age’ - either a fire of judgment that marks the end of the age of second temple Judaism or a fire of judgment that has everlasting consequences for second temple Judaism. The other is to enter, by way of a long and dangerous road, into the life of the age to come. It’s very simple and makes perfect historical sense. For Jesus the phrase to aiōnion consistently looks forward to a future event or perhaps an everlasting state of affairs.”
You have stumbled into the contradiction without realising it. ‘To aionion’ is consistently used to refer to an age to come - doesn’t at this point matter whether it is your post AD 70 age, or the majority view, an age overlapping with ‘this present age’ leading into a future completion. ‘Pyr to aionion’ (eternal fire) is also fire of a future age - consistent with the usage of ‘to aionion’. You have made it into a fire of the passing age - of which there is only one candidate - ‘this evil age’. There is no reference in OT or NT to an age which is the ‘age of 2nd temple Judaism’.
You said (quoting me):
” ‘AD 70 was a tragedy predicted by Jesus, a judgement associated with the ‘coming of the Son of Man’, but not the final judgement (of which it was a precursor), and not the final ‘coming of the Son of Man’ (which is yet to be completed).’
Again this is the product of church tradition. There is nothing in the text that supports this double fulfilment. I don’t think you can have your cake and eat it.”
You are wrong - and the majority opinion of NT interpretation by scholars and church alike is against you - for reasons which I have elaborated on more than one occasion, and which you have rejected.
You said (quoting me)
” ‘the procedure must be moderated by the paucity of explicit reference to those particular historic interests in the texts themselves.’
Jesus said to his disciples, ‘when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near’ (Lk. 21:20). How much more explicit does he need to get? He has plenty to say about the coming war, partly by way of direct description, partly through prophetic allusion. He has nothing to say about a secondary fulfilment in the remote and unimaginable future.”
Sorry Andrew, you are wrong. Quoting just one example, which I do not dispute, is not proving your case. There is very little direct explicit reference to AD 70 in the NT; apart from the three synoptic references to the destruction of the temple, there is no explicit reference whatsoever.
Re: Gouging out eyes and resurrection
Peter, if the explicit alternative to ‘life’ is destruction, then Jesus is talking about continued existence. I’ll repeat: one road leads to life, the other road leads to destruction. That is the repeated pattern in the Gospels. Of course, it is life in the Spirit, centred on Jesus himself, etc., but in the first place it is life as opposed to death and has in view the destruction that resulted from the uprising against Rome. The whole argument is found in Jeremiah 21:8-10:
This is exactly what Jesus tells Israel: two paths, one leading to life, the other leading to war, destruction and fire.
There is a difference between ‘life of the age to come’ and ‘fire of the age to come’. In biblical terms ‘fire’ symbolizes a day of judgment, not a protracted condition (cf. 1 Cor. 3:13). The life that he speaks of is contrasted temporally not with the ‘fire of the age to come’ but with death, which is a protracted condition (in a rather negative sense).
There is no reference to an ‘age of second temple Judaism’, true. But there is an unequivocal sense that the present age is coming to an end soon - witness several statements in the Gospels which you persistently ignore, plus statements in Paul such as 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 and 10:11. If the whole system by which Israel organized its relation with YHWH ended in AD 70, to be replaced by a community centred on Jesus, then we can safely say that the end of the age for Jesus was the end of second temple Judaism.
So what are your reasons for thinking that Jesus saw a fulfilment of the language of gehenna beyond the destruction of Jerusalem which it so naturally denotes?
It is not just the explicit references to AD 70. It is also the countless allusions to OT passages, such as Jeremiah 21:8-10 above, that describe concrete, historical judgment on Israel. There’s also Matthew 22:7; and the whole of the apocalyptic discourse centres on the attack on Jerusalem. In any case, even one explicit reference to the war is one more than the explicit references to a final end to history.
Re: Gouging out eyes and resurrection
Hope this isn’t descending into gouging each others’ eyes out - a kind of theological catfight!
My response to your points:
1. You cannot just quote an allusion to ‘the way of life/death’ in an OT prophecy, which had its fulfilment in the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon, and say that this equates to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem 500 years later, in a quotation - Matthew 7:14 - which has no specific prophetic context. Jeremiah explicitly refers to Babylon; Jesus makes no such reference - and specifically to Rome, none whatsoever. The reason is obvious to any spiritual infant - Jesus is introducing a new dimension to the narrative, in which life means life of the Spirit - which is its majority meaning everywhere in the NT, not life as survival through a catastrophe in Jerusalem.
2. I misunderstood you; I thought you meant that ‘pyr to aoinion’ was the burning of the dead bodies in the valley of Hinnom. That would have been the fire of the age which is passing, 2nd temple Judaism in your terminology - not ‘pyr to aionion’ - which is the ‘fire of the age (to come)’. That fire is yet to come. Agreed? (I don’t think so!)
3. “an unequivocal sense that the present age is coming to an end soon” : there is no such unequivocal sense, and no, I don’t ignore other statements in the gospels about this, and never have. I said there is no ‘explicit reference’ to AD 70 apart from the three synoptic accounts. There are indeed “other statements”, and these are specifically to do with a Jewish disaster. This is unlikely to be connected with 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 (see ‘The Resurrection of the Son of God’ p.291). You have misread 1 Corinthians 10:11 completely. Paul speaks of ‘the fulfilment of the ages’ as having already come, in contradiction to your interpretation of 7:29-31, where a calamity - not the fall of Jerusalem - is still to come. There is no sense anywhere in the NT that “the whole system by which Israel organized its relation with YHWH ended in AD 70, to be replaced by a community centred on Jesus.” That happened 37 years previously, when Jesus died on the cross. Israel as a whole learned how to continue its system based on circumcision, food laws and sabbaths, as it had already been doing for many years before the time of Jesus. Torah study replaced temple worship. In Jesus’s time, there were an estimated 6-8 million Jews in the diaspora, about 10% of the total population of the Roman empire; 25% of the population of the middle east were Jews (‘Not everything in the bible is inspired’ p. 114 - Neil Rees). All these Jews had learned to live without temple worship being the centre of their religious experience. So nobody “can safely say that the end of the age for Jesus was the end of second temple Judaism.”
4. Why do I think that “the language of gehenna (goes) beyond the destruction of Jerusalem which it so naturally denotes?”
Because it does not so naturally denote the destruction of Jerusalem! Bring your own construct, and you can make a case for almost anything if you try hard enough. It seems to me far more obvious in the synoptics that the organisation of the material takes it out of time/history-specific frames of reference (to which, I insist, there is extremely little explicit reference, and for good reasons), and makes it applicable to all ages. If that was not the case, in the end, why read it? It’s just a history book with little relevance to anyone after AD 70. For sure, we can get much greater depth of field by understanding the historic context; that is all part of the business of good biblical interpretation. But in the end, Jesus offers life for the world, not religious history.
Re: Gouging out eyes and resurrection
I’ve tried to give a fuller defence of the argument about the two ways here, though clearly this is not going to be resolved at the exegetical level. From my point of view it will need to be shown that the narrative-historical reading does not in the end diminish the relevance of the Bible for the church. That is a much bigger issue to tackle.
So what do you make of Jesus insistence that ‘there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom’ (Matt. 16:8). That’s not unequivocal?
I don’t think I have misread 1 Corinthians 10:11. Paul believes that the church is at a critical transitional stage that can be described as the ‘end of the ages’. He has in mind a present state of affairs: the whole point of the analogy with the exodus generation is that the church must not now give way to ‘temptation’. This is a period of eschatological distress and if the church acts idolatrously, it will not survive it but will be destroyed, just as 23,000 died in the wilderness (cf. the warnings to the seven churches in Revelation).
That’s unfair. It’s not my construct. It’s Jeremiah’s. The question is: How did Jesus use it? How would it have been heard at the time by a Jewish audience? The argument may be wrong, but it’s a biblical argument.
Re: Gouging out eyes and resurrection
Just responding in the order in which you take things:
1. “So what do you make of Jesus insistence that ‘there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom’ (Matt. 16:8). That’s not unequivocal?”
(Matthew 16:28). It’s not unequivocal, but it is cryptic, rather than explicit (supporting my previous contention). However, I do see this as a reference to AD 70. This is not the exclusive meaning of ‘the coming of the kingdom’, however, which is very apparent from the way ‘the kingdom’ is described and presented in the gospels. From unrepentant Israel’s point of view, a ‘coming of the kingdom/Son of Man’ in AD 70 was the reverse face in judgement of the ‘coming of the kingdom’ at Jesus’s ascension and the outpouring of the Spirit (which they obviously turned their backs on). The one event (AD 70) was part of a nexus of events including the other.
2. 1 Corinthians 10:11 - again, I would refer you to Wright’s comment, p.291 ‘The Resurrection of the Son of God’.
3. “That’s unfair. It’s not my construct. It’s Jeremiah’s. The question is: How did Jesus use it? How would it have been heard at the time by a Jewish audience?”
It’s entirely fair - it’s your own construct of how Jesus used it and how a Jewish audience would have heard it. I have a very different construct, based (a) on contextual factors (in the gospels generally, and around Matthew 7:14 in particular), and (b) on the wider narrative of Jesus’s death, resurrection, ascension, outpoured Spirit - each of which receives scant attention in your version of a Coming of the Son of Man narrative.
In the wider narrative, Jesus frequently takes OT allusions, and leads them in a different direction from what we would have expected, or gives them a surprising application. (Paul does this to an extent in 1 Corinthians 10 - at least, 1st century Jews would have found it surprising). This is the entire basis of my argument about NT interpretation, and my contention with the way you handle NT interpretation using the OT as the governing interpretive principle without taking note of changed contexts of interpretation between the OT and NT.
“How a Jewish audience would have received it” is one interpretive principle; another is how the gospels in general, and this point in particular, were intended to be received, in the light of (a) how they are written and presented (ie for all time, or time/history-specific?) and (b) how they can be understood in the context of the other NT writings (ie AD 70 is not a controlling interpretive event or governing metaphor, but the death/resurrection of Jesus assuredly is).
Please note my final comment in the ‘destruction of body and soul in gehenna’ thread.
Re: Matthew 18:8-9
I do notice that Jesus used the same imagery to warn against the sin of lust. Most likely, imageries are freely applied to make the point without being tied specifically to one application exclusively.
In light of the kingdom of heaven breaking into this world, entering life is not necessarily limited to the end of age. Rather, the application is here and now, entering life in the kingdom of heaven that breaks into our world. In that sense, Jesus is saying that it is better to live maimed in the eschatological community than to live in the corrupt world under its value system with all body parts intact.