Browsing by Author "Nel, Marius J."

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    Matthew's reconfiguring of salvation in a context of oppression
    (African Sun Media, 2020) Nel, Marius J.
    Socio-historically both the story of Jesus narrated by Matthew, and the community he wrote for, can be located within Rome’s sphere of influence (Wainwright, 2017:30).2 According to Jonker (2018:6), it is important to take both these contexts (the world in and behind the text) into consideration when interpreting the biblical text in Africa. In reading the biblical text simply with a comparative paradigm, as is often done in studies undertaken by African scholars, a direct relationship between the world(s) constructed in the text and various African contexts is often assumed. Jonker has instead argued for an analogical paradigm that relates the textual communication to its socio-historical setting of communication (the world behind the text). While both the setting of Matthew’s story and that of Matthew’s communication must therefore be taken into consideration, the point of departure should be the contextual engagement of the constructed realities with the social-historical circumstances of the time of textual formation (Jonker, 2018:12–13). Matthew’s story of Jesus (the world in the text) is primarily set in Roman-occupied Galilee and Judea with its protagonist, in the words of Sim (2012:73), ultimately “brutally executed in Roman fashion by Roman soldiers on the orders of the local Roman governor.” The composition of the Gospel itself occurred approximately two decades after the disastrous Jewish revolt against Rome. In this period its audience would have been exposed to a relentless Roman propaganda campaign3 that sought to humiliate the defeated Jewish people with which Matthew’s community had a close association (Sim, 2012:63, 73). While it is a speculative enterprise to attempt to reconstruct the precise social history of a text like the Gospel of Matthew (the world behind the text) in terms of its patterns of scriptural citation, it remains important to read it in terms of the broad context of its protagonist and initial readers. It is clear from Matthew that they were subject to the economic exploitation, political oppression, military power and idolatry that characterised the Roman Empire (Hays, 2016:108; Sim, 2012:73).