Date of Award
Summer 7-24-2025
Document Type
Dissertation - Restricted
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Theology
First Advisor
Joshua Burns
Second Advisor
Andrei Orlov
Third Advisor
Deirdre Dempsey
Abstract
Historians and biographers in the ancient world applied standardized idioms and forms to narrate death. Embedding textual clues allowed narrators to indicate how the immediate community and future readers should memorialize the deceased. By evaluating a person’s life through their death, author served as meaning-makers, distinguishing a good death from a bad death. Matthew, like all the canonical evangelists, narrates Jesus’s death. Except, unlike them, he relates two deaths in his Passion Narrative: Judas Iscariot and Jesus of Nazareth. Judas’s death is a self-caused hanging while Jesus is crucified, also a form of hanging. This unique narrative feature calls for an autopsy of Matthew’s Passion Narrative. More to the point, what is needed is an autopsy of the two death scenes and their interrelationship. My approach to offering an integrated reading of these two deaths in Matthew begins by situating them within the framework of death as a discourse. The textual history reveals that authors shared basic literary formulas and motifs to narrate death. Key textual clues that authors used to qualify an individual’s death include (1) the manner of death, (2) who or what causes or instigates the death, (3) the deceased’s final words, (4) how the remains were handled, and (5) the deceased’s community’s narrated response. In the first chapter, using the five categories above, I will examine some of the many discourses of death in the Old Testament and Second Temple Jewish literature. This will provide a foundation for how to read death in Matthew’s gospel while also uncovering conceptions of life, death, and the afterlife in the Jewish world facing its text. In chapters two and three, I will apply this framework to Judas’s hanging and Jesus’s crucifixion. This will enable us to see how Matthew engages the biblical and social discourse of death while also layering meaning for his audience. In the final chapter I will evaluate the implications reading the pair of deaths by placing them side-by-side. This will allow us to view Matthew’s patterns as a narrator and to establish what social and theological purposes death serves in his narrative.