The Use of Patristic Exegesis

Dale Allison notes that Matthew “stipulates that it be interpreted in the context of other texts. This means that it is, in a fundamental sense, an incomplete utterance, a book full of holes. Readers must make present what is absent; they must become actively engaged and bring to the gospel knowledge of what it presupposes, that being a pre-existing collection of interacting texts, the Jewish Bible. The First Gospel is a mnemonic device, designed, to use the current jargon, to trigger intertextual exchanges which depends upon informed and imaginative reading.”

How do we know, though, what counts as a designed trigger and what doesn’t?

Allison suggests that the Fathers are of some help here – not because they always get things right, but because “unlike most of us, they lived and moved and had their being in the Scriptures. It was their popular music. They still read aloud. They still had a small literary canon. And they still heard Scripture chanted. They were accordingly attunted ot hear things that we no longer hear, things which we can only SEE after picking up concordances or doing word searches on our computers.”

As an example, he notes that several patristic fathers note an allusion to Moses in the third beatitude (“blessed are the meek”), but that almost no modern commentators do. The church fathers not only remembered that Moses was the meekest man in the world, but also noted that Jesus was promising something to the meek of His time that Moses never received – the land. Through Jesus, who is more meek even than Moses, the meek inherit what even the meekest man of the Old Covenant did not – rest, the land.