Discovering Luke (DBT)

By Joel B. Green

This interpretation of Luke encourages in-depth study of the text and genuine grappling with the theological and sociohistorical questions it raises. It draws on a range of methodological interests (author-, text-, and reader-centered) as complementary rather than mutually exclusive ways of understanding the text. It also recognizes the importance of the reception history of biblical texts, increasingly viewed as a vital aspect of interpretation rather than an optional extra. 

Throughout Discovering Luke, Joel Green gives readers strategies for reading the Gospel of Luke and guides them through Luke’s world in its historical, ideological, political, and economic contexts. Green reviews key issues raised by the Gospel and connects these issues to questions of how Luke should be interpreted today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Sep 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467462266

Joel B. Green

Joel B. Green (B.S., M.Th., Ph.D.) is professor of New Testament interpretation, Fuller Theological Seminary. He was vice president of academic affairs, provost and professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. Prior to his appointment at Asbury in 1997, he was associate professor of New Testament at the American Baptist Seminary of the West/Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. His books include What about the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology (Abingdon, 2004); Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching: The Recovery of Narrative and Preaching the New Testament (Baker, 2003); Salvation (Chalice, 2003); Introducing the New Testament: Its Literature and Theology (with Paul Achtemeier and Marianne Meye Thompson, 2001); Beginning with Jesus: Christ in Scripture, the Church and Discipleship (2000); Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts (with Mark Baker, 2000); Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology (with Max Turner, 2000) and The Gospel of Luke in the New International Commentary on the New Testament (1997). For over 20 years, Green has been the editor of Catalyst, a journal providing evangelical resources and perspectives to United Methodist seminarians. An ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, he has pastored churches in Texas, Scotland and Northern California. He has also served on the boards of Berkeley Emergency Food and Housing Project, and RADIX magazine.

Book preview

1

Ways of reading Luke’s Gospel: through the Middle Ages

Strange as it may seem, this book is an invitation to read Luke’s Gospel in ways that would seem quite extraordinary when compared with the way it has been read for some 19 centuries. My aim is to treat the Gospel of Luke – sometimes called the Third Gospel, due to its canonical location as the third of the four NT Gospels – as literature. What this entails will unfold in this and the following chapters.

From early on, the Church has dug into Luke’s Gospel as though it were a rich lode of scenes and stories from which to mine nuggets in the service of a range of purposes, especially historical, theological and moral. This is true of theologians and preachers, but also artists, who found here a wealth of material for portraying Jesus’ life and teaching.¹ To borrow a term from particle physics, earlier approaches to Luke’s Gospel were atomistic in their interest in the elements that make up the Lukan narrative, piece by piece, rather than with the narrative read as a whole. The reception of Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth is a good example: ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus …’ (Luke 2.1 AV) – a short passage read annually in homes and churches, typically without reference to how it introduces major concerns that permeate the Gospel of Luke. Other examples are readily available, including the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, the tale of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and Jesus’ words of forgiveness from the cross. These renowned texts are all found in Luke (and not in the other NT Gospels), yet are remembered generally without reference to their setting and interpretation within Luke’s Gospel. By way of example, we need to look no further than Robert Wuthnow’s sociological study of American altruism and magnanimity. Wuthnow documented how the parable of the Good Samaritan encouraged charitable behaviour in American public life in the twentieth century – this in spite of the fact that few Americans could actually retell the whole parable and even fewer could identify Luke’s Gospel as our source for this parable; we might add that the question of how the Good Samaritan story meshes with Luke’s wider theological and ethical interests was never even raised.²

We can trace the beginnings of serious study of the Gospel of Luke as Luke, as a literary whole, only as far back as the twentieth century, especially to the literary-historical work of Henry J. Cadbury (1883–1974), the introduction of redaction-critical study of Luke by Hans Conzelmann (1915–89), and the heroic efforts of Joseph Fitzmyer (1920–2016) and I. Howard Marshall (1934–2015) to put Luke on the map as a theologian in his own right. Writing in 1927, Cadbury both introduced study of Luke’s Gospel as literature and presaged much of what would become central areas for theological enquiry. By the 1960s, W. C. van Unnik (1910–78) could refer to the study of Luke-Acts as a ‘storm center’.³ Subsequent study has drawn attention to Luke’s Gospel in a way unparalleled in the history of interpretation.

We begin, then, with the interpretation of the Gospel of Luke in the Church of the first centuries and Middle Ages. Then, in the next chapter, we will sample readings from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras before turning to the interpretation of Luke in the modern era and today. As much as possible, we will explore readings of a single Lukan text, Mary’s Song (or the Magnificat):

Mary said,

‘With all my heart I glorify the Lord!

In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my saviour.

He has looked with favour on the low status of his servant.

Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favoured

because the mighty one has done great things for me.

Holy is his name.

He shows mercy to everyone,

from one generation to the next,

who honours him as God.

He has shown strength with his arm.

He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.

He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones

and lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things

and sent the rich away empty-handed.

He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,

remembering his mercy,

just as he promised to our ancestors,

to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants for ever.’

(1.46–55)⁴

I have chosen this text for two reasons. First, Mary’s Song is found among the NT writings only in Luke’s Gospel. Second, Mary’s Song announces and documents what will become in Luke’s narrative a series of intertwined theological motifs, including Luke’s understanding of the story of Jesus (and of the Church) as the continuation of Israel’s story, and the topsy-turvy nature of salvation, in which the powerful are pulled down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up.

The early (and medieval) Church

Location, or context, is crucial for understanding the practice of biblical interpretation. By context, I refer initially not so much to a biblical text’s own historical or literary setting, though questions of this kind will surface quickly enough in what follows. Rather, my present interest is the setting or place within which the Bible is read. For the Church of the first centuries, say, through the sixteenth century, the Bible’s legal address was manifestly and incontrovertibly the Church. Even when attempts were made to give Scripture a more public, even universalizing voice, the Bible was read by and on behalf of the Church – its formation, its faith and its witness.

Although Luke’s Gospel belongs generally to the margins of early and medieval church exegesis, what we find in what we may loosely call ‘commentary’ on Luke exemplifies Scripture’s ecclesial (or churchly) address. The early Church had much to do with the Gospels of Matthew and John, much less with Luke and even less with Mark. Notable exceptions include readings and homilies associated with major celebrations in the Christian calendar, such as the Christmas season or Feast of the Annunciation.⁵ For Luke’s Gospel we have only three ‘commentaries’ from the early Church – from Origen (185–254), Ambrose of Milan (339–97) and Cyril of Alexandria (c.378–444). Commentaries as we know them today did not line the shelves of even the most sophisticated libraries of the Church’s gifted interpreters and theologians. Instead, the work of exegesis was homiletical, pastoral and theological, as ‘biblical scholars’ simply were preachers and pastors, theologians and defenders of the faith. ‘Commentary’ therefore took the form of sustained work with Scripture in letters and theological treatises, and in sermons. Cyril’s commentary on Luke’s Gospel, for example, is a compilation of his sermons on the Third Gospel – a kind of running exposition of Luke, proceeding sometimes phrase by phrase, sometimes line by line, and sometimes skipping over Lukan material on which we might have wished to benefit from Cyril’s wisdom.⁶

If the Bible’s legal address is the Church of Jesus Christ, perhaps it only follows logically that its scriptural interpretation is characteristically centred on Christ. The early Church practised a Trinitarian approach to the Bible, a hermeneutic emphasizing the Father’s revelation of the Son by means of a Spirit-inspired Scripture to Spirit-enabled readers (or hearers). For the early and medieval Church, then, what we might call the intent of the author is all-important. This claim turns on an important distinction, however. The author in question was not Moses or David or Ezekiel or Luke or Paul. The Bible’s author is God. For the early Church, God stands behind and authorizes these Scriptures, and God’s aim infuses these scriptural words. The central aim of these Scriptures is to reveal Christ – or, to put it differently, interpreting the Scriptures is Spirit-empowered contemplation of Christ. This is true of all the Scriptures, Old and New, plain or obscure. As Luke 24 has it, Jesus ‘interpreted for them the things written about himself in all the scriptures, starting with Moses and going through all the Prophets’ (v. 27), or as the early credo Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 15 declares, it was in accordance with the Scriptures, all of them, that ‘Christ died for our sins’, ‘was buried’ and ‘rose on the third day’ (vv. 3–4). Finally, just as the Holy Spirit spoke the Scriptures, and continues to speak in them, so the early Church assumed that only the Spirit could lead its readers to a right understanding of them. To anticipate a tectonic shift in biblical interpretation in the early modern era, for the early Church the Bible cannot be read ‘like any other book’, nor is its full meaning readily available to the non-churched public. The Holy Spirit is at work in and through the Church to form readers (and hearers) so that they might grasp what would otherwise leave one in puzzlement, namely, the truth of Scripture, christologically understood.⁷

Irenaeus of Lyons (c.125–c.202)

The extant writings of Bishop Irenaeus exhibit little by way of interaction with Mary’s Song, but his theological exegesis does provide insight into the centrality of theological hermeneutics of Scripture in early, inner-ecclesial struggles for orthodoxy. In particular, the bishop exemplifies what it means to read Scripture from within the Christian tradition – a mainstay of exegetical practice until the modern era.

In the first book of his celebrated work Against Heresies, Irenaeus explicates the Valentinian Gnosticism known to him (chs 1–8) – a cosmology according to which the primordial Plēroma (‘fullness’) was compromised, resulting in the creation of a defective world and, within it, a flawed humanity. The OT God is thus the imperfect creator of the material world, and the way of salvation would have human beings escaping the shackles of that material world in favour of the spiritual. When Irenaeus critiques this view (ch. 9), he accuses his opponents primarily of bad exegesis. In doing so, he provides this analogy: someone might glean phrases and names from Homer’s epic poems (which were widely known in the Roman world), then recast them in verse that the naive might regard as Homeric. In the same way, Gnostics collect names and phrases scattered throughout Scripture, then organize them within a narrative of their own making. Such a narrative could never be confused with the hypothesis of Scripture, one that expresses Scripture’s own economy – that is, with the way God has arranged Scripture, its own plot line or narrative sense. The Valentinian theological system derives not from the words of the prophets, nor from the teaching of the Lord Jesus, nor from the traditions received from the apostles. Unsurprisingly, then, their scriptural interpretation disregards ‘the order and the connection of the Scriptures’ (1.8.1).⁸ Those who retain the Rule of Truth received at their baptism, however, discern and are guided by the proper order and position of scriptural expressions and so understand Scripture rightly (1.9.4). Irenaeus proceeds in this context to articulate the unity of the Church’s faith, the Rule of Truth, derived from the apostles and their disciples.

The Rule of Truth, also known as the Rule of Faith, takes a Trinitarian form – identifying and characterizing the work of the Triune God: the Father Almighty, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit. As Irenaeus articulates the Church’s unified faith, its christological core grants special importance to the activity of the Holy Spirit, for it is the Spirit

who through the prophets preached the Economies, the coming, the birth from a Virgin, the passion, the resurrection from the dead, and the bodily ascension into heaven of the beloved Son, Christ Jesus our lord, and His coming from heaven in the glory of the Father to recapitulate all things, and to raise up all flesh of the whole human race, in order that to Christ Jesus, our Lord and God, Savior and King, according to the invisible Father’s good pleasure, Every knee should bow [of those] in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess Him, and he would exercise just judgment toward all.

(1.10.1)⁹

Irenaeus’s appeal to the Rule of Truth at this juncture of his argument serves two agendas at once. First, he demonstrates continuity between the OT and the gospel of Jesus Christ, and (against the Valentinians) thus confirms that one (and only one) God is at work in both. Second, he underscores Jesus’ enfleshment, his fully embodied humanity, grounded in his having been born of a virgin, his suffering and death, his resurrection and his Ascension. For the bishop, enfleshment, or incarnation, did not mark a 30-year interlude in the life of God’s Son but extends beyond the grave (hence, against the Valentinians, physicality is not a mark of creation’s imperfection). Jesus passes through every stage of human life – that is, he recapitulates human life – so that humanity (in all its physicality) may likewise be raised up. Irenaeus’s argument, then, is an exegetical one, but one that is ruled in relation to Scripture’s hypothesis.

What has this to do with the reception of Luke’s Gospel in the second century? This is a challenging question, since it is not easy to distinguish between Irenaeus’s use of the Third Gospel and his use of traditions available to Luke and/ or of a narrative outline of Jesus’ life.¹⁰ Even so, it is intriguing that, of the four episodes in Jesus’ life on which Irenaeus’s version of the Rule of Faith centres – that is, the virginal conception, the suffering and death, the resurrection, and the bodily Ascension – all are recounted only in Luke’s Gospel.¹¹

When, in book three of Against Heresies, Irenaeus seeks to demonstrate further that there is only one God, he moves from treatment of Israel’s Scriptures (ch. 6) to early Christian texts that might seem problematic (chs 7–8) and then to the positive witness of those texts (chs 9–12). An appeal to Mary’s Song appears in this third section, as the bishop observes how various heresies draw on the Gospels for support but do so selectively. Marcion, he says, uses an amputated version of Luke’s Gospel, the Valentinians the Gospel of John, and so on. Accordingly, when the bishop refers to the Magnificat (3.10.2), he does so, first, to demonstrate that the Church (in Mary’s voice) acknowledges that God spoke to the Church’s OT ancestors; and, then, to verify that the Church acknowledges only one God – who gave his Instructions to Moses and, in Christ, fulfilled his promise to Abraham. In other words, Mary’s witness on behalf of the Church supports Irenaeus’s overarching argument: Israel’s Scriptures prove the oneness of God. A parallel affirmation is found in the context of a second reference to Mary’s Song in Against Heresies, in which Irenaeus urges that Mary’s words show how Abraham, ‘through the Word’, knew the Father and confessed him to be God, and, by means of revelation, knew that God’s promise to Abraham would be fulfilled with the coming of God’s Son, ‘so that he might himself also embrace Christ’ (4.7.1).¹²

Brief as they are, Irenaeus’s references to Mary’s Song are important for the way they address what we might call ‘the problem of the Old Testament’. Today, Christian theologians might struggle with what to make of the OT in the light of the advent of Jesus Christ. The early Church addressed the opposite problem: given Israel’s Scriptures, what are we to make of the gospel? In his exegesis, including his use of the Magnificat, Irenaeus emphasizes the significance of Israel’s story for grasping God’s character and work, the overarching pattern by which to make sense of Israel’s Scriptures and the good news of Jesus Christ, and, then, how the Triune God ensures the continuity of the one God’s work from the OT into the coming of Christ and the Church’s life.

Origen (185–254)

Widely hailed as the most important biblical exegete of the early Church, Origen is also much maligned due to his practice of allegorical exegesis – a mode of interpretation based on the view that the characters, places, words or events of Scripture speak of another realm of meaning. It is often alleged that he could make a biblical text say whatever he wanted, irrespective of its plain sense. Turning to Origen today, some might wonder whether they have encountered communication from another planet, but his approach to exegesis is actually less novel and more principled than Origen’s critics might have allowed.¹³

Origen’s hermeneutic draws from a range of influences – his advanced hermeneutical and rhetorical training, for example, but also his encounters with Christian heterodox engagement with Scripture and the pastoral concerns he nurtured. The source of the heretical teaching he encountered – for example, Marcionism and Gnosticism – was bad exegesis, to be sure, but he was also concerned with their uncritical dependence on troublesome aspects of Greco-Roman philosophy. Embracing any teaching alien to the faith is tantamount to rejecting the tenets of that faith, and this led Origen to emphasize the Church’s Rule of Faith as a guide for the work of genuine scriptural interpretation. We might say that, in Origen’s theological hermeneutics of Scripture, validity in interpretation is measured, at least in significant part, by the alignment of one’s exegetical work with the apostolic faith. His approach to Scripture also took as a corollary of Scripture’s authoritative status its immediacy to contemporary readers, the capacity of these Scriptures to speak on God’s behalf into the readers’ present and to take root in their lives. Exegesis, in this sense, ploughed the language and theological categories of the Scriptures deep into faithful furrows (or, to change the metaphor, patterns) of thinking, feeling, believing and behaving.

Together with his reading of Jesus’ and Paul’s interpretative practices, Origen’s commitment to the Scriptures’ inspiration led to his dissatisfaction with reducing the meaning of a biblical text to its plain or literal sense. He sought their hidden, deeper sense as well – a sense sometimes referred to as ‘spiritual’ and/or ‘moral’. His use of allegory sometimes sought to make sense of what in the biblical text might seem nonsensical and sometimes moved forward under the assumption of a text’s surplus of meaning, his conviction that it had still more to offer. In his Homilies on Luke, we find that Origen’s belief in the inspired nature of the biblical text pressed for its spiritual dynamism, such that ‘every word of the Scripture has its meaning’ (35.7), a meaning that embraced its significance for Origen’s (and not only Luke’s original) audience.¹⁴ (It is telling that, in his thirty-fifth homily, just quoted, the single word in question is the definite article ‘the’!) Encounters with Scripture were formative events that nurtured believers in the faith, a viewpoint that presumes the spiritual vitality of biblical interpreters themselves. Indeed, Origen claims that heretics read the Scriptures just as the devil does: ‘not to become better through reading the holy books, but to use the simple, literal sense for killing those who are friends of the letter’ – that is, those who possess a simple faith (31.2).¹⁵

In a sermon on Luke’s narrative of the encounter between Elizabeth and Mary (1.39–45), Origen recognizes that some manuscripts identify Elizabeth, not Mary, as the one who spoke the words of the Magnificat. Text-critical sensibilities of this nature would have been forged during his training in Greco-Roman hermeneutics. His sermon on Mary’s Song (Homily 8) centres on two words, magnify and humility, both of which seem in his view to be out of place and thus requiring elucidation.

In the first line of the Magnificat, Luke uses the verb μεγαλύνω (megalynō), which modern lexicons render as ‘to magnify’ or ‘to make great’. Modern translations read:

With all my heart I glorify the Lord!

(CEB)

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord

(NAB)

My soul magnifies the Lord

(NRSV)

Origen’s concern is how a soul might magnify the Lord, since the Lord can neither increase nor decrease. Taken according to its plain sense, Mary’s utterance makes no sense, since no one can actually ‘make the Lord great’. No, he writes, the Lord ‘is what he is’ (8.2).¹⁶ Seeking a deeper meaning, one that turns on his neoplatonist-influenced understanding of the human person as body, soul and spirit, Origen writes that humans are made in the image of God’s Image. That is, since ‘the Son is the image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1.15), humans bear God’s image in a derivative sense, as an image of the Image. On this basis, Origen is able to make sense of Mary’s opening line: ‘Therefore, when I make the image of the Image – that is, my soul – large, and magnify it by work, thought, and speech, then the Lord himself is magnified in my soul, because it is an image of him.’ The converse is also true: ‘If we are sinners, he diminishes and decreases’ (8.2).¹⁷

The second term in question is ταπείνωσις (tapeinōsis), typically translated as ‘humble state’ (NET) or ‘lowliness’ (NAB, NRSV). Hinting at Origen’s dilemma, the CEB refers to Mary’s ‘low status’. How could the mother of God’s Son, the Saviour, suffer disrespect? ‘What was humble and despised in her’ (8.4)?¹⁸ In wider usage in the Greek-speaking world, tapeinōsis had a negative connotation (low status, but also lewdness, depravity or dishonour), so it was important that he show how this quality of character might attract divine blessing. He does so by situating Mary’s humility in relation to the four cardinal virtues of classical antiquity: justice, temperance (or self-control), fortitude (or courage) and wisdom.¹⁹ Accordingly,

what she says, ‘He looked upon the humility of his handmaid,’ is equivalent to saying, ‘He looked upon the justice of his handmaid,’ ‘looked upon her temperance,’ ‘looked upon her fortitude and her wisdom.’ For it is right for God to look upon virtues [and], in the Scriptures, humility is declared to be one of the virtues.

(8.4)²⁰

On this basis, Origen can paraphrase Mary’s claim in this way: ‘God looked upon me because I am humble and pursue the virtues of gentleness and submission’ (8.5).²¹

This interest in the virtues continues in Origen’s reflections on Mary’s next phrase: ‘From now on all generations will call me blessed.’ On one level, the literal level, he acknowledges that the words ‘all generations’ apply to all believers. ‘But, if we search for something more profound, I will notice how valuable it is to join to it, because he who is powerful has done great things for me.’ This is because God raises up the humble. If you approach the Lord in humility, in weakness, Origen proclaims, then:

he gives you courage or authority; he gives you the kingdom, so that you might be placed under the ‘king of kings,’ and possess the kingdom of heaven in Christ Jesus, to whom is glory and power for ages of ages. Amen.

(8.6)²²

Ambrose of Milan (339–97)

Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, need not detain us long. Even though his commentary on Luke is a rarity of the early Church, the long shadow of Origen’s influence is obvious. For example, of Elizabeth and Mary, Origen had written, ‘Sin began from the woman and then spread to the man. In the same way, salvation had its first beginnings from women’ (8.1) – a comment refashioned in Ambrose: ‘For just as sin arose from women, so also good begins from women’ (2.28). Both also find in Luke’s birth narrative a foundation for declaring (in Origen’s words) that, in imitation of Elizabeth and Mary, ‘the rest of women can lay aside the weakness of their sex’ (8.1);²³ Ambrose makes a comparable claim, but goes further in regarding Mary’s response to God as prototypical for all: ‘Let the soul of Mary be in each [person], so that it magnifies the Lord; let the spirit of Mary be in each [person], so that it rejoices in God’ (2.26).²⁴

Otherwise, Ambrose’s primary interpretative concern mirrors that of Origen – agreeing with him on what it might mean to ‘magnify the Lord’. It is

not that anything could be added to the Lord by a human voice, but because He is magnified in us. For the image of God is Christ, and, therefore, if the soul has done any righteous and pious act, it magnifies the image of God in the likeness of which it was created.

(2.27)²⁵

Cyril of Alexandria (c.378–444)

Although one of antiquity’s most prolific interpreters of Scripture, Cyril, the archbishop of Alexandria, is remembered most for his defence of orthodox faith, especially with regard to Christology, against the counterclaims of Jews and Christian heretics. Chief among those presumed to be heretics was Nestorius, from whom the Nestorian heresy takes its name. This is the view that two substances, the one divine and the other human, were conjoined in Christ – this in opposition to the orthodox understanding of Christ, championed by Cyril, as the unity of the divine and the human. (Subsequent study of Nestorius’s writings would raise questions about the appropriateness of identifying him closely with the Nestorianism that bears his name.) Even if the Alexandrian’s place in christological controversy is widely celebrated, his exegetical contributions were influential in their own right; indeed, they provided the basis of his theological work. It is perhaps not too much to say that the controversies in which Cyril found himself centred on how best to read the Scriptures.

If preaching today is sometimes viewed as moving between two horizons, the ancient and contemporary, or, with respect to the significance of a biblical text, as spanning the bridge from ‘what it meant’ to ‘what it means’, then Cyril would never be mistaken as a modern preacher. For him (and this was true more broadly through the Reformation), preaching did not involve a two-step process. Rather, it took the form of the exposition of the Scriptures, not as an antiquarian exercise but in view of its always-contemporary significance as God’s voice. This homiletical practice is on exhibition on practically every page of Cyril’s commentary on Luke’s Gospel, itself a collection of his homilies.

Cyril’s treatment of Mary’s Song appears in a sermon that combines selections from Mary’s Song (1.46–55) and Zechariah’s Song (also known as the Benedictus, 1.68–79). Reading the Magnificat, he attends especially to the identity of the arrogant, the powerful and the rich – who are scattered, pulled down and sent away empty-handed; and the lowly and the hungry – who are lifted up and filled with good things. The arrogant are

the wicked demons who with their prince fell through pride: and the Greek sages, who refused to receive the folly, as it seemed, of what was preached: and the Jews who would not believe, and were scattered for their unworthy imaginations about the Word of God.

Cyril continues, ‘And by the mighty [i.e. the arrogant] she means the Scribes and Pharisees, who sought the chief seats.’²⁶ He associates rulers with ‘haughtiness’, a modifier he also uses to label demons, the devil, the Greek sages, and the Pharisees and scribes, as well as ‘the Jews’, ‘who once gloried in their empire, but were stripped of it for their unbelief’.²⁷ What of the rich?

The Jews … were enriched by the giving of the law, and by the teaching of the holy prophets. For ‘to them belonged the giving of the law, the adoption of sons, the worship, the promises.’ But they became wanton with high feeding, and too elate at their dignity; and having refused to draw near humbly to the Incarnate One, they were sent empty away, carrying nothing with them, neither faith nor knowledge, nor the hope of blessings. For verily they became both outcasts from the earthly Jerusalem, and aliens from the glorious life that is to be revealed, because they received not the Prince of Life, but even crucified the Lord of Glory, and abandoned the fountain of living water, and set at naught the bread that came down from heaven. And for this reason, there came upon them a famine severer than any other, and a thirst more bitter than every thirst: for it was not a famine of the material bread, nor a thirst of water, ‘but a famine of hearing’ the ‘Word of the Lord.’²⁸

Contrariwise, the lowly and the hungry are the Gentiles, fringe peoples whose lives were wasting away in misery, but who on account of their faith are exalted and filled with spiritual blessings.

Let me draw attention to three noticeable aspects of the Alexandrian’s exegesis here. First, he is at pains to paint Greek philosophy and Judaism in a bad light, associating them with the devil and declaring that they stand under God’s judgement. Undoubtedly, Cyril’s