Today I received an email announcing the acceptance of my proposal to the Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible unit at the Society of Biblical Literature’s Annual Meeting in San Antonio, November 2023. The proposed title is “Adjusting and Readjusting Perspectives on the Chair of Moses in Matt 23:2,” with the following pitch:

Jesus’s mention of the “chair of Moses” in Matt 23:2 has a curious Wirkungsgeschichte. This small phrase affects the early church’s conceptualization of authority along the lines of a chair/throne of the church, of the apostles, and of Christ (as in Origen and Tertullian); it is later instrumental in conceptualizing the chair of St. Peter in Rome; it becomes a point of contention in the European Reformations, as the chair/throne of Moses, of Peter, of Christ, and of Satan(!) enter into the polemics of the day—and so on. From the early modern period to the present, all of that earlier focus on ecclesial authority fades into the background as referential theories of meaning push interpreters toward what Luz calls the “archaeological-realistic” meaning of the chair of Moses. Among twentieth-century interpreters there was a drive to find material artifacts, chairs in first-century synagogues, and to load them with the freight of Jesus’s saying in Matt 23:2. (Many recent interpreters have been right to be wary of such archaeological “findings.” It turns out, for example, that the structure housing the famous stone chair at Delos, a chair often labeled a “chair of Moses,” is likely not a synagogue at all, according to Matassa’s Invention of the First-Century Synagogue [SBL Press, 2018].) In addition to outlining various traditions of interpretation relating to the chair of Moses, this paper aims to situate the more recent focus on ancient synagogue chairs within an array of intellectual and cultural impulses affecting recent biblical studies in the academy. It suggests that the search for “archaeological-realistic” meaning is a function of post-Shoah self-consciousness among Christian interpreters, and that this impulse to link Jesus to various strands of first-century Judaism historically has parallels in the older impulse (e.g., Irenaeus’s) to link Jesus to Moses redemptive-historically.

The paper will likely change and develop as I research for it and write it over the summer. Also, I proposed this paper for myself with the expectation that it would become part of the introduction of my dissertation.

In all of this, I thank the Lord my God, and I will continue to ask him for the resources, sufficiency, and competence to learn, and then to teach, his Word.