My proposal to the Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible program unit of the Society of Biblical Literature was accepted. That’s two proposals accepted (see the post about the other one here). I give thanks to God! With his will, I’m planning to attend the 2024 Annual Meeting in San Diego in November.

The proposal titled “The Scribes and Pharisees as the Civil Sovereigns of Israel according to Hobbes’s Leviathan” is copied here:

Jesus’s mention of the “chair of Moses” in Matt 23:2 has a curious Wirkungsgeschichte. That small phrase affects the early church’s conceptualization of authority along the lines of a chair 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 of Moses, of Peter, of Christ, and of Satan(!) enter into the polemics of the day—and so on. This paper examines a novel interpretation found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651/1668), where Hobbes departs from the usual focus on ecclesiastical authority. He uses Matt 23:2–3 and the chair of Moses (“Moses chaire” or “chayre”) as a justification of the right of monarchy and of a subject’s total obedience to earthly sovereigns in any matter not running against explicit divine commandments. This politicization of the chair of Moses also enters into Hobbes’s arguments against Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), who uses Matt 23:2–4, together with Matt 16:19, to illustrate the Pope’s legislative power over all Christians in whatever commonwealth. Against that position, Hobbes argues that Moses was Israel’s civil sovereign, and that the chair of Moses symbolized only the legislative power of Israel’s civil sovereign—not the ecclesiastical authority of Peter or a later Pope, and especially not any authority to contradict other civil sovereigns. Hobbes’s connection between the chair of Moses and civil authority, which is sharply distinguished from the church, paves the way for later interpreters to secularize Jesus’s commendation-and-rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees. Hobbes also highlights political implications of the Gospel according to Matthew that have been felt but often not stated.

This paper, as yet unwritten, is a planned part of my dissertation, in a chapter on political concerns arising from the “chair of Moses” saying. I look forward to hearing feedback and connecting with other scholars involved in similar projects.