There are some publishers I check up on frequently when it comes to new spiritual reading—Ignatius Press, Ascension Press, the Augustine Institute, Scepter, and Liturgical Press are the ones that jump to mind. I never think of checking Regnery Publishing, though, and so for the third straight time I almost missed a new release in Michael Pakaluk’s series of Gospel translations. Last time his new rendering and commentary on John’s Gospel had been out for about a year before I snagged a copy. This time, thanks to a comment on this very site, I was less than a month late ordering a copy of Be Good Bankers, his thought provoking new treatment of the Gospel According to Matthew.
I have leafed through my share of bland commentaries. This is not one of them. At times I was reading Pakaluk defend a hypothesis with great curiosity, then a page later I was looking up a John Chrysostom quote, and then soon after that I felt spurred on to redouble my efforts in building virtuous habits.
As with his previous two releases in this series, Michael Pakaluk graciously took the time to answer some questions I had on behalf of all us readers of Catholic Bible Talk.
Q&A with Michael Pakaluk (questions are in italics)
This is now your third translation and commentary, following The Memoirs of Saint Peter in 2019 and Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John in 2021. What do you remember jumping out at you immediately when you first started working with the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel?
The contrast between the musicality, vividness, and sharpness of Our Lord’s language, and the matter-of-fact, no-nonsense character of Matthew’s language in his narrative. Matthew generally writes in what I call a “business Greek,” that is, clauses consisting of a participle followed by a finite verb. For example, “after hearing the king, they went on their way … seeing the star, they rejoiced heartily … coming into the home, they saw the child … falling prostrate, they paid him homage.” I attribute this “business Greek” to Matthew’s accounting background. In accounting, one makes entries in a ledger which consist of a description of some transaction followed by an amount and possibly a date. These would have a similar structure: “For buying a cow, 2 denarii. For selling a bushel of corn, 1 denarius.” A tax collector was a recorder. In his profession Matthew would have been making entries like this all the time.
Your entry point into Mark was your assertion that the sacred author was working off of Peter’s memory, preaching, and authority. With John’s Gospel you took seriously the tradition that Mary was in Ephesus with John the Evangelist, and that we can, as it were, hear her voice in the Fourth Gospel. The subtitle of Be Good Bankers is The Economic Interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel. Can you summarize for us the argument on which your commentary is based?
My method is to begin with a hypothesis and see whether it proves fruitful in how it illuminates the text. My hypothesis is that Matthew was a mid-level, ambitious tax collector who, because he was ambitious, had made himself well familiar with best practices of Roman banking, accounting, and contract law. He would have had the opportunity to learn these things and would only have needed a motive. That motive was his ambition.
On this hypothesis Jesus called Matthew not in spite of this commercial background but because of it. He recognized Matthew’s ambition too and judged it could be directed to higher purposes. I claim that the hypothesis reveals the structure and logic of Matthew’s gospel, and it also draws attention to subtle details of his language which we otherwise might have missed. In this sense the hypothesis is “shown” to be true.
In those other two books I found fresh perspectives by looking for “the person behind the gospel writer,” as you say, Peter in the case of Mark, and Mary in the case of John. I find it more interesting as a scholar to look at a gospel as influenced by a person rather than as produced through a redaction of prior texts. For this book, the person behind the gospel writer is Matthew. Matthew, his former self, the tax collector, conversant about banking and accounting, is the presence and personality behind the gospel of Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist.
What I call “the economic interpretation” of the gospel of Matthew is that gospel as illuminated on that hypothesis. I mentioned the structure of the book. The typical way of conceptualizing the gospel of Matthew is to view it as a “layer cake” of actions of Jesus interwoven by discourses of Jesus. I say, instead, that it is organized on the pattern of a typical book of accounts for a Roman household, the first half dealing with deposits, the second expenditures. The dividing line between these is precisely Peter’s, “You are the Chirst.” The main Deposit considered in the first half is the deposit of divine nature, of infinite value, into the account of the human race through the Incarnation, while the main Expenditure of the second half is the payment of this value to purchase us out of the debt and bondage of sin, in the Redemption, which means literally a buying back.
Even if one was completely unpersuaded by your economic interpretation, there is so much here in your commentary. As I worked through the Sermon on the Mount, I could feel my knowledge of the Gospel deepening as I grappled with your comments. I especially appreciated your analysis of the word “hypocrites”, and the modern trap of seeing these people Jesus criticizes as merely lacking sincerity or authenticity. Likewise, your commentary on the eye as the light of the body (6:22-23) helped me make new connections. Previously I suppose I was viewing this saying as Jesus’ condescension to the imperfect knowledge of the ancients about how eyes work and not appreciating its context amidst sayings on covetousness and treasure. What do you think many of us in the pews need to understand more urgently about the Sermon on the Mount?
The Sermon on the Mount is a complete charter for Chrisitan life. As such, it is a marvelous, divinely constructed instrument of self-examination. I believe it was intended by Jesus to provoke, in those who listened to it, a sharp awareness of their own sin and therefore their need for a savior. Socrates taught that wisdom is knowing that one does not know. How can one learn otherwise? People lament the loss of a sense of sin, but sin exists, it is real, and it is within us. It most certainly will undo all of us unless it is dealt with. We cannot deal with it ourselves but need a Savior. Far from being a depository of “great moral teaching,” the Sermon on the Mount teaches that “morality” cannot save us.
I was curious what you would do with “epiousios” in the Our Father and you did not disappoint! In contrast to “daily bread” or “supersubstantial bread”, your rendering gives us “substance covering bread”. Is this one of those times where the honest translator must not make smooth where the biblical text is obscure and challenging? Take us into your translation process here.
If the substance of the bread is changed with the words, “This is my body,” then the bread or rather remaining appearance of bread is quite literally superficial. It is on the surface. What does one call it then? It is bread only on the surface, “upon the surface bread” or “substance covering bread.” There were lots of ways for Jesus to have said “daily” if that’s what he wanted to say, but he did not choose those ways. As a translator, it is most important to convey the meaning that Jesus intended to convey. At this point, if he coined a word, the translator can coin a word too, which corresponds to his meaning.
Something about your presentation in this book made me feel like we were sitting in the same room looking at the Bible together. Very little modern scholarship makes me feel that way. Maybe the only other text I can think of is another commentary on Matthew–the Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word tetralogy by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakas. I get this feeling all the time, though, when I read the Fathers, especially Augustine’s commentaries on the Psalms and John, where one feels like he is wrestling with the text right in front of you. Besides Be Good Bankers, where should we be going for more faithful and intelligent commentaries on Matthew?
The homilies on the gospel of Matthew by St. John Chrysostom. This is one of the greatest masterpieces of spiritual writing, if not the greatest. Apparently St. Thomas Aquinas had this kind of high estimate of it. He famously said once that he’d trade the entire city of Paris for that book.
There was a sharp conversation happening on this blog a few years ago about whether a literal translation is always going to end up sounding something like the RSV. Your translation contains lots of precision of language–I am thinking of your preference for “den of robbers” rather than “den of thieves” in 21:13. You are one of the few translators to use “face of the sky” in 16:3 rather than something like “appearance of the sky”. You are not shy, though, to choose renderings more based on the impression they impart. In your rendering of the encounter with the Gaderene demoniac, you use three different phrases to give us an idea of what Matthew is trying to say when he writes the Greek word we are used to hearing as “behold”. How literal were you trying to make your translation?
I do not take myself to be aiming at literalness but rather accuracy as the chief goal. Accuracy for me means: everything conveyed by the Greek is captured in the English, including not only what is conveyed directly by the sentence itself as a complete thought but also what is conveyed indirectly by the context in which the sentence is found in the text; while, at the same time, nothing not conveyed directly or indirectly by the Greek is conveyed directly or indirectly by the English. All the time unwanted implications find their way into translations, and these must be guarded against also. If accuracy is preserved as the chief goal, then within that boundary one can and should be “literal” too, which might involve using “face of the sky” for instance.
At the same time over the years I have grown more appreciative of St. Augustine’s method in his harmony of the gospels, which is that the exact words used by different gospel writers do not need to be the same if the substance of the meaning of the differing groups of words is the same. Yes, it’s difficult to explain what this “meaning” is and what counts as sameness. But, still, if the inspired writers themselves are given a certain leeway in language by God himself, then, I imagine, so implicitly is a translator.
This is a very approachable work. This is spiritual reading, not technical reading. But neither is it simplistic. You may be the first writer I have ever encountered to successfully make me care about a chiasmatic literary structure. You also don’t dwell on things that I think are points of focus for a beginning commentary–what is mammon, who are the magi, etc. What kind of reader is this book for?
We should all of us grasp the gospel in a manner which matches our capabilities. We need to do this and are meant to do it. If we have been trained for a profession, say, we are engineers, then we can and should grasp the gospel in a manner suitable to an engineer, that is, with a certain inquisitiveness, intelligence, and care of thought. I suppose I write my books in this spirit.
Tell us a bit about how you treated the parallels with Mark’s Gospel in this translation. Did you ever look back at your work from The Memoirs of St. Peter?
I continue to think that, from the point of view of translation only, that was my most interesting project, because Mark’s language is so unusual and, when dealt with well, yields inescapably the conclusion that his writing was intended to convey spoken language. But in writing this book on Matthew, when passages are very similar, I did not go back to Mark and compose a translation of Matthew influenced by my prior translation of Mark. I worked on Matthew afresh. And yet perhaps I should have taken that other approach. As I say in the book, I believe that Mark’s gospel, or perhaps a proto-Mark in an oral tradition supported by outlines on wax tablets, was regarded as authoritative by Matthew and for that reason it was relied upon by Matthew. It was authoritative because it was Petrine, not because of the mere fact that it was written down first, if it was. Whether it was written down first is not important, and whether Matthew relied upon it is not important. What is important is whether Matthew did not need to rely on it but did nonetheless because of its authority.
You allude in your commentary to how the parable of the talents implicitly approves of interest lending. How is the exegete to distinguish between what is merely depicted and what is implicitly approved of? Surely, for example, Luke’s telling of the parable of the banquet from chapter 14 of his Gospel is not an implicit justification for the burning of cities.
In the parable of the talents there is an obvious principle underlying what the master says: when there is time-value of money, then to return to the lender solely the principal that he loaned you, is to return to him less than his original amount, which is unjust. So now you have the major premise. It states a matter of intuitive justice. All that you need to add now is the minor premise, and you get a justification of lending on interest: we are living in a society in which generally money has a time value (because the economy is growing constantly and money is used for investment as much as to cover necessities).
I love reading your footnotes for the wide variety of works you cite. Flipping through just now I saw St. Alphonus Liguori, the Catena Aurea, William James, Roger Scruton, F.A. Hayek, John Henry Newman, and Aeschylus. What have you been reading lately?
I just finished a book on St. Thomas Aquinas’s “Prayer before Study,” Oratio ante Studium, and so my reading has been until very recently shaped by the demands of that book. Of greatest importance are the treatises of Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Thomas’s commentary on Dionysius’s treatise On the Divine Names. I’m on sabbatical now, and I may just now have time to undertake some of the reading I proposed to myself for my sabbatical. I want to read through the whole of Marshall’s Principles of Economics. This was the main and most influential textbook in economics in the first half of the 20th century. I’ve read parts of it but want to read the whole thing systematically. For spiritual reading I’ve been reading the Gospel Homilies of St. Pope Gregory the Great. These are wonderful.
Speaking of reading, I’ve been slowly working through the five book-length interviews of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI while I have my coffee and eat breakfast. I am halfway through God and the World now, meaning I am halfway through the whole corpus. Somewhere Peter Seewald asks Cardinal Ratzinger about his Bible reading habits and he mentions that besides reading the scriptures in German he will spend time in the Greek text of the New Testament, but also the Septuagint. What translations and texts do you use when you are reading the Holy Scriptures?
I typically read the New Testament in Greek not in translation. I grow in appreciation all the time of the Vulgate. The RSV is very solid, as you indicate. When I converted to Christianity from atheism I studied the Bible with an evangelical Christian and we used the old NASB. Since I memorized many verses from the NASB, I retain a fondness for it. I appreciate its efforts to be very strict and “literal.” Otherwise, I sometimes use the Catena Aurea of St. Thomas Aquinas as a commentary. For the gospel of Matthew I was deeply impressed by the homilies of St. John Chrysostom on Matthew, which I mentioned.
I saw online that you were having an event for the launch of the book at Catholic University in the first week of April. I am only an hour away now, but on that particular day I was busy playing laser tag with my class from school. I hope the event went better than my laser tag game. They killed me 14 times in ten minutes. How has the reception of the book been so far?
That event was recorded and may be found on YouTube at this link. It’s not a high quality recording. For the event at The Catholic Information Center a month earlier I gave a good overview of the book (available on YouTube here). I’d recommend that presentation as an introduction to the book. The reception of the book has been very strong. I hate the whole focus on self-promotion on the internet and social media today. I will do some minimal promotion of this book but intend to leave the pathway of its success—or not–up to God.
Lastly, can we expect your rendering of Luke in a few years? I have been having fun guessing what your angle might be on that one. His companionship with Paul? Painting? Medicine? The mindset of a Gentile Greek? The identity of Theophilus? There are a lot of possibilities.
God willing I would like to complete the set of four translations and four new approaches to the gospel with a volume on Luke. I cannot start it until at the earliest the Fall of this year. The book reasonably would appear two or three years later, God willing. I plan to present Luke as “the Pauline gospel” but emphasizing what I call the “Christian romanticism” of the main themes in St. Paul. We do not often realize that what people love as romanticism–what is good in it–comes from Christianity. Actually, C.S. Lewis was deeply aware of this and wrote a scholarly book about it which almost no one reads (but should) The Allegory of Love.
Postscript
Fourteen questions is very many to answer. I feel humbled that the professor answered even ten of them, though had this been a face to face conversation, I am sure I would have picked his brain about even more. To give you an idea of the sorts of ideas proposed in Be Good Bankers which I still have rattling in my mind two weeks after finishing the book, here are two interesting nuggets with which I leave you.
1. Have you ever been reading the Gospels and noticed that the pericopes tend to be very similar in length? When I started attending weekday masses with some regularity in 2015 it jumped out at me. Looking at the New Jerusalem Bible last year, which divides the pericopes with bold headings, I was reminded of this observation. Pakaluk proposes an explanation I have never encountered elsewhere in this book: the sort of notes which would provide a record of these events is exactly what we would expect to fit on a standard sized wax tablet of the sort much in use in the Roman world.
2. Let us leave to the side for a moment the arguments for and against the two-source theory and the patristic opinion of Matthean priority. In an essay at the end of Be Good Bankers, Pakaluk presents a persuasive case that there are good reasons to believe that Matthew wrote the Gospel that bears his name. I would point you to the entire essay, but one point I have carried with me is that if Mark’s Gospel bore the authority of Peter in some way (cf. The Memoirs of Saint Peter) then it would make perfect sense for Matthew to use Mark as a source, despite the fact that he was an eyewitness and Mark was not. That is not the main thrust of Pakaluk’s argument, but a point made showing the weakness of some of the two-source theory’s foundational arguments.