Matthew's breaking of Mark's chiasmus
The cursing of the fig tree
and the cursing of the temple in Mark

     In some cases, noted on previous pages, Matthew deletes lines found in Mark's gospel for theological reasons. The pattern of these deletions is consistent and are found to be deletions not just of passages in Mark, but rather a deletion of the low theology and the low Christology characteristic of the gospel of Mark, in favor of an elevated theology found in the later document written by the author of Matthew. A consistent pattern of deletions like this is not coincidental, all of them found to be deletions of passages suggesting a low theology and then replaced in the Matthew version by a high Christological version of what purports to be the same events.

     In some cases however the deletions in Matthew's gospel take the form not of removing passages but rather of rearranging passages, breaking the structure of Mark's earlier arrangement in the process, and in these cases where Mark's chiasmus are broken apart by Matthew it is the case that the chiasm contained within its structural arrangement a strong attack on the Torah and the temple system. Once again this deliberate breaking apart of Mark's symbolic arrangements and the consequent watering down of the attacks on the Torah cannot be merely coincidental (repetitive patterns are not indicative of coincidence but rather of deliberation - the chiasmus must first recognized for what it was, the meaning of the structural arrangement must be clearly understood, and then deliberate action taken to destroy and disturb the structure thus muting the attack). In these instances it is found that the offending verses are not deleted in Matthew's edited account, but rather the redaction in these cases simply involves destroying the structural arrangement through the movement of verses.

     The opening chapters of Mark's gospel contain chiasmus and juxtapositions that both contain a strong attack on the family and mother of Yeshua and a strong attack on the Torah and the religious temple system. This goes a long towards explaining why we find that Matthew follows exactly the ordering and structural arrangement of the Gospel of Mark from chapter 7 onwards but the first six chapters are chopped up and tossed like a salad in Matthew's version. Such systematic adherence to Mark's order in the latter half of Matthew is no coincidence, and this leaves it to be explained why then Matthew destroyed completely the ordering of the material and parables in the first six chapters. The reason is simple. Matthew was destroying chiasmus by rearranging verses, thus diluting the meaning embedded in the structural arrangement of the opening chapters of the earlier book on which the later book (Matthew) shows a clear literary relationship and obvious literary dependence.

     What the chiasmus in Mark's gospel reveals is that is was the attitude of the author that one should utterly reject the temple system and the Torah ideology, and this is revealed not only on the surface, by reading the parables in Mark, but is reinforced through the chiasmus which reinforce and echo this theme, something Matthew recognized, thus explaining this particular form of nullification through rearrangement. Matthew's attitude is going to be a strange one of both critiquing the Torah and ‘keeping the Torah' which does not require wholesale rejection, as in Mark, but rather ‘reinterpretation'. (It is impossible to assign a single consistent ideology to Matthew since the manuscript went through periods of later reactionary (conservative) redaction in which material was added in successive stages, leading to an internally inconsistent manuscript that does not adopt a single ideological point of view for this very reason. Consult the various pages found in the Matthew index for examples of theses revisions and this sort of redaction to get a clear idea of what I am referring to here. For these reasons it is difficult to say exactly what the original position of the author of this manuscript might have been as regards the Torah, but it is clear from the structure of the book that it was a position less radical than the complete rejection of the Torah we encounter in Mark).

     A simple example of Matthew's breaking of Mark's chiasmus for the previously noted ideological reasons can be easily demonstrated by noting the redaction performed on the story of the attack on the pigeon sellers and money changers in the temple.

     Mark's chiasmus of the cursing of the temple system is an interesting example of the use of structural juxtaposition in Mark's gospel, with sequences of parables placed in close proximity, in this case a chiasmus concerning the temple followed by a brief recapitulation and concluded with a summary parable. Matthew follows Mark's arrangement almost in parallel in this instance with the noteworthy difference that Matthew rearranges certain key verses and breaks the structural integrity, in the process while, in what turns out to be characteristic form for this type of reorganization in Matthew,. muting the criticism of the temple system in the process. Give the overall pattern of muting criticism by changing Mark's chiasmus when it concerns Torah ideology this is hardly coincidental, but is a fine example of redaction performed for ideological reasons.

     The original chiasmus is organized as follows. (Note that the verse divisions in the Bible are arbitrary and a later invention, so the chiasmus must be reconstructed thematically.)

(Introduction)
Mark 11:11 Entry into Jerusalem
Mark 11:11 Went to the temple
Mark 11:11 Look around in the temple
Mark 11:11 Evening came they left Jerusalem and went to Bethany

(Cursing the Fig tree)
Mark 11:12 Return trip to Jerusalem
Mark 11:12 In the morning he saw a fig tree
Mark 11:12 Looked at the fig tree but it had no figs (Parallels verse 11, ‘he looked at the temple')
Mark 11:14 He cursed the fig tree (may no one ever eat figs from you again).
Mark 11:14 His disciples heard it.

(Cursing the Temple)
Mark 11:15 Entered Jerusalem (parallels verse 11)
Mark 11:15 He entered the temple. (Parallels verse 11)
Mark 11:15, 16 He overturned the tables of money changers and pigeon sellers, stopped trading (Parallels the Cursing of the fig tree.)
Mark 11:17 He cursed the temple authorities saying, My house should be a house of prayer but you have turned into a den of thieves (may no one ever eat figs from you again)
Mark 11:18 Pharisees heard it (Parallels verse 14, Disciples heard it)

(Introduction of thematic summation intended to explain the motivation for the crucifixion and the subject of the recapitulation in the following two parable sequences)
Mark 11:18 They wanted to arrest him, but feared the people (subject of recapitulation in verses 27 to 33 where once again he ‘goes to Jerusalem', they challenge him but are afraid of the people. Also the subject of the parable of the murderous tenants which follows - the pharisees wanted to arrest him, because they knew the parable was about them, but they were afraid to act because of the people.)

(Summary recapitulation of the cursing of both the fig tree and the temple)
Mark 11:19 Evening came and they left the city (parallels verse 11)
Mark 11:20 In the morning they saw the fig tree. (Parallels verse 12)
Mark 11:20 It was withered to its roots. (It had no figs once again)
Mark 11:21 And disciple remembered that he had cursed the fig tree. (Parallels verse 13, 14)

(Summation of cursing of fig tree parable which has been used as a wrapper around the cursing of the temple.)
Mark 11:21 Disciple said ‘the fig tree you have cursed has withered to its roots.'
Mark 11:22, 23 Yeshua said have faith in God and you can hurl mountains into the sea.

     Mark uses the technique of ‘foreshadowing' frequently in the gospel (one of the best examples is that on the first entry into Israel proper a tone of menace is established and the crucifixion is promptly foreshadowed for the first time.) In the above example there are several notable examples of the same sort of thing. First he ‘enters Jerusalem' and ‘enters the temple' and ‘looks around'. The cursing of the fig tree, which then follows, foreshadows the cursing of the temple, and there are allusions to this parallel embedded in the structure through the use of the technique of repetition (he entered Jerusalem, he entered the temple, and also through the device of repeating ‘the disciples heard it' after the fig tree is cursed and then paralleling this with ‘the pharisees heard it' after the cursing of the temple. The reaction of the pharisees foreshadows the following two parables which are basically repetitions of the same theme (they wanted to arrest him, they were afraid of the people).

     The summary recapitulation again uses repetition to allude to the structural similarities embedded in the sequence (once again they leave Jerusalem in the evening, and once again in the morning they pass by the same fig tree, the disciples remember (paralleling ‘the disciples heard him') The summary conclusion applies both to the fig tree and temple. Both were cursed and both ‘withered to the roots' as a result. The fig tree parable is used as a wrapper around the cursing of the temple and this type of juxtaposition and use of chiasmus is characteristic of Mark's entire gospel and was deliberate. The careful sequencing of material and the attention to structure continues in the following two parables which, as just mentioned pick up on the theme of the pharisees wishing to act but being restrained by fear of the people. This theme recurs repeatedly in Mark's gospel and in every case follows an attack on the Torah, and thus one of the great over arching themes of the Gospel of Mark is the explanation of the meaning of the crucifixion (the Messiah was crucified because he led a radical rejection of religious traditions, and was murdered for this very reason by the religious authorities of his day. The dogma of ‘a sin sacrifice of a sinless God like figure to pay for humanities debt of sin' is a feature of Pauline letters. In Mark's gospel the crucifixion is understood as the typical reactionary murder of a revolutionary, and Christ is not good, for only God is good, and you are saved by ‘keeping the commandments' not through ‘an atoning sacrifice'. The ‘atonement sacrifice' was one of the features of pharisaic religion that was repeatedly condemned by Mark, and when combined with Mark's low Christology, it is obvious that the dogma of the ‘Levitical sacrifice of a perfect Lamb' is not one of the themes of the Gospel of Mark).

     Matthew, in just one example of this sort of thing, destroys Mark's chiasmus in this instance. Matthew follows Mark almost line for line in this part of the manuscript (where Matthew does introduce new material, the author promptly returns to pick up on the next verse where the arrangement in the Gospel of Mark has been disturbed.) However there is notable exception that turns out to be a characteristically Matthew like action - Matthew yanks the parable of the fig tree out of place and moves it to another part of the manuscript. In doing this Matthew breaks the chiasmus and dilutes the severity of the message of cursing the temple (so that it withers to its roots). In Matthew's gospel the parable of the fig tree becomes a single parable (the fig tree is cursed later and withers immediately, not the next morning) and the parable becomes not about cursing the temple system (withering it to its very roots, something Matthew is averse to do) but rather incongruously and somewhat stupidly, becomes about the power of a believer to curse at vegetation ‘if you only believe'.

     That Matthew would follow Mark line by line, except for the fig leaf parable demonstrates that Matthew moved the fig leaf parable out of place for a reason, and the reason is obvious when you consider what the fig leaf parable meant in its original positioning in the gospel of Mark. To further distance the fig leaf parable from the story of the cursing of the temple Matthew makes the cursing of the temple more about reforming the temple (by forcing people to change money and sell pigeons outside). The temple was not cursed to its roots, according to Matthew's redactional activity. To drive the point home that the temple was not utterly cursed, Matthew introduces a new parable to put some distance between the rearranged fig leaf parable and the story of ‘the reforming of the buying and selling system in the temple (which is about as strong a critique as Matthew is willing to tolerate). According to Matthew's new parable, immediately after going on this destructive rampage in the temple, the Christ promptly appeared in the temple to preach and teach (the temple having been ‘cleansed; it certainly did not require ‘cursing to its very roots', and Matthew attempts to make this polemical point by introducing this polemical parable, and by destroying the fig tree chiasmus.

Matthew's alterations follow:

     (Matthew follows Mark's story of the entry into Jerusalem, with the much ridiculed difference that Matthew suggests that he rode on both an ass and a colt at the same time. The prophecy being alluded to suggests that he ‘rode on an ass, on a colt the foal of a donkey'. So Matthew takes the passage very literally and has both an ass and a colt saddled up and tells us somewhat foolishly that ‘he rode on them' both at the same time. You see Matthew always insists that everything was ‘a great fulfillment of prophecy' and if straddling the saddles of both an ass and a colt the foal of a donkey at the same time is what is required for prophecy to be fulfilled, well there is no lengths that Matthew won't go to have ‘prophecy completely fulfilled.' Actually the phrase ‘an ass, a colt the foal of a donkey' was just poetic language referring to the same animal, and not to be taken literally, which Matthew did. Another good example of the same sort of foolish use of prophecy is found when Matthew first tells us that Christ enjoyed tremendous popularity, and was healing people, in fulfillment of Isaiah where we read ‘he took our infirmities and bore our diseases.' Immediately after quoting this verse Matthew then goes on to tell us about the tremendous popularity of Christ and the great crowds that hung on his every deed and action. Because of Matthew's flippant and offhand use of this verse, it has become embedded in Christian theological use of prophecy. What makes this flippant use of this one verse so so foolish and incongruous in Matthew's gospel, is that the passage in Isaiah makes the point that ‘he was despised, a man from whom people turned away their faces in disgust. We hated him and esteemed him not. He had nothing about him to attract anyone.' In the original language of the passage there is a suggestion that he was shunned for having leprosy and other contagious diseases, and was considered cursed by God for all his chronic diseases, ‘but it was our diseases he was bearing and he took our infirmities.' This is the passage Matthew chooses to quote, sandwiching this one verse in between his glorious tales of the tremendous popularity of Christ whom he insists had much about him that attracted people like flies. So to say that Matthew often uses (or rather misuses prophecy) in foolish ways goes without saying, and this, along with his having the Messiah ride an ass and a colt at the same time, or the so called prophecies in the opening chapters of the book are prime examples of this particular form.)

     Aside from these small differences (if you can call riding an ass and a colt at the same time a small difference) Matthew follows Mark line for line in this section of the manuscript, except that in cutting the story of the fig tree Matthew has Christ dismount from the ass and the colt and go straight to the business of ‘purifying the temple' (with the fig tree story cut the temple is no longer being cursed to the very roots). To drive the point home that the temple was only being ‘purified', and not cursed, Matthew immediately follows the story of the cursing of the temple with the new version of events which has Christ now an active member of the newly ‘cleansed' temple. Another notable change is that Matthew states that ‘Yeshua entered the temple OF GOD', a significant theological difference introduced into the parable that goes a long way to explaining the destruction of the fig leaf chiasmus (this was not a temple of God, according to Mark).

"And Yeshua entered the temple of God and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, "It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer'; but you make it a den of robbers."And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" they were indignant; and they said to him, "Do you hear what these are saying?" And Yeshua said to them, "Yes; have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast brought perfect praise'?" And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there. In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he was hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside he went to it, and found nothing on it but leaves only. And he said to it, "May no fruit ever come from you again!" And the fig tree withered at once. When the disciples saw it they marveled, saying, "How did the fig tree wither at once?" Matthew 21:12

     This material is then followed by Matthew's new version of the fig leaf parable. By distancing the fig leaf parable from the story of the cursing of the temple and by using just specifically this type of interpolated material in his revised version of events, Matthew is deliberately breaking Mark's chiasmus and further redefining the meaning of the fig leaf story in the process. It is now a story about cursing vegetation, not temples, as the interpolated material makes clear. That both the destruction of the chiasmus and these ‘new parables' both center on the theme of ‘not cursing the temple' this new arrangement in Matthew's gospel is not coincidental, but ideologically motivated.

     The fig tree withered at once, and it was the story of a random piece of vegetation being cursed by the ‘power of faith' and had nothing to do with cursing temples to their roots, since temples were ‘the temple of God', places where little babies uttered words of praise and Messiahs could be found preaching (immediately after sacking the place).

     This is not the only example of this sort of thing in Matthew's gospel, and in the other cases Matthew also destroys structural arrangements where the criticism of the Torah is severe, watering things down in the typically Matthew like way.

     As an example of this you can consider Mark's chiasmus condemning the Torah as an ‘unclean food'. Once again we see the familiar pattern of two outer brackets wrapping around an inner structure, followed by a recapitulation of the thematic contents of the chiasmus in a following parable.

     The outer brackets of the structure consist of two parallel parables concerning ‘bread' and ‘the feeding of multitudes' (Mark chapter 6 verse 35, Mark chapter 8 verse 1). These two outer wrappers surround parables attacking the food laws (on the subject of ‘unclean foods'). Following the second outer bracket, the sequence is recapitulated in a scene onboard a boat, in which the subject is once again bread. In the two bread sequences the crowd ‘have no bread' and in the recapitulation on the boat ‘the disciples have no bread'. The disciples prove to be to dim witted to understand that ‘I am not talking about bread' but rather ‘the bread' he was referring to was ‘the yeast of the scribes of pharisees.' Now yeast is used in the making of bread, and the theme of the inner core of the structure is both ‘unclean foods' and the hypocrisy of the religious pharisees. The theme then becomes ‘beware the yeast of the scribes and pharisees', yeast they were obviously using in baking loaves of bread that people would then ‘eat'. We are told that the disciples then finally understood that he was referring to ‘the teachings of the scribes and pharisees' and this was the ‘unclean yeasty food - or bread' that they were to diligently avoid.

The broad structure of the chiasmus has the following general form.

Mark 6:35 The people have no bread. Feeding multitudes.
Mark 6:45 Walking on water, but in summary we are told ‘they did not understand about the bread, because their hearts were hardened.'
Mark 6:53 Healing mulititudes.
Mark 7:1 Confronted by Pharisees over traditional purity regulations.
Mark 7:6 Pharisees are hypocrites who nullify the prophets.
Mark 7:14 Christ nullifies the food laws of the priestly tradition (counterpoint).
Mark 7:18 Disciples do not understand what he was saying about the food laws.
(Note the story of the Gentile dog woman is an interpolation into Mark's gospel and will not be considered here.)
Mark 7:31 Healing the deaf.
Mark 8:1 Multitude has no bread. (Disciples still do not understand about the bread. Parallel to the previous bread parable.)
Mark 8:10 Pharisees demand a sign (after all these miracles have happened. This is hyperbolic sarcasm, and also equates the blind pharisees with the blind disciples in the following parable.)
Mark 8:13 Recapitulation of the previous sequence. The disciples, like the multitude have no bread, and think that the meaning of things is to be found in ‘bread' but are rebuked and finally understand that they must ‘beware the yeast of the scribes and pharisees' which means that they must beware their teachings, including, in the context of the sequence, they must beware the biblical food laws as one example (and, in the overall context of the Gospel of Mark, they must beware of the Sabbath laws, beware of the menstruation laws, beware of the pigeon sacrificing laws, beware the atonement sacrifice, and just beware of the Torah and the temple system in general). The theme then does not concern literal ‘bread' but rather they come to understand that ‘bread' is symbolic for religious doctrine.

     The central pivot of the structure consists of an attack on the ‘food laws' and the notion of ‘unclean foods' juxtaposed next to an attack on the Pharisees for ‘nullifying the prophets.' This is pure polemic on the part of the author of Mark. The food laws and the purity laws in general, as well as the Sabbath laws and so on (also condemned in the manuscript) these were all ‘Bible Laws' and to strip the Pharisees of any possible defense on the grounds of ‘scripture' Mark turns the table by charging them with hypocritical misuse of the Bible. (Mark was influenced by such radical prophetic traditions as those found in Jeremiah and Isaiah, whom he quotes in an allusion to these earlier attacks on the Torah). Mark then proceeds to turn the tables by nullifying the priestly writings. The appeal to prophetic tradition is a polemical argument intended to strip an opponent of justification and also to justify the following attack on the purity regulations, in particular the food laws. This particular structural juxtaposition is a classic example of a purely polemical chiasmus, so characteristic of the literary style of the author of the gospel of Mark.

     In this case Matthew does not disturb the basic structure of Mark's chiasmus, he merely diluted the point. According to Mark, Yeshua taught his disciples that nothing that goes into a person's mouth can make them unclean, in direct contradiction to the purity regulations of books such as Leviticus (already condemned by former prophets ignored by the pharisees whom Mark charges with the crime of nullification). The summation then is that ‘by saying this Yeshua declared all foods clean' a doctrine also echoed in many church letters (for example in Romans, Colossians, Titus, among others). Mark was not alone in espousing this traditional belief of the early church, nor was it a real novelty to attack the Torah in the Jewish tradition, prophets having already done so in the past. However, Matthew is to conservative to be a part of this more radical tradition, and so the chiasmus is diluted by excluding the bit about ‘declaring all foods clean'. In Matthew's diluted version ‘not washing your hands cannot make you unclean.' Hand washing, while being a tradition, was not strictly a Torah practice, while food laws were clearly entrenched in the Torah, so in Matthew's version it is the traditions that are attacked, and not the Torah. (According to Matthew not washing your hands won't make you unclean. This is a dilution, and only partially successful, since it leaves one to wonder if ‘food' can make you unclean, and we must assume that Matthew, like Peter as portrayed in the gospel of Luke, felt that foods would indeed make a person unclean, as described in the Torah. This is not a consistent philosophy, but rather a dilution of the point of Mark's chiasmus, which concerns food, typified by ‘bread' and ‘bad yeast' used in making bread, all of it surrounding parables on the theme of rejecting ‘unclean food laws' and alluding to prophetic traditions of rejecting the Torah regulations.

     So to dilute this particular chiasmus is to once again radically alter the original intent of the sequence, which was also based on earlier strands of radical prophetic tradition, which Matthew, in constantly watering down Mark's torah critiques, is plainly not interested in preserving or promoting, preferring the Torah the prophets condemned, or so it would seem. Let us just say that Mark and Matthew did not share a common ideology when it came to the Torah and protest against the Torah, and Matthew also held to a high theological position, in contradiction to Mark, and it is these ideological differences that are responsible for Matthew's deletions of particular lines in Mark's gospel and alterations of Mark's chiasmus. The redaction in the Gospel of Matthew is motivated by ideological and theological differences between the two authors.