Insights from African American Interpretation

Mitzi J. Smith, Mark Allen Powell Powell, Mark Allen Powell

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506400174
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506401133
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

p>Each volume in the Insights series discusses discoveries and insights gained into biblical texts from a particular approach or perspective in current scholarship. Accessible and appealing to today’s students, each Insight volume discusses how this method, approach, or strategy was first developed and how its application has changed over time; what current questions arise from its use; what enduring insights it has produced; and what questions remain for future scholarship.

Mitzi J. Smith describes the distinctive African American experience of Scripture, from slavery to Black Liberation and beyond, and the unique angles of perception that an intentional African American interpretation brings to the text for a contemporary generation of scholars. Smith shows how questions of race, ethnicity, and the dynamics of “othering” have been developed in African American biblical scholarship, resulting in new reading of particular texts. Further, Smith describes challenges that scholarship raises for the future of biblical interpretation generally.

4

Slavery, Torture, Systemic Oppression, and Kingdom Rhetoric: An African American Reading of Matthew 25:1–13

Oppressive structures are often adjusted to accommodate the changing fears and desires of the (neo)colonizers and/or dominant oppressors. The public face of an oppressive system can change (or alternate, at times), between oppressor and oppressed subordinated other; aspects of the new facade may even appear representative of the oppressed. But the death-dealing policies continue to the detriment of the oppressed. Oppressive systems must be exposed and deconstructed or dismantled (even in sacred texts), not simply recycled or cosmetically adjusted to palliate and opiate the oppressed and their allies. Studies have proven that black women and men, the poor, and other peoples of color are unfairly targeted by law enforcement; that they are more likely and disproportionately the victims of police profiling; that they receive longer prison terms for lesser crimes; that they are stereotyped as lazy, hypersexualized, and capable of more violence and criminal behavior than others; that they as a group make less money than their counterparts for doing the same jobs; and that, despite all this, they are expected to embrace a politics of respectability (an elitist ideology that requires them to quietly lift themselves up, acquiescing and genuflecting to unjust laws and practices, which results in victim blaming), even though justice eludes them and their rights are diminished.^[1] Oppressive systems must be named, especially those structures that are embedded or reinscribed in sacred texts and contexts.

The biblical text sometimes lends itself to support oppressive structures and disregard for human freedom and dignity in societies. A Gospel narrative, inclusive of slave parables replete with stereotypes, did not have to be perverted to support the inhumane system of slavery and its routine physical, spiritual, and psychological cruelties against African slaves. Matthew’s Gospel, for example, abounds with slave parables in which exemplary stereotypical slave behavior serves as a model for persons desiring membership in the kingdom of heavens. Missionaries seeking to convert the black “soul” on southern American slave plantations recognized the usefulness of slave parables to help perpetuate slave ideology, making the connection between the “faithful slave” and the divine master. Palmer’s Plain and Easy Catechism for slaves includes the following prayer: “Help me to be faithful to my owner’s interest . . . may I never disappoint the trust that is placed in me, nor like the unjust steward, waste my master’s goods.”^[2] Former slave Frederick Douglass recalled how Master Thomas would bind and for hours flog his crippled cousin Henny. After each brutal beating Master Thomas would proclaim the following: “That servant which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes”^[3] (emphasis mine). It was inexcusable for a slave to be ignorant of and/or fail to meet the master’s demands, to be unprepared to fulfill his subordinate status as slave. If it was determined that a slave was negligent, most masters showed little mercy.

Unjust systems wreak havoc on the lives of the marginalized and the poor and make it possible to condone and justify their victimization. In the slave parables, slave ideology and brutality are reinscribed, sanitized, and sanctified with theological rhetoric. In Matthew 25:1–13 and its immediate context, the master–slave relationship, with its stereotypes, fears, and cruelties, functions as a legitimate metaphorical exemplar for participation in the kingdom of heavens. In this essay I read Matthew 25:1–13 through an African American interpretive lens that prioritizes black people’s historical and contemporary experience with oppressive systems. My interpretive lens engages the slave testimony of former American slave Frederick Douglass’s autobiography My Bondage, My Freedom; Page DuBois’s examination of the etymology of the Greek word basanos and its development to refer to state sanctioned testing by torture in ancient texts; Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of “ambivalence” and the function of stereotypes; and Ange-Marie Hancock’s social political theory of “a politics of disgust” that operated in the welfare reform debates under the Clinton Administration resulting in the passage of the Personal Responsibility Act in 1996, shifting blame onto victims. I shall argue that the ten virgins in the parable are stereotyped slaves, entrapped in an unjust, oppressive structure, who function as the potential collective bride of the bridegroom.

Re-Reading the Parable: Exposing Oppressive Structures

I read the parable of the ten virgins (Matt 25:1–13) in its literary context and as part of a trilogy of slave parables (the other two are about the faithful and wise slave overseer in 24:45–51, and the master’s distribution of talents to his slaves in 25:14–30). In the parable of the ten virgins, which is peculiar to Matthew, Jesus likens the kingdom of the heavens to ten virgins (parthenoi) that go to meet the bridegroom. All the virgins take their lamps, but five are characterized as foolish (mōrai) for their failure to carry excess oil. The five wise (phronimos), having carried surplus oil for their lamps, are prepared for the groom’s late arrival. The bridegroom delays (chronizontos) his appearance so long that all the virgins fall asleep. When all the sleeping virgins are awakened by the midnight alarm of the groom’s arrival, the five foolish ones had burned through their oil. The five wise ones have oil reserves but seemingly insufficient to share with the five foolish. The wise virgins admonish their foolish sisters to buy their own oil. Once the foolish have gone shopping, the groom arrives. The overly prepared wise virgins arise, light their wicks, and resume as if they had not fallen asleep. With lighted lamps in the dead of night, the wise virgins greet their groom and enter into the final portion of the wedding festivities (tous gamous).^[4] And the door is closed behind them. When the five foolish virgins return, requesting entrance, the master (kurios) rejects them: “I do not know you” (25:11, 12). At verse 13, the moral of the parable is given: “Stay awake, therefore, because you know neither the day nor the hour [of the master’s arrival].”^[5]

This parable, together with the slave parables that frame it, reinscribe oppressive structures, stereotypes, and tactics, including torture, particularly in the form of sleep deprivation. Tortured submissive slaves are presented as exemplary participants/members of the eschatological kingdom of the heavens, and God is likened to a harsh slavemaster. When God is represented as a patriarchal enslaver in Scripture, many readers are reluctant or will not permit themselves to critique the harmful stereotypes and unjust systemic demands inscribed in the text, or the oppressive depictions of God. Further, I propose that the kingdom rhetoric itself is very problematic.

Absentee Bride or Slave Brides?

Most interpreters have resigned themselves to the conclusion that the bride is absent from the Matthew’s wedding parable in chapter 25.^[6] Amy-Jill Levine asserts that the ten virgins are “more likely, servants waiting for the groom to return to his home.”^[7] I propose that the ten virgins are all potential or intended brides of the one groom and not, euphemistically speaking, servants, but, rather, slave brides. Several ancient interpreters from the early third century through the early fifth century CE arrived at this same hermeneutical position: the virgins are brides. Hippolytus of Rome (170–235 CE) in an allegorical interpretation of the ten virgins in Matthew 25 wrote the following: “come, ye maidens, who desired my bride-chamber, and loved no other bridegroom than me, who by your testimony and habit of life were wedded to me, the immortal and incorruptible Bridegroom . . . come all, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”^[8] Methodius—also known as Euboulios, Bishop of Olympus, and Patara in Lycia (260–312 CE)—in his only complete extant work, titled Banquet of the Ten Virgins (or Concerning Chastity), praises the virginal life, in both men and women. He, too, produced an allegorical interpretation of the Matthean parable of the ten virgins, writing that those who preserve their virginity are “being brought as a bride to the son of God.” The number ten is symbolic of those who believe in Jesus Christ and have taken the “only right way to heaven.” Five also here refers to five senses or “pathways of virtue—sight, taste, smell, touch, and hearing.” Methodius further states that those who have maintained their virginity are “all under the one name of His spouse; for the spouse must be betr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Series Foreword
• Introducing African American Interpretation
• Twentieth-Century Foundations
• African American Biblical Interpretation in the Early Twenty-First Century
• Slavery, Torture, Systemic Oppression, and Kingdom Rhetoric: An African American Reading of Matthew 25:1–13
• Dis-membering, Sexual Violence, and Confinement: A Womanist Intersectional Reading of the Story of the Levite’s Wife (Judges 19)
• Bibliography
• Index