The (Im)polite Jesus: An Analysis of Jesus’ Verbal Rudeness in Matthew’s Gospel

Abstract

(Im)politeness, understood as a description of verbal rudeness, seems to characterize aspects of the Matthean narrative, which in my view, have not received enough scholarly attention. My intention is to fill this gap, examining the concept of (im)politeness in this Gospel from the perspective of a first-century reader. I use an adapted socio-rhetorical approach, exploring the Gospel of Matthew as a synchronic narrative unit in order to find a literary purpose for the Matthean Jesus’ (im)politeness. To complement this approach, I use literary pragmatic and sociolinguistic methods as lenses for reading Jesus’ (im)politeness in Matthew’s story. I engage with Greco-Roman materials, paying attention to similar (im)polite words and expressions presented in Matthew’s Gospel and the Hellenistic corpus of literature. Consequently, my purpose is to uncover the socio-cultural world encoded in this Gospel and compare the Matthean Jesus’ (im)politeness with that of other Greco-Roman characters in writings from the period. The findings show that Jesus uses (im)polite words and phrases when debating, teaching and using metaphoric language in Matthew’s Gospel. The findings also display numerous examples of verbal (im)politeness in Greco-Roman documents, revealing that (im)politeness in this time and in these texts differs from contemporary Western understandings. The Matthean Jesus’ (im)politeness is in accordance with other Greco-Roman examples in which characters interact with people using (im)polite language.