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(ProQuest: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.)
AT THE LAST MOMENT OF JESUS' TRIAL, the Matthean passion narrative adds a verse that has variously fueled anti-Judaism and disturbed commentators ever since: "and . . . all the people said: 'His blood be upon us and upon our children'" (Matt 27:25).' The verse has become something of an interpretive crux. There is, on the one hand, the older and standard reading of the text: by this cry the people incur judgment, worked out in Matthew's scheme of things in the destruction of Jerusalem. Daniel Marguerat puts it starkly: "By this cry, Israel has wiped itself out of the history of salvation."2 On the other hand, there is the more recent "ironic" reading. Jesus, as the angel tells Joseph, is the one who saves his people from their sins (1:21); his blood is poured out, as he tells his disciples at supper, for the forgiveness of sins (26:28); when the people call down his blood upon their heads they therefore invoke, albeit unwittingly, their own salvation.3 Judgment here yields to redemption through the blood that saves, in an echo of the story of Passover.
What are we to make of these opposing interpretations? Each traces in Matthew's passion narrative an opposite theme-blood and destruction, on the one hand; blood and forgiveness, on the other. Both are coherent, but each succeeds only by ignoring the other. Is there, perhaps, a reading of the people's cry that does justice both to the fate of Jerusalem in Matthew's Gospel, and to the promise of salvation, precisely to "the people"?
The problem is illuminated by a paradigm strange to the contemporary reader-and passed over in the commentaries in a line or two-but central to Matthew's treatment of the death of Jesus: that of innocent blood. By describing Jesus' death in terms of innocent blood, Matthew sets his passion narrative within a paradigm of bloodguilt and purgation, purity and pollution, which is deeply rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures and still current in the Judaism of Matthew's own time and after.41 propose first to explicate the paradigm, with particular attention to the Jewish legend of the death of Zechariah, and then to show how it informs and interprets Jesus' death...