Pulling The Covers Back- "Be Ye Therefore Perfect" feat. Trevan Hatch

"I have never heard this before." - Greg

Trevan Hatch, professor at BYU focused on the Ancient Middle-East, lays out a framework for Matthew 5:48, "Be ye therefore perfect." I had never heard this approach before but Trevan backs this up with evidence from the scriptures.

We can look at "perfect" through a modern, Western mind as we often have, or as "complete" which is more popular today and fits within a temple framework of the Sermon On The Mount. But Trevan's explanations given though the context of other verses of scripture using the Greek word, "Teleios" showing support for a completely new understanding of the verse. 

 Raw Transcript

we take a very selfish approach we take this verse and we isolate it put it on an island we say okay I have to be
perfect am I doing my scripture am I going to the temple am I listening to prophets and like there's an endless list of a checklist that's inward
focused Christ is saying how about first and foremost we look
[Music] outward boy this one's fun this is
something that I had never heard before I had studied the scripture a lot I thought I had a pretty good grasp of
what it meant I don't think I do anymore I I think that what I believe it meant
still means but but wow this has expanded so much what am I talking about I'm talking about Matthew 5:48 be ye
therefore perfect trevan hatch by Professor brings in some context here that I I did not know and he backs it up
with other scripture and and does a fabulous job with this uh you're going to learn something about this right this
is part of the what we get uh with uh Jesus's Sermon on the Mount and and I don't think you've ever heard this
before so prepare yourself to learn something really exciting about the
Beatitudes in Matthew 548 and what does it mean to be perfect and I'm not just talking about being complete right it's
not just Tios it is how it is used in the scriptures really fun stuff this
episode is brought to you by scripture notes scripture notes is the application that I use for all of my scripture study
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an incredible asset for you go there now here we go all right welcome to Quick show my name is Greg Matson and I am
your host in this episode we bring back Trevon hatch from Bigham Young University religion scholar uh expert on
Ancient near East and we're going to talk about perfection in Matthew 548 welcome back yeah thanks appreciate it
yeah I love I love this topic yeah so let's go over this I mean I've heard I've heard different takes on this before you know what does this mean you
look at the underlying Greek in this and is this in a ritual setting Etc what uh
what is your study brought to you so yeah what we we uh I wrote an
article with a colleague and he's the latterday St Doctrine uh librarian and so basically we have two sections where
he kind of goes sweeps through uh Mormon sermons like latterday Saint you know
sermons in general conference and say this is how generally church members have talked about Matthew 548 be
therefore perfect right so let me do that and we can just kind of skip past that because it's um Everybody kind of
knows what that is like it's a it's a doctrine that is used because of our
interest and our emphasis in becoming like God that was a natural proof text
and and I call it a proof text I'll show you why uh you know if the audience some in the audience doesn't know what a proof text is it's basically taking um
usually the context is or the connotation you take it out of context some you isolate a verse or
isolate a certain passage that will speak to or support your own doctrines
affirmation price yeah right um but and latter and latter St prophets and others
for 100 years you know God command Christ commands us to be perfect and we
got to work at it it's not going to be easy or even possible but you know you strive and you know there's different
ways they do it some times they'll say you can't be perfect in everything but there are some things you can be perfect in pay your tithing for example right
but then there's a little twist um in the Book of Mormon and this is how
latterday Saints have interpreted and used the Book of Mormon because if you remember when Christ came to the
Nephites he gave The Sermon on the Mount and and then he also gave be therefore
perfect but he adds be ye therefore perfect as I and your father is perfect
so he added in he didn't say say that to the his Jewish audience he says it to his nephite audience so then and and
then commentators you know there's others I got one here um Dr Daniel lllo who was in two generations ago in the
religion department he kind of summarizes what the implication is the doctrinal implication he says that Jesus
had one example of perfectness to recommend to us in in the old world and
she says Our Father in heaven and after his resurrection and glorification the
Savior could offer himself as an example so when he's talking to the the the Jews
uh in Palestine he can't offer himself because he hasn't been resurrected and so then he's resurrected he goes to the
Nephites um and then he now he can offer that's a very simple logic right so now you can just that's why he added in and
as I and your father in Heaven so a lot of the Saints have run with that so what I for my section and I've been I've been
this is not just the paper I just wrote I I've been doing this for a decade and I have there's numerous podcast episodes out there what I you know where I spell
this out if you know if BYU for example came to me and said can you give a you you want to give a devotional at some
point in my career if that ever happened I would probably give you this right um or if somebody said you know give a sacr
meting talk you can talk about whatever you want it would be this MH um because it's and I always make sure to lecture
on this with my students because it's very important and the evidence that it's this important is because is that in
that you have videos and and podcasts and speeches non-stop by by latterday St
prophets and also Bo scholars in fact the boou studies journal the current
issue the whole thing is perfectionism from a social scientific perspective they don't deal necessarily with this
it's quoted a lot but they're looking at you know and these are all social scientists who were looking at the latter Saint you know demographic and
what level of perfectionism do they have maladaptive you know perfectionism or
and they really break it down and say this is what we're actually experiencing in our culture because you have some
critics and others will say that latterday Saints are unique and then just a very high level of religious OCD
and scrupulosity and these Scholars are saying that's not actually true we have
it it's there but it's not as you'd probably find in any religion or any group of people in any swo of people
you'd probably get that oh yeah you You' find it in Orthodox Jewish Ultra Orthodox Jewish like there it gets very
OCD mhm and and that's and sometimes it's conditioned like in function like
the way they're they're acting sometimes it's mental health or it's like a psychological thing but you're saying it's actually reduce it's less than
people think it's less than it's been portrayed yep according to them and somebody could look up Faith matters
podcast or YouTube channel whatever just in the last couple weeks and Justin Dyer I think that's who it was spoke for an
hour about this right um and we could even Google right now we could like pull up Google and we I did it earlier to see
what we'd find but I typed in lattery Saints be therefore perfect I just went down three or four pages and it's just
it's all like the the general trend is to pull back on the toxic toxic
Perfection where you have to do everything right and this is holistic be perfect in thought action whole
Christian way of living right and that's not and we've been doing this for a couple decades now because president um
Nelson's talk in 1995 perfect be perfect pending perfect pending you have Elder
Holland be perfect eventually right they've already started to pull back and so what I wanted to do is to put this um
in its ancient Jewish context to see what comes out like let's just go to all the different angles and see what and
see and this is one of your expertise is that ancient Jewish this is my early Judaism Jewish history Jewish law like
all that M so the the and the Greek word is Tios mhm you know has a broad range
of meanings and a lot of people like it's been democratized enough to where if you go to church and you this this
verse comes up somebody will raise their hand not even a Samaran teacher whatever just a random person will raise their
hand and say yeah it mean it's teos and it means or even if they don't know the Greek word they'll say it means per be
perfect it doesn't mean it doesn't mean be perfect it means be whole or complete or like there's a hedging there and pulling back like that's everywhere
right and so there's a range of meanings that are we can go even a little deeper than just a simple like it means
complete or whole because what does that even mean I don't even know like President Nelson does qualify it and he
goes through but most people don't remember what he says they just oh means complete or whole what does that mean some people that into a temple comp
context even like like you've gone through the whole I think teos is used also in the
mysteries in in GRE in Greece as well kind of an idea of a fulfilling the journey type of thing yeah yeah so um so
let's go through it I'll give you different examples so in there's Greek Roman and Jewish literature mostly in in
Greek and Latin but so in the Greco Roman literature you have it's used in different ways so if you look at an
educational context it means that the students they start as beginners but
they eventually get to the point where they are the teacher they've Advanced it doesn't mean they are perfect or without
error but it means most mature that's that's a way that some people have interpreted it in a medical context
ancient this is a physician who has quote reached the limit of professional study again these are uh there's all
kinds of different study like Greek books and you know you can go to all kinds of different Lex and you know
tease out the differen is based on the context and in a medical context is what is um and it's a person who uh is ready
to treat patients okay the Greek word also means it could mean might or
efficacious so be therefore Mighty or efficacious in a biological context it
means a fully grown adult fully grown adults aren't perfect right you've
attained a certain status and now you're ready to do certain things now in in New Testament if you just take the word Taos
in the New Testament um you can look all the way through and it there's it shows a sense of undivided attention to God's
will in some context um it can be wholly invested in a certain cause or
completely invested so you get the word whole or complete completely invested into and devoted to a cause uh there's a
motiv a motivation there very motivated in the theological dictionary of the new testament which is this big set where
it'll take a Greek word and then there's a the Old Testament theological dictionary of the Old Testament that
takes Hebrew and it'll track it all the way through and so you you can get a snapshot of what this word means all the
way through and in the New Testament uh there's lots of different words but the conclusion of those Scholars who put
that together was they said one does not find in the New Testament any understanding that this word means the
gradual Christian um up to moral perfection like the advanced to moral
perfection that's not what it means it's this never ending quest for Perfection
right that's a latterday saint uh with our interest in becoming exaltation yeah and then putting in a
verse um okay so then the Hebrew equivalent is um tamim it's it's where
so you get the word that roote it carries a lot of
different meanings throughout the Hebrew scripture one of them is without blemish in a sacrificial context so we do get there
there is some times where it's it's a perfect sacrifice okay but that's a very
rare and most of them there's within a religious or moral or ethical context it
suggests neither sinlessness nor a particularistic obedience to a legal
system um let's see what we got uh there's tamim is used to describe
Abraham and job um as Men of Integrity innocence and devotion yeah they're obviously not
perfect according to the context yeah so so with that kind of context and
people could study this and have lots of different examples but that context we can translate it in a number of ways we can translate it be therefore mature be
therefore mighty be therefore efficacious be wholly invested be
therefore completely focused on the task at hand even as your father which is in heaven is completely focused on the task
at hand so my question was like when I was going through this is if we look at Christ's injunction to his Jewish
audience the question is what is the task at hand You're motivated to do what
you're wholly invested in what completely motivated to do and what what's that task okay so then we go to
the scriptures and it's it's very straightforward you don't even have to go to the Greek in English in the King
James you have this a word that appears that tells us exactly where to look and the word is there for
right I mean if the example is like if if I come into this room and I and I
just sat down they turn on the cameras and I say Greg therefore uh I probably got to go I probably have to leave like
the audience would have to assume that I've said something before MH hence I'm using the word therefore okay so but we
we so we need to look at the verses before that sure and and I and I tell my students I you know I said this is key
because um whenever you see the word therefore in scripture ask yourself what's the therefore therefore it's like
Mormons thus we see right he's drawing it's it's therefore it's like an if then
yeah yeah so uh so let's go to it so we can go to Matthew 5:48 but if we look at the
verses before that um this is what we get he says ye this is verses 43- 48 ye
have heard that it has been said Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy but I say to you love your enemies
bless them that curse you do good to them that hate you and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute
you that ye may be children of your father which is in heaven for he maketh
his son to rise on the evil and on the good and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust for if ye love them which
love you what reward have ye do not even the publicans do the
same if ye salute your brethren only what do you more than others do not even
the public publicans do so and then he says be therefore perfect so basically what he's saying is like look anybody
can just love any like love somebody who loves you like even even gangsters like
they do the same thing if you if you love them they'll love you back that's not hard Christ is saying the hard part
and if you want to be like God he says right in this verse if you want to be children of your father in Heaven you want to be like Heavenly Father you need
to love those who hate you and then he says therefore be perfect or whatever
that word means be Taos as your father which is in heaven is Taos so my question when I ask my
students this or when I'm you know is be perfect in what it's pretty clear it's
in loving others right um and that's not surprising because that's Christ's
almost his whole message you go to the Hebrew prophets and you go through and you look at whenever they're complaining about the Israelites it's either idol
worship or it's not taking care of the least among you Amos does it like all of them do this almost all of them and you
get to to Christ and he continues right on and how many times does he uh talk about this issue and so if this is a
very important this mini love sermon he's giving um like be motivated be
highly motivated be invested be completely and totally invested in loving others especially those who hate you and if you can do that only then
will you be like the god of Israel yeah it's kind of like charity the pure love of Christ in a sense be therefore
charitable or or have the Pure Love Of Christ with you uh as he does on the cross also right forgive them they know
know not what they do that's right yeah um and then later in the gospel he he
uses this same you know we can and then now what we have to do is there's different angles we can look at it but there he defines this word later in the
gospel so in Matthew 19:21 this is the new revised standard I use different
translations um he says that if Christ says if you wish to be perfect Tios go
sell your possessions and give the money to the poor again this is an context of
doing something for others helping the poor helping the least among you that doesn't mean you know be like if you
want to be perfect like you know if you give everything away now now you're you're perfect U if you want to do this
Taos if you want to be wholly devoted to the cause to to me to the to the kingdom of God to God of Israel then then do
that bless other people so then let's see let's go down
um the question though is like when you I've watched all kinds of videos and
podcast see what my scholar friends and others are saying and for example you'll get like Taylor and Tyler like um Taylor
haverson and Tyler Griffin right they have their scripture Central wherever they did this uh when we do the New
Testament a couple years ago I was listening I tuned in and they I was curious to hear what they would say and
what they were saying is like this means this verse is the culmination of Christ's entire sermon and it's in a
covenant Temple type Covenant setting right and it was really good I think it's valuable but for me knowing this
context my first question was well how do we know that Matthew 548 is
not part of that mini love sermon and how do we know it's not either a standalone or part of the entire sermon
and there's a few ways to to to look at that so if if Jesus wanted this verse to speak to the entire Christian worldview
and be the culmination of his entire sermon then he would um have put it at
the end of chapter 7 not right in the middle right he's not done yet MH so that's one clue the other one is that
the author of Luke if you compare Luke and Matthew Luke doesn't have this big sermon he breaks it up either they're
broken up and Matthew puts them together or it's together and Luke breaks it up but when Luke does break it up all the
all the many sayings of Jesus all the different sayings that were kind of floating around and attribute it to Jesus and then Matthew kind of puts them together Luke leaves them separate but
he has that in the mini love sermon context he doesn't have a longer section the
Matthew 548 yeah it's it's Luke 636 is the parallel to Matthew 548 so that's another way to tell um the third is that
some Greek manuscripts like the co codex vinus is the earliest New Testament full
New Testament manuscript we have from the 4th Century but if you look at a codex like that an ancient text it
shows and actually asked one of our Greek like scribal and textual Scholars
and he actually pulled up the the manuscript and he wanted to and I want to ask him does this paragraph
demarcation show what does it show and he says the punctuation and the paragraph demarcation at least in that
codex shows that verses 43 and 48 are together in one block of it's one
thought right so that's another way I just want to say to the audience here it's interesting because in Luke 636
that you brought up it is the word is merciful exactly in in the King James
perfect is merciful yeah so and yeah and later on I go through that and it's talks about all the same kind of love it
repeats the word love and same thing yeah and then it says be therefore merciful so he puts the the context back
in Jesus's lips like the original ma Matthew has it the the Gospel Matthew has it there it says that we miss it
because we isolate it and we put that verse on an island and then we put all kinds of doctrinal like restoration yes
out of context you know and so we miss you know the reason why Matthew 548
we've gravitated towards that instead of Luke 636 is because those are two different things in our minds one is
perfection and exaltation whatever the other one is like helping your neighbor being merciful and stuff like that yeah
so and then um and actually Luke has a there's other
stuff in there be kind the unthankful me you know there's all kinds of things in there that are added to Matthew so
what the author of Luke does is he sandwiches between he's got be therefore perfect that parallel and it's it's
sandwiched in between Jesus's many love sermon and the Golden Rule so he just puts it's all like it's how you yeah
judge not condemn not yeah so it's it's not this ending quest for Perfection
it's like it's first and foremost how you treat other people and what I think is the way I describe it to my students
is that we what we do is we take a very selfish approach I don't know maybe it's not a word but it by by selfish I mean
that we take this verse and we say okay we again we isolate it put it on an island and we say okay I have to be
perfect and so what that means is am I doing my scripture am I going to the temple am I listening to prophets and like there's an endless list of a
checklist that's inward focus and Christ is saying I me yeah it's important to do that but Christ is saying how about
first and foremost we look outward at those that the least Among Us right yeah again I'm going to go here to Luke 640
as you were saying this and then it comes down after talks about basically uh being merciful to those
around you in 40 says the disciple is not above his master but everyone that is perfect shall be as his master so
again if you took 40 out of context just by itself you'd get the same thing as we think of is Matthew 548 yeah exactly
yeah in in in first John in 4: 18-
2021 the word Taos is used in relation to loving On's neighbor so then you have
Jesus's followers who are taking that saying that attributed to Jesus or that it's ped down like Jesus taught this and
then you have the author saying there is no fear in love but perfect love that Taos word but perfect love casteth out
fear because fear ha torment he that feareth is not made perfect in love we love him because he first loved us if a
man say I love God and hateth his brother he's a liar for he that loveth is not his brother whom he has seen how
can he love God who has not seen and this is the Commandment we have from him from Christ that he who loveth God love
with his brother again in this context of how we treat other people it's powerful powerful message that we I
don't know if we get enough of that in our in our meetings like I'm not criticizing I just like we of how much
it's mentioned in scripture of treating the less fortunate yeah I we don't I
don't see there's something I I talk about that I bring up that's you talk about the Golden Rule you brought that up um there's something that I talk
about that is the Platinum rule which is you know the golden rule is you know doing to others as you would have others
doing to you which we do get in the New Testament but there's also in the New Testament a rule that may even hit home
more which is you know you're going to be judged the way you judge others and so it's do unto others as you
would have God do unto you yeah I like that yeah yeah totally yeah and this
comes from the you know if you look at if Christ is teaching um most of the
things he says the Golden Rule like all that you know this manyi love sermon he's pulling it from hist scriptures
from the Jewish scriptures mhm um and a lot of people unless we reference it in
our manuals or in our scriptures we don't see it but it this comes from Leviticus there's a whole bunch of verses in there for example Leviticus
11:44 this is the whole Book of Leviticus is about the Holiness of the people of Israel and it's trying to help
God who left the Garden of Eden come back into the presence of the people
with the Tabernacle right and so then there's all these things about purity and and what to do to have the god of Israel come back in your presence so in
Leviticus 11:44 it says for I am the Lord your God sanctify yourselves
therefore and be holy for I am Holy and then in 19 Leviticus 19:2 you
shall be holy for I the Lord your God am Holy and this is the principle of
imitating God is imito day it's the life of godliness or the IM it's called the
imitation imitating God and this is all throughout the Torah and the author of
Deuteronomy knows these passages and uses them and and and expands on it so
it says in Deuteronomy 10:18 and 19 he the Lord doth execute the Judgment of
the fatherless and the Widow and loveth the stranger I don't know if that are
you picking that up on there I don't hear these condenser mics don't usually pick that up it's usually only thing
right here so I'm guessing we're okay okay I think we should be good yeah
right so I'm assuming cut this out I go back yeah um's okay in Deuteronomy 10:18 and 19 it says he refering to the Lord
he doth execute the Judgment of the fatherless and the Widow and loveth the stranger and give giving him food and
rment and then it says love ye therefore the stranger for ye Were Strangers in the land of Egypt so it's all over the
place in the Torah the Hebrew prophets pick it up Jesus picks it up and
um you know and then we've got uh Matthew 548 the another angle is from
Amy Jill Levine who's a Jewish scholar of the New Testament and she in one of her books um I happen to be reading and
I saw this and I thought I would dump it in here because even without the entire explanation that we've given she just by
introducing the Greek grammar of this passage shows that this is not an imper in the imperative form it's not a
command it's a future indicative it's an if then statement so you can translate
based on her based on the grammar you can say if you love your enemies as God loves his enemies then you will be
perfect even as your father in Heaven is perfect and in fact in verse 45 illustrates this very thing it says
as much before you get three verses later it says if you love your enemies in verse 44 then you may be children of
your father which is in heaven verse 45 like clear as day but we have
everyone ringing they like trying to figure out what does this mean and doesn't mean like um and so I love the
profets and others are trying to pull it back but even everybody who's trying to do that and think of creative ways and like oh it doesn't have to be now could
could be eventually could be like it's still out of context we there those messages still work but we along with
those let's put it in context and see what Jesus is teaching his Jewish followers and my students love this
absolutely love this because a lot of them they really struggle like nowadays they come home from their missions and
they're just all like you know uh they're extremely religious CD and like
uh and they they do struggle a lot of struggle with mental health and it's not that it's not the church it's not the
doctor it's not how we live that pushes them into religious OCD that's what all our social scientists are showing but it
could increase it it could exacerbate the problem and so and even with people who don't have a tendency to to do that
there's still like some guilt and like am I doing enough am I always doing enough again this inward Focus rather than outward Focus to other people um
and as Jewish study scholar who's going through and looking at all the context one day I'm going to write a whole book on this where Jesus is on the the idea
of love and forgiveness is rooted in Hebrew scriptures it's not Judaism is not a religion of Law and violence and
you know and then New Testament is love Mercy it's it's it's all there God has
used the word hessed loving kindness like that we get that's all that's used all throughout the Old Testament so it's
not just a vengeful God and then a loving Christ it's the the whole way through the Torah the Hebrew prophets
and Jesus saying in order to be children of God yeah there's I idolatry and there's
other but it's how you treat those who are the least among you and all your enemies like and I I love that message
and that's that's really cool yeah so be therefore perfect be therefore loving right be therefore charitable be
therefore keeping uh your fellow man in mind and completely devoted to the cause
of helping alleviate uing Jesus constantly clothed the naked feed you know feed the poor yeah and it's the
same message as you know your faith hope and charity because I mean charity is like the greatest among all of it is charity and that's the same message that
he's giving there it seems right yeah and I you know even even the BYU Counseling Center couple a couple years
ago when I was writing this I noticed they you know put a big blog out Matthew 548 and they they're probably sharing it
with their students who come in and they're all messed up you know with their um you psychologically with their
struggles and their checklist and you know they say you don't have to be perfect yes it says perfect bits of it
like they they do the same thing again there's not a problem with it but I'm just saying just throw it in context
share Luke or share other scriptures emphasize Grace with there's all kinds of you know ways that where we've been
emphasizing Grace with Brad wil Cox's you know talk that everybody's referencing um in recent
years um yeah so it this is just a very simple you know we take a biblical
studies approach what is Christ at least according to his fall followers teaching his first century Jewish audience and it
works with the nephite audience as well be perfect like God and I like we are we love those who hated us Christ is saying
on the cross you know they don't know what they're doing you know uh show mercy and Grace I mean that's that's
that's the Christian message and I wish we you know have that more yeah that's
awesome yeah Trev really good stuff love that I had never heard that before uh and I read a lot and I've never heard
that before so that's uh that's great stuff appreciate you coming in talking about that be therefore loving is the
message there so Trev appreciate it yeah thanks