The Use Of Matthew 27:47 As Evidence Of Prayer To Saints

The passage has been brought up by some advocates of praying to saints. I discussed the passage in a post a few years ago.

Keep in mind that Jesus' opponents often accused him of things they and he disapproved of (Matthew 11:19, 12:24). They heard him say "Eli, Eli" (Matthew 27:46), so they had to come up with an explanation. The idea that Jesus' enemies, in the process of misinterpreting what he said, would only attribute to him something that they thought was an acceptable practice, thought was accepted to some significant extent among the Jewish people, or thought Jesus had approved of in the past is ridiculous. It would be like taking 11:19, in the same gospel, as evidence for Jewish and/or Christian support of gluttony and the abuse of alcohol. And the absence of any condemnation of prayer to saints in Matthew 27:47 doesn't tell us that the individuals who made the comment held a positive view of the practice. A lack of condemnation could be a result of agnosticism about the practice or a result of expecting the audience to recognize the problematic nature of the practice without having it explained to them (as in 11:19 and 12:24). Besides, if the individuals who made the comment about Elijah were Romans, what's the relevance of whether they approved of praying to people who are in the afterlife? What Matthew 27:47 tells us is that the concept of prayer to saints was known at the time, but it doesn't tell us whether the concept was viewed positively, neutrally, or negatively or who viewed it that way.

If the passage reflects some degree of Jewish acceptance of prayer to saints, something I see no way to argue for from the passage itself, it falls into the category I discussed in a post earlier this year. Ancient Jewish support for praying to beings other than God was accompanied by Jewish opposition to the practice. That opposition seems to be older, Biblical, and the view that was the dominant one among Christians during the earliest generations of Christianity.

Arguments For Prayer To Saints And Angels In Psalms 103 And 148

Ancient Jewish sources often associated angels with various aspects of the universe that people in the modern world often don't associate angels with, such as stars and weather (e.g., Job 38:7, Revelation 1:20, 12:4-9). Angels were perceived as highly active in the world and responsible for much of what happens in earthly life. It's been suggested that the call for mountains, trees, snow, and other sources to bless and praise God in Psalms 103 and 148 are directed to angels, the angels who have charge over those aspects of life. Supposedly, those references to angels are further evidence that those psalms support prayer to angels. And taking those parts of the psalms as references to angels undermines the appeal to impersonal objects in the psalms as evidence that a rhetorical device (apostrophe) is involved rather than prayer.

Reading Prayer To Saints Into Hippolytus

Prayer to saints is absent and contradicted among the relevant sources during the thousands of years of history of the Biblical era. It's also widely absent and contradicted among the earliest extrabiblical Christians. For the evidence to that effect, see here.

So, advocates of the practice have resorted to claiming that it's supported by material like the Mount of Transfiguration account in the gospels and Matthew 27:47. They also appeal to various apocryphal documents, anonymous inscriptions and manuscript fragments, etc. I've responded to such arguments in other posts. Since the lack of support for prayer to saints among the earlier church fathers is so problematic for advocates of the practice, they read it into some of those fathers to try to make the practice seem more credible. Among the earlier fathers, Hippolytus is the one who's most abused in this context. And I've addressed those abuses in other posts over the years, like here.

In the remainder of this post, I want to focus on a few other efforts advocates of prayer to saints have made to find the practice in Hippolytus. I'll start by quoting the relevant passage with emphasis added (in bold, italics, and underlining):