the seat of honor: the prominent synagogue seat that marked whoever sat in it as a person of rank
The word is a compound of two everyday Greek words, one meaning "first" and one meaning "chair." The seat it names is first in prestige, not first in a row or first in time. Each of its four appearances places it in a synagogue, where a few prominent seats stood near the chest that held the scrolls, turned toward the congregation, so that whoever sat there was in full view of the whole gathering.
All four appearances also make the seat the object of a craving rather than a plain fact about furniture. Jesus criticizes religious teachers who love these seats, and three of the four passages set them beside the best place at a dinner party (πρωτοκλισία), then beside respectful greetings in the marketplace and flattering titles. Together that list describes a scoreboard of public recognition, and this word names one square on it.
Nothing in the word itself is critical. It simply names the best seat, much as English speakers talk about a place at the head table. The sting comes from what the Gospels put around it: these are the seats people wanted, in the one room where their neighbors would watch them take one.
Outside the New Testament the word is hard to find. The standard Greek dictionaries record no use of it before the Gospels, and afterward it turns up mainly among Christian writers, who made it a label for church leaders who argued over precedence. The ordinary Greek word for a chair (καθέδρα) carries none of this weight, and it is the plain seat this compound is built on.
Disputed
Whether the charge that scribes and Pharisees craved the chief seats reports first-century synagogue practice or reflects the later conflicts of the communities in which the Gospels were written.
- majorityHonorific seating was a genuine feature of ancient synagogues, attested by benches and stone chairs in excavated buildings and by inscriptions granting a reserved seat to benefactors, so the criticism rests on a real social practice even though the sweeping portrait of a whole group is polemical.; L. I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, 2005); R. Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel (Brill, 1988); A. J. Saldarini, 'Delegitimation of Leaders in Matthew 23', CBQ 54 (1992): 659-680; A. Runesson, 'Rethinking Early Jewish-Christian Relations: Matthean Community History as Pharisaic Intragroup Conflict', JBL 127 (2008): 95-132
- minorityThe specific accusations in Matthew 23:5 to 7, seats included, belong to the setting of the Gospel writer and his community's quarrel with the synagogue rather than to the historical Jesus.; E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Fortress, 1985); E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE to 66 CE (SCM, 1992)