Matthew

Reggie M. Kidd

Introduction

Of the four canonical Gospels, Matthew's is the only one to use the term church ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 16:18; 18:17). For this and other reasons, Matthew's account has always commended itself as being especially useful to the "church" that Jesus founds in this Gospel. One reason is that as a master artisan — or in his own terms, a steward of old and new (13:52) — Matthew structures his Gospel in a way that ties the Old and New Testaments together as Israel's story and the continuation of Israel's story in the newly emergent church. To that end, Matthew provides richly suggestive patterns for teaching (see below, for his five teaching blocks: the Sermon on the Mount [chaps. 5–7], the mission to Israel [chap. 10], parables of the kingdom [chap. 13], life in the church [chap. 18], and preparation for judgment [chaps. 23–25]).

Another reason that Matthew's Gospel has proved so serviceable for the church's teaching and preaching is its finely balanced sense of Jesus's mission — its sense that God has come among us, first to forgive and heal, and then to remake and refashion. Immanuel has come to take our sin to the cross and then to work in us so that, at the core of our being, we reflect the character of our heavenly Father in what we do. Accordingly, beginning as early as Irenaeus in the second century, Christians have associated Matthew's Gospel with the figure of the "man" in Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4. This profound intuition takes its point of departure from the fact that Matthew begins with Jesus's human genealogy. Matthew's first words in Greek — literally, "A book of genesis" — indicate that he would have us understand that the human race's new genesis takes place now in Jesus. And in the end, there is nothing that makes human beings more radiantly alive than reflecting the character of the God whose image they bear.

Background Issues

Authorship

The "Gospel according to Matthew" never circulated without that title, and has long been believed to have been written by the apostle Matthew. According to Eusebius (fourth century), Papias (second century) received from John the elder (first century) the understanding that Mark wrote his Gospel as "Peter's interpreter" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and that Mark did so "not in ordered form"; then Matthew "gathered together the logia [a term which can refer both to words and to deeds] in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew dialect" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). Early church writers and modern scholars thought that by "Hebrew dialect" Papias meant the Hebrew or Aramaic language. But Matthew's Greek is some of the smoothest in the New Testament; more likely, Papias meant that Matthew's "ordered arrangement" was according to Hebrew sense of style. Thus, for instance, his arrangement (see below) of the deeds and words of Jesus into five blocks that recall the structure of the Torah.

Additionally, Origen (third century) understood Matthew to be "once a tax collector, but later an apostle of Jesus Christ; he published it for those who came to faith from Judaism." It is difficult to know by what authority Origen identifies Matthew as the tax collector — whether he has an external authority, or whether he infers it by observing (as many have since) that Matthew's Gospel alone calls him "the tax collector" when listing him as one of the twelve apostles (Matt. 10:3). Regardless, early church tradition assigned Matthew the symbol of three purses.

C. F. D. Moule's suggestion that Matthew 13:52 is autobiographical is attractive: "Therefore every scribe who has been trained [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] here is cognate both with the word "disciple" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and with Matthew's name ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])] for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old." It is impossible to prove, despite E. J. Goodspeed's proposal, that Matthew is pointing to the sort of note taking or secretarial skills that his craft would have required, now brought into the service of Jesus. Nonetheless, it is just as plausible as (and I suggest more so than) modern theories that bypass historical Matthew — for example, "Matthew" as a written project by a collaborative group (similar to the writings of the Essene community) or a work produced by "a second-generation (Hellenized) Jew." Moreover, if the intention in these theoretical instances was to appropriate the name of one of the Twelve as the author to lend legitimacy to the teaching, one might have expected the use of the name of a more illustrious apostle.

Audience

Because of this Gospel's familiarity with the Jewish world of its day, the scholarly consensus is that Matthew is written to a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian community, one that is grappling with Israel's mission to the nations through Jesus the Messiah. This could be one of any number of churches, from Alexandria, to Jerusalem, to Antioch, Sidon, Tyre, or beyond. Matthew's Gospel itself does not yield many clues, except perhaps that when Matthew notes the spread of Jesus's fame early in his ministry, the Gospel writer notes his fame extending beyond Mark's Galilee (Mark 1:39) or even Luke's Judea (Luke 4:44) to include, of all places, Syria (Matt. 4:23–24). It was there, according to the book of Acts (see esp. Acts 11:19–30; 13–14), that the early church first learned how to bridge the gulf between its Jewish roots and the Gentile mission, and where "the church" was gaining an independent identity as being made up of "Christians." It was there that Matthew's Gospel is first cited, and...