INTRODUCTION
The gospel of Matthew was the early church’s favourite book. It was the most quoted, most copied, most read, and the most preached Christian book of the early centuries.
This immense popularity can easily be accounted for.
First, Matthew served then, as it can still serve, as a great instruction manual on the person of Jesus and the nature of discipleship. Matthew presents Jesus as a new Moses and the long-awaited Davidic deliverer. His Jesus embodies God’s presence, ushers in the kingdom of heaven on earth, and by his death brings the forgiveness of sins. The five major discourses in Matthew’s gospel function as something of a manifesto for the church, outlining its vocation, its mission, its way of life, and its hopes. The discourses define the way of ‘righteousness’ that should characterize kingdom-people. It is above all a teaching book about how to be a follower of Jesus. According to Edouard Massaux: ‘Until the end of the second century, the first gospel remained the gospel par excellence. People looked to Mt. for teaching which conditioned Christian behavior so that the Gospel of Mt. became the norm for Christian life.
Second, Matthew enabled the church to hold on to its Jewish heritage even while looking ahead to a gentile future. Matthew was written at a precarious time; that, of course, could mean any time from Easter onwards, but many suppose that a likely setting for Matthew is in the period AD 80–100, when those Jewish Jesus-followers who survived the catastrophe of AD 70 in Judea found themselves marginalized or even expelled by local Jewish communities. They were at the same time witnessing an influx of gentile converts into churches in the eastern part of the empire. We have to remember that for much of early Christianity, certainly during Paul’s work in the 40s and 50s and certainly reflected in Matthew, one of the main presenting issues was the abrasive relationship between following Jesus and the culture and expectations of the Jewish world.
The questions faced were difficult, even paradoxical. How does a Messiah-believer lay claim to Israelite ancestry, when this particular ‘Messiah’ and his followers have been rejected by most Jews? Or else, what kind of people are we when our God is Israel’s God, the Messiah and his apostles were Jewish, but most of our members are now gentiles? This is where Matthew comes into his element. Matthew sees the identity of the Christian community as authorized by the Jewish scriptures, which find their fulfilment in Jesus the Messiah, and in this fulfilment gentiles come to the God of Israel through Jesus, Israel’s Messiah. In other words, in Matthew’s gospel, christology, story, and social identity are all interwoven to demonstrate that the church, comprised of Messiah-believers whether Jewish or non-Jewish, are not deviant apostates, but are legitimate heirs of Israel’s heritage and stand at the centre of God’s saving purposes.
CONTEXTUAL AND CRITICAL MATTERS
Origins of Matthew
This gospel is sometimes called ‘the first gospel’, because of its place in the emerging canon of scripture. Many earlier readers reckoned it was also the first to be written; but not many today would agree. The early church ascribed the book to ‘Matthew’, identifying him as the tax-collector whom Jesus called to follow him, and who was later appointed one of the twelve apostles. But the book itself is strictly anonymous. Nothing substantial in it identifies the author as Matthew the Galilean tax-collector. In addition, one might wonder why Matthew would rely on the gospel of Mark as a major source for his book, as most suppose, since Matthew was an eye-witness but Mark most likely was not. (That is one of several reasons for the ‘minority’ position that still holds to Matthean priority.) Perhaps a disciple of Matthew took Matthew’s teachings and combined them with the basic outline and content of Mark’s gospel—though of course guesses like that prove nothing. If Matthew was then associated with one or more of these non-Markan sources, it would have been natural to name the gospel after him.
So what can we say about the sources of Matthew’s gospel? He incorporates 90 per cent of Mark’s gospel, usually in an abridged form—assuming ‘Markan priority’, which will be discussed below. What Matthew thought of Mark’s work is a good question: some think Matthew was revising it, others that he was aiming to replace it. One likely answer was given a century ago by F. C. Burkitt: ‘Matthew is a fresh edition of Mark, revised, rearranged, and enriched with new material.’ Matthew basically follows Mark’s outline, but makes subtle changes. He tones down the ‘secrecy’ motif; he plays down the dullness of the disciples; he stresses prophetic fulfilment, intensifies eschatological hopes, and edits episodes that might offend certain readers, not least anxious ‘Jewish Christians’. Above all, Matthew supplements Mark’s story with extra unique material (usually referred to as ‘M’; see box: ‘Matthew’s unique material’) and some materials shared with Luke, these last being possibly derived from the common source that scholars have called ‘Q’, or else explicable in terms of Luke’s use of Matthew.
Date
If Matthew used Mark, as normally assumed, that might help with dating—the caveat being that the dating of Mark, too, is disputed. In any case, many assume that Mark was written in around AD 70, so that Matthew, notionally dependent on Mark, would have to have been written sometime later, though how much later is open to debate. An upper limit for the composition of Matthew is around AD 117, since Ignatius of Antioch cited Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism in one of his letters. In addition, the Didache (‘Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’) seems to have absorbed distinctly Matthean features, and though this too is disputed, the Didache is normally associated with Syria around AD 100–20 or even earlier. So, most likely, Matthew can be dated between AD 70 and 100.
Matthew and Jewish sectarianism
One plausible suggestion is that Matthew was written in a Greek-speaking urban centre in Syro-Palestine, among a network of churches that included Jews and gentiles, in proximity to a sizable Jewish community influenced by Pharisaic/ rabbinic leaders. Such Jewish groups would retain their horrified resentment of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. This description would fit many places and times, but one possible guess would be Syrian Antioch15 in the 80s of the first century.
We have to remember that the Pharisees and Jewish Christians were the only Jewish sects that survived the Roman subjugation of Judea and the sacking of Jerusalem. On the eve of the siege of Jerusalem, the Jerusalem church is said to have fled to the Trans-Jordan. Many Jewish Christians probably settled thereafter in places like Antioch, where other believers had already migrated as a result of earlier persecutions. Later Jewish legend suggests that, after the Jewish revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem, Johanan ben-Zakkai established a new Pharisaic/ rabbinic academy in the coastal town of Jamnia (Yavneh), west of Jerusalem. The new academy gradually came to exert authority over Jews living in Palestine, and at some point purportedly issued a new version of the ‘Eighteen Benedictions’, including a curse on heretics in general and Christians in particular.
We have to remember that the Pharisees and Jewish Christians were the only Jewish sects that survived the Roman subjugation of Judea and the sacking of Jerusalem. On the eve of the siege of Jerusalem, the Jerusalem church is said to have fled to the Trans-Jordan. Many Jewish Christians probably settled thereafter in places like Antioch, where other believers had already migrated as a result of earlier persecutions. Later Jewish legend suggests that, after the Jewish revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem, Johanan ben-Zakkai established a new Pharisaic/ rabbinic academy in the coastal town of Jamnia (Yavneh), west of Jerusalem. The new academy gradually came to exert authority over Jews living in Palestine, and at some point purportedly issued a new version of the ‘Eighteen Benedictions’, including a curse on heretics in general and Christians in particular. Many have supposed that Matthew reflects the socio-religious situation that would then arise, in which a Pharisaic group like that at Jamnia was trying to reconstruct and consolidate a Jewish way of life from which its central symbol, the Temple, had been removed.
We have to be cautious here. The academy at Jamnia was only one of the emerging Jewish centres. It had no immediate capacity to dictate policy to other Jewish communities. There is no evidence for a widespread purge of Jewish Christians—or, indeed, for the promulgation in that period of a ‘benediction’ designed to exclude Jesus-followers, who would be unable to call down a curse on themselves. That said, we have reason to suspect that the pre-70 opposition to Jewish Christianity was intensified in the post-70 period. Jewish Christians were flogged in synagogues, as we know already from Paul. Many, reading between the lines of Matthew and John, have supposed that Christians were being driven out of synagogues, though that historical proposal is in danger of circularity. There was certainly internecine rivalry between Jews and Christians in Asia Minor, and at a later point Christians were indeed cursed as part of synagogal prayers. Both groups—the Pharisaic/rabbinic leadership and the Jewish Christians—were trying to reconfigure their beliefs and communities without the Temple; the Jewish Christians were known to be associated with an increasing number of gentile Christ-believers; the Pharisees were in the germinal stages of transforming the debris of the second-Temple Jewish world into what would become ‘rabbinic Judaism’. Clashes were inevitable. Our problem is that all of this is very difficult to date.
The conflict between the two groups is reflected in numerous passages in Matthew, though once again there is a danger of circularity. Some of the regular arguments appear to grow from an unwillingness to ascribe any great tension to the time, or the teaching, of Jesus himself. (The problem with that, of course, is that it becomes much harder to explain why Jesus incurred opposition, death threats, and finally crucifixion.) But, whatever we make of it, we find in Matthew (1) an emphasis on the Jewish rejection of Jesus; (2) a ferocious denunciation of the Pharisees; (3) a defence against the kinds of criticisms that Jews were making against Jewish Christians; and (4) an alternative vision for Israel, based on the fulfilment in Jesus of the hope of Israel. Matthew can be read as explaining that the destruction of the Temple was warranted by the priestly opposition to Jesus. He stresses that Torah was to be fulfilled by Jesus’ love ethic, rather than the Pharisaic halakhah. He tells how God, through Jesus, has included gentiles in the kingdom. Matthew has written an apology for what might be called ‘messianic Judaism’ as the proper heir of the older Jewish way. The fact that most of this could equally well be said of Paul should make us wary of concluding that it must all be taking place after AD 70; but the case can still be made that that is the more likely time for the book to be written.
So did Matthew himself, his initial audience, or his implied readers think of themselves as still in some way part of the social fabric of Judaism centred on the synagogue? Or have they been expelled, and forced now to live and worship elsewhere? We should note that in geographical terms there was no ‘Jewish state’ as such: Judea and Galilee did not function like that. But was Matthew’s church effectively a sect within Judaism, engaging in intra-factional polemics, or have Matthew and his church been ejected, so that they are now defining themselves over against some kind of Jewish world? ‘Judaism’ itself was not, of course, a rigidly fixed entity with well-defined dogmas and policed social boundaries. Indeed, as we have seen, the word ‘Judaism’ itself referred at this time not to a ‘religion’ but to the activity of zealous propagation of Jewish allegiance and symbolic life. In addition, leaving ‘Judaism’ was not like leaving a Baptist church for a Presbyterian one. To be excluded from the Jewish world meant a painful break in the network of family, religious, social, and commercial relationships. It frequently entailed a form of social death with all the shame and shunning that went along with that.
To complicate matters, however—and perhaps to undermine this sketch altogether—we know that Christians and Jews, while becoming in some ways distinct from one another, still retained a certain family resemblance, and remained in close social proximity, with many people moving to and fro between the two groups and trying to belong to both. This is evidenced by Ignatius of Antioch’s complaint against those Christians who fraternized with Jews or who followed Jewish customs; something people would not have worried about had the two communities been isolated from one another. This situation continued for many generations, with Chrysostom in the fourth century facing similar problems to those of Ignatius. So the Christian ‘break with Judaism’—the so-called ‘parting of the ways’—was never final or complete, at least not until the fourth century.33
Has this really helped us to locate Matthew? Perhaps, though the question is probably more complicated than is often made out. Matthew is most likely written in, and for, an environment where Jewish Christians and their gentile converts wanted to remain in some sense part of Jewish communities, but where there was mounting pressure for them to be expelled. Perhaps that had already begun to happen. But this generalized conclusion does not help with dating as much as has sometimes been thought. The Pauline parallel suggests that much of this might have been true already in the 30s, 40s, and 50s; the fall of Jerusalem suggests that it might have become more acute in the 70s or 80s. Ancient historians often have to conclude that we do not know.
Purpose
So why did Matthew write his book? Clearly, to draw out the manifold ways in which the story of Jesus of Nazareth brought the long and prophecy-laden story of Israel to its God-ordained goal. This would mean simultaneously offering a manifesto for Jewish believers to retain their allegiance to their ancestral scriptures and controlling narrative, and outlining the way in which they should also embrace the new world in which Jesus had been revealed as Israel’s Messiah and as the Emmanuel, the living embodiment of Israel’s God. This would also mean effectively offering an apology, before the watching Jewish world, for following Jesus, presenting this as the fulfilment of Israel’s heritage, the true form of loyalty to Israel’s ancestral calling and hopes. Most Jewish groups, after all, were struggling with this kind of question at the time. The Dead Sea Scrolls advance an agenda like that; Bar-Kochba would claim in the 130s that his group was the true fulfilment of Israel’s purposes; the rabbis who compiled the Mishnah were saying ‘this is what true allegiance to the Torah should look like’. Matthew would fit right into this picture, as (once more) would Paul.
Finally, Matthew is quite clearly offering a manual for discipleship, for a church living as a minority group in a hostile majority culture.
- Infancy narrative (1.1—2.23)
Matthew’s opening, so apparently boring to a modern western reader, would be electrifying for a first-century Jew. He traces Jesus’ genealogy in three stages: Abraham to David, David to the exile, and the exile to Jesus—with fourteen generations in each. In other words, there have been six ‘sevens’ so far . . . and now comes the goal, the perfection, the seventh seven, the aim of it all. The genealogy summarizes Israel’s history, climaxing in Jesus.
Abraham of course is the start; Jesus’ Davidic descent is stressed by Matthew even more than by the other evangelists; but what about the exile? As we’ve seen earlier (see chapter 5), many Jews of the second-Temple period regarded themselves as, in a sense, still in exile, still suffering the result of Israel’s ‘sins’, languishing under pagan powers. The long story of Abraham’s people, Matthew is saying, will come to fulfilment with a new David who will rescue his people from their exile, that is, ‘save his people from their sins’.
The Matthean birth story describes how a Galilean virgin named Mary, though pledged to Joseph, became pregnant ‘through the holy spirit’. Joseph was planning to set aside the marriage privately, on suspicion of infidelity, until an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and told him that ‘what is conceived in her is from the holy spirit’. Matthew adds an editorial remark that Jesus’ birth fulfils the words of Isaiah 7.14 about the virgin bearing a child who is to be called ‘Immanuel’, which means ‘God with us’ (1.18–23). This is the more interesting in that we know of no pre-Christian readers of Isaiah who took the passage in this way. It seems far more likely that the story of Jesus’ extraordinary conception generated a search for relevant texts rather than (as has often been suggested) the other way round.
Jesus is born in Bethlehem. Matthew follows this with the story of the visit of the Magi from the east (2.1–12), the flight of the holy family from Judea to Egypt in order to escape Herod’s Pharaoh-esque attempt to kill the child (2.13–18), and their return to Nazareth after Herod’s death (2.19–23). Matthew peppers this story with Old Testament citations that identify Jesus as either rehearsing a biblical pattern or else fulfilling prophetic promises for Israel’s deliverance. The narrative exhibits several points of contact with exodus and exile traditions where Jesus’ infancy recapitulates a new exodus and the end of exile, marking him out further as the true representative of Israel (Mt. 2.13–18).
Jewish Features Unique to the Gospel of Matthew:
| Source | Subject |
| Mt. 1—2 | Jesus presented as a new Moses |
| Mt. 1.1; 9.27; 12.23; 15.22; 21.9, 15; 22.42 | Emphasis on Jesus as the ‘son of David’ |
| Mt. 2.4; 3.7 etc. | Increased focus on Pharisees |
| Mt. 3.2; 4.17; 5.3, 10, 19, 20, etc. | Matthew prefers ‘kingdom of heaven’ over ‘kingdom of God’ with ‘heaven’ functioning as a circumlocution for ‘God’ |
| Mt. 4.5; 27.53. | Jerusalem is described as the ‘holy city’ |
| Mt. 5.32 | The condition ‘except for sexual immorality’ reflects Shammaite teaching on the grounds for divorce |
| Mt. 5.47; 6.7 | Righteous behaviour contrasted with what the ‘pagans’ or ‘gentiles’ do |
| Mt. 6.2–18 | Contrast of synagogue behaviour with Christian behaviour |
| Mt. 9.13; 12.7 | Contest with Jewish leaders over the meaning of Hos. 6.6, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’, in the post-Temple era |
| Mt. 10.5; 15.24 | Jesus’ ministry restricted to ‘the house of Israel’ |
| Mt. 13.52 | Matthew’s ideal disciple, and perhaps an explanation of what he thought he was doing, is: ‘Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.’ |
| Mt. 15.17 | Omits Mark’s parenthetical remark ‘In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean’ from Mk. 7.19 |
| Mt. 15.22 | Changes Mark’s ‘Syro-Phoenician woman’ (a Roman designation to distinguish such people from Libyo-Phoenicians) to ‘Canaanite woman’ |
| Mt. 16.17–18; 18.18 | Language of ‘binding’ and ‘loosing’ reflects Jewish background |
| Mt. 23.3 | Enjoins obedience to those who sit in Moses’ seat |
| Mt. 23.5 | Mention of Jewish dress including ‘phylacteries’ and ‘tassels’ |
| Mt. 23.7–8 | The honorific nature of the title ‘Rabbi’ |
| Mt. 23.40 | Disciples should pray that the flight from Jerusalem is not on a sabbath |
Following Davies and Allison 1988–97, 1.26–7 with further additions.
- Beginning of Jesus’ ministry (3.1—7.29)
John the Baptist now appears on the scene as the Isaianic ‘voice’ crying in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord by preaching repentance and administering baptism. The Baptist’s message was that judgment was imminent. No-one would escape it by claiming Abrahamic descent, so they had better produce fruit in keeping with repentance, with that ‘turning back to the Lord’ spoken of in Deuteronomy. Someone was about to arrive—a ‘Coming One’—who would usher in a time of purification. His ‘baptism’ would be one of spirit and fire.
Jesus then presents himself for baptism, leaving John somewhat embarrassed. ‘I need to be baptized by you,’ he says, ‘and do you come to me?’ Jesus replies that it must be done to ‘fulfil all righteousness’; meaning apparently that Jesus’ humble submission to baptism symbolizes his vocation, the task to which he has been appointed by God the father. When Jesus is then baptized, the holy spirit descends on him like a dove, and a voice from heaven, quoting Psalm 2.7, announces God’s pleasure with the divine son (3.13–17).
Jesus is then led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil (4.1–11). The temptations focus on the radical distortion and perversion of the vocation to which Jesus had pledged his loyalty in baptism and which had just been confirmed by the voice from above: is he really God’s son? If so, should he ‘prove’ it by a self-serving use of his miraculous powers? Each time, Jesus resists the devil by quoting Deuteronomy. As throughout the stories of his birth and baptism, the temptation narrative thus portrays Jesus as the true Israelite. In the words of Terence Donaldson:
Matthew, therefore, presents Jesus as one who in his experience recapitulates the story of Israel. Like Israel of old, Jesus has been called by God out of Egypt to a life of humble obedience; like Israel, this calling was put to the test in the wilderness. The hope of the story is that, unlike Israel, Jesus will remain faithful where Israel was disobedient.
Matthew then offers a snapshot of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, seeing Jesus’ work in the traditional tribal areas of Zebulun and Naphtali as the fulfilment of Isaiah 9.1–2, with the great light shining on the people as Jesus announces the inbreaking kingdom and summons people to repent (4.12–17). He then calls two fishermen, Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, to follow him and ‘fish for people’ (4.18–22). The narrative rounds off with a description of Jesus’ public ministry, attracting crowds from Jewish and gentile regions (4.23–25).
The first discourse, the Sermon on the Mount (chs. 5—7), features Jesus on a mountain, like a new Moses, giving the people a new Torah (5.1–2). Jesus teaches a series of beatitudes (5.3–12), calls disciples to be salt and light (5.3–16), and then clarifies that his teaching fulfils rather than nullifies the Torah (5.17–20). Thereafter comes a series of antitheses, marked by the formula ‘You have heard that it was said . . . but I tell you’, which mostly intensify Torah commands, closing with an exhortation to imitate the perfection of God the father (5.21–48). This is followed by a call for traditional Jewish piety (almsgiving, prayer, and fasting) but without pretentiousness or hypocrisy (6.1–18). What matters above all is God’s kingdom (6.19–34). The ‘golden rule’—treating others the way one wants to be treated—is seen as the fulfilment of the law and the prophets (7.1–12, echoing 5.17). The discourse ends with a variation of the Jewish ‘two-ways’ sketch of ethical teaching,40 offering a series of contrasts: wide and narrow gates, wolves and sheep, fruitless and fruitful trees, mere profession versus actual devotion, and the foolish and wise builders (7.13–27). What strikes the crowds about all this is not just the particular teachings, but the authority with which Jesus delivers them (7.28–29).
- Revelation of Jesus’ authority (8.1—11.1)
That note of authority continues in the next section, with stories of dramatic healings that lead to further teaching on the kingdom (for instance, its extension to the gentiles) and discipleship. Matthew links the healings to the Isaianic prophecies about the Servant who ‘took up our infirmities and bore our diseases’ (Mt. 8.17 = Isa. 53.4). The challenge of discipleship is encapsulated in the story of the boat caught in the storm (8.23–27). Jesus’ offer of forgiveness, and his fraternizing with tax-collectors and ‘sinners’, produces strong opposition (9.1–13), and Jesus insists that the new life he is bringing cannot be constrained by the old practices such as fasting (9.14–17). More healings follow in chapter 9, leading Matthew to portray Jesus as the Davidic shepherd-king of Israel, who looks upon the crowds with compassion, like sheep without a shepherd, and whose harvest is in urgent need of workers (9.36–38).
Jesus then appoints the Twelve as ‘apostles’, with authority to cast out impure spirits, to heal the sick, and preach the kingdom of heaven (10.1–4). This leads in to the gospel’s second great discourse (10.5–42), containing instructions for the Twelve in their urgent and dangerous itinerant ministry. For the moment, this is confined to ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (10.6); Jesus has already predicted the ingathering of gentiles (8.11), but this will not happen until after the climactic events in Jerusalem (28.19). The apostles must not be afraid, but must remember that the response they get is the equivalent of a response to Jesus himself.
- Jesus’ ministry causes division (11.2—13.53)
All this raises for Matthew’s readers, as for Jesus’ contemporaries, the question of whether Jesus really is Israel’s Messiah. Even John the Baptist, now in prison, sends messengers to ask Jesus if he really is the ‘one to come’, namely, the Messiah. Matthew stresses that Jesus really was the Messiah. But Jesus was operating off a different script, a different way of understanding Israel’s story. He wasn’t thinking of himself in terms of Elijah calling down fire from heaven. He was thinking of passages like Isaiah 35, the great prophecies of what would happen when Israel was not so much judged and condemned, as restored after judgment. A time when the exile would be over, the blind and the lame would be healed, and God’s people would be set free at last.
Conflict, however, continues, not least over things Jesus did on the sabbath. His many healings, particularly exorcisms, prompt his opponents to charge that he is in league with the devil, and Jesus denounces such talk as blasphemy against God’s spirit (12.22–32). If the Pharisees want a ‘sign’, he will give them the sign of Jonah, ‘three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’, a reference to his coming Passion and resurrection. He compares the current generation to a man who has been exorcized, but the demon has returned and repossessed him.
Then comes the third major discourse of Matthew’s gospel, a series of parables about the kingdom of heaven (and we remind ourselves that ‘kingdom of heaven’ in Matthew, as with its equivalent ‘kingdom of God’ in the other gospels, does not refer to ‘heaven’ as the final post-mortem destination of God’s people but to the arrival of God’s sovereign, saving, ‘heavenly’ rule on earth itself—as in the prayer which Jesus taught).
BLAST FROM THE PAST
Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. AD 350–428) was the bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia in the late fourth and early fifth century and was a popular teacher in the eastern churches. His account of Peter’s confession in Matthew 16.16–18 sounds like a proto-protestant interpretation by identifying the ‘rock’ principally as Peter’s confession and only secondarily as Peter himself. Theodore wrote:
This is not the property of Peter alone, but it came about on behalf of every human being. Having said that his confession is a rock, [Jesus] stated that upon this rock I will build my church. This means he will build his church upon this same confession and faith. For this reason, addressing the one who first confessed him with the title, on account of his confession he applied to him this authority, too, as something that would become his, speaking of the common and special good of the church as pertaining to him alone.*
This seems, in fact, to have been the dominant interpretation of this passage right up to the Roman Catholic ‘counter-Reformation’ in the second half of the sixteenth century.†
- Cited in Simonetti 2002, 45–6.
5. Jesus and his disciples (13.54—19.2)
The polarizing nature of Jesus’ ministry is expressed through a series of vivid episodes. These include the rejection of Jesus in Nazareth, his home town (13.54–58), Herod’s suggestion that Jesus was John the Baptist risen from the dead, leading to the morbid side-story of how Herod had the Baptist put to death (14.1–13), followed by the feeding of the five thousand (14.14–21). Jesus then stills a storm on the Sea of Galilee (Peter having tried and failed to walk on the water), inducing awe and worship (14.22–33). When he and the disciples land in Gennesaret, the people recognize Jesus and bring out their sick for him to heal them (14.34–36).
The scene changes abruptly to another confrontation, this time over purity traditions (15.1–20). Jesus then withdraws northwards, outside the land, where his normal principle of working only with Jewish people is overridden by the witty persistence of a mother on behalf of her daughter (15.21–28). Returning to Galilee, Jesus once again heals many sick people, and once again feeds a large crowd (15.29–39).
Matthew switches back to the opposition with a strange coalition of Pharisees and Sadducees demanding a sign from Jesus, no doubt hoping to bring a charge against him that he was a false prophet, using signs and wonders to lead Israel astray. But Jesus once again will only offer them the ‘sign of Jonah’ (16.1–4; see 12.39), warning the disciples about the Pharisees’ teaching, which like yeast would work its way into their minds (16.5–12)
All this prepares for Matthew’s version of the scene at Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus elicits from Peter the confession ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God’ (16.16). Jesus responds by assuring Peter that he can only say this because God has shown it to him, and that he will have a crucial role in the establishment of the kingdom (see ‘Blast from the past: Theodore of Mopsuestia on Peter’s confession’).42 Jesus is building, not a physical city, but a community of allegiance (16.13–20).
As soon as Peter has recognized him as Messiah, Jesus insists that his vocation, precisely as Messiah, is to go to Jerusalem, not to conquer like a military general, but to be rejected, killed, and raised up on the third day. Peter tries to talk him out of this; but, echoing chapter 4, Jesus rejects Peter’s protest as a satanic temptation. Following him will mean denying oneself, taking up one’s cross, and accompanying him to crucifixion! (16.21–28).
If there is a common theme in Matthew 14—17, it might be the mission of Jesus to bring Israel to its appointed eschatological goal of national restoration (especially 16.18; 17.11–13) while Israel’s leaders conspicuously reject Jesus’ claims and his message (especially 16.1–4). If Jesus is to reconstitute Israel around himself, renew the covenant community, and rebuild the nation on messianic foundations, then he must also outline the manner of intramural life that characterizes this community.
All the material above is quoted directly from “The New Testament In Its World,” by NT Wright and Mike Bird, SPCK publishing, 2019
The Carpenter's Nail 