The Gospel According to Matthew – The New Testament In Its World – NT Wright and Mike Bird

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.

All the material above is quoted directly from “The New Testament In Its World,” by NT Wright and Mike Bird, SPCK publishing, 2019