Introduction:
The Teachings of Matthew: The Gospel according to Matthew is the first book in the New Testament, and also serves as a bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The gospel tells us of Jesus and his teachings. one of Jesus’ disciples, and it circulated anonymously (Harris 149). The message in this gospel was compiled to minister to a Jewish and Jewish-Christian community when tensions between early Christians and postwar Jewish leaders aggravated bitter controversy. The Gospel of Matthew was written as an encouragement to the Greek-speaking Jewish Christians and Gentiles who were, at least partly, Torah observant during the 80s C.E. probably at Antioch in Syria (Harris 148). The teachings of Matthew gave special attention to presenting Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, in whom the writers of the Old Testament prophesied would come true (Matthew 1:21-22). From the onset, Matthew established Jesus’ messianic credentials by listing a record of his genealogy in Matthew 1:1-17. Matthew wanted to present Jesus’ life in the context of Biblical Law and prophecy (Harris 149). Throughout the entire Gospel, Matthew highlights Jesus’ execution of ancient predictions, frequently emphasizing the connection between Jesus and the assurances made to Israel, for instance, the royal dynasty of David. Matthew used a literary formula in his teachings that made the connection between prophecy and specific events in Jesus’ life.
The Sermon on the Mount:
The Blessed Sayings (The Beatitudes): A positional statement and a consequence. The word blessed may be translated as happy, blessed, to be envied – (“blessed”) describes a believer in an enviable position from receiving God’s provisions that extend His grace. This happens with receiving the Lord’s birthings of faith. The concept is related to the theological idea of sanctification. Sermon on the Mount (continued): the role of judgment. Define the meaning of justice. receiving the attitude and basis of prayer: The entrance, the consequences, and the foundation. Life in the Kingdom of God. The narrative of His ministry. the centurion and a healing justification for the reader. healing of Peter’s mother-in-law. discipleship and its cost. the stilling of the storm. healing of the paralytic.The tradition of Papias: Reference to Matthew in Aramaic or Hebrew. The reference is not clear as to whether it refers to language or style.
Date:
Matthew would be written after Mark. His reference to Jesus’s predictive prophecies regarding the destruction of Jerusalem would indicate a time before the destruction of Jerusalem. Matthew’s use of the idea of church and similar expressions by Paul would indicate the Gospel would have been written before the eighties and nineties of the first century.
Approving of the Temple Tax:
Jesus in Matthew approves of the temple tax in Matt 17:24-27. While it is of course conceivable that Matthew is simply passing on Jesus’ tradition faithfully, the issue is that the temple tax after 70 CE became a tax for the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome. teaches that Jewish Christians should not contribute to their fellow Jew’s rejection of the gospel by refusing to pay the Temple tax. This exhortation not only shows Matthews’ concern to win Jews. It specifically favors a date of writing before AD 70; for after the destruction of God’s temple in Jerusalem. Surely Matthew does not include this passage to support the upkeep of a pagan temple, for then the argument implies that the disciples are sons of the pagan God.
Purpose:
Matthew emphasizes the ethical content of Jesus’s teaching to strengthen Jewish Christians and how Jesus is the true fulfillment of God’s prophesied Messiah. To announce that the Kingdom of God is at hand, to demonstrate the love of God to His people, that the promise of the Father to redeem mankind has come, and to proclaim the message of Jesus Christ to the world.
Light to the Gentiles :
Finally, Matthew’s reading of Scripture opens the narrative of God’s mercy to embrace the Gentiles. Indeed, he intimates that it has always been Israel’s special destiny to bear God’s light to the nations and that this destiny has now come to fruition in the mission that Jesus has initiated. The Isaianic eschatological vision of the nations bringing tribute and coming to worship the God of Israel is adumbrated in Matthew’s story of the magi, who say to Herod, “We have seen his star at its rising, and we have come to worship him” . This artful story – without the quotation of a proof text about Gentiles , already prefigures Jesus’ sovereignty over all nations, which is explicitly declared in the conclusion of Matthew’s narrative . Matthew’s interest in the Gentile mission is foreshadowed once again in the formula quotation that accompanies the beginning of Jesus’ Galilean ministry .Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: “Land of Zebulon, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles – the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and the shadow of death a light has dawned.”
The Sermon on the Mount(part 2) :
Sermon on the Mount that he has come not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it (Mt 5:17). Yet precisely this saying suggests that we must reckon with a Matthean hermeneutical program considerably more comprehensive than a collection of a dozen or so proof texts. In what sense does Jesus fulfill the Law? If Jesus has come to fulfill every jot and tittle of the Law (Mt 5:18), we should expect Matthew to develop a far more wide-ranging account of the accordance between Scripture and Gospel. And indeed, that is just what we find in this narrative: A diverse and complex use of Scripture. According to Senior’s tally, there are sixty-one Old Testament quotations in the Gospel. That means that the formula quotations constitute, even by the most generous estimate, only about one-fifth of Matthew’s total. And that does not even begin to reckon with the hundreds of more indirect Old Testament allusions in the story. Above and beyond the question of citations of particular texts, we must reckon also with Matthew’s use of typology, his deft narration of tales that Senior (1997:115) describes as “shadow stories from the Old Testament”. Through this narrative device, with or without explicit citation, the reader is encouraged to see Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament precursors, particularly Moses, David, and Isaiah’s Servant figure. It is of course impossible to survey all this material in the present chapter, but we shall examine a few key passages that shed light on Matthew’s strategies for reading Scripture. story. From the founding promise to Abraham there is an ascending movement to the Davidic kingship (Mt 1:2-6a), then a decline into exile (Mt 1:6b-11), followed by a period of obscurity awaiting the advent of the Messiah (Mt 1:12-16). It is very striking that.Moses does not figure in this sketch of the plot of Israel’s story; it is a story about promise, kingship, exile, and return – a story in which the Law of Sinai plays no explicit part. This does not mean, of course, that Matthew has no interest in the Mosaic Law – quite the contrary. Nonetheless, his narrative strategy of beginning with the genealogy has the effect of highlighting Jesus’ identity as a messianic king, rather than as a lawgiver. The strong emphasis given to Israel’s exile in Matthew’s genealogy imparts a particular shape to the history that the reader is asked to remember: the story of Israel is a story that juxtaposes God’s covenant faithfulness (as signified by the promise to Abraham and the promise to David) of an everlasting kingdom [2 Sm 7:12-14]) to Israel’s unfaithfulness (as signified by David’s sinful taking of the wife of Uriah [Mt 1:6, alluding to 2 Sm 11-12] and by the checkered history of the kings that followed him, leading up to the deportation to Babylon). Thus, the genealogy functions for the reader who remembers the complexity of the stories evoked by Matthew’s list of names, as a “Sündenspiegel ” in which Israel sees its sins reflected (Alkier 2002:20). Yet, at the same time, the structure of the genealogy clearly points forward in hope, for it leads finally to “the Messiah ” Jesus, the one who “will save his people from their sins ‘ (Mt 1:21) (Rapchinski 2004). Here we see an example of the hermeneutical significance of the genealogy: it compels the reader to understand that the “sins” from which God’s people are saved are not merely petty individual transgressions of a scrupulous legal code, but rather the national sins of injustice and idolatry that finally led to the collapse of the Davidic monarchy and the Babylonian captivity. Finally, Matthew’s genealogy introduces four anomalies into the story, through the appearance of four women in the list of Jesus’ ancestors: Tamar (Mt 1:3), Rahab (Mt 1:5), Ruth (Mt 1:5), and Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah (Mt 1:6). Since the names of women were not ordinarily included in genealogical lists, the reader might well wonder why these four are singled out particularly because of the omission of well-known matriarchs such as Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. It is sometimes suggested that each of the four women mentioned by Matthew was in some way involved in unusual or disreputable sexual activity – thus providing the background for an apologetic reading of the story of Jesus’ mother Mary (Mt 1:16), who was also suspected of sexual impropriety (Mt 1:18-25). If the Abrahamic-Davidic line was carried forward to the Messiah through these women of questionable virtue, so the argument goes, then we should not be surprised if doubt attends the reputation of the Messiah’s mother as well. Yet, anyone who took offense at these women and their offspring would be “depreciating what God had chosen to bless” (see Davies & Allison 1988:171). It is by no means clear, however, that Ruth should be included in a list of women accused of sexual irregularities. Additionally, in the case of the story of David and Bathsheba, it is David who is singled out as a sinner; that is where all the emphasis is placed in the canonical narrative, as shown with particular clarity in 2 Samuel 12:1-15. The story places no blame on Bathsheba. Furthermore, we should not overlook the fact that three of these anomalous women (Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth) are heroines who are commended in the biblical stories for their daring and faithful actions (Gn 38:1-30; Jos 2:1-24, 6:22-25; Ruth passim). In other words, they are characterized in the stories not by their doubtful reputations but by their tenacious fidelity. More pertinent for Matthew’s purposes is the fact that all four can be understood as non-Israelites. Tamar was understood in some Jewish traditions as a Canaanite or a proselyte. Rahab was a Canaanite, Ruth a Moabite, and Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah the Hittite. In each case, these foreigners were included within the story of Israel and indeed made part of the bloodline of David, the archetypical king of Israel. Thus, in the genealogy Matthew already hints at a major theme of his gospel: the story of Israel is open to the inclusion of Gentiles. These four women in the ancestry of the Messiah prefigure the mission to “all nations” (Mt 28:19) by demonstrating that God has woven ethnic outsiders into the story from start to finish. Matthew explains none of this, nor does he quote any of the Old Testament passages in which Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba appear. Still, his inclusion of them in the genealogy of Jesus encourages the reader to recall their stories and ponder their significance for understanding the shape of Israel’s story. They prefigure the mission to “all nations” that is announced in the Gospel’s closing chapter.
References:
1.Harris, Stephen L. The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction. 4th ed. Sacramento, California: McGraw Hill, 2002.
2.Senior (1997:89) points out that “The Nestle-Aland appendix lists 294 implicit citations or allusions in Matthew.
For the most detailed and methodologically elegant study of one of these narrative typologies, see Allison (1993), The new Moses: A Matthean typology. My doctoral student Leroy Huizenga is at work on a dissertation in which he argues that the Matthean Jesus should also be understood in typological relation to the figure of Isaac in the Akedah tradition.
4.On the importance of Abrahamic covenant traditions in Matthew, see Brawley (2004:127- 148).
5, Thus, the opening chapter of Matthew’s Gospel is theologically consonant with Wright’s (1996), Jesus and the victory of God, which interprets the significance of Jesus’ work as bringing about the end of Israel’s exile. Wright believes that the Jesus of history understood his own mission in these terms; whether that is so or not, Matthew certainly understood Jesus’ work in that way.
In this way, they prefigure the Canaanite woman of Matthew 15:21-28 (see Levine 2001:22- 41).
7.Richard Bauckham (1995:313-29) shows that references to Tamar as “daughter of Aram ” in Job 41:1 and TJud 10:1 should not be understood to mean that she was an Aramaean. As Bauckham demonstrates, however, the biblical account in Genesis 38 is ambiguous on the question of her ancestry, and Philo (Virt 220-22) refers to her as a Syrian Palestinian – that is, a Canaanite – who converted to worship the one true God. The text of bSot 10 provides evidence for a rabbinic tradition that she was a proselyte.
