Gospel of Matthew

Overview

Matthew is about seventy pages and it is built, not assembled. Almost all of Mark is inside it, reordered, plus a large body of sayings it shares with Luke and a further body found nowhere else. The author, who never names himself, wrote in Greek somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean around 80 to 90 CE, for a community that knew the Hebrew scriptures well and was arguing bitterly with other Jews about what they meant.

The architecture is the thing to notice first. Between an infancy narrative at the start and a passion narrative at the end, the book alternates story and speech in five long discourses, each closed by the same formula: when Jesus had finished these sayings. Five is unlikely to be accidental in a book this concerned with Moses. There are five books of the law, and Matthew’s Jesus delivers his first discourse from a mountain, is taken as an infant into Egypt and brought out again, and is tested in the wilderness for forty days.

The other structural habit is the fulfilment formula. Ten or so times the narrator interrupts to say that something happened in order to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet, and then quotes. It can read as strained, and sometimes the quotation is doing unusual work. The point is not proof-texting for its own sake. Matthew is arguing that the story of Israel has an ending, and that this is it.

What happens

Beginnings (1 to 4). A genealogy from Abraham through David to the exile and on to Jesus, arranged in three sets of fourteen, with four women in it who each have an irregular story. An angel tells Joseph to take Mary as his wife. Magi follow a star to Jerusalem, ask Herod where the king of the Jews has been born, and Herod, having found out, kills the children of Bethlehem while the family escapes to Egypt. Then John the Baptist at the Jordan, the baptism, and forty days of testing in the wilderness.

The Sermon on the Mount (5 to 7). The first and longest discourse, and the most famous three chapters in Christian literature. The Beatitudes; salt and light; the declaration that he has come not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them; six antitheses that take murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, retaliation and love of neighbour and press each one past the act into the heart; instructions on giving, praying and fasting without an audience, with the Lord’s Prayer at the centre; the birds and the lilies against anxiety; judge not; the narrow gate; and the two builders, on rock and on sand.

Galilee (8 to 18). Healings and miracles gathered in blocks, then the second discourse, sending the twelve out with no money and a warning that they are sheep among wolves. Opposition hardens: sabbath disputes, accusations that he casts out demons by Beelzebul, the demand for a sign. The third discourse, in chapter 13, is seven parables of the kingdom, sower and soils, weeds among the wheat, mustard seed, leaven, hidden treasure, pearl, and dragnet. John the Baptist is executed. Five thousand are fed. At Caesarea Philippi Peter says who he thinks Jesus is and is told he is the rock; six days later three disciples see him transfigured. The fourth discourse, chapter 18, is about life inside the community: the lost sheep, how to deal with a member who wrongs you, and forgiveness not seven times but seventy times seven.

Jerusalem (19 to 28). He goes south, enters the city on a donkey to shouts of Hosanna, drives the money changers out of the temple, and spends several days in public argument over taxes, resurrection and the greatest commandment. Chapter 23 is a sustained denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees. The fifth discourse, chapters 24 and 25, turns to the end: the destruction of the temple, the coming of the Son of Man, and three parables about being ready, closing with the judgement of the nations, where the criterion is food given, strangers taken in, and prisoners visited. Then the Passover meal, Gethsemane, the arrest, Peter’s denial, the hearing before Caiaphas, Pilate washing his hands, the crucifixion with its cry of abandonment, the empty tomb, and a last scene on a mountain in Galilee with the command to go to all nations.

How to read it

Read the Sermon on the Mount first, in one sitting, and then read the rest of the Gospel around it. It is the shortest route into what the book is asking of a reader.

Read chapter 23 and the Passion narrative with the history in mind. Matthew’s community was in a painful quarrel with the synagogue, and the polemic is a family fight written down. One line in the Passion, where the crowd calls the blood down on itself, has been used for centuries to justify persecution, and any honest reading has to say so out loud rather than pass over it.

If you have read Mark, read Matthew with an eye to the differences. He softens the disciples, adds the birth and resurrection appearances, and turns Mark’s rapid, breathless narrative into an ordered teaching manual. The changes are the argument.

A note on the kingdom of heaven. Matthew uses it where the other Gospels say kingdom of God, almost certainly out of reverence for the divine name. It does not mean the afterlife. It means God’s rule arriving, and the tension between arriving and arrived runs through every parable in chapter 13.

The common misreading is to take the Sermon as a set of rules to be scored against. Read the antitheses and ask instead what kind of person is being described, and whether the demand is meant to be met or to be felt.

Questions it raises

• Jesus says he has come to fulfil the law, not abolish it, and then appears to revise it six times in a row. What is fulfilment here?
• The Beatitudes call the poor and the mourning blessed. Is that a promise about the future, a description of the present, or a redefinition of what blessedness is?
• Are the demands of the Sermon on the Mount, on anger, divorce, oaths and retaliation, meant to be practised by everyone, or to expose what nobody can do?
• The judgement in chapter 25 turns entirely on treatment of the hungry and imprisoned, with no mention of belief. How does that sit with the rest of the Gospel?
• Matthew keeps saying events occurred to fulfil prophecy. Is he reading the story out of the scriptures, or reading the scriptures out of the story?
• Peter is called the rock and then denies knowing him. What does the Gospel think authority rests on?