Gospel of Matthew

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A book opens with a list of names. Before any scene, before the star or the mountain or the cross, the Gospel of Matthew sets down a genealogy — Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and on through fourteen generations to David, fourteen more to the exile, fourteen more to a carpenter’s betrothed in a Galilean town. Nothing about that ledger is incidental. It is the gospel’s first argument, made in the oldest Israelite manner: that the man it is about stands in a line, that the line is the line of promise, and that to read what follows one must already be reading the scriptures of Israel.

The Gospel of Matthew is the first of the four canonical gospels and the opening book of the New Testament: an account of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, written in Greek in the later first century. As a gospel — from the Greek euangelion, “good news” — it belongs to a small family of narratives composed to proclaim rather than merely to chronicle, and it shares so much of its wording and order with two of the others that the three are read side by side. It takes its name from Matthew, the tax-collector numbered among the twelve apostles, to whom the early church ascribed it; the text itself names no author, and the attribution is a second-century tradition rather than a claim the book makes for itself. Most scholars hold that it was composed anonymously, drawing on earlier sources, around 80 to 90 CE.

The most Jewish of the gospels

Among the four, Matthew is the most insistently Jewish — not in the sense of addressing a people outside the movement, but of speaking from inside the world of Second Temple Judaism, with its scriptures, its festivals, its arguments over the Law assumed rather than explained. The genealogy that opens it traces Jesus to Abraham, the father of the nation, and to David, the king from whose house the Messiah was promised to come; the title of the very first verse, biblos geneseōs, echoes the opening of Genesis and frames the whole as a new beginning written over the old. At nearly every turn the narrative pauses to mark that an event happened to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet. These formula quotations — roughly a dozen of them, stitched in at the birth, the flight, the ministry, the entry into Jerusalem, the betrayal — are the gospel’s signature device. They turn the life of Jesus into a reading of the Hebrew scriptures, and the scriptures into a prophecy of that life.

The figure they construct is the awaited Messiah of Israel and the authoritative interpreter of the Law: not its abolisher but its fulfiller, who declares that not one stroke of a letter will pass from the Law until all is accomplished, and who then deepens its commandments past the letter — you have heard that it was said, but I say to you. The shape of the portrait is Mosaic. An infant escapes a murderous king and is carried into and out of Egypt; the teacher goes up a mountain to deliver his instruction, as Moses went up Sinai; the teaching itself is gathered, in the reading first pressed by Benjamin Wisner Bacon in 1930, into five great blocks, a structure that has been heard as a new Pentateuch answering the five books of Moses. Whether the author intended so strict a parallel is debated — many scholars accept the fivefold architecture while doubting that Matthew meant his book as a counter-Torah — but the new-Moses typology runs too deep in the text to be incidental.

The five discourses and the Sermon

The book’s most distinctive formal feature is that ordering of the teaching. Five times the narrative breaks for a long, self-contained discourse, and each time it resumes with the same hinge: “And it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these sayings.” The five are the Sermon on the Mount (chapters five through seven), the charge to the apostles sent out to preach (chapter ten), the parables of the kingdom (chapter thirteen), the instruction on life within the community of disciples (chapter eighteen), and the discourse on judgment and the end of the age (chapters twenty-three through twenty-five). Between them runs the narrative of the ministry; the structure alternates word and act with a deliberation found in none of the other gospels.

The first of the five is the most consequential block of teaching in the Christian scriptures. The Sermon on the Mount opens with the Beatitudes — blessings pronounced on the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, those who hunger for righteousness — and gathers into a single sustained address the antitheses on murder and adultery and retaliation, the command to love one’s enemies, the warning against laying up treasure, and, at its center, the Lord’s Prayer. Here the gospel’s program is compressed: a righteousness that exceeds the legalists’, kept not for show but before the Father who sees in secret. Whatever the historical sequence of the sayings collected here, Matthew presents them as one mountain sermon, and it is in this arrangement that they entered the prayer, the catechesis, and the moral imagination of the church.

The Synoptic Problem and the sources

On how the gospel was made, scholarship has reached a working consensus rather than certainty. Matthew shares so much wording and sequence with Mark and Luke that the three are called the Synoptic Gospels — “seen together.” The dominant solution, the two-source hypothesis, holds that Matthew drew on the Gospel of Mark, taking over the great bulk of it and smoothing its rough Greek, and on a further collection of the sayings of Jesus, conventionally labeled Q from the German Quelle, “source,” which it shares with Luke. To these inherited materials it added a body of episodes and sayings found nowhere else, the Sondergut or special matter. This is a reconstruction — widely accepted, contested at its edges, and resting on a sayings source that has never been found as a physical document. (The competing solutions, which dispense with Q or reverse the order of the gospels, belong to the longer history of the Synoptic Problem.)

A separate and older tradition about the gospel’s making must be set beside the modern one. Papias of Hierapolis, writing in the early second century in a work now lost, reported that Matthew arranged the logia — the oracles or sayings — in the Hebrew dialect, and that each interpreted them as best he could; the notice survives only in a quotation by the fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea, in the third book of his Ecclesiastical History. That remark is the seed of the ancient attribution and of the long-lived idea of a Hebrew or Aramaic original. Most modern scholars conclude that it cannot describe the gospel as it stands: the Greek Matthew shows no sign of being a translation, and it depends visibly on the Greek text of Mark. What Papias described, if anything real, was something other than the book that bears the name.

The community behind the book

The community that produced the gospel remains a matter of inference, read off the surface of the text. Its sharp polemic against the Pharisees — the seven woes of chapter twenty-three, the charge of straining out gnats and swallowing camels — its assumption that readers grasp Jewish custom without explanation, and its evident anxiety over the relation of the new movement to “their synagogues” have led many to place it among Jewish followers of Jesus in Roman Syria, perhaps at the great city of Antioch, in the years after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The catastrophe is presupposed in the parable that has a king burn the city of those who refused his invitation. The polemic is sharpest precisely because it is internal: this is the rhetoric of a Jewish group contending with rival Jewish leadership for the loyalty of the same people after the loss of the Temple, not the language of outsiders looking in. Anthony Saldarini read the book on exactly these terms — as the work of a Jewish teacher writing from within Judaism, his attack aimed at competitors and not at a nation — and David Sim has described the Matthean community as a law-observant Christian Judaism still inside its parent tradition. The anti-Pharisee language, set in its moment, is a family quarrel made scripture, not a verdict on a people.

The same currents run through the Didache, an early manual of church order that shares Matthew’s wording at several points — most plainly in the version of the Lord’s Prayer it directs the faithful to say three times a day, given in a form close to Matthew’s and carrying the doxology. Whether the Didache drew on the gospel, or both drew on a common liturgical tradition of the same Syrian milieu, is debated; the kinship itself is not. The first writer to quote and echo Matthew unmistakably is Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, around the year 110 — a thread of evidence that has helped fasten the gospel to that city.

The matter found here alone

Several of the most familiar scenes in the Christian imagination survive in Matthew and nowhere else among the gospels. The infancy narrative is its own: the visit of the Magi from the east, following a star to the child and offering gold, frankincense, and myrrh; the dream that warns Joseph; the flight into Egypt and the massacre of the children at Bethlehem under Herod, told in the key of the exodus and the prophets. Through the ministry, Matthew alone has Peter walk on the water and sink, and alone records the saying that names him the rock on which the church will be built. At the passion it adds the dream of Pilate’s wife, the governor washing his hands, the guard set at the tomb. And it closes on the Great Commission: the risen Christ on a mountain in Galilee, sending the eleven to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, with the promise that frames the whole book like an arch. For the gospel had opened by naming the child Emmanuel, “God with us,” and it ends on the same word made promise — I am with you always, to the close of the age. The reach to all nations turns the most Jewish of the gospels outward at its last breath, sending the message of Israel’s Messiah past the borders of Israel.

The making of the canon, and the gospel left out

The gospel’s place was not always secure, and its security came from use. Against teachers who read only one gospel and others who read many, the church of the second century fixed the number at four, neither more nor fewer, and set Matthew at their head. The fixing was a contest as much as a settlement. In the 140s Marcion of Sinope, holding the Creator of the Hebrew scriptures to be a lesser god than the Father of Jesus, threw out the Old Testament entire and with it any gospel so saturated in it — keeping only an edited Luke and the letters of Paul. Matthew was, by that measure, the unthinkable opposite of Marcion’s canon: a gospel that could not be read at all except through the Law and the prophets, that made the promise to Abraham its first line. The church that rejected Marcion kept the book that most insisted on the continuity he denied. The same boundary that excluded the sayings-collections later buried at Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Thomas among them, enclosed Matthew at its center; the contrast measures what the canon was choosing for — a narrated life bound to Israel’s scripture, over a string of secret sayings.

The gospel in scholarship

The critical study of Matthew is two centuries deep and turns on a few landmark works. The standard scholarly commentary in English is the three-volume Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew of W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, in the International Critical Commentary series (T&T Clark, 1988-1997), which dates the gospel to between 70 and 100 and most probably 80 to 95, and reads it as the work of a learned Jewish Christian; an abbreviated one-volume version followed in 2005. Beside it stands Ulrich Luz’s Matthew, translated into English in the Hermeneia series (Fortress, 2001-2007), distinguished for tracing the history of the gospel’s interpretation across the centuries alongside the exegesis. R. T. France’s The Gospel of Matthew (Eerdmans, 2007) reads the text as it stands, attending less to its prehistory than to what its author meant to convey. On the social world that produced it, Anthony J. Saldarini’s Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community (University of Chicago, 1994) and David C. Sim’s The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism (T&T Clark, 1999) set the gospel firmly inside late first-century Judaism. The fivefold-discourse thesis goes back to Benjamin Wisner Bacon’s Studies in Matthew (1930). The Greek text itself is established in the critical Novum Testamentum Graece of Nestle and Aland, now in its twenty-eighth edition, whose apparatus records the manuscript variants beneath every verse.

For the later church the gospel’s authority was settled, and its influence outran every rival account. Its ordering of the sayings made it the most quoted of the four in the early centuries; across Christianity the catechumen learned the faith from its Sermon, the year was kept by its nativity, and the painters drew their Magi and their mountain from its pages. The genealogy that stands at the threshold did its work: it placed the whole story inside Israel’s, and made the reading of Israel’s scripture the condition of reading the gospel at all. The line of names that opens the book, running from Abraham down to the carpenter’s house, was the first claim the church learned to make and the last it would surrender — that the one it followed was the end toward which the old promise had been leaning all along.

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