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Gospel of Matthew - Introduction
- Held in great esteem and much quoted by the early Church and ever since, and so placed first in the NT.
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But not now believed to have been written before Mark, which was written around the time of the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. Matthew uses almost all the verses in the Mark's Gospel, plus a lot of other material, much of which was also known to Luke. Therefore Matthew believed to have been written in the early 80s, ie after sufficient time for Mark's Gospel to have become widely known. Mark is not seen as an eye-witness of Jesus, and if Matthew was an eye-witness he is unlikely to use Mark so extensively. So Matthew is not believed to have been an apostle, although some of the traditions in Matthew may have been handed down from the apostle.
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Probably written in Antioch, Syria, where the Christian community initially consisted largely of Jews, but tensions arose as more and more Gentiles became Christians. So Matthew's Gospel may be seen as showing Jewish Christians why they needed to accept that the Christian Church eventually had to develop separately from Judaism.
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Between the infancy narrative (Chaps 1 - 2) and the Passion narrative (26 - 28), Matthew marshals his material into 5 sections or "books", each starting with a short narrative and continuing with extensive discourses and ending with "When Jesus had said these ...".
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These can be summarised as:-
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1. Proclamation of the Kingdom (3:1 - 7:29)
2. Mission in Galilee (8:1 - 11:1)
3. Opposition (11:2 - 13:53)
4. Church (13:54 - 19:1)
5. Confrontation in Jerusalem (19:2 - 26:1)
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Matthew's Gospel is a story, with characters and events rooted in history woven into a narrative which catches out imagination. And as a story it is good to read it from beginning to end - as we do on Sundays in this year of Matthew. More than the other gospels, Matthew is full of sayings of Jesus, handed down from the eye-witnesses, and collected into discourses, each with its own motif.
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Above all Matthew firmly links Jesus with Judaism: the opening genealogy, frequent OT quotations and constant concern with Jewish Law and customs - often with criticism of the way these are being interpreted by Jewish leaders. But while Matthew is also keen to show Jesus is Messiah for the whole world, he is also baffled by the rejection of Jesus by the majority of Jewish leaders, and the division and hostility that grew between Judaism and the early Christian communities.
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Why attempt to understand the background to any Gospel? Some would say we should just savour what any book immediately says to us, without seeking any deeper meaning behind the words. But the Christian faith is based on the Christ-event: a revelation by God in history. So before we seek the meaning of any Christian text for us now, we must first try to understand what it meant to its author and his audience at the time it was written - in this case about 50 years after Christ had died. And to read eg the Declaration of Independence without any knowledge of its historical and cultural background would be to miss a great deal of its meaning - both to its writers and to us today. Even more so if we accept, as most scholars do, that Matthew's gospel is a very conscious remodelling of Mark's gospel. Then we need to form some idea of the reasons Matthew may have had for seeking a rewrite.
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Matthew's gospel was written in good Greek, clearly for a Greek-speaking audience to hear, with many Greek plays-on-words which a Greek-speaking audience would appreciate. But the gospel also shows a wide knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures, and also some Semitic features. So it seems likely that at least some of the audience had been Jews and understood Aramaic, which was spoken in first century Palestine, a language similar to Hebrew.
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So Matthew's community/audience appears to have been partly Jewish, partly Greek Gentile, and so located perhaps in Syria, probably Antioch, the third largest city in the Roman Empire.
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And Matthew himself is now thought by many to have been a Gentile, for although he has a thorough knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures, he appears not fully conversant with Judaism. (And hence not Matthew the Apostle.). One of several examples is Matthew's insistence that Jesus enters Jerusalem seated on both a donkey and a colt (Matt 21:1-9). Although Mark had understood this quotation from Zechariah (Zech 9:9) correctly, Matthew takes the Hebrew poetic parallel construction "riding upon a donkey, and upon a colt" too literally.
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One way of understanding Matthew's gospel is to see it against a background of a Jewish Christian community in which the proportion of Gentile Christians is gradually becoming larger and more dominant. Not only do the Gentile Christians have inadequate understanding of the Jewish background to their faith (as perhaps we do 2000 years later), but the Jewish Christian members need help to understand why their Church is not Jewish - why do Gentiles not need to become Jews, why have the doors of Jewish synagogues been shut against Christians?
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So one can see Matthew starting out with Jesus giving teaching which is very close to the Jewish Scriptures, but then gradually bringing the teaching to align more closely with the then current Christian teaching, and particularly emphasising the extent to which Jewish teachers had laid down practices which were no longer in accord with the Jewish Prophets.
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Hence the outline structure above: after opposition from the Jewish authorities, Jesus more plainly says that they are wrong, and begins to structure his teaching, expounded on the Mount and taken further than Ten Commandments, for a Church that is already going to the Gentiles.
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For example, in 10:5-6 Jesus says "Do not go to the Gentiles" etc, repeated in 15:24. But after the Resurrection, when this apocalyptic event has ushered in "new age", Jesus sends his disciples to all the nations (28:16-20), where they are to initiate new members with baptism, not with circumcision.
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For Matthew Jesus' Death and Resurrection marks the end of the Jewish Temple cult, beginning the new age in which the Gentiles are brought into the Easter faith community. And Matthew has only one appearance after the Resurrection, in which Jesus comes to his Church to remain with them forever - "all days" - there is no Ascension, and minimal expectation of Christ's second coming in glory. In this sense Matthew has moved towards John's "realised eschatology" - we are already in the new age. But the old and new worlds are still mixed: there is still to be a final judgement when the wheat and tares will be separated (Matt 13:36-43), and those without a wedding garment will be thrown out (Matt 22:11-14).