Introduction to Matthew

Title and authorship

The book names no author, and the earliest testimony of the church is unanimous that it is Matthew's — the tax collector called from his booth Matthew 9:9, one of the Twelve Matthew 10:3. The other Gospels call the same man Levi Mark 2:14 Luke 5:27, and this one alone attaches the trade to the name in the apostolic list: Matthew the tax collector. A man who signs his own list of honors with his old profession is telling the reader something about the book's subject.

The internal texture fits a man of that trade. This Gospel is the most orderly of the four — five great blocks of teaching, each closed by the same formula Matthew 7:28 Matthew 26:1 — and it is the one most interested in money, naming coins and sums the others pass over: the talent, the denarius, the two-drachma temple tax Matthew 17:24, the thirty pieces of silver weighed out and flung back Matthew 27:5. Records were his profession, and this is the Gospel that keeps the accounts.

It is also the Gospel written closest to the synagogue. It quotes the Hebrew Scriptures more than any other, assumes its readers know the law and the customs it never stops to explain, and argues throughout that Jesus is what Israel was promised. A former collaborator with Rome writing the most thoroughly Jewish of the four Gospels is its own quiet sermon.

Date

No date is given, and the internal evidence points to the decades before the fall of Jerusalem. The temple is still standing in the book's assumptions: it discusses leaving a gift at the altar Matthew 5:23–24, the temple tax is a live question Matthew 17:24–27, and the destruction of the buildings is delivered as prophecy with readers still urged to flee when the sign appears Matthew 24:15–16. A book written after the year seventy would have had every reason to note the fulfillment, and this one does not.

The setting the book assumes is a community of Jewish believers under pressure from the synagogue — expelled, argued with, and needing to know that following Jesus is not desertion of Moses. That is why the fulfillment formula runs through it more than a dozen times, why the Sermon on the Mount opens with don't think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets Matthew 5:17, and why the sharpest words in the New Testament against Israel's teachers stand in chapter twenty-three, spoken from inside the family rather than outside it.

The closing scene points the other way. A book that begins with a Jewish genealogy ends on a mountain in Galilee with a command to disciple all the nations Matthew 28:19, which is where the argument has been going since the magi arrived from the east in chapter two.

Backgrounds

Written for readers who know the Scriptures. Matthew quotes and alludes to the Hebrew Bible constantly and rarely explains it. Where Mark stops to translate an Aramaic phrase or describe a Jewish custom for Roman readers Mark 7:3–4, Matthew assumes both. The argument only works on readers who can hear the echoes.

The fulfillment formula. More than a dozen times the narrative pauses to say that something happened that it might be fulfilled which was spoken Matthew 1:22 Matthew 2:15 Matthew 2:23 Matthew 4:14 Matthew 8:17 Matthew 12:17 Matthew 13:35 Matthew 21:4 Matthew 27:9. The quotations are used in more than one way — some are direct prediction, some are patterns of Israel's history recapitulated in Jesus, some are single phrases lifted to make a connection a modern reader would not draw. Read them as the book uses them rather than flattening them into one kind.

Five discourses, each with a closing formula. The teaching is gathered into five blocks — the Sermon on the Mount, the mission charge, the parables of the kingdom, the community discourse, and the discourse on the end — and each closes with when Jesus had finished Matthew 7:28 Matthew 11:1 Matthew 13:53 Matthew 19:1 Matthew 26:1. The formula is the book's own structural signal.

The kingdom of heaven. Where the other Gospels say kingdom of God, Matthew usually says kingdom of heaven — the reverent Jewish circumlocution, the same kingdom under a name that avoids the divine name. Nothing doctrinal turns on the difference.

Pharisees, scribes and the synagogue. The opponents in this Gospel are not chiefly the Roman occupiers but the religious teachers of Jesus' own people — a conflict about the law's meaning, conducted between parties who both take it seriously. Chapter twenty-three is family argument, and reading it as anything else has done immense damage.

Galilee and Jerusalem . The geography carries the argument: a ministry in the northern villages that the book calls Galilee of the Gentiles Matthew 4:15, a single journey south, and a week in the capital that ends at a cross — then back to a Galilean mountain for the commission.

Theology and purpose

The book exists to show that Jesus is the promised one of Israel's Scriptures, and that his kingdom is open to the nations. Those two claims are held together from the first page: a genealogy tracing him to Abraham and David Matthew 1:1 which nevertheless names four women of foreign or irregular history, and a birth narrative in which the first worshipers are astrologers from the east while Jerusalem's king tries to kill him.

Immanuel is the frame. The book opens by naming him God with us Matthew 1:23 and closes with I am with you always, even to the end of the age Matthew 28:20. Everything between is inside that promise, including the sentence that puts him where the presence used to be: where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them Matthew 18:20.

Righteousness that exceeds. The Sermon on the Mount does not lower the law's demand or abolish it; it drives it inward — to anger, to the look, to the motive of the almsgiving — and states the standard as unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees Matthew 5:20. The teaching is impossible as a ladder and coherent as a description of what the kingdom's king produces in his subjects.

Mercy over sacrifice. Twice the book has Jesus quote Hosea against his opponents — I desire mercy, and not sacrifice Matthew 9:13 Matthew 12:7 — and it is the interpretive key to every controversy in the book. The law's purpose decides the law's application, and a reading that produces cruelty has been read wrongly.

Judgment is real and it is by fruit. No Gospel says more about the final separation: the weeds and the wheat, the net, the closed door, the talents buried, the sheep and the goats. And in every case the criterion is what was done rather than what was claimed — not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord" Matthew 7:21.

The church is named here, and only here. Twice Matthew 16:18 Matthew 18:17, and both times in the context of a community with authority to act, a procedure for restoring a sinning brother, and a promise of the Lord's presence among the gathered. This Gospel is the one that expects an ongoing congregation.

And the commission is universal. The book that begins in a Jewish village ends by sending disciples to every nation, teaching them to observe everything commanded — a mission whose content is the obedience the five discourses have just spelled out.

Additional notes

Note — the two genealogies. Matthew traces the line through Solomon and Luke through Nathan, and the lists differ between David and Joseph Matthew 1:6–16 Luke 3:23–31. The honest accounts are ordinary: one may follow legal or royal succession and the other physical descent, or one may run through Mary's line. Matthew's own arrangement is openly schematic — three sets of fourteen Matthew 1:17, achieved by omitting known kings — which tells the reader it is a designed list making a point about David rather than a complete register.

Note — the fourteen generations. Fourteen is twice seven, and the numerical value of David's name in Hebrew letters. The omissions are not errors; ancient genealogies routinely skipped, and son of regularly means descendant. The shape is the argument: this is the son of David, in a list built on David's own number.

Note — Matthew and the earlier account. Much of what Matthew narrates is also told in Mark, usually more briefly and in the same order; where that is so, what repays attention is what Matthew's telling carries that the other does not, and Matthew's fullest work is in the material Mark does not contain at all. Scripture nowhere states which Gospel was written first, and the early church's ordering testimony is not uniform.

Note — Herod and the children of Bethlehem. No source outside this Gospel records the killing at Bethlehem Matthew 2:16, which readers sometimes raise as an objection. The village was small enough that the number of boys under two would have been perhaps a dozen — a footnote in the reign of a king whose recorded acts include executing his own wife and three of his sons. Silence is what the scale predicts.

Note — the thirty pieces of silver. The quotation at Matthew 27:9 is attributed to Jeremiah while its clearest wording is in Zechariah Zechariah 11:12–13; the potter's field and the purchase belong to Jeremiah's imagery Jeremiah 19:1–13 Jeremiah 32:6–9. Citing a fused quotation under the name of the major prophet was a normal ancient practice, and the passage draws on both.

Note — the raised bodies at the crucifixion. Matthew 27:52–53 reports tombs opened and many bodies of sleeping saints raised, appearing in the city after the resurrection. It is unique to this Gospel and reported without elaboration, and its placement makes its point: the death that tore the veil also broke the graves, and the first fruits of the resurrection appear alongside the resurrection itself.

Outline

How the book is built

God with us, and with you always inclusio 1:18-28:20

• A 1:18-25 The name explained at the birth: Immanuel, which is, being interpreted, God with us — given before the child has done anything.
• A′ 28:16-20 The promise repeated in his own voice at the end: I am with you always, even to the end of the age — given as the ground of the mission.

The book is framed by one promise stated twice in its own words. It opens by explaining the child's second name from Isaiah — they shall call his name Immanuel, which is, being interpreted, God with us Matthew 1:23 — and it closes on a Galilean mountain with the risen Jesus saying I am with you always, even to the end of the age Matthew 28:20. The frame is not a theme detected by a reader; the book supplies the translation at the front so that the last sentence can be heard as its fulfillment. Everything between the two happens inside the promise, and the midpoint states it a third time in the present tense for the gathered community: where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them Matthew 18:20. Read this way, the commission at the end is not a departure scene. The Gospel that begins by naming him God-with-us ends by sending disciples to every nation on the strength of his remaining so.

The five discourses chiasm 5:1-25:46

• A 5:1-7:29 The Sermon on the Mount: the righteousness the kingdom requires, closing on two builders and two houses in the storm.
• B 10:1-42 The mission charge: disciples sent out as sheep among wolves, ending on a cup of cold water given to one of these little ones.
• C 13:1-52 The center: the parables of the kingdom, and the one discourse that stops to explain why he teaches in parables at all.
• B′ 18:1-35 The community discourse: greatness as a child, the danger of causing one of these little ones to stumble, and forgiveness without limit.
• A′ 24:1-25:46 The discourse on the end: watchfulness through the last things, closing on two sets of virgins, buried and invested talents, and sheep and goats.

The teaching in this Gospel is gathered into five blocks, and the book marks each one itself with the same closing formula — when Jesus had finished these words Matthew 7:28 Matthew 11:1 Matthew 13:53 Matthew 19:1 Matthew 26:1. That five-fold signal is the text's own, and the discourses pair around the middle one. The first and last are long addresses to disciples about the life the kingdom requires and the judgment that ends the age, and both close with paired parables of two responses — the wise and foolish builders, then the wise and foolish virgins and the sheep and the goats. The second and fourth both concern the disciple community, outward and inward: those sent out among wolves, and those who must forgive a brother seventy times seven; both use the phrase about these little ones Matthew 10:42 Matthew 18:6. At the center stands the discourse on the kingdom's parables, the one block whose subject is why Jesus teaches this way at all.

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