Matthew's Pesher Gospel Structured Around Ten Messianic Citations of Isaiah

Abstract

Outlines of Matthew's Gospel tend to focus either on a distinction between discourse and narrative (Bacon's 'five books', or subsequent chiastic proposals), or on a narrative plot outline, often attributed to Mark's Gospel. Both have significant weaknesses, but a way out of the stalemate may be found in rhetorical analysis of the Old Testament citations which are clearly important in Matthew. When one considers just the words quoted from the prophet Isaiah, it is possible to discern ten distinct citations, sometimes admixed with the words of a related minor prophet, spaced evenly throughout the Gospel. The number ten corresponds to an intriguing Rabbinic tradition of which Matthew was arguably aware, and the use of the citations as a string of structural 'kernels' around which assorted traditions were clustered corresponds closely to the pesher technique identified in recent analysis of the Damascus Document from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The article concludes with an exposition of the ten pesher units of the Gospel defined by these citations, focusing on how every other Old Testament quotation in each unit reinforces Matthew's interpretation of the wider passage in Isaiah from which the citation was selected.