Matthew’s Theology of Fulfillment, Its Universality and Its Ethnicity

Abstract

While the title and presentation of the book appears as a standard monograph, Waetjen’s work is actually a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the whole of Matthew. Herman C. Waetjen is Professor Emeritus of New Testament at San Francisco Theological Seminary and veteran NT scholar. As the title indicates, Waetjen holds to a particular thesis concerning Matthew’s meaning, a thesis he seeks to present through his exposition of the First Gospel.The introductory chapter is brief but contains the thesis that underlies Waetjen’s exposition. Amid describing his perspective, Waetjen states simply rather than argues for his understanding of the standard introductory matters. Waetjen asserts that the author was not a disciple of Jesus but constructed his work from Mark and Q from Antioch in the aftermath of the destruction of the temple in AD 70. Within this milieu, Waetjen believes that Judaism was confronted with how to reformulate and reconstitute itself and had three competing alternatives. The Pharisees, directed by Yochanan ben Zakkai, represented a torah-centric way of life. A second alternative was a hopeful Jewish apocalypticism that awaited the new creation, represented by the writing of 2 Baruch. The third alternative was the Gospel of Matthew and its theology of fulfillment. Waetjen believes the evangelist was a contemporary with Yochanan ben Zakkai and makes use of 2 Baruch but aims to discredit and reject both of the alternative movements.The evangelist believes that his community is the beginning of the new creation, the new Israel centered around Jesus and constituted by his resurrection. Together, they are what is greater than the temple. This belief drove Matthew to compose the foundational charter of this new creation community. This charter is meant to encourage this prosperous Jewish community in Antioch to embrace the full significance of their identity as God’s new Israel, while simultaneously preventing them from separating themselves from fellow Jews as a new religion. Waetjen suspects the community was under increasing pressure because of emerging Judaism represented by the rabbis of Yavneh and the birkath hi-minim.While ch. 2 comments more in-depth on the Gospel’s prologue, Waetjen makes some comments on Matt 1 as he frames his reading of the Gospel. Waetjen argues that Jesus is, paradoxically, the 13th and 14th generations in the genealogy. This portrays Jesus as participating in and ending the exile, and later in the prologue his dual ancestry is revealed as an intertwining of humanity and divinity. This makes Jesus the “first human being of God’s new creation” (p. 6), the Son of God and the Son of the Human Being. Waetjen states, “Matthew composed a gospel that required them to comprehend the paradoxical genesis of Jesus’ ancestry and to discern the dialectical interplay of the two identities that originate from his dual origin” (p. 12). This perspective is important for Waetjen to state in the introduction, as he argues that, through the narrative world of the Gospel, “Jesus unites the being of his two ancestries dialectically” (p. 8). This emphasis on the dialectical nature of Jesus was also important for the original audience, as Matthew’s community also wrestled with their ethnic identity and their new identity as God’s new Israel.The commentary proceeds according to the five-book structure of Matthew. Like many, Waetjen believes Matthew’s five-book structure, with prologue (1:1–25) and culmination (26:2–28:20), reflect a pentateuchal form, providing both continuity and discontinuity with the story of Israel, and is arranged around thematic material in the narrative and discourse units of each book. After ch. 1’s introduction, ch. 2 covers the prologue (Matt 1:1–25), chs. 3 through 7 each cover and individual “book” division of the fivefold structure, and ch. 8 covers the culmination of the Gospel (26:2–28:20).Readers will encounter fresh observations and serious scholarly engagement on social, historical, and theological levels in this work. Waetjen’s work joins the diverse chorus of Matthean scholars such as David Sim, Anders Runesson, Amy-Jill Levine, John Kampen and others who advocate for reading Matthew firmly within the context of Judaism. Given the engagement with the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish literature, it is unfortunate that the book contains no ancient-sources index or modern-author index, but it does conclude with a bibliography.