Abstract
This essay surveys the evangelist Matthew’s reading of Israel’s Scripture. Rather than focusing only on Matthew’s distinctive formula quotations, we must observe the subtler ways that Matthew evokes scriptural images and patterns. The essay highlights four major aspects of Matthew’s reading of Scripture. (1) Matthew reads Israel’s Scripture as a story that highlights election, kingship, exile, and messianic salvation as the end of exile. (2) Matthew reconfigures Torah into a call for radical transformation of the heart. (3) Matthew highlights Scripture’s call for mercy, particularly by emphasizing Hosea 6:6 as the hermeneutical key to Torah. (4) Matthew interprets the mission to the Gentiles as the fulfilment of Israel’s destiny and the active embodiment of the authority of the Son of Man (Dn 7:13-14) over the whole world. Jointly taken, these strategies of interpretation produce a striking reconfiguration of Israel’s Torah.
Highlights
This essay surveys the evangelist Matthew’s reading of Israel’s Scripture
Four of the ten formula quotations appear in the birth and infancy narratives; if we add the fulfilment citations in Matthew 2:5-6 and 3:3, we find that nearly half of these weighty hermeneutical directives are placed in the plot structure even before the baptism of Jesus, and still another accompanies his initial proclamation of the kingdom in Galilee (Mt 4:14-16)
We began our discussion with Rowan Williams’ (1998) proposal that the death and resurrection of Jesus led to a prolonged process of “reorganization of religious language,” a process to
Summary
In the opening chapter of The Wound of Knowledge, Rowan Williams (1998:1) writes: “Christian faith has its beginnings in an experience of profound contradictoriness, an experience which so questioned the religious categories of its time that the resulting reorganization of religious language was a centuries-long task.” The “experience of profound contradictoriness” is, the crucifixion of Jesus as the event that somehow brought God’s salvation to the world: “the paradox of God’s purpose made flesh in a dead. And beyond the question of citations of particular texts, we must reckon with Matthew’s use of typology, his deft narration of tales that Senior (1997:115) describes as “shadow stories from the Old Testament” Through this narrative device, with or without explicit citation, the reader is encouraged to see Jesus as the fulfilment of Old Testament precursors, Moses, David, and Isaiah’s Servant figure.[4] It is impossible to survey all this material, but we shall examine a few key passages that shed light on Matthew’s strategies for reading Scripture It is impossible to survey all this material in the present chapter, but we shall examine a few key passages that shed light on Matthew’s strategies for reading Scripture
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