Abstract
The vision of the Last Judgment with which St Matthew concludes so magnificently the teaching ministry of Jesus stands out from the Gospel pages with a unique and snow-capped majesty. It is a literary tour de force never quite approached elsewhere in the First Gospel, and it possesses that grandeur of simplicity which removes it toto coelo from the lurid and melodramatic scenes of the End which Jewish apocalyptic, like subsequent Christian thought, found it necessary to paint. As Professor T. W. Manson says, and Professor J. Jeremias agrees (The Parables of Jesus, p. 144), ‘It contains features of such startling originality that it is difficult to credit them to any-one but the Master himself’ (The Teaching of Jesus, p. 249); or, again, in the more recent words of Théo Preiss, it evinces ‘a sobriety of feature and colour, a reserve, a bareness which can come from hardly any other source but that of Jesus himself’ (Life in Christ, p. 47).
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