The Gospel According to Matthew Please Turn in Your Bible to Isaiah 52, Because It Is from the Old Testament That We Get This Id
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
New Testament Bible Content Overview Lesson 3, page 1 The Gospel According to Matthew Please turn in your Bible to Isaiah 52, because it is from the Old Testament that we get this idea of “good news.” Look at Isaiah 52, beginning with verse 4: This is what the Sovereign L ORD says: “At first my people went down to Egypt to live. Lately Assyria has oppressed them, and now what do I have here?’ declares the L ORD , “for my people have been taken away for nothing. Those who rule them mock,” declares the L ORD . “All day long my name is constantly blasphemed. Therefore my people will know my name. Therefore in that day they will know that it is I who foretold it, yes, it is I.” How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news , who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns.” Listen, your watchmen lift up their voices; together they shout for joy. When the L ORD returns to Zion, they will see it with their own eyes. Burst into songs of joy together, ruins of Jerusalem, for the L ORD has comforted his people. He has redeemed Jerusalem. The L ORD will lay bare his holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God. What is a Gospel? This idea of glad tidings, of good news, is the reason why these accounts of the life of Jesus were named gospels. First, I want to talk a little about what a gospel is—not what the Gospel is, but what a gospel is. The word euangelion (the verb form is euangelizomai ) has at its heart a declaration, an announcement. The prefix is the Greek epsilon-upsilon prefix that means “good.” So a eulogy is a “good word” about someone’s life, and the euangelion is good news. Now I want you to see that good news is not just an idea, but it is an announcement about events in history. It is a report of victory in battle. We can think of good news or the announcement of victory as the word that would be sent back to the homeland when an army has prevailed on the battlefield. It brings great joy to the population because a threat to their safety has been overcome. This good news not only brings joy to the homeland, but it also serves as a summons to the conquered. Often, we do not talk about that aspect of good news. The victory of God in the Gospel also has an imperative sense. It is not just declarative in the sense of the announcement of the events of victory through Jesus over the powers of sin and death—if you are thinking about it in terms of a Pauline structure—but it is also a summons to the conquered that they are under new rule. They have a new lord, and so the announcement of victory is the announcement of new management on the earth. So we have established some Old Testament background on the idea of a gospel from the Septuagint— this translation of “good news” from Isaiah. But also, we have the Greco-Roman context of the report of victory in battle, but now we need to think about a gospel as a particular literary genre. It is helpful to pay attention to the literary structure of texts. Texts have a certain design. Of course, gospels are narratives, so they follow narrative structures with issues like characterization and pacing, use of time and space, setting, points of dramatic tension, and resolution. All the features of narrative are there, but we also have the possibility of thinking about the Gospels as biography , since they focus primarily on one life, the life of Jesus. Bios means “life” in Greek. As we look at other writings about important people, they often include details about the person’s birth, their achievements—particularly their achievements politically or on the battlefield—and how they died. Some features of the Gospels, and particularly of Matthew and Luke, which both have birth accounts, correspond to certain aspects of the genre of ancient biography. © Spring 2008, Greg Perry & Covenant Theological Seminary New Testament Bible Content Overview Lesson 3, page 2 What about historiography? Historiography has in view not just the life of a particular person, but also the life of a people. Typically it narrates the story of a particular ethnic group or nation, and so there are certain aspects of historiography in the Gospels. We should not just focus on Jesus and His character, which might be the focus of a biography. We are not merely trying to discern from Jesus’ actions and His teaching something about His character. The Gospels have a broader interest as well. They are interested in how people responded to Jesus. In terms of various social groups—His followers, the Pharisees, the people of the land, the Roman leaders—the evangelists have an interest in how people respond to Jesus. These are the interests of historiography . If we think about the fact that aspects of both genres are involved, then we should not limit our classification of the Gospels either to biography or to historiography. We should also realize that the Gospels have a unique purpose. The Gospel writers declare a testimony about the significance of the life of Jesus primarily for a particular group of people—the people of God. The Gospel writers are not disinterested, so-called “objective” historians, they are passionate disciples. Thus, they are called “evangelists.” They are advocates of this good news regarding the reign of God expressed through Jesus, the Messiah of Israel. So the Gospels contain aspects of biography and aspects of historiography, but they are also marked by a unique purpose, and so with the gospels we see the development of a new genre. There are other so- called gospels that appear, but (as I said in the previous lesson when we were talking about the canon) those other gospels are not really gospels. They are just collections of sayings. They do not really have a narrative structure to them at all. They are groups of sayings, and they have a very different character. Situating Matthew’s Gospel There is some question about when Matthew’s Gospel. In terms of the history of the New Testament, Jesus’ death was around 30 AD, and Peter’s death was around 65 AD. It is probably true that Peter’s voice is the voice behind Mark’s Gospel, as some of the early church fathers talked about Mark’s Gospel as “the memoirs of Peter.” If Mark’s Gospel was the first to be written, and accounts for the general correspondence between Mark and Matthew and Luke, then Matthew was written around 70 or 80 AD, at least in part, to deal with some of the pastoral issues that would arise in this difficulty between Jewish Christians in their relationship to the synagogue in the wake of Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of Rome (70 AD). Matthew and Luke seem to base their chronology of Jesus’ life and ministry, for the most part, on the way in which Mark progresses. There is also the possibility of another hypothetical source (Q) that explains correspondences between these three gospels, often referred to as the Synoptic Gospels for their similarities. Eusebius, however, tells us that Papias attributed the earliest collection of Jesus’ sayings to Matthew writing in Aramaic. But, we do not have that text. Papias’ belief in an Aramaic text probably explains why originally Matthew was thought to be the earliest Gospel. Clement and Origen also say that Matthew’s account came first. They are probably basing that on the idea that there was an earlier collection of sayings attributed to Matthew, written in Hebrew. By the way, the Gospel of Matthew was written anonymously. The text never says who the author is. The title, “According to Matthew,” was added later, but what we see is that the author of the Gospel of Matthew uses good Greek. He was probably well-educated. He was very familiar with and interested in the Old Testament, and he used it in a lot of different ways that we will talk about. He seems to have had no need to explain Jewish customs, like Mark did in his Gospel. Mark explained what these funny habits are, and you would only need to do that for outsiders. Matthew does not do that. He has a familiarity with the Old Testament and uses it in terms of echoes and allusions, revealing a deep familiarity with the Old Testament Scriptures. The author of Matthew also has specific interest in the law. One interesting thing about Matthew’s Gospel that makes it quite distinct is its five sections of discourse. Matthew © Spring 2008, Greg Perry & Covenant Theological Seminary New Testament Bible Content Overview Lesson 3, page 3 lengthens Jesus’ teaching by comparison to Mark, who is focused on Jesus’ actions. Matthew provides five major sections called the five discourses. It is quite probable or possible that Matthew constructed Jesus’ teaching into five groups as some kind of an echo of the five books of Moses. One view of why Matthew constructed his Gospel this way is that Matthew wanted to present Jesus as the new Moses. Matthew was sensitive to Jewish issues in terms of the use of the name of God. Instead of the phrase basileia tou theou , “the kingdom of God,” typical of the other synoptic Gospels, Matthew typically says, “the kingdom of heaven.” It is a circumlocution.