Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: Matthew

By Anthony J. Saldarini

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Saldarini’s introduction to and concise commentary on Matthew. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers.
 
Rather than attempt a verse-by-verse analysis, these volumes work from larger sense units, highlighting the place of each passage within the overarching biblical story. Commentators focus on the genre of each text—parable, prophetic oracle, legal code, and so on—interpreting within the historical and literary context.
 
The volumes also address major issues within each biblical book—including the range of possible interpretations—and refer readers to the best resources for further discussions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467454230

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Matthew

Anthony J. Saldarini

INTRODUCTION

Name, Authorship, Composition, and Date

The modern English name The Gospel According to Matthew arose from a variety of titles, called superscriptions, placed above the beginning of the Gospel text in ancient manuscripts. Two of the most reliable manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, have the simple superscription According to Matthew. The early Christian author Papias (c. AD 125, quoted by the fourth-century historian Eusebius) refers to Matthew as the author of a collection of Jesus’ Hebrew/Aramaic sayings or oracles (logia). Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 180) speaks of Matthew as the author of a Hebrew Gospel which Irenaeus views as a source of the Greek Gospel According to Matthew, which he possessed. No Hebrew or Aramaic collection of Jesus’ sayings has survived, so its existence must remain hypothetical. However, Irenaeus testifies that by the late second century the Greek Gospel of Matthew was available and accepted as authoritative.

The author of the Gospel does not identify himself within the narrative. Tantalizingly, the tax collector who followed Jesus is named Levi, son of Alphaeus in Mark 2:14 (cf. Luke 5:27), but is named Matthew in this Gospel (9:9). Levi the tax collector does not appear in the lists of the twelve apostles, but the name Matthew does; in the Gospel of Matthew the list of the twelve identifies Matthew as a tax collector (10:3), while the other lists simply give the name (Mark 3:18; Luke 6:16; Acts 1:13). Some commentators hold that the author of this Gospel subtly substituted his own name, Matthew, for the otherwise unknown Levi. Others suggest that Levi the tax collector changed his name to Matthew after he began following Jesus (cf. Simon’s new name Peter in 16:18). Still others propose that the author of this Gospel replaced the otherwise unknown Levi with a symbolic Greek name Maththaios (Matthew) which sounds somewhat like the Greek word for disciple, mathētēs. In the end neither the external nor the internal evidence explains satisfactorily the origin of the title Gospel According to Matthew or identifies the author of the Gospel. This, however, is not unusual. First-century society valued ancient and traditional writings much more than contemporary Western culture does and cared less about the personal identity and accomplishments of authors. Thus the author of the Gospel remains anonymous without affecting the credibility or authenticity of his work. In this commentary the anonymous author of the Gospel will be referred to interchangeably as the author of Matthew, the author of the Gospel, or Matthew. No claim is made that the apostle Matthew was the author. One other piece of evidence may clarify the author’s social setting. He may hint that he is a learned scribe when he compares the scribe of the kingdom to a householder who brings old and new things out of his storeroom (13:52) and when he praises the prophets, wise men, and scribes whom God has sent (23:34).

The Gospel’s literary characteristics and its relationships with the other two Synoptic Gospels (Mark and Luke) provide probable evidence dating the Gospel and for the process by which it was composed. The Synoptic Gospels share many sayings and stories, which are often found in the same order. The most convincing hypothesis for their literary relationships concludes that the Gospel According to Mark was composed first and then was used independently by the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Since Mark probably was written around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem (AD 70), the Gospel of Matthew must be dated after that. And since Ignatius of Antioch (died c. 107) seems to have cited the Gospel of Matthew, it was probably written in the last two decades of the first century. The Gospel of Matthew drew on a number of oral and written sources besides Mark. Since the Gospels of Matthew and Luke share a number of teachings of Jesus and a couple of stories which are not derived from Mark, both authors probably had available a collection of sayings of Jesus, conventionally designated Q (from the German word for source, Quelle). Many scholars have reconstructed and commented on Q, but this commentary will attend only to Matthew.

Social and Historical Setting, Audience, and Community

The Gospel of Matthew has often been placed in the city of Antioch in Syria, the third largest city in the Roman Empire, because it had large Jewish and Christian communities, provided a literate Greek-speaking milieu for the composition of the Gospel, and was the home of Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, who probably quoted the Gospel in the early second century. However, any city of several thousand people in the eastern Mediterranean would provide the cultural context for the composition of the Gospel, and many of those cities contained a significant Jewish population. Thus scholars have suggested a number of other cities for the origin of the Gospel, including Caesarea, Tyre, and Sidon on the Mediterranean coast, the cities of the Decapolis in Transjordan, and the Galilean cities Tiberias and Sepphoris. No city has gained widespread support. Recent research into the development of Second Temple and early rabbinic Judaism suggests a city near Galilee or Judea. The legal discussions and arguments developed in Matthew’s narrative correspond to the legal agenda found in Second Temple Jewish writings such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Jubilees and in the early layers of the Mishnah isolated by Jacob Neusner. The author of Matthew knows and participates in late-first-century Jewish discussions of law, so he probably had contact with the early rabbis who a century later (c. 200) produced the Mishnah, a detailed exposition of Jewish law. Since the rabbis were only a small, local Judean and Galilean group in the late first century and had not become widely influential yet, Galilee or an area contiguous with Galilee or Judea becomes a more probable home for the Gospel of Matthew than Antioch.

The Gospel’s author, like the authors of the other NT books, addressed a concrete first-century community or communities of followers of Jesus. No NT writings are missionary documents addressed to nonbelievers. Scholars have argued over the composition of Matthew’s community. The majority have held that author was a Jew and his audience/community contained many Jews who had become followers of Jesus (so-called Jewish Christians). Since the author shows a special concern for Gentiles (lit. the nations, used to refer to non-Jews), many have held that the community had a large Gentile membership as well. A minority have argued that the author and audience were virtually all Gentiles. More recently some scholars have argued that the Matthean community was virtually all Jewish and that one purpose of the Gospel was to urge the Jewish followers of Jesus to reach out to Gentiles with the good news about Jesus. This understanding of the author and audience as Jews who followed Jesus depends on a new appreciation of the variety of Jewish communities and movements in the first century. Neither the first-century Jews nor the early followers of Jesus can be defined as unified orthodox communities. Rather, Jewish communities included a number of reform movements, messianic and apocalyptic worldviews, political stances toward the imperial authorities, supportive and critical attitudes toward the temple, and interpretations of biblical traditions and laws which competed for followings in Judea and Galilee as well as in diaspora cities. In this context the author of the Gospel of Matthew seems to be a Jewish teacher who believes in and follows Jesus, who teaches and guides his own community of Jewish followers of Jesus, and who tries to refute other Jewish leaders with different views and practices. Thus the Matthean group in the late first century did not differentiate itself as Christians in opposition to Jews. (In other places at the same time communities of Gentile followers of Jesus probably did make such a distinction.) This scenario explains the sharp and often intemperate polemics against the Jewish leaders for which Matthew’s Gospel is notorious. The attacks make most sense not as a rejection of Judaism by a Christian but as an attempt of one teacher and leader to blunt the influence of other leaders and their teachings. These polemics, however, which call the Pharisees hypocrites (23:13–36) and blame the people in Jerusalem for Jesus’ death (27:25), have subsequently been used in anti-Semitic attacks which have resulted in discrimination, injury, and death for Jews.

Approach and Limitations of the Commentary

This commentary will stress the Gospel as a literary unity. It will link the stories and teachings to one another in order to explain the purpose of each element in the Gospel as a coherent whole. The commentary presupposes that the late first-century author of the Gospel made use of a variety of early traditions, including the Gospel of Mark, the sayings source Q mentioned above, as well as a number of teachings, stories, and sayings passed on orally or in writing. In composing this Gospel the author rewrote Markan stories and teachings to improve the Greek, make them more concise, and emphasize aspects of Jesus’ character, work, and thought which were important to him and his audience. The author of Matthew, like the other three evangelists, interprets and adapts the Jesus tradition to the needs of his audience. He is a relatively conservative and reliable tradent but not a modern historian or archivist recording traditions from the mouth of Jesus.

This commentary will omit some valuable approaches common in larger commentaries, mostly due to limitations of space. It does not proceed verse by verse, explaining words, odd expressions, ancient customs, physical realities, historical events, and unfamiliar outlooks as they occur. Rather, it concentrates on larger units of expression and the most important aspects of the narrative and neglects some of the minutiae of the text. More significantly, the commentary does not consistently compare Matthew’s narrative with the parallel and often differing presentations in the other two Synoptic Gospels, Mark and Luke. Though much can be learned from this essential task, describing and explaining each of the differences takes an inordinate amount of space incompatible with a brief commentary. Surprisingly to some, the commentary will not try to determine which teachings may go back to the historical Jesus. For some readers and scholars the identification of such sayings and of the historical Jesus constitutes the apex of Gospel study. However, the Jesus tradition has given the church four very different Gospels, all of which were written by second-generation followers of Jesus. Attempts to reconstruct the teachings behind the four Gospels are necessarily hypothetical and in fact have not resulted in a broadly acceptable consensus. In addition, the status of each saying and each story must be argued at length. Similarly, no attempt is made to construct the original form of the sayings source (Q) because this task, too, is a very hypothetical and fragile enterprise. At the level of philosophical and theological principle, to locate some kind of privileged truth about Jesus in the pre-Gospel tradition is to narrow the scope of truth excessively and to concede too much to modern skepticism about the kind of literary and theological interpretation found in the Gospels. This commentary concentrates on one authoritative first-century author’s interpretation and presentation of Jesus, to understand it in its context and to make it available to Christians and other interested readers today.

Structure and Genre

Outlines of Matthew’s Gospel come in several types. Some summarize the content in greater or less detail; others mark off the larger literary units and sub-structures which give the narrative its shape. Still others focus on the narrative action surrounding Jesus, the central character of the Gospel. A few literary observations will provide a general orientation to the movement of the narrative and its contents. The first four chapters introduce Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God in telling the story of his birth and infancy (chs. 1–2) and the beginning of his public activity (chs. 3–4). The last three chapters recount the climax of Jesus’ life, his arrest, condemnation, suffering, and death (chs. 26–27), and his resurrection and final instruction to his disciples to make disciples of all nations (ch. 28). The most striking feature of the twenty-one chapters between are Jesus’ five sermons, which are thematic collections of his teachings. The most famous, the Sermon on the Mount (chs. 5–7), summarizes Jesus’ teachings. The others instruct disciples how to spread Jesus’ message (ch. 10), explain the kingdom of God in parables (ch. 13), teach communal love and forgiveness (ch. 18), and encourage vigilance and hope in the second coming of Jesus and the final judgment (chs. 24–25). The intervening chapters recount Jesus’ healings (chs. 8–9), describe the opposition he faced (chs. 11–12; 21–23), and trace the ongoing instruction of his disciples (chs. 14–17; 19–20).

These actions, teachings, and evaluations of Jesus are contained in a narrative which resembles to a limited extent an ancient Greco-Roman life (Gk. bios) of a famous person. Such a life emphasized the virtues and accomplishments of the subject and his moral meaning for the reader. The goal of an ancient life was not to attain detailed historical accuracy and completeness as in a modern biography, but to encourage the reader to a life of virtue. In some ways, Jesus’ life in the Gospel of Matthew resembles ancient lives of the prophets which stress their call by God, the role or task to which the prophets are dedicated, and often the sufferings which they must undergo. Some scholars have fruitfully compared the Gospels to aspects of the so-called Greco-Roman romances or novels which stress the interaction of the hero or heroine with the gods and their escapes from danger. On the other hand, the Gospels lack the highly emotional and erotic motifs common to this literature. Granted these literary similarities, the four canonical Gospels have more in common with one another than with Hebrew or Greco-Roman literary types and constitute an identifiable genre of their own.

Symbols, Themes, Thought, and Theology

The Gospel of Matthew does not discuss or allude to the kind of systematic theology which modern Christians are used to, with its clearly defined, abstract categories such as Christology, justification, salvation, eschatology, and ecclesiology. Commentators have sometimes imposed these categories on the Gospel narrative to the detriment of its vital message and communicative immediacy. On the other hand, the narrative’s major symbols, themes, characters, and actions require some kind of organized exposition and interpretation.

Though Jesus is the main character in the Gospel, God is the primary force behind the narrative and in the world as the author of Matthew understands it. As a background character, God is always present and active. Most of the actions and goals of the characters relate positively or negatively to God’s purposes and activity. Jesus’ birth, mission to Israel, death, and resurrection take place according to God’s will. God controls history from creation to the final judgment when the Son of Man will appear. Through it all God is faithful to his people and merciful to them when they sin and fail. God appears most clearly as the Father of Jesus, who is himself the Son of God; and Jesus is reciprocally a cipher for God, God’s agent on earth and the mediator between humans and God. Jesus’ birth, powers, and wisdom make him more than a prophet or simple representative of God. As Son of the Father, apocalyptic Son of Man, and Messiah, Jesus functions as a heavenly being (cf. the last scene—28:16–20) who is plenipotentiary for God, that is, Emmanuel, meaning God with us (1:23).

God the Father and Jesus his Son form the center of the web of kinship relations which hold the author’s narrative and community together. God as Father to Jesus the Son supports the relationships of love and mercy which hold together the brothers and sisters of Matthew’s community. The story of Jesus’ birth implies that he is not Joseph’s son but God’s, and at crucial moments God reveals that Jesus is his Son, especially at the baptism and transfiguration (3:17; 17:5). In turn Jesus acknowledges the importance of knowing and recognizing the Father (11:25–27), especially when Peter, who speaks for the disciples, calls Jesus the Messiah and Son of God (16:16–17; cf. also 14:33). The apocalyptic phenomena at the death of Jesus make clear even to the Roman centurion and his soldiers, who are neutral observers, that Jesus is the Son of God (27:54). Satan (3:17) and the demons (8:28–29) know that Jesus is the Son of God through their otherworldly knowledge.

Because the title Son of God carries with it connotations of trinitarian theology for modern Christians, it is important to review the first-century Jewish understanding of this term which Matthew actualized in his narrative. The Judean kings, preeminently David, were the sons of God in a special way. God promised to treat David’s son as his own son and not reject him (2 Sam 7:14). This stress on royal kinship merges divine with human rule in Israel. Ps 2:7 extends the hope of divine and Israelite rule over all the earth: The LORD said to me, ‘You are my son.’ … I will give you the nations for an inheritance. That the hopes found in these two passages were alive among Jewish groups in the first century can be seen in the Qumran midrash on the last days (4Q174, also called Florilegium or Eschatological Midrashim), which quotes 2 Samuel 7 and Psalm 2 together. The themes of divine election, sonship, and eschatological royal power are also found in the so-called Son of God text found at Qumran (4Q246 or 4QpsDan ara) in which a king is being addressed and promised that his son shall be hailed (as) the son of God, and they shall call him son of the Most High. Second Temple literature recognizes a wider sense of the Son of God as a righteous person. The righteous one helps his fellow humans, endures suffering from the unjust, and in the right circumstances rules wisely as God wills (Sir 4:10 [Heb.]). Such righteousness in responding to God fits Matthew’s stress on obedience to the law and God’s will. God’s care for the just, like his care for the king, is expressed in kinship terms which transcend the present. The book of Jubilees has God predict to Moses that Israel will return to God and keep the commandments. Then I shall be a Father to them, and they will be sons to me. And they will all be called ‘sons of the living God.’ And every angel and spirit will know and acknowledge that they are my sons … and I shall love them (Jub. 1:24–25; cf. also Pss. Sol. 17:26–27). The just sons of God are frequently persecuted by the wicked, but vindicated by God (Wis 2:16–18; 5:5), as is Jesus when threatened by Herod (Matthew 2). In Second Temple Judaism the son obeys God faithfully and can depend on God for favor, protection, or, in the case of persecution, vindication.

Jesus is also the Christ, a Greek word which translates the Hebrew Mashiaḥ (Messiah), meaning anointed one. The title Messiah/Christ was the earliest and preeminent title used for Jesus by his followers. As early as Paul’s letters (the fifties of the first century) Christ is treated as part of Jesus’ name as well as a title; similarly in Matthew it is both a name (1:1) and a separate title (1:17). In the HB kings and high priests were anointed when appointed to office. In Second Temple Jewish apocalypses a Messiah is a powerful figure sent by God to intervene in an evil world on behalf of those faithful to God. This intermediary may be designated as an anointed king like David who will war against evil and rule once it is destroyed or an anointed priest or may be a similar kind of figure such as a prophet like Moses (Deut 18:18) or an angelic warrior. Contrary to many Christian understandings of the Messiah, not all Jews were expecting a Messiah. Some first-century Jews did not accept the relatively recent teachings about the end of the world; others expected God to intervene directly without the use of an intermediary. Those who hoped for a messianic figure had a variety of expectations. The early followers of Jesus had to integrate into this web of apocalyptic hopes something new, a Messiah who had suffered, been executed, and risen from the