Building Blocks of Wisdom: The Chiastic Structure of Matthew’s Gospel

By William J. Wright

Matthew chose not to write his Gospel in chronological order. Why? How does his presentation of the Gospel differ from the other three? I show that Matthew organized his book into fourteen chiasms, explain how chiasms work, and describe the advantages that Matthew afforded the careful reader. The contrasts and comparisons of the vertical and horizontal aspects of the chiasms provide the reader with new insights into the events of Jesus' earthly ministry, and examining the peaks of the chiasms provides a ready summary of the author's key events--some of which are surprising and take careful thought to see why he stresses them over more familiar events.
The chiastic structure aides in memorization due to its ordered pairs and, because they can span multiple chapters in one unit, allow for a view of the whole story at once. The result is a better understanding of the emotions of the disciples and the man on the street at a time when everything they had known was changing daily.
Reading Matthew's Gospel the way it was written allows the reader a more complete understanding of its message.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666774184

William J. Wright

William J. Wright is a retired physician who lives with his wife, Sarah, on seventy acres outside Pettyview, Arkansas, where they raised their four boys and where these stories took place. He is the author of Beginning with Genesis: A Journey from Knowledge to Wisdom (2022) and Building Blocks of Wisdom: The Chiastic Structure of Matthew’s Gospel (2023).

Book preview

Introduction

Of the four gospels, only Luke is told in strict chronological order.¹ John wrote his gospel later than the others and was filling in the gaps that had been left out of the synoptic gospels.² For what purpose did Matthew and Mark tell the stories they chose in the order they used? If we knew that, it might unlock a fuller message they were communicating.

Each of the four gospels has its own purpose. Mark has barely started his gospel when Peter is called by Jesus. A few verses later, still in chapter one, Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Matthew waits until chapters four and eight to relate these events. Luke reverses them, with the mother-in-law being healed in chapter four and Peter called in the next chapter. John doesn’t mention either.

Have you ever noticed that Matthew, in laying out his Gospel, tells of Jesus feeding 5,000 followers and just a chapter later feeding 4,000 (Matthew 14:13 and 15:32) and it doesn’t happen again? Or, Jesus is asked for a sign that he is the Messiah and says that the only sign they will get is the sign of Jonah—twice, 12:39 and just four chapters later in 16:1? The same tight window is true for Jesus telling the elders that God seeks compassion over sacrifice (9:13 and 12:6) and discussing binding and loosing in the Kingdom of Heaven (16:19 and 18:18). One of the theses of this book is that Matthew groups events together to help emphasize his main points.

The only reason we know our own history is that a few people worked to develop communication skills. That includes inventing alphabets, refining paper, learning to make books, and standardizing spelling. Before that there were oral traditions, which required discovering techniques to ensure the oral histories remained accurate.

The early writers did not have chapters or even paragraphs, and minimal punctuation to help with emphasis. They also did not have bold, italics, underline, small caps, ALL CAPS,—dashes—or varying fonts. Instead they often used the structural arrangement of repeated thoughts or phrases.³ They did have chiasms, which was a common teaching technique in Hebrew literature. Chi is the Greek letter resembling our letter X. A lesson (argument) that builds up to a point then symmetrically builds down with supporting information takes the form A–B–C–B’–A’.⁴ The main thrust is C. The apex may be supported by the bases, A and A’, but more frequently in this gospel the apex forms a contrast to the bases of the chiasm. The tiers of the chiasm, A–A’, B–B’, etc., form equivalencies horizontally across the chiasm which enrich our understanding of each level of the chiasm.

This is different than typical western argumentation in which we start with a point, A, which is agreed upon, and show that B follows logically, C follows that, and on until we arrive at our conclusion. Western thinking differs from eastern thinking in other important ways as well. For starters, it uses the left side of the brain whereas Eastern languages use the right. Eastern languages, e. g., Hebrew, read right to left whereas Western languages, e. g., Greek, reads left to right and the Greeks, when they appropriated the Eastern Semitic letters to build their alphabet, flipped the letters right to left.

These differences take some getting used to, but if Matthew wrote in chiasms, it would reward the reader to understand how they work. For one thing, when the apex of the chiasm is reached half of the information related to it is still to come. That means that for many verses—maybe dozens, and in complex chiasms (more on that later), possibly more than a chapter—Matthew is still referring to the apex.

Also, the chiasms are not made of point A leading to point B. They are built with a thought or deed which provides the reader with a feel of what is happening more than a concrete claim. The chiasm goes forward then back and like any trip, you see things differently coming than you did going.

Louis L’Amour, the great writer of western novels, always had his heroes stop frequently on their travels across the great expanses of the West and look back because the landmarks would be different on the return trip. Chiasms provide more than one view. Chiastic thinking is like going up one side of the mountain and coming down the other. The view from the top is the same, but what it is on top of changes, providing more information about the mountain and its peak.

Similarly, in real time there are many things happening at once. Chiastic structure and thought allows us to see how multiple events impacted an event or teaching.

The purpose of this book is to examine how Matthew used chiasms to build his gospel, then to examine the chiasms themselves to gain wisdom from their structure by comparing the paired horizontal elements with each other and contrasting the bases of the chiasms with the apex. Because of this comparing and contrasting, this book is not a quick read. If you have things to do more important than understanding this gospel, I suggest you go and do them now. Come back when you have the time to do the work.

The book is, however, a quick re-read. It is easy to find what you want to review in The Scroll (Section Four, end of the book), get the chiasm number, and find it in the text—each chiasm number is bolded when it is first discussed. I frequently hear a sermon of a verse exegeted and hurry home to see what is on the other side of that chiasm for added insight.

Using chiasms has the advantage of helping the reader visualize the message and making it memorable—no small accomplishment when even today a majority of Christians worldwide not only do not have copies of the scriptures, but many cannot read. Breaking the account into chiasms allows a focus on the main points—the peaks of the chiasms—for an overview, but also an in-depth study of the stories, parables, and events that comprise the individual chiasms. The symmetry and paired sides also aid memory.

I will be writing about the chiasms as if the verses are written on a long scroll with each level rising a step further off the baseline. Written like that it rises on the left side and declines on the right side of the chiasm. However, when I write out the chiasm so that the levels can be seen and compared, I will be coming down the page with the levels progressively indented. For consistency I will still refer to the left and right sides and make vertical and horizontal comparisons as if we are looking at the scroll.⁵

If you think of a verse you remember from Matthew, you will most likely find it heading a chiasm, and usually it will head one of the top two or three levels in the complex, or nested, chiasms.

Understanding the story being conveyed by an author requires understanding his audience and his purpose. Luke, as mentioned, sets out to give a chronological account of events. He had not been present with Jesus, but had interviewed those who were, including, according to tradition, Jesus’ mother, Mary: it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order.⁶

As to audiences for each gospel, generally accepted is that Matthew was writing to the Jews, Mark to the Romans, Luke to the Greeks, and John to the world. An intriguing sidebar is the opinion that the writer of Mark was John Mark, the disciple, who also wrote John much later than the three synoptic gospels,⁷ and he wrote it to fill in areas that the disciples and other contemporaries of Jesus knew from experience and that had been considered common knowledge. As time passed and the church grew to include large numbers of people who had not been present initially and large areas outside of Galilee and Judea, it became necessary to write down those things which were left out or discussed tangentially in the earlier accounts. John was filling in the details for new Christians twenty to fifty years after Mark and Matthew were written.

If Luke is chronological, the other gospels manifestly are not. No doubt Jesus repeated some of the parables to different audiences, and blind eyes were opened and demons banished many different times,⁸ but some of the stories are clearly in a different order. With a view of nuances of message to different audiences, we can see that different sequencing of events are not mistakes, but part of the technique of delivering the message of that gospel to those readers.

Matthew (Levi) was a Jew writing to readers steeped in Jewish tradition: Torah, Rabbinical schools, festivals, history, and prophesies. He has 101 Old Testament references—by far the most of the gospels.⁹ Daniel had told of the coming of the Messiah,¹⁰ but the timing of his prophesy was unclear because it was related to the rebuilding of the temple. No one was sure whether it was the start or the completion of the temple, which had several starts and stops. In any event, the expectation was high that the promised Coming was near.¹¹ Matthew demonstrated to the Jews looking for Messiah that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophesies and is God’s Christ. The Good News he presents is ordered to make that case.

Many authors have recognized a general chiastic structure of Matthew taken as a whole, i.e., one large chiasm. (Google Matthew chiasm.) The purpose here is to look at Matthew as a series of chiasms, arranged to tell a story and explain it using contrasts and similarities. Sometimes individual elements of one of the chiasms, say B and B’, are themselves smaller chiasms. This structure is called nested chiasms. An example is seen in the Sermon on the Mount, which has sub- and sub-sub- levels. I will give names to the chiasms, both as a memory aide and to assist in referencing them throughout the gospel. I will also give them numbers to assist in labeling the chiasms as they are written out.

Matthew has four distinct sections in his gospel. He starts by reviewing Jewish history and explaining why Jesus is the promised Messiah. He then has two sections each designated by a thundering From That Time. In the second section of Matthew’s gospel, the that time was Jesus’ desert temptation and John’s arrest and Jesus is preaching that the kingdom of heaven is not some distant event but is at hand; after the second From That Time (chiasm seven in chapter 16 of the gospel—the lines in the sand drawn by Jesus and the elders) Jesus is preparing the disciples and telling them that He must go to Jerusalem, suffer, die, and be raised. The fourth section I call The Witnesses because it is a series of short chiasms in which Matthew gives accounts of what the people involved in the events of the Passion saw and said, ending with the empty tomb.

Matthew ends with a short chiasm setting out the Great Commission.

Section One: The Legitimacy of Christ

Section Two: The Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

Section Three: The Son of Man to Jerusalem

Section Four: The Witnesses

1

. Luke

1

:

3

.

2

. Synoptic is derived from a Greek word meaning can be seen together.

3

. After Clarke, whatisachiasm.html.

4

. This might better be represented as , but space requires the linear presentation.

The Chi or X comes from putting an ABBA argument in block form: then drawing lines connecting the As and the Bs. More will be said about structure when we get to complex chiasms in