01 Gospel of Matthew Introduction

Krisan Marotta: Welcome back to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how it means. We're starting a new series on the Gospel of Matthew, and today I'm gonna introduce you to the book. The lecture notes for today's talk from the link below the podcast, and you can also find them by going to my website, which is wednesdayintheword.com, then slash Matthew 1. So glad to have you along today. Teaching through one of the gospels has been on my bucket list for quite a while, and I am particularly excited to teach Matthew's Gospel because Teaching Through the Sermon on the Mount has also been on my bucket list. So today we're going to go over background and introductory material for Matthew's Gospel, talk a little bit about how to study the Gospel, and then in the next podcast, we'll start looking at the text itself. So let's dive in. The Gospel of Matthew is one of four books that record the life of Jesus. Matthew wrote this gospel, this book, to tell us who Jesus is, what Jesus said and did, and what that means for us. Since Matthew wrote his gospel primarily for a Jewish audience, it is filled with references to and quotations from the Old Testament. And Matthew will emphasize the aspects of Jesus' ministry that fulfilled the promises of the Davidic kingship and the Old Testament prophets, ideas which his audience was very familiar with. Whenever you start studying a new book of Scripture, one of the first questions you want to ask is who wrote it and when was it written? And as with most of the books of the Bible, there is somewhat of a debate over who wrote this gospel. I'm not really going to get into that debate. I accept the longstanding tradition that the apostle Matthew wrote this gospel, although, like all the gospels, the author is not named in the text itself. And Matthew doesn't give any hints as to who the author is in his text, like John and Mark do. But we do have very old manuscripts with titles that identify the author of the gospels. So these manuscripts say the gospel according to Matthew, the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel according to Luke, and the Gospel according to John. Those titles were probably added to the manuscript when the Gospels were collected and put into one scroll. They probably were not on the original documents, but they are very old evidence as to the authors of the Gospels. Do we know for absolute certain that Matthew wrote it? No, we probably don't, but I don't really see any reason to question the long historical tradition that we have that ascribes this gospel to Matthew, the disciple of Jesus. If you want to delve more into the question of authorship, you can find that discussion in just about any of the commentaries on Matthew. I'm not going to go into it here. Today, most scholars think that Mark wrote his gospel first and that Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels next with John writing last. But the view that Mark's gospel was the first one written didn't arise until the early nineteenth century, and scholars who follow that system would date Matthew's gospel to around eighty AD. However, the early church fathers unanimously claimed or believed that Matthew was the first gospel written, and that it was written before the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, probably somewhere in the 60s. In either case, this gospel was written within about thirty to forty years after the resurrection of Christ. I started thinking about that because I've been married almost forty years, and that made me wonder, could I write an account of the time that I first met my husband and our first three years together? And I really think I could. I have lots of memories and mementos of that time, and I most definitely could if the Holy Spirit was opening my eyes and inspiring my memory as he did for Matthew. Now who was Matthew? Matthew is also called Levi. He was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. And he was a tax collector before following Jesus. And what that means is that he was one of the people that the Romans employed to collect taxes. So the Roman publicans employed locals in the place where the taxes were owed to actually collect the taxes. Remember, there were no checks in those days, no electronic payments. People had to physically hand over coins to some collector. And these underlings made their money by adding their own fee on top of the taxes that were due, and they were notorious for confiscatory practices. So Matthew was one of these local underlings. His duty was to collect a toll or a transport tax from local merchants and farmers carrying their goods to market as well as caravans passing through Galilee, and that would have made him an employee of Herod Antipas. To the Jews, these tax collectors were particularly reviled because they were visible reminders of the nation's enslavement to Rome, and if that wasn't bad enough, they were also unclean because their job required them to work and touch and associate with Gentiles. So as a rule, only the lowest and most desperate Jews would accept such an unpopular job. It's interesting that only this gospel mentions that Matthew was a tax collector. Perhaps the other gospel writers didn't want to embarrass Matthew by pointing out his rather nefarious background, but Matthew is humble enough to mention it himself. As a tax collector, Matthew must have known the value of goods of all kinds. He would have known the value of wool and flax and linen and pottery, brass, silver, gold, barley, wheat, olives, figs. He would have known the value of both local and foreign monetary systems, and he would have been able to speak the local Aramaic language as well as Greek, which was the language of commerce, and he may well have known other languages as his job required. There's some speculation that Matthew had a brother among the twelve apostles, and there are three main views on this. First, some think that Matthew and Thomas are brothers because in Mark three hundred eighteen and Luke six fifteen, Matthew is coupled with Thomas, and Scripture tells us that Thomas was a twin. So that's given rise to the speculation that Matthew was in fact the twin brother of Thomas. A more popular view is that Matthew and James the less are brothers, and this is because Matthew and James are both called the son of Alpheus, and that leads some to speculate that Matthew and James are either full brothers or half brothers. However, most scholars think that if Matthew did have a brother among the twelve, one of the gospels would have mentioned it clearly, because the gospels clearly tell us that Peter and Andrew were brothers and that James and John were the brothers, the sons of Zebedee. Now it's not really important to know whether Matthew had a brother among the twelve or not, but it's kind of interesting to wonder about. According to church tradition, Matthew remained in Jerusalem for about fifteen years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Then he traveled to several foreign nations, primarily Ethiopia and Persia, and several of the early church fathers say that Matthew was one of the few apostles who died in natural death. However, a later tradition in the Roman Catholic Church claimed that he died as a martyr in Ethiopia. From the research I did, which admittedly was not exhaustive, I don't think we have definitive historical information to know for sure whether he died in natural death or was martyred. That's the author. Now let's talk about Matthew's Gospel. If you read the four Gospels, you'll quickly notice that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are very alike, while John's Gospel is quite different. In Matthew's Gospel, about 20% of the material is unique to Matthew, which means that 80% of it is repeated in either Mark, Luke, or John. The Gospel of John, on the other hand, tells very little of what is in the other gospels. Now there are lots of differences between John and the three synoptic gospels, but there's one that I want to highlight because I think it will help us understand the Gospel of Matthew as we study it. And that is how these books present the relationship between Jesus and the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the capital city of ancient Israel. It was the center of Jewish worship, and it was located in the region of Judea. During the time of Jesus, the temple of God was located in Jerusalem, the central government was located there, and every year the people of Israel would flock to Jerusalem for three major festivals. Jesus did not live in Jerusalem, and Jesus did not grow up there. He didn't even live in the region of Judea, he lived in Galilee. Now if you have a map in your Bible, you might want to pull it out and refer to it or take a look at it later on. If you look at a map of Israel at the time of Christ, you'll see that Judea is in the south with the capital city of Jerusalem. The region of Samaria is above Judea, and then the region of Galilee was above Samaria. The distance from Jesus' hometown in Galilee to Jerusalem was about ninety miles if you walked through Samaria or 120 miles if you walked around it. Now Jews from Jerusalem did not think very highly of Jews from Galilee. Yes, they were fellow Jews, but those in the south thought that Galilean Jews were too influenced by Gentile Greek culture as there were a lot of Gentile towns around them. They thought the Galilean Jews weren't pious enough. The two regions even had separate governments. Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipos, and Judea was ruled by Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Galilean Jews had a different accent from Southern Jews, and you'll remember from the account of Jesus' arrest that one person recognizes Peter as a Galilean because of his accent, because of the way he talks. So if Jerusalem is the center of Jewish life, like the New York City, the big metropolitan center of Jewish life, then Galilee is out on the fringes or the edges. The fact that Jesus is from Galilee was a strike against him. Now to us, these are just names and places in the Bible, but there was a cultural tension between these regions. The Judean Jews looked down on Galilean Jews the way a New Yorker might look down on a person coming from Mississippi. To the New Yorker, he comes from a culturally inferior place and he speaks with a funny accent. And that's how the Jews of Judea viewed the Jews of Galilee. They came from this really strange culturally inferior place and they spoke with a funny accent. So now Jesus comes along, the Messiah, or at least someone claiming to be the long-awaited Messiah, and he's from Galilee. The Jews in Jerusalem would have thought, no, no way, that's not possible. That's like saying, you know, that the next president of the United States is going to come from Cut Bank, Montana. That's just no one from nowhere. So the fact that Jesus did not live in or near Jerusalem, but lived in Galilee is an important part of his story. Now I want to examine how the Gospel of John portrays Jesus' relationship to Jerusalem, and then we're going to look at how Matthew portrays the same relationship. So if you start in the Gospel of John in chapter two, Jesus travels to Jerusalem for the Passover. And while he's there, he goes into the temple, throws out the merchants, drives them out, and makes a lot of important people mad at him. He talks to a Pharisee named Nicodemus, who seems very interested in what Jesus has to say, and then he travels north through Samaria and back to Galilee. Jesus then returns to Jerusalem for another festival. This time he heals a man on the Sabbath day, and the Jewish leadership is so outraged at what they consider a violation of the Sabbath that they seek to kill him. Knowing this, Jesus returns to Galilee again, and he stays away from Jerusalem because he knows that people are seeking his life. And then we read in John 7 1, after this, Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill him. But then, somewhat secretly and quietly, Jesus returns to Jerusalem again for another festival, the feast of booths, and there is great turmoil. People are looking for him, some because they think he's great, others because they think he's a fraud, and some because they're just curious to find out what's going on. And about halfway through the feast, he begins teaching in the temple. However, the officers who are sent to arrest him fail to arrest him because they get too interested in his teaching. He keeps teaching, and the Jews get so agitated they pick up rocks to stone him. In fact, twice this happens and he escapes both times. He leaves Jerusalem for Jordan, but then he hears that his friend Lazarus is dead, so he returns to Bethany, which is about two miles from Jerusalem. And by the time he gets there, Lazarus is dead, but Jesus raises him from the dead. And this really upsets the Jerusalem leadership. They have a big meeting and they resolve that they're going to kill Jesus. Jesus withdraws again, but he stays nearby because Passover is drawing near, and when Passover arrives, Jesus has his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and this time they arrest him and execute him, and he is resurrected. Now, as John portrays the story, Jesus has a number of visits into Jerusalem where he stirs up trouble and then leaves only to return again and cause more trouble. There were three major Jewish festivals each year, and it's likely Jesus went to Jerusalem for each festival. And each time he encountered new people, he made new disciples, and each time his actions provoked the leadership and increased their desire to kill him. And finally the Jewish leadership has had enough and they implement their plan to arrest him and have him crucified. Now that's how John portrays the relationship between Jesus and Jerusalem. Compare this with how the other three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, portray the same relationship. The other three Gospels do not mention this back and forth between Galilee and Jerusalem. They don't deny that Jesus made these trips, they just don't mention them. Instead, the first half of each of the three synoptic gospels is set in Galilee and its surrounding regions. Jesus teaches and does miracles in Galilee in the north. And toward the end of his Galilean ministry, each of the three Gospels has the same dramatic turning point in the story. Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is, and his disciple Peter answers, You're the Christ. And after this event, Jesus begins to teach them that he has to go to Jerusalem and be executed, but he will be raised again. And you'll see this phrase, he set his eyes toward Jerusalem. The second half of each gospel then is about Jesus' journey to Jerusalem, which culminates in his triumphal entry, execution, and resurrection. This structure is really clear in Mark and Matthew. It's a little less clear in Luke, but I think it's still there. To summarize, Matthew, Mark, and Luke use a different structure in their gospels than John uses in his. John portrays this back and forth structure, noting each time Jesus traveled to Jerusalem for one of the feasts, and how each time tensions rise over Jesus and his ministry. The other three Gospels use a two-part structure. They focus first on the work Jesus did in Galilee. They have this turning point where Peter says you're the Christ, and then they portray the rest of the gospel as his journey to Jerusalem. Now we don't know for certain which gospel was the first one written and who decided to tell the story in this two-part structure. As I mentioned, the most popular view today is that Mark wrote first, however, the early church fathers believed that Matthew wrote first. Whoever wrote first, I think it's clear that each writer is telling the story for his own purposes. Each of the gospel authors is editing and picking what to tell for his own plan and the audience he's writing his story for. The authors shape the story and organize it to highlight the significance of the events for a particular audience that they're writing to. Now I'm not saying that Matthew is mistaken. I'm not saying Matthew is lying in any way. He never claims to be telling every single solitary event in the life of Jesus in exact chronological order. Rather, Matthew wants to tell the story in a way that highlights certain truths and brings out certain themes. He portrays the life of Jesus as a journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, and that is an accurate and important way to understand the life of Jesus. That is a profoundly true insight into what happened. Jesus started his life in Galilee on the outskirts of Jewish life, and then he went to Jerusalem, the center of Jewish life, where he was executed and resurrected. Matthew, as all authors do, is organizing the story to highlight the themes and connections he wants to highlight. He's telling the truth about what Jesus said and did, but he's not marching chronologically through the story. He's not writing a biography in that sense. He has organized his story to highlight certain theological themes about the significance of who Jesus was and what he did. A lot of scholars recognize this two-part structure to Matthew, but beyond that, there is some debate about how to outline his book. If you browse a few commentaries, you'll find many different proposals for how to outline it. In fact, every commentary I looked at proposed a different structure within the two part view, and that makes it a little difficult to be dogmatic on the subject of an outline, but I think we can safely say this. Matthew presents the life of Jesus in the two part structure I just talked about. First his ministry in Galilee and then his journey to Jerusalem, including his death and resurrection. Now within that two part structure, there are five places where Matthew records a major teaching of Jesus. And these are sometimes called the five discourses. And discourse is just a fancy word for a sermon or a body of teaching. The first one is in chapters five through seven, that's the Sermon on the Mount. The second one is in chapter ten, that is the commissioning of the twelve, where Jesus gives instructions as he sends out his disciples. The third discourse is in chapter thirteen, where Jesus gives several parables about the kingdom of God. The fourth discourse is in chapter 18, and Jesus is talking to the church, and here he tells his followers how they should relate to each other. And then the fifth discourse is in chapters twenty-three through twenty-five. It's often called the Olivet Discourse, and this is where Jesus talks about the future. Now I think Matthew has intentionally presented five bodies of teaching, each one thematically unified. And each discourse ends with a very similar phrase, something like, and it came about when Jesus finished these words. This phrase becomes a formal marker, so to speak, that says the end, the end of the lesson. So if you put this together, this two-part structure and these discourses, that gives us a structure like this. And I will put this in the lecture notes so you don't have to try to memorize it or write it down. And again, those lecture notes are on Wednesdayintheword.comslash Matthew one. Chapters one through four function as a sort of prologue. Give us some preliminary material about the birth of Jesus, the ministry of John the Baptist, Jesus' baptism and his temptation. Chapters five through sixteen, then, is section one, which covers Jesus' ministry in Galilee. And in this section, we have three discourses the Sermon on the Mount, the sending of the disciples, and the kingdom parables. Surrounding these discourses are stories about the miracles Jesus performed and his interactions with various people. And I think we'll see as we go through that these stories, these interactions are thematically related to the discourses. Chapters 16 and 17 is the turning point. Jesus begins talking to his disciples about how he must go to Jerusalem and die and be raised again, and he turns his eyes toward Jerusalem. Then chapters 18 to the end is the second section, which covers the journey to Jerusalem and everything that happens there. And in this section, there are two discourses. A discourse about how believers should relate to each other and the Olivet Discourse, which he gives after he arrives in Jerusalem and he talks about what's going to happen. And of course, this section culminates in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Before we end today, I want to talk a little bit about how to study and approach a gospel. First you could say gospels are ancient biographies, but there are some important differences. Gospels are not just biographies. The gospels do not intend to record every detail of Jesus' life in chronological order like a biography. They are an apologetic. They don't just record the teachings of Jesus and his thoughts, they defend and explain the importance of his teachings and his thought. Similarly, they don't just record the events in his life, they explain why those events are important and how they are significant. So you could say they record the sayings and anecdotes about Jesus, but they also show his moral character, they explain how he fits into the whole plan of redemptive history. So in that sense, they're historical theology. Now when we study a gospel, we want to approach them like we approach narratives. We want to learn as much as we can about the historical context and the culture of the day. When Jesus speaks to Pharisees, we should know who Pharisees are. We should know a little bit about what they thought and how where they ranked on the social ladder and why they would be talking to Jesus. When he's talking to the Herodians, we should find out who they are. When Jesus performs a miracle at a wedding, we ought to know something about wedding traditions of the day. When he travels from place to place, not only should we look at a map to see where he's going, we should learn something about the culture of the place he's traveling to. Is it primarily Jewish? Is it Gentile? Is it rural? Is it cosmopolitan? And so forth. So we want to study them the way we study narratives, looking at culture and background and scenes, but we also have to notice and take into account the specific literary forms that Jesus uses. Jesus uses a lot of different types of teaching. Sometimes, as in the discourses, we have straight didactic teaching, like a lecture or like a sermon. But sometimes he speaks in parables, sometimes he speaks in metaphors, sometimes he's quoting the Old Testament, and sometimes he's speaking in exaggeration or hyperbole. And we have to recognize each literary form he's using and work with it. So if he starts speaking metaphorically, we don't want to take him literally and vice versa. When the author gives us a clue, like Jesus spoke this parable about the kingdom of God, then we want to interpret that parable as about the kingdom of God, not modern life in America. And while it's useful and always helpful to notice key words and repeated phrases, we want to make sure that we think in terms of paragraphs and scenes, because the gospels are stories. They're not a collection of verses from which to pick and choose our favorites. They are stories that serve to tell us something about who Jesus is and what he came to do. And we want to study each story and each scene in the story in light of the whole gospel and the points that the author is making. So we have to look at the literary units like paragraphs and scenes and discourses and then work with each unit, but put it back into the gospel as a whole. And finally, and perhaps most important, if you remember nothing else about how to study a gospel, remember this. The gospels are about Jesus, not us. The authors make bold and forthright claims about who Jesus is and why it's important. They wrote their gospels to teach us about him. So the first question we want to ask is what does this teach me about Jesus? Not what does this teach me as I face tomorrow. What it means to me is the last question you want to ask after you've thoroughly understood what the author is telling you about Jesus. To close, I want to remind you of the impact Matthew's gospel has had on our culture. Quite apart from teaching us about who Jesus is, Matthew wrote many words and phrases that have become part of our culture. In fact, they are so much a part of our culture that even atheists and agnostics can often quote them. And these are just a few of them. This is Matthew 4.44. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Matthew 19 24. It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. Matthew six twenty-eight and twenty nine. And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before swine. 7 7, ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock, and it will be open to you. 1626, for what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? Matthew five five, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. twenty-two twenty one, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. twenty six forty-one, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. 2652, for all who take the sword perish by the sword. And then perhaps the most famous, Matthew 7.12, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These words that all come from the Gospel of Matthew have greatly influenced Western culture. But that's not why we're going to study the Gospel of Matthew. We're going to study Matthew's gospel to learn about who Jesus is and why his life is significant. Spoiler alert, at the end of the story, Jesus is crucified and God raises him from the dead. And at the end of his gospel, Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, This is Matthew twenty eight, eighteen, and Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. If that's true, and I believe it is, then we should want to learn all we can about who this Jesus is, which is of course Matthew's purpose. Matthew wrote this book to tell us who Jesus is, what he said, what he did, and why that's important. In the next podcast, then we'll delve into chapter one. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how to figure it out. If you haven't visited my website, I encourage you to stop by. I have no ads on my website. None. No ads whatsoever. Instead, it contains a wealth of Bible study materials, all free and designed to help you improve your skills and your understanding of the Bible. I don't take any advertising, I don't accept donations, but if you want to thank me, please join the mailing list, leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen to your podcast, and tell a friend about this podcast. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. You can find more of his music on heartfeltmusic.org. If you want to hear more or delve into previous episodes, please go to my website, wednesdayintheword.com. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.