But readers must progress past the Greco-Roman tradition for influence upon Matthew. Major inspiration comes from the historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible.47 Early on, the term “gospel” began to be employed as a sort of genre description of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The term “gospel” (εὐαγγέλιον) and its verbal cognate “gospelize” (εὐαγγελίζω) point to the oral proclamation or message of good news. Why did the early church begin referring to these written documents as “Gospels”? The answer comes from looking at the first words of Mark, the first written Gospel. It has been widely argued that the opening words of Mark’s Gospel are not simply an introduction to his work but most likely serve as a title or heading: “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ θεοῦ).
Not only do we have some hints in the evangelists’ works themselves that these should be labeled as “Gospels,” but the early church witness also supports this. As early as the first half of the second century (ca. AD 150–55), the noun εὐαγγέλιον was used in Justin’s Apology to refer to the Gospel books.48 In addition, the superscriptions added to the four evangelists in the second century were consistently “the Gospel according to X.” So the followers of Jesus early on seemed to follow Mark in labeling these works as “Gospels.” However, the more important question for this study is the implication of these being labeled as “Gospels.”
In the OT, and more specifically Isa. 40–66, the term “gospel” refers to the hope of the future restoration of God’s reign through his chosen servant. For example, in Isa. 52:7 εὐαγγελίζω is put in parallel to the reign of God (βασιλεύσει σου ὁ θεός).
How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of him who brings good news,
who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness,
who publishes salvation,
who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isa. 52:7, emphasis added)
The good news is described here as the reign of God, or peace, happiness, and salvation. The larger context is that Israel sits in exile, and the people await the return of their God to bring them out of exile and back into their home. The context of Isa. 40–66 also speaks of them in exile and suffering because of their sin. Jesus clarifies for Israel that the main problem with Israel is not what others are doing to them but what they have done to themselves. The good news can only be understood after they have realized the bad news. The good news they are waiting for is a Savior, a representative to enact the reign of God. Thus the gospel of the evangelists means the reinstatement of the reign of God.
Therefore, when Jesus comes proclaiming “the gospel of the kingdom” of God (Matt. 4:23; 9:35), the disciples must have understood that Jesus’s ministry fulfills the hopes of which Isaiah spoke. It was thus appropriate for the disciples and the early church to label their stories as “The Gospel according to X” because in these stories we learn how Jesus satisfies the gospel expectations.49 The Gospels are stories about Jesus, and Jesus’s message is that the kingdom of God, the reign of God, is here in his person.
Matthew chooses to tell this “Gospel” because it completes the great story line of the Scripture. The trained scribe understood himself as continuing the ancient story of God’s dealings with his people, beginning with Adam and Eve and going through Abraham, Moses, and David. At its core the whole Bible is a narrative of God’s work in the world, and Matthew completes this portrayal with the story of Jesus. The hopes and dreams of Israel centered on the announcement of good news and more specifically the good news that their God reigns over the whole earth. Matthew, as the scribe, illustrates for his readers that his rabbi is the representative of God who will bring God’s kingdom. These are not just any stories, but stories of the Jewish messiah, the king from David’s line, the son of Abraham.
The combination of these two genres (ancient biographies and OT narratives) instructs readers both that Matthew presents Jesus as a figure to emulate and that this story is the climax of the great narrative of Israel. Matthew, and the other Gospel writers, take the wisdom sayings of Jesus and connect them with the narrative mode of the Hebrew Bible. According to Dryden this means that the Gospels function as wisdom: they “teach practical wisdom by instilling in readers a personal allegiance to a particular value-laden picture of the world.”50 Matthew writes of Jesus’s life in these particular forms so that we might see the values of Wisdom embodied as the new and the old intermix in his discourses and actions.
Shadow Stories
Matthew provides an ancient biography peppered with the Hebrew Bible. But we need to press more into the manner of how he tells this story of Jesus, for this instructs us about the wisdom learned from his sage. The First Gospel can be understood on a basic narrative-development level: Jesus is born, baptized, begins his ministry, is challenged, dies, and rises from the dead. Yet the shadows of the Torah nearly always shape Matthew’s historical rendering. The OT Scriptures constitute the “generative milieu” of Matthew’s story. It is somewhat like the baby boomers experiencing the first generation of Star Wars movies and then watching the 2015 installment The Force Awakens. The director J. J. Abrams explicitly made the film in a way that both new and old fans could appreciate. There was the basic plot line, which carried the movie forward, yet when Star Wars fans saw certain scenes, they couldn’t help but be reminded of earlier movies. The point is that there is the text (The Force Awakens), and then there is the subtext (earlier Star Wars films). They cohere with one another in some ways and differ in others, but those with ears to hear and eyes to see end up seeing more than the uninformed viewer does.
Yet exactly how Matthew (and the other NT authors) employ the OT is debated. The dispute pertains to both the terms used to describe the method and the actual practice behind these terms. Some prefer the name typology, others intertextuality, or inner-biblical exegeis, or figural representation, or midrash, or allegory.51 The division between these camps creates deep divides among interpreters (though there is probably more commonality than they realize). I don’t attempt to solve the debate here, but I do want to point out one oversight and attempt to correct it in my presentation. The problem with some of the aformentioned terms is that they unintentionally produce tunnel vision rather than viewing parallels together. If Matthew’s gospel-narration of Jesus’s life reflects and completes the persons, places, things, offices, events, actions, and institutions of the OT, then these should be viewed together.52 The combination of all these things produces a story.
I will therefore use the term shadow stories as the comprehensive term partially because shadow stories are unique to the Gospels’ narration.53 They connect large swaths of narrative rather than just points or dots in the story. The point here is to push people past simply looking for similar terms and to look for a combination of these factors and the development of a narrative through quotes, allusions, and echoes. The main importance of this is that as we study Matthew, we should be looking for more than “word” connections; we should watch for “narrative” echoes as well. Associations are made to Jesus’s life that demonstrate how all the types in the Hebrew Scriptures are fulfilled in the antitype. This makes sense, for a story consists not only of persons but also of events, institutions, things, offices, and actions.
So, for example, Jesus is presented as the new Moses (person). In portraying Jesus as the new Moses, Jesus is set on mountains (places) mirroring Sinai and other such imagery. At times, he is even portrayed in shining clothes (things), showing that he is near to God, like Moses. As the new Moses, Jesus is thus the new prophet (office), who speaks for God and leads his people on a new exodus (event). He does this by the sprinkling of his blood (action), which establishes the new covenant (institution). Readers should not take these out and only assess them individually, as if they stand on their own. Rather, they should examine how Matthew’s narrative develops the portrait of Jes
us as the new Moses. The narrative as a whole is shaped in a way that imitates, duplicates, and replicates a previous story, not only individual pieces of it.
Explicit or Subtle?
Many scholars notice how explicit Matthew’s use of the OT is, and the abundance of fulfillment quotations support this contention, but Matthew can also be subtle.54 Sometimes his overt fulfillment statements distract readers from seeing other shadows dancing across his pages.55 Dale Allison says that while Matthew made much clear, he did not trumpet all his intentions; a careful reader will note this even in the first few verses.56 Matthew’s style is not only overt but also full of allusions and implications. It is not a contradiction to assert that Matthew is both explicit and subtle. He is explicit on the surface level but subtle on a deeper level. Sometimes the overt words of Matthew are plain so that a modest reader can get his point, but his form is subtle. Other times the individual words seem plain, but then when comparing them with an OT text, one realizes much more is going on.
For example, Matthew cloaks his introductory narrative about who Jesus is (chap. 1) and where he is from (chap. 2) with distinctly torahaic robes. Using a string of fulfillment quotations in chapter 2, Matthew shows his readers how to interact with his unfolding story. Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem is to fulfill the prophecy that a ruler will come from Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2). His life in Nazareth fulfills the expectation that he will be called a Nazarene (Isa. 11:1). On one level the meaning is plain, but when one examines the OT, no quote exists that says, “One is coming who shall be called a Nazarene.” Matthew surely knew this, so he must want his readers to see something more than what was on the surface. Many therefore conclude that Matthew executes a wordplay with Isa. 11:1, which says, “Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit” (NASB). In Hebrew, the word for “branch” is netzer, which in the Hebrew consonantal text would appear as NZR, the letters occurring also in NaZaReth. Matthew is thus explicit on one level but subtle on another.57
Matthew can be subtle, ambiguous, and “untidy” at times because, like a good artist, he knows words on a slant are sometimes more effective. In the words of R. T. France, there is a surface meaning but also a “bonus meaning” that conveys the increasingly rich understanding of the person and role of Jesus.58 The point is not that Matthew is “a verbal juggler, but [an] innovative theologian whose fertile imagination is controlled by an overriding conviction of the climactic place of Jesus in the working out of the total purpose of God.”59 The First Gospel is a mnemonic device, a trigger for intertextual interchanges that depend on an imaginative and careful reading.60 So Matthew provides stories about Jesus, but these stories have shadows lurking both in the foreground and the background. Some of these shadows have clear outlines, while others require more work on the part of the reader.
Reception and Production
As I have argued, Matthew is convinced that the coming of the apocalyptic sage-messiah has fulfilled Israel’s expectations. Shadow stories look more to the larger narrative patterns and note that events, persons, institutions, places, things, and offices can’t ultimately be separated. But how does Matthew find these figures and shadow stories? Does he read backward from Jesus’s life, or forward from the OT? David Orton is right to state that Matthew’s method was probably more natural than parsed out.
Matthew may not himself have been fully aware of the mechanics of his own method, since it plainly operates on an intuitive level, involving a high degree of lateral thinking and unconscious allusion. For Matthew the exercise is certainly not an academic one, some kind of word-game, or even a rabbinic-type exegesis; it is a product born of extended reflection and meditation on the written words of scripture and of his Jesus-sources.61
While Matthew may have not been aware of his mechanics, it is useful to step back with hindsight and categorize what he is doing. Matthew seems to employ a reading of both reception and production.62 Reception focuses on how Matthew received meanings generated by the OT text. Production refers to the way in which Matthew exposed or inserted meanings in earlier texts. In simpler terms, Matthew reads both forward and backward. He sees things latent in the OT text before Christ’s advent and also sees things that can be recognized only retrospectively, after the coming of Jesus.
While the prospective reading is not provocative, some are uncomfortable with a retrospective reading. Kaiser states, “If it is not in the OT text, who cares how ingenious later writers are in their ability to reload the OT text with truths that it never claimed to reveal in the first place?”63 I care, especially if Matthew the scribe is the one reloading the text. The crux of the argument comes down to what “in the OT text” means. Matthew is not taking the text for a spin that the original authors would not have recognized. Rather, their view was hazy because the fullness of time had not yet arrived. This does not mean that Matthew is finding things in the OT text not already there. Instead, the nature of their thereness transforms with the coming of Jesus.64 As Moo and Naselli state, “Does the OT intend the NT’s typological correspondence? We would answer ‘no’ if ‘intend’ means that the participants in the OT situation or the OT authors were always aware of the typological significance. On the other hand, we would answer ‘yes’ if ‘intend’ means that the OT has a ‘prophetic’ function.”65 These readings are not contradictory to the OT texts but truly retrospective readings. To put it another way, it is divinely intended but recognized retrospectively.
An example outside the Scriptures of how retrospective readings work may help here. Daniel James Brown’s best-selling book, The Boys in the Boat, tells the story of the Washington University crew team who won the gold under Hitler’s glaring eye. At the end of the book Brown reflects on what Hitler saw that day in 1936, connecting two events that could only be done so retrospectively. Brown says:
It occurred to me that when Hitler watched Joe and the boys fight their way back from the rear of the field to sweep ahead of Italy and Germany seventy-five years ago, he saw, but did not recognize, heralds of his doom. He could not have known that one day hundreds of thousands of boys just like them, boys who shared their essential nature—decent and unassuming, not privileged or favored by anything in particular, just loyal, committed, and perseverant—would return to Germany dressed in olive drab, hunting him down.66
Brown, as the narrator, brings two events into association: the day the Washington crew won the gold and the day when American soldiers invaded Germany. He acknowledges that Hitler could not have known, but he, as the author who stands on the other side of the war, sees the prefigurement of the American heart in the boys in the boat.
This is similar to Matthew’s method. Many of the Hebrew Scriptures are certainly prophetic, and Matthew sees them straining forward toward the messiah. However, other texts only shine after the messiah has come. Brown admits that Hitler could not have known what lay before his eyes, but now that the war is over, the two events can be held in simultaneity. This is true of all history. The whole truth concerning an event can only be known afterward, and sometimes only long after the event itself has taken place. The OT authors are not at fault for not knowing the future or how it will shape the events they are experiencing. If we believe that new events in history bring light and meaning to previous events, then how can we not also believe this for the coming of the Son of God? The apocalyptic coming of the messiah casts new light on old stories: the lamp of Jesus reveals corners that were dark and musty. Only after the fact of Jesus is Matthew able to see certain connections. So, like Brown, Matthew reads backward.
The process of reading and interpretation is a complex interplay between a retrospective and prospective reading. For example, if you read a detective novel and the key is revealed at the end, then all the hints in the first part come together. Suddenly the reader sees that the clues were present the whole time, but the key needed to be revealed. The early church described Jesus as the “key” of the Scriptures. Once the key is revealed, readers s
ee the clues contained all along in Scripture. Retrospectively they seem patent; prospectively they seem more latent. The process of reading and interpreting Scripture is usually even more complex than a simple detective novel: once you reach a conclusion, it is hard to tell whether “the new” was discovered prospectively or retrospectively.
Other NT authors and indeed Jesus’s words on the road to Emmaus in Luke (where he interprets for them from “Moses and all the Prophets” all “the things concerning himself”; Luke 24:27) confirm this method. The new law stands over the old law and determines how we are to interpret the old law. This is because all of the NT authors read the Scriptures under the banner of Christ. Hugh of St. Victor says, “All of Divine Scripture is one book, and that one book is Christ.”67 Therefore, their exegesis of the OT is paradoxical, for though the authors viewed the Torah as authoritative, they also extended the text by pointing to its fundamental telos. The word spoken in the Torah was never meant to be self-referential but now dwells in Christ.68
Matthew’s language in chapter 13 supports this idea of reception and production. In one sense, according to the context of Matt. 13—and indeed the entire Gospel—this newness is not really “new.” These things have “been hidden since the foundation of the world” (13:35). Jesus is not changing God’s plan, for God has been slowly painting his canvas all along. At the same time, the revelation of these things through the Son is new. These are new/old truths, and the discipled scribe brings out a plate of goods for the benefit of others. According to Matthew, the message of the kingdom of heaven does not do away with the old but builds on top of it. Matthew shows his readers that in their enthusiasm for finding the new, they must not disregard the old. The old is not thrown away but brought out in fresh clothing. As Frederick Bruner says, “The new does not displace the old but accompanies it.”69
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