Mabry Matthew Part 1

All right, Every Nation Seminary, welcome back to New Testament One. Today, we are going to open the book of Matthew. So, I hope at this point you have already read the book of Matthew, and as I said in previous lectures, that you've read it at a super low resolution, kind of fast, and then a higher resolution, slower going through the book bit by bit. The goal of this lecture is that you would have an understanding of the shape of the Gospel of Matthew, that you would be able to describe how it is similar to and different from the Gospel of Mark and later other books as well, and that you would also maybe get a little bit of insight as to why the genealogy is there. This is one of the few places in the New Testament where we have a genealogy, and so it's a really important thing itself. And that you can see kind of... in your own hands, as it were, how important it is that we have multiple gospel attestations to the life and ministry of Jesus. Now, Matthew is different than Mark. You know, as we mentioned, Mark is 16 chapters and everything is moving really quickly. Matthew has some different concerns. Matthew was written a little bit later, as you know, we think between like the 50 and 60 period AD. And it was written by Matthew. the apostle Matthew, the tax collector, the guy that Jesus called to follow him out of a most unexpected set of circumstances, kind of the Jewish sellout to the Roman overlords, and he came and became a follower of Jesus. And interestingly, Matthew's primary audience is his own people, is a Jewish audience. Now, how do we know that? Well, we know that with a couple of clues. A big clue is the way Matthew is arranged, which we'll talk about in just a second. And another big clue is the genealogies and the overall way Matthew seems to talk to his audience with specifically Jewish-sounding concerns. And so you can think back to the lecture that we did on the Gospel of Mark and all those reasons why we imagine Mark was speaking to non-Jews. Just flip that around and you can figure out why we think Matthew was speaking to Jewish people. Additionally, Matthew seems to have arranged what we probably think are decades of oral tradition, along with material from Mark. Remember the synoptic problem we spoke about in that interesting graphic? So Matthew has some additional material, along with the stuff that he got from Mark. And one commentator puts it like this. Matthew shows careful, if complex, organization. The author has used a variety of stylistic devices with considerable... artistry. The result is an alternating presentation of deeds and words of Jesus, which have been collected and arranged topically for the sake of their impact on the reader. Now, I agree with that design. You'll get a lot of like Jesus teaching, and then Jesus does something, Jesus teaches, and then Jesus does something, Jesus teaches, and Jesus does something. And the somethings that Jesus is doing is almost always a miraculous work of some sort. But before we dive too far into that, let's talk about the literary design of the Gospel of Matthew. Now, there have been lots of outlines proposed. And just so you know, when I give you an outline, or if you see one in a commentary, or you see one from the Bible Project, or you hear one from some other professor, these are our observations. And so there are a few different angles and disagreements that some scholars have on the kinds of arrangements that most reflect the text. But a lot of scholars, I think a majority of them, See in the Gospel of Matthew a kind of five-book setup that is mirroring the five books of the Torah. Now, some say that this book is arranged a lot like Mark. We remember Mark was based on kind of a geographical procession, and geography features in this gospel. But there are some really important literary markers that get us to the end of one section and the beginning of another. and so for instance in your book Intro to the New Testament D.A. Carson and Douglas Moo propose a seven-part outline they've got chapters one and two as a prologue and then they've got a gospel of the kingdom in three and seven and then the kingdom under Jesus'authority and they kind of break it down into seven parts I prefer the kind of breakdown that you saw probably on the gospel project or sorry the Bible project video that you watched where you've got an intro and an outro and five books in between. And so this is sometimes called the new Moses structure, where Matthew is trying to get his readers to understand very clearly that Jesus is stepping into his role as new, truer, and better. Moses. And so that would mean like the intro is the first chunk, chapters one through three. And in thinking about this, I want to recall to mind the stuff that you would have learned in your hermeneutics class, where you learned about blocking. This is a good way to think about how to structure a book. And so you can see the blocking that's going on very clearly here in Matthew. The first three chapters are an intro, and then you've got these five books, as it were, and then the outro or the resolution. And that's the passion of Jesus, his life, his death, and his resurrection in chapters 26 through 28. Now, I, for the most part, I agree with that structure. And so that's going to be the kind of structure or structural approach that we will take as we look through the gospel of Matthew. Let's say a little bit more about the structure of Matthew. You might be asking, like, how do we know that Matthew is structured with these five books? Well, if you read the assigned reading in George Ladd's book, not theology, the New Testament, you'll have read that there's a kind of phrase that shows up over and over again. It's translated differently in the English Bibles. It's something to the effect of, you know, when Jesus finished saying these things, or when Jesus finished teaching these things to his disciples, something like that. That occurs at the end of each of these sections. And in Greek, it's pretty much the same. And so that's a big literary verbal clue that kind of stands out to go, okay, hey reader, this chunk of the things Jesus was saying, that's now over. Now let's pay attention to some new action. Something new is happening. And so that's how the five books are thought to be sewn into the literary contours of the book. And we've got to say, Matthew is a literary genius, because the way he both very clearly indicates to the reader some things that he wants us to see in relationship to the Jewish nature of the book itself, or how he arranged the... genealogies, which we'll get to in a moment, is really powerful, but he's also extremely subtle in that he like kind of rearranges the material of his gospel to not really be that chronological, but rather topical, which is why those five books really hang together, not just with that literary break that I just mentioned, but also thematically and topically. And so that's my view of Matthew. You'll probably find if you... look at some different commentaries, especially critical commentaries, that they might have other things to say, but that is by far the most popular and the most prominent, and I think the most textually successful view of Matthew's arrangement. Let's talk about some theological themes of this textbook, or this book, rather. One of the great themes of this book is the Jesus is greater than Moses theme, that you see there are these parallels that are that the reader just can't help but notice. Both Jesus and Moses came out of Egypt. They both had their own exodus out of Egypt. Both crossed waters to get into their real ministry. In Moses'case, it was the Red Sea. In Jesus'case, it's the water of baptism. Both wandered in the desert. In the case of Moses, it's four years. In the case of Jesus, it's 40 days. Moses failed in the desert. Jesus succeeded in the desert. Both deliver a law. Moses came down from a... Mount Sinai and delivered Torah, Jesus, as we'll see later, he gives a new law and actually goes up on a mountain to stand up there and do it. So that Jesus and Moses parallel is really important. Also, it's very clear that Jesus is fulfilling the mission of Moses. Remember that Moses said in Deuteronomy 18, one like me, a prophet like me will rise up. And so Jesus is stepping into that new Moses prophet role. and he's giving this new teaching, he's also saving from sin and bringing about a new covenant, which is yet another Mosaic parallel, because Moses was the administrator of a covenant, namely the Mosaic covenant, and Jesus is bringing about a new covenant in his blood. And so this all kind of comes to a head when we get to this word fulfillment. There is a lot of the use of this word in Matthew's gospel. In fact, it occurs... in Matthew's gospel more than any other gospel. It is most prominently seen in the formula like, this thing took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Now, one idea that characterizes Matthew's gospel over and over again is how Jesus is the fulfillment of Mosaic hopes and Old Covenant hopes. And so, you'll find Matthew using the word fulfillment more than any other gospel by far. On your screen right now, you can see all of the actual references. It's a lot. And the whole point of that is to get you recognizing all of those aforementioned Old Testament hyperlinks. Remember when we talked about that. Now again, this is evidence for the Jewishness of this particular gospel, because Matthew expects that you know about all of those spots and all of those promises that he is intentionally showing you that Jesus fulfills. And so that's a huge theme, and it's connected to the theme of Jesus as the newer and greater Moses. Another theme is this idea that... Jesus is Lord. He's King. He's the Messiah, which is just another way of saying the anointed one or the hoped for King. Matthew has a very high Christology, has a very high view of Jesus. A simple demonstration of this would be like in Mark, you'll see Jesus referred to as Rabbi or teacher, something like that. Matthew pretty much never does this. Matthew over and over again uses the word Lord. to describe Jesus, which isn't hugely weighty, except it's one of those literary clues that as we zoom into the text of scripture, we begin to see, oh, he's trying to show me something a little bit different than Mark. Mark is action. Remember all that cool stuff that Jesus was doing? And it kind of ends on this, like, what are you going to do about it sort of ending. Matthew is being a bit more slow, a bit more intentional to demonstrate to you that Jesus is the Lord. In 123, Matthew... says Jesus is Emmanuel, is God with us. That's a huge callback to the book of Isaiah, obviously. He is the king who judges. At the very end, we get this conversation, and Jesus is the one who's going to be king. But particularly around this idea of Jesus being addressed as Lord, one commentator, R.T. France, says this, thus, while the form of address, Lord, need not in itself indicate more than social politeness. It is striking to find it regularly used in Matthew's narrative as an address by Jesus'disciples where Mark has teacher or rabbi. In 1433, where Mark records only that the disciples were utterly astounded by Jesus walking on water, Matthew tells us that they worshipped him, saying, truly you are the Son of God. We can go on and see more, and if you would like to, I highly recommend Francis'commentary, and you can find that, of course, in the library. But he talks more and more about this. And of course, another theme is the relationship between Jesus and the law. We talked a little bit about this in the first few lectures, but Jesus is taking the law of Moses and he's dialing it up. We'll talk more about that a little bit later, but he's clearly not abrogating the law, nor is he like obsessively nitpicking over the law like the Pharisees were doing. He's doing something new and unexpected in much the same way Moses did something new and unexpected. And that leads me to an excursus that I want you to listen up for just a little bit, which is where I would like for you to understand a little bit more about the world of the New Testament. Now, in your assigned writing, you'll have read some from N.T. Wright, and he is by far one of the best scholars around who understands the world of the New Testament and the expectations and the politics and all of that. But suffice it to say, It was a highly divided Jewish world. The Jews had returned home from exile, but they recognized that things were not as they were. You may remember reading in your Old Testament, particularly in Chronicles, that when the Jews returned and the temple was rebuilt and all that good stuff, there was some weeping. It wasn't this woohoo kind of celebration. It was, okay, we're back, but something's still off. And so they understood that their exile was the result of their... disobedience. And so the scriptures very clearly say that if you disobey, you'll be exiled from the land. And then they disobeyed and they were exiled from the land. So it's pretty clear to see that. Now, if you were a Jew living in say 200 or 100 BC, and you knew that, and you wanted God to renew the place that you lived and the people that you were a part of, you would probably want to work really hard to obey the law. And this desire gives rise to the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a group of religious teachers who basically went full into these particular laws of Moses, the 600 plus laws of the Old Testament, and put rules and regs all around them. So they would build, as they would often say, fences around the law. So this was the law that we didn't want to break. what the Pharisees would do is build a layer of religious practices around the law that you might have broken these, but you won't get to this. And the idea, at least in the beginning, was that they wanted to remain in the land and they wanted God to bless them. But they became very, very conservative, if you like, about how they were to reform the people of Israel. Then there were the Essenes. The Essenes were the people who, you know, you might think of as a parallel to like the modern-day Amish. Highly religious and thinking that the world of the first century Jewish lands was so corrupt that the only way they could really reconnect to God is if they left civilization, left society, and began to practice on their own. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which you may have heard of. are the recordings of the scriptures that many of these Essenes used. And so that's how we know much about them these days. And then, of course, there were like the Sadducees and the Herodians. And the Herodians, particularly, were the Jews that wanted to kind of go along to get along and bring the Jewish people into sort of the modern age. And so you can kind of see a breakdown right there of liberal, conservative, and ascetic, and... And then you've got the Sadducees who are sort of anti-supernatural. And it was a complicated religious and social and political milieu. And that's what I want you to see. In some preaching, you kind of get this flat look of the Jews of the day as if they were all these nitpicking Pharisees. And that's not quite right. It's actually much more complicated than that. There were many various power struggles happening all over the land at the time, which is why... It's so remarkable that they all united to get rid of Jesus, of course, which is why Matthew will also navigate us through conversations he has with the Pharisees about the law, and then the Sadducees about the supernatural and the resurrection, and then the Herodians about how our relationship to Caesar should be, and all of those things. What I'm doing in telling you this is to help you understand that... The New Testament was written in a real historical milieu that is not the same as the one that we live in now. However, it has some important parallels. And just as you know, whatever country you're from, that politics in your country are complicated. It's not just two sides. It's two sides with various interest groups and maybe a third side or a fourth side. So very similar in the first century. Humans have been like this for quite some time. And that helps us to understand some of the things that are going on in the... text of the New Testament, particularly in the histories. Now, again, for more on that, Wright has written quite a lot on that. And I suggested some books in the assigned reading and suggest them. I assigned books in the assigned reading. And if you want more information on that, you can, of course, just reach out to me and I will let you know. So having said that, let's get on to analyzing the text itself. Now, because the synoptics kind of parallel each other in many places. I'm going to skip ahead of a few spots. We're not going to walk line by line, chapter by chapter, but let's start with the first, if you like, the bookend of these five books of Moses. If you can imagine these five books of new Moses, the five sections of the book of Matthew, and then we've got these bookends that are holding it all together. The introduction, chapters one through three, serve as the first one of these bookends. It begins with this phrase, the book of the genealogy. of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Whoa. So you're showing up and you're saying he's the son of David. He's the son of Abraham. Very, very clearly, this is a different kind of book than the book we just read, which was Mark. Here, Matthew's not hiding the ball. He wants you to see this Jesus that I'm about to tell you about is the fulfillment of all of the hopes of ancient Israel. Already, that theme is getting kind of precipitated, if you like. And then we go into the genealogy proper. Now, one of the things that you need to understand about this genealogy and many biblical genealogies is that they are selective, not exhaustive. So this is not like if you went down to, you know, Ancestry.com or looked in like the historic register of whatever country you're in, and you would find the exact like genealogical record with everyone's name. That's not what's going on here. Rather, it's a selective genealogy to help you and I. understand a few things. And it's arranged in three groups. It's three groups of 14 names each, or three double sevens, if you like. So there's three sections in this genealogy, and they're kind of double seven name arrangements. And so the group one, the first group you can see, is the Abraham group. And it will probably in your Bible be denoted by a paragraph mark. If you're reading in English or any romantic language that's written like English, you'll see Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, etc., etc. And then you'll move down to group two, which is David's group. Again, it's two groups of seven. And then group three, which is Jesus'group. Now, why would Matthew be arranging his book like this? Because he wants you to see the same thing that every other genealogy in the Old Testament, or not every other, but many of the other genealogies in the Old Testament are designed to show you, which is this guy that I'm talking about. He's from royal lineage. He qualifies for the title I'm about to give him. In this case, he qualifies for the title of Messiah, for Christ. Now, I want to... point something out. One of the things apologetically that you'll hear often is like, you know, the Bible's anti-women or something like that, but there are named in Matthew's genealogy four women, which is super interesting and unusual for the time. There was Tamar, who was an adulteress. There was Rahab, who was a prostitute and a pagan living in Jericho. There was Uriah's wife Bathsheba, who was the victim of a sexual assault and was seduced by David. Of course, you know about her. And then there was... Ruth, who was not a Jew at all. She was a Moabite woman who came to follow the ways of the people of Israel. Now, these women are introduced, I think, to prepare us for an amazing woman that we're going to meet in just a couple of paragraphs, and that's the woman of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It's important here that you see that that is fundamentally unusual. In the history of Western civilization, or all of civilization up to that point, women weren't elevated. Women weren't considered equal with men. They were considered the property of the paterfamilias in the case of Roman society. Here, Matthew's already doing something different. Why? Because Matthew watched how Jesus treated women. And Matthew watched how Jesus treated his mom. And so here in Matthew's genealogy, he's weaving in this theme of great women. And so here comes the Christmas story in a... in 1, 8, and through the rest of chapter 2, and you're going to see how Mary has been super, super faithful. Now, here in the Christmas story, we've got more of the fulfillment going on. We've got Jesus is Emmanuel, which is God with us. The nations are coming. That's the three wise men. Just a word on the three wise men. They were not kings. That's not what the text says. That is a legend that has grown up particularly around Orthodox Christianity. Um, we, we think they were probably, uh, wise men means like pagan astrologers who are looking at the signs of the sky and somehow it was revealed to them that the, the savior of Israel and the Messiah for the whole world was going to be born. And so the visitation of the Magi is just an early indication of the way the book of Matthew ends, where Jesus sends everyone out to the nations. Here, the nations are coming to see Jesus right there at the very beginning. Now, there should be a chart up on the screen at this point that shows you some more parallels of the section of text, sometimes called a pericope, which is just a fancy word that means section of text that's hung together by a theme, and some fulfillment. You'll see the birth of Christ, which is fulfillment of a prophecy that Jesus or the Savior would be born of a virgin. In Isaiah, you'll see the arrival of the Magi. And you'll see that fulfilled in Bethlehem. You'll see the escape to Egypt. You can see what's going on in the text. I'm not going to tell you about all of them. But the idea here is Jesus is fulfilling all of the Old Testament expectations from Moses on into the prophets. So pay attention to this guy. That's what the introduction is really doing for us. And then finally, we get John the Baptist, Jesus'cousin. He comes like an Elijah figure. Simply comes onto the scene without explanation. We don't... We don't really know where he came from. There's no big discussion about him. We'll learn more about John the Baptist later. But John the Baptist just shows up in those days. John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, repent for the kingdom of heaven is in hand. So we don't get a lot about him, except that he shows up as an Elijah figure. And very clearly, Matthew is saying, see, this fulfills this chunk of text. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Now see what Matthew is doing. This is to show just the theme of fulfillment once more, that Jesus is the one who's fulfilling all of ancient prophecy. And so is John, his cousin, who's the Elijah figure, showing up to announce his arrival and prepare Israel for his arrival. And so Jesus shows up for his baptism. Here we get more details about his baptism than we got in the Gospel of Mark. And we get him being baptized. It says here, in case you're wondering what I'm looking at, I've got my text on another screen right here for the scripture. So I'm looking over here to look at it. It says that... Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John to be baptized. And here we get something we don't have in Mark. Here we get John going, whoa, why should this happen? You don't need to be baptized. You haven't sinned is the implication of the text. But Jesus says this is to fulfill all righteousness. So let's talk about baptism for a little bit. Baptism has no direct parallel in the Old Testament. You're not going to find baptism anywhere in the Old Testament. You'll find priestly washings and you'll find cleansing and stuff like that. So they have thematic connections. There's no ritual of baptism present in the Old Testament. So this is pretty much entirely new. What it does seem to follow is the pattern of initiation that Gentiles would have taken in order to enter the Jewish community. So if you were a non-Jew and you wanted to begin to follow the Jewish ways, you would have been put through a series of of tests and questions, and then you would have to wash yourself, and of course, submit to circumcision if you're a male. And this is really the only parallel we get. What's it saying, therefore? It's saying that the people of Israel are like the lost sheep. They're like non-Jews. And so it was offensive, actually, to be telling Jewish people that you need to be baptized, because it was to say, there's something wrong with you that your Jewish heritage can't solve. It was very offensive to the people at the time, and as prophets are wont to do, they say something really powerful and strong. It can be very, very offensive, but it hearkens the reader to this idea that, okay, there's like a revival movement growing that Jesus steps into, and the revival movement that's growing is the ministry of John. Now, let's talk a little bit about why Jesus was baptized. He says in verse 15, to fulfill all righteousness. So Jesus has not come to confess in, oh John, I've been a terrible person and I need to be cleansed. Instead, he says that he is there to fulfill righteousness. That is, he is to wrap up the promises and the four sights and the four tastes of Messiah coming and to fill in those. And as our Savior, as the one who's perfectly human and fully God, he is showing us what we should do. A big pattern in the New Testament is Jesus does something and then teaches us about it, or Jesus says something and then goes and does something to attest to it. And so if we are, as we'll see in just a second, called to follow him, then a pattern for the life of a disciple, and perhaps a reason that this is written down, is that we might follow in the same ways. And so when Jesus is being baptized, he's saying, come ye. baptized. Like, if you want to follow me, follow me through the waters of baptism. Now, by righteousness, let's unpack that. Matthew's not talking about a righteousness as in, like, you know, Jesus was there to fulfill all the good, kind of legal, correct things. That could be what he means, but it seems more like a parallel or a indication of the actual Christian life, viewed as a relationship with God and focused on obedience. And so, as a pattern, Christians would immediately follow it. You'll see Jesus doing this in the third chapter, but at the very end of the gospel, what does Matthew have Jesus saying? Go into all the world, make disciples, baptizing them. So at this moment, the Father speaks from heaven, and he endorses Jesus as his Son. Now, I should say, the idea of the Son of God has different meanings in the Old Testament. Now, I don't want to undermine your Christology by any means, but there are multiple entities that are spoken of as the Son of God. And this is actually important because it actually underscores Jesus as the divine Son of God, the one that all these other ones point to. In the Old Testament, particularly like, say, Exodus, Israel is God's Son. There's also David, who's spoken about as God's Son, like in Psalm 2 or in 2 Samuel. Now, this is not a bug. The Old Testament of the Bible isn't confused on who the Son of God is. The Bible is making parallelisms to show you. Jesus is a better son than Israel. Jesus is a better son than David. Jesus, in another gospel, Adam is a son. Jesus is a better Adam. The point is to point to Jesus as the one to whom all of these monikers of sonship are fulfilled in and are fulfilled by. And so this is a feature. It's not a bug. And I really, really want you to see that. Another thing that we see is tenderness. This is not merely my son. According to the father, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. There's a... There's a fatherliness and a fatherly tenderness that Matthew wants us to see that is unlike the kind of worship that anybody would have been experiencing at the time in a non-Christian setting. And then, of course, the Holy Spirit comes and the Spirit of God descends on him like a dove. And this is, of course, he's baptized and the Holy Spirit comes upon him or he receives a baptism in the Holy Spirit, which... is meant, once again, to have this creational theme. When was the last time the Father and the Word and the Spirit and water were all hanging out together? Genesis 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form, and it was void, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, and then God said, let there be light. Again, just like in Mark, and just like in all the Gospels, they're indicating here a new creation theme. Okay, so... the new creation theme of, you know, the Spirit and the Word and the Father are all right there. And we're also seeing something that's going to be important later, which is the empowerment of the Spirit for ministry. So in the last book, the Holy Spirit flung Jesus out or threw him out or pushed him out. It was a very aggressive sounding language. Here, the scriptures are simply say that the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. And we get more detail about this wilderness temptation. So let's talk about that. Again, more creational themes. Jesus is the next person to come face to face with Satan or the tempter conversationally. And so here comes Satan doing the same thing, presumably to Jesus that he did to Adam, to tempt him to, you know, try to fulfill God's ways without God's word and all of these other things. But what you need to know here is that this is a clear new creation theme. And how does Jesus respond? He responds by saying three times, it is written. It's worth reflecting that while Satan offered Jesus sovereignty over all the earth, if he would but give in and worship him, Jesus worshiped only God. And all the power in heaven and on earth was actually given to Jesus. So it was a temptation to bypass the cross. It's kind of like the old song lyric, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Surely Satan thought that he would be able to tempt Jesus in his human nature. However, it did not. And unlike Adam, who failed temptation in the garden with the devil, Jesus passed through his temptation, was ministered to. And then it says that he was filled with the Holy Spirit and went out to begin his ministry. So in the beginning of his ministry, we get him beginning to preach. And Jesus picks up the torch. And Matthew... that Matthew lays out here literarily. And he summarized his message pretty much as the same as John. He says, repent, because the kingdom of God is at hand. He takes the baton, as it were, from his cousin and is saying very much the same sort of thing. And so what Jesus is doing here is kind of giving you a clue in the words of Matthew about how his ministry is going to look. It's calling people. to a new kingdom, to a new way of living. And so then we get, you know, the first disciples are called, the first miracles are done, and Jesus is calling different kinds of people. He's healing all kinds of people. And then there will be some teaching. So again, this is a pattern in Matthew. We're going to get Jesus doing things, and then Jesus saying a lot of things. And here, right, what comes up next is the famous Sermon on the Mount, which takes up... chapters 5 and chapters 6 and a little bit of chapter 7. So in your next lecture, we're going to talk about Sermon on the Mount.

The goal of this lecture is that you would have an understanding of the shape of the Gospel of Matthew, that you would be able to describe how it is similar to and different from the Gospel of Mark and later other books as well, and that you would also maybe get a little bit of insight as to why the genealogy is there. This is one of the few places in the New Testament where we have a genealogy, and so it's a really important thing itself. And that you can see kind of... in your own hands, as it were, how important it is that we have multiple gospel attestations to the life and ministry of Jesus.

Now, Matthew is different than Mark. You know, as we mentioned, Mark is 16 chapters and everything is moving really quickly. Matthew has some different concerns. Matthew was written a little bit later, as you know, we think between like the 50 and 60 period AD. And it was written by Matthew.

the apostle Matthew, the tax collector, the guy that Jesus called to follow him out of a most unexpected set of circumstances, kind of the Jewish sellout to the Roman overlords, and he came and became a follower of Jesus. And interestingly, Matthew's primary audience is his own people, is a Jewish audience. Now, how do we know that?

Well, we know that with a couple of clues. A big clue is the way Matthew is arranged, which we'll talk about in just a second. And another big clue is the genealogies and the overall way Matthew seems to talk to his audience with specifically Jewish-sounding concerns.

And so you can think back to the lecture that we did on the Gospel of Mark and all those reasons why we imagine Mark was speaking to non-Jews. Just flip that around and you can figure out why we think Matthew was speaking to Jewish people. Additionally, Matthew seems to have arranged what we probably think are decades of oral tradition, along with material from Mark.

Remember the synoptic problem we spoke about in that interesting graphic? So Matthew has some additional material, along with the stuff that he got from Mark. And one commentator puts it like this.

Matthew shows careful, if complex, organization. The author has used a variety of stylistic devices with considerable... artistry. The result is an alternating presentation of deeds and words of Jesus, which have been collected and arranged topically for the sake of their impact on the reader.

Now, I agree with that design. You'll get a lot of like Jesus teaching, and then Jesus does something, Jesus teaches, and then Jesus does something, Jesus teaches, and Jesus does something. And the somethings that Jesus is doing is almost always a miraculous work of some sort.

But before we dive too far into that, let's talk about the literary design of the Gospel of Matthew. Now, there have been lots of outlines proposed. And just so you know, when I give you an outline, or if you see one in a commentary, or you see one from the Bible Project, or you hear one from some other professor, these are our observations.

And so there are a few different angles and disagreements that some scholars have on the kinds of arrangements that most reflect the text. But a lot of scholars, I think a majority of them, See in the Gospel of Matthew a kind of five-book setup that is mirroring the five books of the Torah. Now, some say that this book is arranged a lot like Mark.

We remember Mark was based on kind of a geographical procession, and geography features in this gospel. But there are some really important literary markers that get us to the end of one section and the beginning of another. and so for instance in your book Intro to the New Testament D.A. Carson and Douglas Moo propose a seven-part outline they've got chapters one and two as a prologue and then they've got a gospel of the kingdom in three and seven and then the kingdom under Jesus'authority and they kind of break it down into seven parts I prefer the kind of breakdown that you saw probably on the gospel project or sorry the Bible project video that you watched where you've got an intro and an outro and five books in between. And so this is sometimes called the new Moses structure, where Matthew is trying to get his readers to understand very clearly that Jesus is stepping into his role as new, truer, and better. Moses.

And so that would mean like the intro is the first chunk, chapters one through three. And in thinking about this, I want to recall to mind the stuff that you would have learned in your hermeneutics class, where you learned about blocking. This is a good way to think about how to structure a book.

And so you can see the blocking that's going on very clearly here in Matthew. The first three chapters are an intro, and then you've got these five books, as it were, and then the outro or the resolution. And that's the passion of Jesus, his life, his death, and his resurrection in chapters 26 through 28. Now, I, for the most part, I agree with that structure. And so that's going to be the kind of structure or structural approach that we will take as we look through the gospel of Matthew. Let's say a little bit more about the structure of Matthew.

You might be asking, like, how do we know that Matthew is structured with these five books? Well, if you read the assigned reading in George Ladd's book, not theology, the New Testament, you'll have read that there's a kind of phrase that shows up over and over again. It's translated differently in the English Bibles. It's something to the effect of, you know, when Jesus finished saying these things, or when Jesus finished teaching these things to his disciples, something like that. That occurs at the end of each of these sections.

And in Greek, it's pretty much the same. And so that's a big literary verbal clue that kind of stands out to go, okay, hey reader, this chunk of the things Jesus was saying, that's now over. Now let's pay attention to some new action.

Something new is happening. And so that's how the five books are thought to be sewn into the literary contours of the book. And we've got to say, Matthew is a literary genius, because the way he both very clearly indicates to the reader some things that he wants us to see in relationship to the Jewish nature of the book itself, or how he arranged the...

genealogies, which we'll get to in a moment, is really powerful, but he's also extremely subtle in that he like kind of rearranges the material of his gospel to not really be that chronological, but rather topical, which is why those five books really hang together, not just with that literary break that I just mentioned, but also thematically and topically. And so that's my view of Matthew. You'll probably find if you... look at some different commentaries, especially critical commentaries, that they might have other things to say, but that is by far the most popular and the most prominent, and I think the most textually successful view of Matthew's arrangement. Let's talk about some theological themes of this textbook, or this book, rather.

One of the great themes of this book is the Jesus is greater than Moses theme, that you see there are these parallels that are that the reader just can't help but notice. Both Jesus and Moses came out of Egypt. They both had their own exodus out of Egypt. Both crossed waters to get into their real ministry. In Moses'case, it was the Red Sea.

In Jesus'case, it's the water of baptism. Both wandered in the desert. In the case of Moses, it's four years.

In the case of Jesus, it's 40 days. Moses failed in the desert. Jesus succeeded in the desert. Both deliver a law. Moses came down from a...

Mount Sinai and delivered Torah, Jesus, as we'll see later, he gives a new law and actually goes up on a mountain to stand up there and do it. So that Jesus and Moses parallel is really important. Also, it's very clear that Jesus is fulfilling the mission of Moses. Remember that Moses said in Deuteronomy 18, one like me, a prophet like me will rise up.

And so Jesus is stepping into that new Moses prophet role. and he's giving this new teaching, he's also saving from sin and bringing about a new covenant, which is yet another Mosaic parallel, because Moses was the administrator of a covenant, namely the Mosaic covenant, and Jesus is bringing about a new covenant in his blood. And so this all kind of comes to a head when we get to this word fulfillment.

There is a lot of the use of this word in Matthew's gospel. In fact, it occurs... in Matthew's gospel more than any other gospel. It is most prominently seen in the formula like, this thing took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Now, one idea that characterizes Matthew's gospel over and over again is how Jesus is the fulfillment of Mosaic hopes and Old Covenant hopes.

And so, you'll find Matthew using the word fulfillment more than any other gospel by far. On your screen right now, you can see all of the actual references. It's a lot. And the whole point of that is to get you recognizing all of those aforementioned Old Testament hyperlinks.

Remember when we talked about that. Now again, this is evidence for the Jewishness of this particular gospel, because Matthew expects that you know about all of those spots and all of those promises that he is intentionally showing you that Jesus fulfills. And so that's a huge theme, and it's connected to the theme of Jesus as the newer and greater Moses. Another theme is this idea that... Jesus is Lord.

He's King. He's the Messiah, which is just another way of saying the anointed one or the hoped for King. Matthew has a very high Christology, has a very high view of Jesus. A simple demonstration of this would be like in Mark, you'll see Jesus referred to as Rabbi or teacher, something like that.

Matthew pretty much never does this. Matthew over and over again uses the word Lord. to describe Jesus, which isn't hugely weighty, except it's one of those literary clues that as we zoom into the text of scripture, we begin to see, oh, he's trying to show me something a little bit different than Mark. Mark is action.

Remember all that cool stuff that Jesus was doing? And it kind of ends on this, like, what are you going to do about it sort of ending. Matthew is being a bit more slow, a bit more intentional to demonstrate to you that Jesus is the Lord.

In 123, Matthew... says Jesus is Emmanuel, is God with us. That's a huge callback to the book of Isaiah, obviously. He is the king who judges.

At the very end, we get this conversation, and Jesus is the one who's going to be king. But particularly around this idea of Jesus being addressed as Lord, one commentator, R.T. France, says this, thus, while the form of address, Lord, need not in itself indicate more than social politeness.

It is striking to find it regularly used in Matthew's narrative as an address by Jesus'disciples where Mark has teacher or rabbi. In 1433, where Mark records only that the disciples were utterly astounded by Jesus walking on water, Matthew tells us that they worshipped him, saying, truly you are the Son of God. We can go on and see more, and if you would like to, I highly recommend Francis'commentary, and you can find that, of course, in the library.

But he talks more and more about this. And of course, another theme is the relationship between Jesus and the law. We talked a little bit about this in the first few lectures, but Jesus is taking the law of Moses and he's dialing it up. We'll talk more about that a little bit later, but he's clearly not abrogating the law, nor is he like obsessively nitpicking over the law like the Pharisees were doing.

He's doing something new and unexpected in much the same way Moses did something new and unexpected. And that leads me to an excursus that I want you to listen up for just a little bit, which is where I would like for you to understand a little bit more about the world of the New Testament. Now, in your assigned writing, you'll have read some from N.T. Wright, and he is by far one of the best scholars around who understands the world of the New Testament and the expectations and the politics and all of that.

But suffice it to say, It was a highly divided Jewish world. The Jews had returned home from exile, but they recognized that things were not as they were. You may remember reading in your Old Testament, particularly in Chronicles, that when the Jews returned and the temple was rebuilt and all that good stuff, there was some weeping.

It wasn't this woohoo kind of celebration. It was, okay, we're back, but something's still off. And so they understood that their exile was the result of their...

disobedience. And so the scriptures very clearly say that if you disobey, you'll be exiled from the land. And then they disobeyed and they were exiled from the land.

So it's pretty clear to see that. Now, if you were a Jew living in say 200 or 100 BC, and you knew that, and you wanted God to renew the place that you lived and the people that you were a part of, you would probably want to work really hard to obey the law. And this desire gives rise to the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a group of religious teachers who basically went full into these particular laws of Moses, the 600 plus laws of the Old Testament, and put rules and regs all around them.

So they would build, as they would often say, fences around the law. So this was the law that we didn't want to break. what the Pharisees would do is build a layer of religious practices around the law that you might have broken these, but you won't get to this.

And the idea, at least in the beginning, was that they wanted to remain in the land and they wanted God to bless them. But they became very, very conservative, if you like, about how they were to reform the people of Israel. Then there were the Essenes.

The Essenes were the people who, you know, you might think of as a parallel to like the modern-day Amish. Highly religious and thinking that the world of the first century Jewish lands was so corrupt that the only way they could really reconnect to God is if they left civilization, left society, and began to practice on their own. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which you may have heard of. are the recordings of the scriptures that many of these Essenes used.

And so that's how we know much about them these days. And then, of course, there were like the Sadducees and the Herodians. And the Herodians, particularly, were the Jews that wanted to kind of go along to get along and bring the Jewish people into sort of the modern age. And so you can kind of see a breakdown right there of liberal, conservative, and ascetic, and... And then you've got the Sadducees who are sort of anti-supernatural.

And it was a complicated religious and social and political milieu. And that's what I want you to see. In some preaching, you kind of get this flat look of the Jews of the day as if they were all these nitpicking Pharisees. And that's not quite right.

It's actually much more complicated than that. There were many various power struggles happening all over the land at the time, which is why... It's so remarkable that they all united to get rid of Jesus, of course, which is why Matthew will also navigate us through conversations he has with the Pharisees about the law, and then the Sadducees about the supernatural and the resurrection, and then the Herodians about how our relationship to Caesar should be, and all of those things.

What I'm doing in telling you this is to help you understand that... The New Testament was written in a real historical milieu that is not the same as the one that we live in now. However, it has some important parallels.

And just as you know, whatever country you're from, that politics in your country are complicated. It's not just two sides. It's two sides with various interest groups and maybe a third side or a fourth side.

So very similar in the first century. Humans have been like this for quite some time. And that helps us to understand some of the things that are going on in the...

text of the New Testament, particularly in the histories. Now, again, for more on that, Wright has written quite a lot on that. And I suggested some books in the assigned reading and suggest them. I assigned books in the assigned reading. And if you want more information on that, you can, of course, just reach out to me and I will let you know.

So having said that, let's get on to analyzing the text itself. Now, because the synoptics kind of parallel each other in many places. I'm going to skip ahead of a few spots. We're not going to walk line by line, chapter by chapter, but let's start with the first, if you like, the bookend of these five books of Moses. If you can imagine these five books of new Moses, the five sections of the book of Matthew, and then we've got these bookends that are holding it all together.

The introduction, chapters one through three, serve as the first one of these bookends. It begins with this phrase, the book of the genealogy. of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Whoa. So you're showing up and you're saying he's the son of David. He's the son of Abraham.

Very, very clearly, this is a different kind of book than the book we just read, which was Mark. Here, Matthew's not hiding the ball. He wants you to see this Jesus that I'm about to tell you about is the fulfillment of all of the hopes of ancient Israel. Already, that theme is getting kind of precipitated, if you like.

And then we go into the genealogy proper. Now, one of the things that you need to understand about this genealogy and many biblical genealogies is that they are selective, not exhaustive. So this is not like if you went down to, you know, Ancestry.com or looked in like the historic register of whatever country you're in, and you would find the exact like genealogical record with everyone's name.

That's not what's going on here. Rather, it's a selective genealogy to help you and I. understand a few things. And it's arranged in three groups. It's three groups of 14 names each, or three double sevens, if you like.

So there's three sections in this genealogy, and they're kind of double seven name arrangements. And so the group one, the first group you can see, is the Abraham group. And it will probably in your Bible be denoted by a paragraph mark. If you're reading in English or any romantic language that's written like English, you'll see Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, etc., etc. And then you'll move down to group two, which is David's group.

Again, it's two groups of seven. And then group three, which is Jesus'group. Now, why would Matthew be arranging his book like this? Because he wants you to see the same thing that every other genealogy in the Old Testament, or not every other, but many of the other genealogies in the Old Testament are designed to show you, which is this guy that I'm talking about. He's from royal lineage.

He qualifies for the title I'm about to give him. In this case, he qualifies for the title of Messiah, for Christ. Now, I want to... point something out. One of the things apologetically that you'll hear often is like, you know, the Bible's anti-women or something like that, but there are named in Matthew's genealogy four women, which is super interesting and unusual for the time.

There was Tamar, who was an adulteress. There was Rahab, who was a prostitute and a pagan living in Jericho. There was Uriah's wife Bathsheba, who was the victim of a sexual assault and was seduced by David.

Of course, you know about her. And then there was... Ruth, who was not a Jew at all.

She was a Moabite woman who came to follow the ways of the people of Israel. Now, these women are introduced, I think, to prepare us for an amazing woman that we're going to meet in just a couple of paragraphs, and that's the woman of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It's important here that you see that that is fundamentally unusual.

In the history of Western civilization, or all of civilization up to that point, women weren't elevated. Women weren't considered equal with men. They were considered the property of the paterfamilias in the case of Roman society. Here, Matthew's already doing something different. Why?

Because Matthew watched how Jesus treated women. And Matthew watched how Jesus treated his mom. And so here in Matthew's genealogy, he's weaving in this theme of great women. And so here comes the Christmas story in a...

in 1, 8, and through the rest of chapter 2, and you're going to see how Mary has been super, super faithful. Now, here in the Christmas story, we've got more of the fulfillment going on. We've got Jesus is Emmanuel, which is God with us. The nations are coming.

That's the three wise men. Just a word on the three wise men. They were not kings. That's not what the text says.

That is a legend that has grown up particularly around Orthodox Christianity. Um, we, we think they were probably, uh, wise men means like pagan astrologers who are looking at the signs of the sky and somehow it was revealed to them that the, the savior of Israel and the Messiah for the whole world was going to be born. And so the visitation of the Magi is just an early indication of the way the book of Matthew ends, where Jesus sends everyone out to the nations.

Here, the nations are coming to see Jesus right there at the very beginning. Now, there should be a chart up on the screen at this point that shows you some more parallels of the section of text, sometimes called a pericope, which is just a fancy word that means section of text that's hung together by a theme, and some fulfillment. You'll see the birth of Christ, which is fulfillment of a prophecy that Jesus or the Savior would be born of a virgin.

In Isaiah, you'll see the arrival of the Magi. And you'll see that fulfilled in Bethlehem. You'll see the escape to Egypt. You can see what's going on in the text. I'm not going to tell you about all of them.

But the idea here is Jesus is fulfilling all of the Old Testament expectations from Moses on into the prophets. So pay attention to this guy. That's what the introduction is really doing for us. And then finally, we get John the Baptist, Jesus'cousin. He comes like an Elijah figure.

Simply comes onto the scene without explanation. We don't... We don't really know where he came from.

There's no big discussion about him. We'll learn more about John the Baptist later. But John the Baptist just shows up in those days. John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, repent for the kingdom of heaven is in hand.

So we don't get a lot about him, except that he shows up as an Elijah figure. And very clearly, Matthew is saying, see, this fulfills this chunk of text. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.

Now see what Matthew is doing. This is to show just the theme of fulfillment once more, that Jesus is the one who's fulfilling all of ancient prophecy. And so is John, his cousin, who's the Elijah figure, showing up to announce his arrival and prepare Israel for his arrival. And so Jesus shows up for his baptism. Here we get more details about his baptism than we got in the Gospel of Mark.

And we get him being baptized. It says here, in case you're wondering what I'm looking at, I've got my text on another screen right here for the scripture. So I'm looking over here to look at it.

It says that... Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John to be baptized. And here we get something we don't have in Mark.

Here we get John going, whoa, why should this happen? You don't need to be baptized. You haven't sinned is the implication of the text.

But Jesus says this is to fulfill all righteousness. So let's talk about baptism for a little bit. Baptism has no direct parallel in the Old Testament. You're not going to find baptism anywhere in the Old Testament. You'll find priestly washings and you'll find cleansing and stuff like that.

So they have thematic connections. There's no ritual of baptism present in the Old Testament. So this is pretty much entirely new.

What it does seem to follow is the pattern of initiation that Gentiles would have taken in order to enter the Jewish community. So if you were a non-Jew and you wanted to begin to follow the Jewish ways, you would have been put through a series of of tests and questions, and then you would have to wash yourself, and of course, submit to circumcision if you're a male. And this is really the only parallel we get. What's it saying, therefore?

It's saying that the people of Israel are like the lost sheep. They're like non-Jews. And so it was offensive, actually, to be telling Jewish people that you need to be baptized, because it was to say, there's something wrong with you that your Jewish heritage can't solve. It was very offensive to the people at the time, and as prophets are wont to do, they say something really powerful and strong.

It can be very, very offensive, but it hearkens the reader to this idea that, okay, there's like a revival movement growing that Jesus steps into, and the revival movement that's growing is the ministry of John. Now, let's talk a little bit about why Jesus was baptized. He says in verse 15, to fulfill all righteousness.

So Jesus has not come to confess in, oh John, I've been a terrible person and I need to be cleansed. Instead, he says that he is there to fulfill righteousness. That is, he is to wrap up the promises and the four sights and the four tastes of Messiah coming and to fill in those.

And as our Savior, as the one who's perfectly human and fully God, he is showing us what we should do. A big pattern in the New Testament is Jesus does something and then teaches us about it, or Jesus says something and then goes and does something to attest to it. And so if we are, as we'll see in just a second, called to follow him, then a pattern for the life of a disciple, and perhaps a reason that this is written down, is that we might follow in the same ways.

And so when Jesus is being baptized, he's saying, come ye. baptized. Like, if you want to follow me, follow me through the waters of baptism.

Now, by righteousness, let's unpack that. Matthew's not talking about a righteousness as in, like, you know, Jesus was there to fulfill all the good, kind of legal, correct things. That could be what he means, but it seems more like a parallel or a indication of the actual Christian life, viewed as a relationship with God and focused on obedience.

And so, as a pattern, Christians would immediately follow it. You'll see Jesus doing this in the third chapter, but at the very end of the gospel, what does Matthew have Jesus saying? Go into all the world, make disciples, baptizing them.

So at this moment, the Father speaks from heaven, and he endorses Jesus as his Son. Now, I should say, the idea of the Son of God has different meanings in the Old Testament. Now, I don't want to undermine your Christology by any means, but there are multiple entities that are spoken of as the Son of God. And this is actually important because it actually underscores Jesus as the divine Son of God, the one that all these other ones point to.

In the Old Testament, particularly like, say, Exodus, Israel is God's Son. There's also David, who's spoken about as God's Son, like in Psalm 2 or in 2 Samuel. Now, this is not a bug. The Old Testament of the Bible isn't confused on who the Son of God is. The Bible is making parallelisms to show you.

Jesus is a better son than Israel. Jesus is a better son than David. Jesus, in another gospel, Adam is a son. Jesus is a better Adam. The point is to point to Jesus as the one to whom all of these monikers of sonship are fulfilled in and are fulfilled by.

And so this is a feature. It's not a bug. And I really, really want you to see that. Another thing that we see is tenderness. This is not merely my son.

According to the father, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. There's a... There's a fatherliness and a fatherly tenderness that Matthew wants us to see that is unlike the kind of worship that anybody would have been experiencing at the time in a non-Christian setting.

And then, of course, the Holy Spirit comes and the Spirit of God descends on him like a dove. And this is, of course, he's baptized and the Holy Spirit comes upon him or he receives a baptism in the Holy Spirit, which... is meant, once again, to have this creational theme. When was the last time the Father and the Word and the Spirit and water were all hanging out together? Genesis 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form, and it was void, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, and then God said, let there be light.

Again, just like in Mark, and just like in all the Gospels, they're indicating here a new creation theme. Okay, so... the new creation theme of, you know, the Spirit and the Word and the Father are all right there.

And we're also seeing something that's going to be important later, which is the empowerment of the Spirit for ministry. So in the last book, the Holy Spirit flung Jesus out or threw him out or pushed him out. It was a very aggressive sounding language. Here, the scriptures are simply say that the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. And we get more detail about this wilderness temptation.

So let's talk about that. Again, more creational themes. Jesus is the next person to come face to face with Satan or the tempter conversationally. And so here comes Satan doing the same thing, presumably to Jesus that he did to Adam, to tempt him to, you know, try to fulfill God's ways without God's word and all of these other things. But what you need to know here is that this is a clear new creation theme.

And how does Jesus respond? He responds by saying three times, it is written. It's worth reflecting that while Satan offered Jesus sovereignty over all the earth, if he would but give in and worship him, Jesus worshiped only God. And all the power in heaven and on earth was actually given to Jesus.

So it was a temptation to bypass the cross. It's kind of like the old song lyric, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Surely Satan thought that he would be able to tempt Jesus in his human nature. However, it did not. And unlike Adam, who failed temptation in the garden with the devil, Jesus passed through his temptation, was ministered to.

And then it says that he was filled with the Holy Spirit and went out to begin his ministry. So in the beginning of his ministry, we get him beginning to preach. And Jesus picks up the torch. And Matthew... that Matthew lays out here literarily.

And he summarized his message pretty much as the same as John. He says, repent, because the kingdom of God is at hand. He takes the baton, as it were, from his cousin and is saying very much the same sort of thing. And so what Jesus is doing here is kind of giving you a clue in the words of Matthew about how his ministry is going to look.

It's calling people. to a new kingdom, to a new way of living. And so then we get, you know, the first disciples are called, the first miracles are done, and Jesus is calling different kinds of people.

He's healing all kinds of people. And then there will be some teaching. So again, this is a pattern in Matthew. We're going to get Jesus doing things, and then Jesus saying a lot of things. And here, right, what comes up next is the famous Sermon on the Mount, which takes up...

chapters 5 and chapters 6 and a little bit of chapter 7. So in your next lecture, we're going to talk about Sermon on the Mount.

Transcript for:Mabry Matthew Part 1

Transcript for:
Mabry Matthew Part 1