Preface
Preface
According to R. Polzin, “Traditional biblical scholarship has spent most of its efforts in disassembling the works of a complicated watch before our amazed eyes without apparently realizing that similar efforts by and large have not succeeded in putting the parts back together again in a significant or meaningful way.”1 This criticism may not unfairly be directed against a good deal of New Testament scholarship, which has been more concerned to discern the sources that underlie our Gospels and to study the methods used by the Evangelists as they have worked through their sources and put their Gospels together than it has been to discover what the Evangelists meant. I do not want to say anything derogatory about such activities. They have their importance, and I have spent a good deal of time doing them throughout the years. But it can scarcely be denied that much recent scholarship has been preoccupied with pulling the watch to pieces and explaining how and why it came to be put together in the way it has.
Important as such work is, it is not the task I have set for myself in writing this commentary. Rather, I have chosen to look at the watch as it has come to us. I want to find out what sense can be made of our first Gospel if we simply take it as it is. Clearly its author intended it to be read by people who had no access to his sources. He expected them to make sense of it as it stood. Surely it is not asking too much to suggest that it may be profitable to attempt to do the same in our age. We may not find our task as easy as the first readers did, but in this commentary we will take a good look at the Gospel as it stands and keep searching until we find the author’s meaning.
Many commentaries spend a lot of time examining the relationship of this Gospel to Q, to Mark, to Luke, and sometimes to other possible sources. I must confess to a certain scepticism about the possibility of being at all certain how the author went about his task of putting his material together. To cite nothing else, the revival of the Griesbach hypothesis (i.e., the view that Matthew was written first, that Mark was an abbreviation of Matthew, and that Luke depended on Matthew) shows that there are great difficulties in handling questions of order and sources. Whatever view we decide on, we will find that many competent critics do not agree. In this commentary I have, of course, taken some notice of Synoptic relationships, but this is not a major feature. I have tried to take this Gospel as a work in its own right and to see what it says to us as it is, no matter how it came to be put together.
Nor have I been greatly concerned with Matthew’s Sitz im Leben. Now I realize that I will be taken to task for this omission, but again I must reply that with the information at our disposal we cannot be sure of either the date or the place of this Gospel, nor of the precise opponents of the Evangelist. Without such knowledge we may engage in more or less plausible speculation, but we can do no more. While I recognize that much can be learned from discussions of such matters, I feel that I have nothing significant to contribute to them. My basic concern is with meaning. I have had in mind the reader who uses his commentaries to answer questions like “What do these words mean?” Throughout I have been concerned with making as clear as I can what I consider to be the meaning of the Greek text that Matthew has bequeathed to the church.
Some readers will object that we cannot know this Evangelist’s real meaning unless we take notice of what he has done to his sources: his alterations give us significant insights into his meaning. But if this is true, we can scarcely be sure of his meaning anywhere, for, despite the confidence with which some scholars put forward their hypotheses of the way Matthew worked, the Synoptic problem has not been solved. J. A. Fitzmyer is not being unreasonable or obscurantist when he points out that “the history of Synoptic research reveals that the problem is practically insoluble.”2 Nobody knows for sure what Matthew’s sources were. Most of us agree that he used Mark (though some deny even this), and a few hold that he used Luke. Most scholars accept the Q hypothesis, but some are happy to dispense with Q, and of those who accept it there is no agreement as to its contents. Given such uncertainties, I think it best to focus on what Matthew has written, while keeping an open mind as to where he got it and how he used his sources.
For this commentary I have made my own translation of the text of Matthew from the Greek. Though it may not be the most elegant rendering, I have used it simply to let the reader know something of what I see in the Greek.
I am grateful to William B. Eerdmans, Jr., for the invitation to write this commentary; to Milton Essenburg for his consideration and expertise in editing a number of my books, including this one; and to many friends who have given me encouragement and help.
LEON MORRIS