Part 81
20. Anyone who knows about the ancient world will wish to raise questions about this account of the NT's cultural milieu. The pervasive Hellenizing of the life of the societies around the Mediterranean, especially in the East, must surely point to certain influences on which nothing has been said. Was this not a world in which the great philosophical achievements of Plato and Aristotle, not to speak of Stoics, Cynics, and Pythagoreans, were currents in the prevailing air? It has to be said that the great philosophies have left little trace in these writings. This is not wholly explained by their dominant Jewishness, for, as the case of Philo shows, Judaism was not in itself inimical to the Platonist idiom of thought. It is more a matter of the social strata from which the NT writers came. They were, by definition, not illiterate, but either their education was scriptural or scribal in content and manner or it stopped at a stage on the ladder below that where serious philosophical teaching would have occurred. All we get then is perhaps a few scraps of Stoicism, possibly affecting Paul's teaching on 'nature' in Rom i and 2:14—15, and showing itself in the discussion of the divine in Acts 17:22-31, and in a few other features; and, a subject of much current discussion, Cynic moral wisdom as a factor behind some aspects of Jesus' teaching. It is a disputed question, not so much whether parallels can be identified, as whether, in the circumstances of Jesus' Galilee (or indeed of the evangelists), Cynic influence is at all probable. The day was not far distant, however, when philosophy (chiefly Platonist and Stoic) was to provide a framework of thought in which Christian thinkers sought to operate. Within a few years of the writing of the last books to find a place in the NT (120 CE?), such attempts were beginning to get into their stride.
3. If our interest is in the churches within or for whom the NT books were produced, then the most obvious place to begin—and the place where we shall get the most direct results—is the corpus of genuine letters by the apostle Paul. Here is the most transparent (or at any rate the least opaque) window available to us as we seek to look at the life of early Christian communities. That immediately creates narrowness, for they cover only a limited range of churches—in Greece and Macedonia (i and 2 Cor, i and 2 Thess, Phil), Asia Minor (Gal, Col, Philem), and Italy (Rom). (Other letters are of uncertain Pauline authorship or unclear geographical destination: Eph, i and 2 Tim, Titus.) Moreover, they vary a great deal in the degree to which they illuminate for us the lives of those to whom they are addressed—as distinct from the thought and interests of Paul who addresses them. Clearest of all is the church in Corinth, where we have the two NT letters (the first of them directly concerned with a welter of practical problems) and personal information from Rom 16, written at Corinth and including greetings from members of the Corinthian church. And Acts 18 gives an account of Paul's initial mission in the city. There is also archaeological and literary material shedding light on the Corinthian background (Theissen 1982; Meeks 1983; Murphy-O'Connor 1983). 4. What is perhaps most surprising about this community, established in the early 503, is the small degree to which its manifold problems appear to reflect difficulties that are related to Christianity's Jewish origins. There were, it appears, some Jewish members, but what one might expect to be their concerns (Law observance, relations to Gentile members, and scriptural interpretation) scarcely figure. This was, already, largely a Gentile community, and most of its problems sprang from overexuberant and elitist religiosity on the part of the most articulate and wealthy members. More clearly than any other NT writings, these letters give evidence of a church whose cohesion was made precarious by the dominance of these religious 'experts'. Precarious, that is, in the eyes of Paul, who insists that all-embracing dependence on Christ implies the transcending of social and racial divisions (i Cor 1—4; 12:13) and the giving of full honour and consideration to the simpler and poorer members (11:17-34; 12:1-13). m Paul's perception, the Lord's supper was to be the outward manifestation of this basic equality of generous love, rather than the focus of social division that it had become in Corinthian
D. The Church of the New Testament. 1. The Christian church is both depicted in most of the books of the NT and presupposed by all of them. Every one of them is the product of one setting or another in the early Christian communities. Sometimes the location of that setting is actually stated; in other cases it is not hard to see a good deal about its character. Though most of the books bear the name of a single author, there is good reason to think that, even if those ascriptions were in fact accurate (and most of them probably are not), we ought to see these writings partly as productions of the church. While they reflect the thought of some single mind—a genuine author—they were not written in isolation in some equivalent of a modern author's secluded retreat, but from the midst of a particular group of Christians with whom the author was in close interaction. Even the author of Revelation, shut away on Patmos, has his mind on the fellowChristians from whom he is separated.
2. But, as we saw earlier, churches were not all of one kind or, in many matters, of a single mind. They differed in geographical location; in exposure to some of the cultural features that have been described; in their relation to Jewish observances and the local Jewish community; in attitudes to leading Christian figures such as Peter and Paul; in social composition (Jews, Gentiles, rich, poor); in the handling of moral
837 INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
among the situations depicted; and it may seem that as, at the outside, the time-span of their composition was no more than seventy years (say, 50-120 CE), and as the period is so distant and obscure, there is little scope for attempts to refine that approach. But we are not entirely without the possibility of identifying developments even within that relatively short period, though certainty very often eludes us.
practice. They were simply continuing to run their meetings along the hierarchical lines taken for granted in a place such as Corinth in households and in guilds and associations of various kinds.
5. Galatians gives evidence of a different situation. Here it is indeed the implications of Christ for the adherence of his followers to Jewish observance that is in question, in particular the traditional Jewish identity-markers of circumcision, sabbath, and food rules. This letter gives a vivid picture of the bitterness caused by this issue (1—2 especially). Whether or not Paul was the first to see adherence to Christ as transcending this observance, and so as eliminating it at least as far as Gentile Christians were concerned (and therefore in effect dethroning it for all Christians), he it was who gave a rationale, scripturally based at that, for resistance to the imposition of the old Jewish marks of valid membership of God's people
9. The first development was the shift in the character of the Christian movement from the period of Jesus' ministry to the subsequent mission and the living of the Christian life. Our written sources in the NT itself, the gospels and Acts, present it as the smoothest of transitions. At first there was, it seems, a brief time of Galilean ministry by Jesus and a small group of adherents, supported from time to time by transient and anonymous crowds. It was marked by constant movement, and a few references to Jesus' home (Mk 2:1, 15) scarcely modify this picture of endless mobility. The fact that the dominant mode of Christian life soon came to be settled and static speaks for the accuracy of this picture: any temptation to redescribe Jesus' circumstances in the light of later times has been resisted.
(3-4; see also Rom 4).
6. Some writings point to there being groupings of churches, whether on a geographical basis, or in relation to a shared missionary-founder. There would often be a shared language—a particular idiom or set of ideas in which to express Christian belief. This is most easily seen in the case of the communities visible in the Johannine Epistles. Here we have evidence of a number of Christian groups (it is unclear how many), where there is a limited degree of common acquaintance (3 Jn) and so perhaps a fairly wide geographical spread, but all sharing some sort of organizational unity (2 Jn i)—and having to struggle to maintain it (3 Jn). The basis of this unity, fragile as it was, was the form of Christian belief whose classic expression was in the Gospel of John, with its distinctive, finely tuned vocabulary of key words (light, life, truth, word), endlessly rewoven like elements in a complex fugue. But it is plain that there was no machinery for the exerting of rigid discipline among these Johannine Christians: the occasion for the first two letters is the emergence of division about the interpretation of their manner of belief concerning the person of Jesus. It is also plain that, even in the short time that must have elapsed between the writing of the gospel and the letters, some of the key words changed subtly in sense, in response to the quarrels. 'Love', for example, becomes a duty confined to the like-minded (Brown 1979).
10. This time was also marked by the rural character of its setting: the big urban centres of Galilee in Jesus' day, notably Sepphoris and Tiberias, are conspicuous by their absence, even though the former was only a few miles from Nazareth where Jesus was brought up. There are of course numerous references to 'cities', in general and by name, but none of them is much more than a village or small town in modern terms. They were small settlements in an overwhelmingly peasant-dominated and agriculture-centred world. We have already seen that, in congruity with this mode of life, this was a setting where Aramaic was the dominant language and where literacy and a wider culture were almost certainly rare. While, like the wandering character of Jesus' ministry, the rural setting has amply survived any attempt the evangelists might have been expected to make to conform their account of Jesus' activities to the urban setting of the churches of their own experience, the Semitic speech has been almost totally obliterated (Mk 5:41; 7:34; 14:36—all dropped by Matthew and Luke in their parallel passages), and Jesus is depicted as possessing both scriptural knowledge and technical interpretative skill, including the ability to read (Lk 4:17), and even perhaps some acquaintance with current popular moral teaching with Cynic affinities. The question attributed to the people in the synagogue (Mk 6:2), 'Where did this man get all this?' has never been satisfactorily answered, except in the terms of supernatural endowment—which the evangelist is no doubt content for us to entertain. However, it has to be said that evidence about synagogues in Galilee in this precise period (as distinct from a little later) and about educational opportunities at village level is practically non-existent and intelligent guesses vary, some more optimistic than the tone adopted here (Freyne 1988).
7. The Revelation of John, with its letters to seven churches in Asia Minor (chs. 2—3), may again testify to some kind of group consciousness among a set of congregations, though it is unclear whether the admonitory role adopted by the seer is self-appointed or represents a formal acceptance by these churches of a special relationship. That such groupings might not be tight or exclusive is suggested by the fact that the church in the major centre of Ephesus appears in three different sets: the seven churches of Revelation, the largely different seven churches who received letters from Ignatius of Antioch (c.no CE), and the Pauline foundations (Acts 19). The speed with which the main NT writings seem to have circulated itself suggests the effectiveness of at least informal ties among the churches, as does such a project as the collecting of Paul's letters, presumably from the churches which had initially received them, a process perhaps concluded by the end of the first century.
11. Leaving these matters aside, we do not have to look for the reason behind the original organizational simplicity, even indifference, of the movement that centred on Jesus. It lay surely in the vivid sense of God's imminent fulfilment of his saving purpose—to which, as we have seen, the gospels (not to speak of Paul and most other early Christian writers) bear witness. True, in the Qumran sect we have a Jewish group that
8. What has been said so far about the early Christian communities may seem to point to virtual simultaneity
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 838
and the members of Christian congregations who did not normally reckon to leave their city boundaries and whose Christian life soon expressed also a change from a movement of unorganized individual adherents, many of them perhaps transiently impressed by the preaching of Jesus (the 'crowds' of the gospels), to one of tightly knit congregations, many of their members belonging probably to a small number of households in a given place and living quite circumscribed lives, marked in all kinds of ways by their Christian allegiance. We have seen that the letters of Paul testify amply to some of the problems resulting from this new allegiance, working its way within the social framework of such cities of the GraecoRoman world as Corinth and Thessalonica.
combined such a sense (despite their existence for two centuries without its realization) with the most meticulous rules and observance covering every aspect of the common life. But in the case of both John Baptist and Jesus, the policy is different: open not secluded, of mass appeal not separatist, personal not immediately communal in its effects. There is not much sign in the gospels (and again the resistance of inevitable pressure to conform the story to later situations is impressive) of any attempt by either of these charismatic figures to ensure the survival and stability of a movement, with the structural provision which that requires. What there is, for example the commission to Peter (Mt 16:17-19), has all the marks of coming from later times: in this example, the words are added by Matthew to Mark's narrative, reducing it to confusion when we read on to 'Get behind me, Satan', addressed now to one just assured of the most crucial role in the church. Even when such material is taken into account, it does not amount to a blueprint: in the later first century, when the gospels were written, the church had still not reached a Qumran-like point, where every detail of life should be provided for by rule. The strong eschatological impulse from Jesus had not exhausted itself, despite the great changes which had nevertheless occurred.
15. We said that the strong sense of an imminent manifestation of God's power, to judge and then to save his own, survived the lifetime of Jesus—it is the framework of Paul's faith—and the shift to a more organized mode of existence. But certain of its concomitants in the earlier phase are no longer prominent. It was not practicable in the circumstances of an urban institution to follow the pattern of abandonment of family and property which is so strong in the preaching of Jesus. No doubt, with the exception of Jesus' immediate circle of itinerant preachers, there was always a measure of metaphor in the interpretation of this theme: Peter was married when he 'forsook all and followed' Jesus (Mk 1:16-20, 29-31), and remained so (i Cor 9:5), and indeed Mark studiously omits wives from the list of relations to be left behind (10:29-31; cf. the prohibition of divorce in 10:1-12)—though Luke (looking back through ascetic rose-tinted spectacles?) does not (18:29). The message might be interiorized into attitudes of single-mindedness and self-abnegation, or modified to spur Christians into generosity (forsaking not all wealth but certainly some), whether to the needy of the Christian group or to outsiders (Lk 10:25—37). Thgre is astonishingly little on these themes in the ethical sections of the letters of Paul (Rom 12:13; 16:1-2 on giving; and i Cor 7:12-16 on marital problems in relation to conversion); though it is hard to believe that passages such as Mk 1:16—20 did not resonate with people whose Christian decision cost them dear in terms of family relationships and inheritance (cf. Jn 9).
12. Those changes were indeed momentous. Almost all the features of Jesus' ministry that have been described were replaced by their contraries. Mesmerized by the smoothness of the transition as described by Luke, as we move from his gospel to the beginning of Acts, readers have been reluctant to grasp how incongruous are the 'before' and the 'after'. Much attention has long been given to the question of how and why the Christian movement survived the death of its founder and the seeming failure of all his hopes and promises; and in answering that question, attention has focused chiefly on the resurrection of Jesus as offering, somehow, the key to the problem's solution. But there is the at least equally fascinating institutional problem. Evidence to shed light on it is almost non-existent, and Luke has thrown us off any scent there might be, encouraging us to see the move as the most natural thing you could imagine: of course, Jesus' followers simply established themselves in Jerusalem, where they happened to be, and started preaching.
16. Christian family life, with its development of injuction and advice for its regulation, was not long in becoming a primary concern in the urban congregations. It had soon become an institution in its own right, and it figures in one form or another in many of the NT letters (i Cor 7; Col 3:184:1; Eph 5:21—6:9; i Pet 2:18—3:7), in terms much like those found in both Jewish and Greek compendia dealing with the same themes. The church had become domesticated. The note of abandonment, as a constant sound in the Christian ear, was muted, as emphasis shifted to the maintenance of church life.
13. In fact it was remarkable that, in institutional terms, the Christian movement survived the crisis. It was done at the cost of severe changes to some of its central attributes and perspectives. Most obviously, there was a shift from rural to urban settings, probably first in Jerusalem, as Acts says, but soon in other major cities—Antioch (one of the largest cities of the ancient world) and then, in due course, in Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome, in the 403 and 503. The world of Galilee was left behind. Indeed, with the exception of a single allusion in Acts 9:31, we have no clear evidence of Christian activity there after Jesus left for Jerusalem. For all we can tell, his work there was without trace—a passing whirlwind. (References to appearances of the risen Jesus there, in Mt 28 and Jn 21, are of uncertain value in this regard and nothing visible follows from them.)
17. It has become common to give more attention to a second transition in church life during the period in which the NT books were written, and sometimes it has been exaggerated or misleadingly described, perhaps in surrender to the impulse to contrast an early golden age with subsequent decline. This is the development in the later years of the first century and the earlier years of the second, of a greater concern to formalize and legitimate Christian institutions of many kinds. The first moves towards an authorized body of
14. There was a shift too (and necessarily, given the urban locations) from itinerant to settled life, with missions undertaken from permanent urban centres. The result of this shift was that tensions arose between the more mobile missioners
«39 INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
21. It is to be noted that all this took place among a still obscure body of people—spreading rapidly across the Mediterranean map and growing in numbers right through the century, but, in the writings available to us, showing little awareness of the world of the history textbook. There are, however, some marks of that world: the author of Revelation has his eyes on the fate of the Roman Empire and is aware of the rise and fall of emperors; Luke knows about Roman governors and other officials in the territories he describes, as well as something of the system they operate (SherwinWhite 1963; Lentz 1993). Yet the events that might be expected to have made an impact on the late first-century writings of a religious group with Jewish antecedents—the Jewish rebellion in Judea, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple at Roman hands, and the mass suicide at Masada—have left only oblique traces, such as elements in a parable (Mt 22:7) and symbol-laden prophecies on Jesus' lips (Lk 21:20-4).
Christian writings probably belong to this time and are one mark of this trend. Others include the final replacement of itinerant missionaries (such as Paul and his associates) by the leaders of local churches, so that the churches now bear the weight of Christian organization and authority: there is no outside body to turn to, except other churches comparable to one's own. Despite the emergence of networks and groupings, local leaders became more prominent, and in more and more places, a single 'supervisor' (episkopos, later acquiring the status of a Christian technical term, 'bishop') came into being as the chief officer of the Christian community. As a matter of history, he probably arose from among the natural leaders of household-churches in a given place, but some bishops at least soon came to see their role in much more lofty terms: as representatives of God the Father and vehicles of the Spirit's utterance. The letters of Ignatius of Antioch (c.no CE; Staniforth and Louth 1987) show us a man whose high sense of his place in the Christian scheme of things makes Paul's idea of an apostle pale by comparison (Campbell 1994). 18. There is little surviving evidence, but it is likely that forms of worship came to be formulated in the same period. The Didache (not in the NT and unknown until a single manuscript came to light in 1873) contains forms of eucharistic prayer from Syria, probably from the late first century. There are signs too of an increasing concern with conformity to whatever in a particular place was seen as orthodoxy: both the Johannine and the Pastoral Epistles show this trait, and in the latter case, there is more interest in urging such conformity than in elaborating on the beliefs actually involved. These pseudonymously Pauline letters are also insistent on the need for respectable behaviour, acceptable to society at large, and on the sober qualities required in church leaders (i Tim 2:1-4; 3:1—11). It is all a far cry from the exuberance and brave independence of mind that mark the mission of Paul half a century before.
the face of it, this is astonishing, so much so that some critics have been led (in the teeth of all other considerations) to date the NT books well before those happenings of 66-73 CE
(Robinson 1976). It may be better to see this silence as evidence of the degree to which the Christian communities responsible for these books had by the time of writing abandoned their Palestinian and, in many cases, their Jewish roots, at least in social and institutional terms. These events impinged, on people whose loyalties and interests now lay elsewhere and who were removed from the immediate scene, less than seems to modern people to be credible.
22. Finally, part of the explanation lies also in the high concentration that marked the self-understanding of the Christian communities: they had strongly formed beliefs not just about God and Jesus, but also about the church itself. In other words, the detached and analytical terms in which the church has been discussed in this article would have been wholly alien to them. In Jesus' own preaching, there can be little doubt that, even if he did not establish 'cells' of followers in the Galilean countryside and villages (and there is no sign of such groups), his preaching of the dawn of God's kingdom, his visible and effective sovereignty, involved communal assumptions. What was to emerge was a purified and rejuvenated 'people of God'—some sort of'Israel'.
19. All the same, it does not do to paint too sharp a contrast between the solid and perhaps unexciting interests visible in some of the late NT writings and the enthusiasm and innovation of earlier days. If Paul is aware of the inspirational force of the Spirit in himself and among his converts, Ignatius shows comparable assurance, speaking with the voice of God. He is no mere ecclesiastical official, basing his position on human legitimation and just, as it were, doing a job for the church. On the other hand, Paul himself is far from being uninterested in due order in his Christian communities. It may sometimes have been hard to achieve or, as in Corinth, power had come to be concentrated in persons he disapproved of—even if they were themselves, it appears, claiming charismatic inspiration. But the whole tone of his correspondence shows an acute concern for properly accredited leadership, as i Cor 16:15-17 tactfully indicates. He was no lover of spiritual anarchy (Holmberg 1978).
23. The urbanizing of Christianity, visible in Paul and elsewhere, brought no break in this 'Israel-consciousness'. Above all in Rom 9-11, Paul produced a complex and ingenious theory to demonstrate the continuity between the Israel of the Scriptures and the Christian community, made up of Jews and Gentiles on equal terms (at least in Paul's determined view). But Paul also saw the church in a quite different perspective, one that was in tension, if not contradiction, with the idea of continuity which his Jewish roots and his sense of the one God of history would not allow him to forgo. This other perspective, for which he also argued with great skill and passion, centred on Christ and the sheer novelty that had come on the scene with him. It was nothing less than a new creation (2 Cor 5:17), with Jesus as a new Adam, starting the human journey off all over again (Rom 5:12-21; i Cor 15:22). In him, the human race was created afresh. Paul's highly concentrated image of the church as Christ's body encapsulates this consciousness, in which the Jew—Gentile divide is not so much overcome as undermined and rendered irrele-
20. However the matter is analysed in detail—and there is room for difference of opinion—it is evident that the churches underwent considerable changes, even within the relatively brief period to which the NT testifies and even to the extent of producing contradictory opinions and policies (for example on ethical questions such as the continuing role of the Jewish Law in daily life, Houlden 1973).
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
27:25), with Pontius Pilate as their pliable but scarcely guilty accomplice (Mt 27:24; Lk 23:22). There is good reason to suppose that this is unlikely to represent the truth of the matter and that it reflects instead the increasing tension between Christians and (other) Jews, as the former were virtually compelled to define themselves over against the latter. Historically, the probability is that, at a time of governmental nervousness in a Jerusalem crowded for Passover, the Roman authorities combined with the Jewish priestly aristocracy who administered the Temple to remove one whom they perceived to be a possible occasion of civil disorder. His execution was, after all, by the Roman method in such cases, that is crucifixion (Rivkin 1984; Brown 1994).
vant (i Cor 12; Rom 12; Gal 3:28). By clever scriptural arguments, chiefly involving the figure of Abraham (Gal 3; Rom 4), Paul sought to reconcile these two perspectives. They did not convince Jews, and while Christians mostly maintained that they were the true heirs of the old Israel, it was the idea of their membership 'in Christ', expressed in baptism and eucharist, and worked out in following his teaching as found in the gospels, that chiefly occupied their practical consciousness. John's gospel systematically shows Jesus, and then those attached to him as branches to vine and as sheep to shepherd (15; 10), as embodying and absorbing all the great attributes and properties that had belonged to Judaism and the people of Israel. They belonged now to the people of Jesus.
4. But this is only the most spectacular instance of a pervasive principle, often hard to identify with assurance. Take, for example, the matter of Jesus' attitude to the Jewish Law. Did he simply take it for granted as the air he breathed, perhaps taking one side or another on subjects of current dispute, but not stepping outside the limits, as currently seen, of legitimate debate? His society did not, it seems, operate under a rigid orthodoxy and there was much diversity of interpretation about such matters as sabbath observance and tithing of produce. Or did he go beyond such bounds, offering a radical critique of the Law's very foundations? If so, it is puzzling that none of the gospels offers this as the reason for his final condemnation (though he is attacked for it in the course of the story, e.g. Mk 3:1—6). But the gospels differ in their presentation of Jesus' teaching on this subject in the course of his ministry.
E. Jesus and the New Testament. 1. It might be expected that an introduction to the NT would open with an account of Jesus rather than delay the subject to the end. After all, directly or obliquely, Jesus is the subject of most of the NT books, and is the most significant factor in their ever having been written at all. There are, however, good reasons for the roundabout approach to the heart of the matter. For, despite all his prominence, Jesus is in the NT a figure to be approached with caution. For one thing, much depends on the reader's interest: whether, for example, you are keen to find out about the facts and circumstances of Jesus' life, personality, and teaching, or about the origins and terms of faith in him. There is a wellgrounded distinction between Jesus as a figure of early firstcentury Jewish history and Jesus as the object of devotion and faith, presupposed by all the NT writers; with the resurrection (that most difficult of phenomena to pin down) as the hinge between the two.
5. In brief, Mark depicts him as radical, marginalizing food taboos and the priority of sabbath observance (7:19; 2:23—3:6) and down-playing the sacrificial system in favour of an ethic of active love (12:28-34); while John shows him superseding the Law in his own person as the medium of God's disclosure to his people (1:17; 2:21; 7:37—8). Matthew, by contrast, has Jesus endorse and intensify the requirements of the Law (5:17-20; 23:23), while he takes a humane view on certain currently disputed issues (12:1—14; I9:I~9J adapting Mark). And Luke places his attitude somewhere between Mark and Matthew, rather in the spirit of the compromise he shows the Jerusalem church arriving at later in the light of substantial Gentile conversions to the church (Acts 15). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that all these presentations have been affected by the diverse resolutions of this problem, both pressing and practical in the first decades of the Christian movement, that were adopted in various different quarters of the church.
2. It is a basic truth that, whatever the claims and the appearances, Jesus is never encountered 'neat' in the NT. Apart from the fact that the gospels are unlikely to be the work of stenographers who hung on Jesus' every word and of adherents who witnessed his every act, those brief books have all the inevitable distortion that goes with selectivity; moreover, it is apparent that the selectivity was not unprincipled or merely random. It worked by way of filters, some obvious, others more hypothetical, by which material was affected on its way into the gospels we read. We have already referred to the frequently ignored filter of translation of speech from Aramaic into Greek. It is accompanied by the equally frequently ignored filter by which the material moves from an originally uneducated Galilean and rural setting to more sophisticated urban settings, in Syria, Asia Minor, or elsewhere, where much vital original colouring must have been invisible.
6. Moreover, all the evangelists were writing after the shock of Paul's strong stand on this very matter, releasing Gentile converts from the adoption of the key marks of Jewish identity—sabbath observance, food laws, and circumcision—and thereby implicitly placing allegiance to Christ as the sole identity marker for all Christians. It appears that the whole subject remained contentious for some time, with a variety of positions being taken (though it remains a puzzle that neither radical nor conservative presentations in the gospels refer to the matter of circumcision on whose irrelevance Paul was so insistent, as Galatians in particular demonstrates). The upshot of all this is that we really cannot tell with certainty exactly what Jesus himself taught or practised, and scholarly opinion remains divided. Careful analyses of crucial sayings, fitting
Sometimes the provision of new colouring is obvious enough: the well-known example of the tile-roofed Hellenistic town house described in Luke's version of the healing of the paralytic (5:19; contrast the Palestinian house in Mk 2:4). For all we know, there are many details, large and small, in the gospels that are both harder to spot and more significant for the general picture than that.
3. Equally important as a distorting factor is the effect of developing convictions and attitudes in the church in the years following Jesus' lifetime. Some instances have proved devastating in their results, above all the way the gospels (increasingly as one succeeds another) place responsibility for Jesus' death on Jewish heads (on all Jewish heads, Mt
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any showing a mostun-messianic Messiah, given the nationalistic associations of the term—if indeed he did make any such claim. And the same would be true even if in reality the claim derives from his followers after his lifetime rather than from himself.
them plausibly into the setting of his time and place, always remain open to alternative interpretations which see them as reflections of the particular evangelists' views (Harvey 1982; Sanders 1993).
7. Jesus is obscured too by the fact that, by the time the gospels were written, interest in the sheer preservation of his words and ideas was overshadowed by his being the object of faith—and by the consequent need to make a case for that faith, which saw him not simply as a figure of the past who had once revealed God and his saving purposes and whose death and resurrection had given new insight into those purposes or marked their realization; but as the present heavenly Lord who enjoyed supreme triumph as God's co-regent and would soon return in the public display of that reality.
10. None of this caution, this indirectness, is designed to say that the gospels merely obscure the figure of Jesus or tell us nothing of value about him. There are certain features of his life and teaching that not only come across loud and clear but were less than wholly welcome in the early church—and would not therefore have survived if the church, like a traumatized individual, simply eliminated that which it no longer approved of or no longer served its purposes. We have seen that the renunciatory teachings of Jesus the Galilean charismatic preacher were toned down or repackaged quite rapidly in the more settled life of the urban churches. Yet we see them prominently displayed in the first three gospels. Much has been made (Hengel 1981) of the saying in Mt 8:22 ('Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead'), advocating, in the name of the extreme urgency of God's call and of his kingdom, a stance of provocative immorality by the standards of virtually any culture and soon abandoned in the family ethic of the church, as Eph 6:4 demonstrates. It is these harder, more uncomfortable elements in the story of Jesus which, however they may sometimes visibly, as one evangelist modifies another, have been modified by the church, speak most powerfully for the tenacity and authority of Jesus' vision, simply because it was his (Harvey 1990).
8. The scriptural text that seemed best to epitomize that faith was 'The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool' (Ps 110:1). This text is quoted more widely across the gamut of NT authors than any other—closely followed by 'Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee' (Ps 2:7), less precise but not dissimilar in import. It is impossible to believe that this faith failed to colour the memory of Jesus' earthly life, even if there had been in the churches a strongly archival sense, or, more likely, a reverence for Jesus' words and the stories of his deeds, which could stand alongside that faith: argument ranges back and forth on the balance of effect of these various aspects of the situation (Gerhardsson 1961; Stanton 1974; Meier 1991).
9. The faith in Jesus which prevents the gospels being neutral records (whatever that might mean) was largely articulated by means of material drawn from Judaism, and especially from the old Scriptures. This was partly for purposes of Christian self-understanding (to what other medium could the first Christians practically turn?) and partly for purposes of self-definition in relation to (other) Jews who did not share their assessment of Jesus and adherence to him. But this appeal to Scripture, which pervades the gospels, makes yet another screen between us and the realities of Jesus' historical life. It is an interpretative tool that was certainly used, in one form or another, by all schools of thought in the early church, but, when it comes to the gospels, we are faced with the question of whether Jesus himself initiated the process—as in the depiction that is before us. Did he not, inevitably, interpret his own mission and person in scriptural terms? If so, to which models did he appeal? And to what extent did the amplifying of this mode of thought in the church, as evidenced in the gospels and elsewhere, merely build upon his foundations and continue along lines he laid down, as distinct from moving along altogether more ambitious paths? For example, when the Gospel of John views Jesus under the image of God's pre-existent Word, his copartner in the work of creation itself (1:1—18), thus drawing on a symbol current in Judaism (e.g. Ps 33:6; Wis 9:1), there is nothing to suggest that Jesus himself made use of that category of thought. It is quite otherwise with Jewish terms such as Messiah, son of God, or son of man. These appear on his lips or are inseparable from the tradition about him. None of them is easy to interpret, and if Jesus used them, it is as likely that they received, by the very fact of their application to him if not from his explicit teaching, twists of sense, perhaps to the extent of sheer paradox, that were novel. Jesus was, after all, on
11. A promising line of enquiry begins by bypassing the gospels altogether. We know when and where Jesus lived: what then can we learn from a knowledge of the times derived from other sources, such as archaeology and histories of the period? We have already made reference to evidence of this kind: the Qumran sect and the Dead Sea scrolls left by them
(Vermes 1977, 1995); the probabilities about the circumstances of Jesus' death; the mixed culture of Galilee with its peasant countryside and Hellenistic cities. But can this approach bring us nearer to a realistic view of Jesus himself, at any rate to a view of his role in the society of his time—what sort of part he played, how he may have fitted into its structure and been perceived (Finegan 1992; Stanton 1995)?
12. This more detached and wider-ranging approach does not yield unquestioned results, but many would agree that it places Jesus in a category of persons recognizable in the period (Vermes 1973). In traditional terms, such persons have affinities with the prophets of former centuries, men who stood out from the prevailing religious culture and social system, declaring the will of God and the imminence of his judgement. More sociologically, we can refer to them as charismatics, that is people whose message threatens to turn the world upside down, challenging conventional values—even those whose morality seems unimpeachable—and looking towards an order of things where life is lived at a new level of righteousness and God is all in all. Such people rarely get much of a hearing: often their day is briefer they are snuffed out by authorities who feel endangered by them. First-century Galilee, somewhat removed from the centre of power in Jerusalem and probably unstable in its rural economy, spawned several such figures, most of them leaving practically no trace. John Baptist had more identifiable effects: he comes into the
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 842
of various kinds are there in the gospels, and they lead us to our final topic: Jesus as the object of faith.
story of Jesus, and the late first-century Jewish historian Josephus (like Mark and Matthew but in somewhat different terms) tells of his execution for his righteous meddling in the affairs of the great ones in the land—a classic prophet's predicament. Moreover (and somewhat mysteriously), like Jesus, he gave rise to a group of followers who, according to Acts 18:24—19:6, had spread to Ephesus in the later years of the century—thereafter they fade from view.
17. If we had only the letters of Paul, we should think that all that really mattered about Jesus' career was his death and resurrection: that is, its importance centred almost wholly on a period of some forty-eight hours—and if more than that, then what followed it (his heavenly rule and presence in his adherents) was more notable than what preceded it. That is the earliest Christian perspective of which we have evidence.
13. Much of the broad picture of Jesus in the gospels coheres with this identification of his social role: the radical, shocking teaching about ties to family and property; the call to 'follow' that brooks no delay, no appeal to prudence; the ready challenge to established religious groups, even the most pious, for their routines and their self-satisfaction; the challenge to central authority—if that is how we are to construe the incident in the Temple (Mk 11:15-17) which probably precipitated the perception of Jesus as a breacher of the peace and his speedy elimination; above all, the sense of the imminent realization of God's rule.
18. How different it is from the picture we get from the gospels. There, though the death and resurrection are plainly the climax of the narrative and occupy a disproportionate place from a purely biographical point of view, these elements are nevertheless parts of a much greater whole. To put it more succinctly, they form the end of a story, where in Paul they acted much more as the inauguration of a continuing state of affairs. It is not wholly satisfying simply to point out that these are different genres of writing and so naturally differ in their perspective. After all, none of these writers was compelled to write as he did, and each wrote in a particular way because, presumably, it reflected the 'shape' of his convictions about Jesus.
14. However, other readings are possible and win some support, even within the method we have been describing. The picture of Jesus as charismatic leader or prophet, once put forward, seems obvious: it makes best sense of the most basic recognition of modern scholarship—that Jesus was a Jew of his time. It brings it into sharp focus and takes us behind some of the other characterizations of Jesus (for example, as the heavenly one come to earth) that soon came to dominate Christian accounts of him (Rom 1:3; Gal 4:4). But it does less than justice to certain other aspects of the gospel material: such as the teaching about there being no need for anxiety, no need for complexity of lifestyle (Mt 6:25—34); or me picture of Jesus and his followers as a band of brothers espousing freedom and simplicity of life under God's heaven, somewhat after the manner of modern opters-out from society. Jesus' common meals with his followers (specially emphasized in Luke) were then the central symbol of this lifestyle, focused on the present.
19. The two perspectives meet, however, precisely in the death and resurrection, and the latter in particular may be seen as the junction between them (Evans 1970; Marxsen 1970). Luke's two-volume work (Gospel and Acts) comes nearest to meeting the need to unite Jesus' life before the resurrection and the life of the church after it—though even this narrative probably ends before the time of writing, and so, like the gospels, looks back from the Christian present to an
(albeit longer) normative history. On the other hand, though the gospels do indeed describe a past that culminates in Jesus' death and resurrection, they are nevertheless imbued with a present faith in the living Christ who, in his heavenly rule, may still be said to inspire his people and even to dwell in and among them: perhaps especially in Mark and John, the backdrop is that of Jesus' past life but he addresses the present of the gospels' readers. So much is this the case that, as we have seen, we must be alert to the effects of this factor as we read the gospels with a view to discovering simply what happened and how things were in Jesus' lifetime.
15. This is a distinctly non-apocalyptic picture of Jesus and, in terms of Jewish heritage, seems to owe more to some facets of Jewish 'wisdom' tradition, with its provision for moral life here and now. But its associations and provenance may lie more in the teaching of Cynic philosophers who adopted values of this kind and whose influence had perhaps penetrated into northern Palestine. The straightforward view is of course, that Jesus himself sensed a directness and simplicity of filial relationship with God—it was his stance in daily life ('father' e.g. Mt 6:7—14). Alternatively, this picture may represent one style among others of church reflection on Jesus, as the tradition about him was exposed to the variegated culture of the Graeco-Roman world (Crossan 1991; 1994). 16. This discussion started, somewhat negatively, under the injunction to approach the figure of Jesus with caution: the nature of our evidence, literary and circumstantial, dictates it. But (to repeat) it would be a mistake to let caution lead to the conclusion that Jesus is a mere enigma, lost in the mists of time or a welter of church obfuscation of whatever clarity there might otherwise have been. As we have seen, some features are unmistakable and their strength shines through. But the equally unmistakable effects of church interpretation
20. To take a small example, but significant for that very reason (and capable of being paralleled almost limitlessly): Mk 9:40 ('Whoever is not against us is for us') suggests that Jesus urged on his followers an open, expansive attitude to possible supporters and deflects them from any narrowness or the erection of barriers and the application of tests. This is, in the words of the church poster, a case of'All welcome'. But Mt 12:30 ('He who is not with me is against me') reflects the precise opposite. Jesus makes stringent demands on potential followers and there is no easy entry to their company: adhering is sharply distinguished from remaining outside. The boundary wall is high. Must we not see here the effects of two different outlooks in different parts of the early church, both equally comprehensible, but contrasting in their policies—and far-reaching in their twin visions of Christian life? It does not take much imagination to see that the two statements betoken two very different ways of believing in Jesus' significance and the scope of his work, as they also may
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
«43
guage that echoes the old stories of providential births, such as those of Isaac, Samson or Samuel.
be seen as the founts of two different traditions in Christian life down to our own day. The gospels, accounts of the preresurrection life of Jesus, then reflect the faith of the postresurrection church, in small ways as in great. These considerations go some way to mitigate the contrast that we drew between the perspectives of Paul and the gospels.
25. In John, the sonship of Jesus in relation to God is taken further still. Partly by way of its associations with other terms and models, it now describes a relationship that does not begin at Jesus' baptism or conception, but exists from all eternity. Jesus' relationship with God, as Father, is, for the Gospel of John, anchored at that most fundamental level. From the vantage point of this climax in the development of the model (soon to be taken up in a more philosophical idiom), we can see how Jesus' representation of God comes to be seen in more and more extensive terms, until it operates on the scale of the cosmos itself.
21. From another point of view, we may indeed say that these writings—and indeed almost all the NT books (the Letter of James is a strange exception)—testify to a remarkably homogeneous faith in the centrality of Jesus as the agent of God's saving purpose. True, they differ in certain respects, in emphasis and terminology, but the unanimity is striking. To return to the obvious: it is this common conviction about Jesus as the one who 'makes all the difference' that holds together the early Christian movement, and so the NT as its literary deposit—whatever other factors loomed large in its life and whatever the problems to which it had to attend.
26. This example of development and of many-sidedness could be paralleled for other expressions and ideas in which the Christians of the NT period clothed their belief in Jesus. Typically, it is based on a variety of scriptural passages, each pointing to its own associations and concepts. Typically too, even within the narrow temporal confines of the NT period, it is neither static nor universal. It is symptomatic of the explosion of symbolic energy which so imaginatively produced the new devotion that saw in Jesus the key to everything.
22. Yet we may observe interesting variations of resonance even in the use of certain terms to express this conviction about Jesus. For example, many early Christian writers speak of him as 'son of God'. But what associations did this expression have for them? It is not, after all, an expression that simply comes out of the blue: it has numerous antecedents in Judaism, and without recognizable resonances it could scarcely have been used at all in its new context. In Paul, the earliest writer to use it, it is not altogether clear what is in mind, for he gives it multiple applications. In Rom 9:4, it receives one of its traditional applications, to Israel as a people (cf Ex 4:22; Hos 11:1); in Gal 3:26 and Rom 8:14, it denotes Christian believers—a usage paralleled in Jewish wisdom writing (Wis 2:18), where it is applied to righteous servants of God. Yet clearly, for Paul, this application to Christians is now closely related (but exactly how?) to its central use for Jesus himself; just as God's 'fatherhood' of Jesus is related to their right to claim that same fatherhood (Gal 4:4—6; Rom 8:14-17). Paul perhaps comes nearest to showing his mind in Rom 8:32, where he appeals to the giving by Abraham of his son Isaac to death (narrowly averted, Gen 22) as a parallel to God's giving of Jesus: 'God did not spare his only son' (cf. Gen 22:16). That model of sonship splendidly and appropriately illuminates the death of Jesus and is an important ingredient in the quest for scriptural texts that could put that otherwise catastrophic event, as far as the hopes of Jesus' followers were concerned, in a positive light. Here was a case where the giving of a son by a father was the seed of total good—the establishing of the people of Israel (Byrne 1979).
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Roman Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Byrne, B. (1979), 'Sons of God—'Seed of Abraham': A Study ofthe Idea of
23. The same model may play a part in the Markan story of Jesus' baptism, where his sonship is announced by God himself: the word 'beloved' in 1:11 is the Septuagint's repeated adjective for Isaac in Gen 22. But here, in what is for Mark the crucial opening scene, establishing Jesus' identity, it is joined with the words of Ps 2:7, 'Thou art my son', probably seen as messianic in import in the Jewish background upon which Mark draws.
the Sonship of God of All Christians in Paul against the Jewish Background (Rome: Biblical Institute Press). Campbell, R. A. (1994), The Elders: Seniority within Earliest Christianity
(Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark), 1994. Campenhausen, H. von (1969), Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual
Power in the Church ofthe First Three Centuries (London: A. & C. Black).
(1972), The Formation ofthe Christian Bible (London: A. & C. Black). Carroll, R. P. (1991), Wolf in the Sheepfold: The Bible as a Problem for
24. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus' sonship is for the first time linked to his conception and birth, but even here the focus is not on physiology but on scriptural texts and models which are seen to foreshadow Jesus and to authenticate his role. In Matthew, for example, Isa 7:14 plays a crucial role (cf. 1:23). In Luke, the whole narrative of chs. i and 2 is couched in lan-
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Evans, C. F. (1970), Resurrection and the New Testament (London:
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and the Beginning of the Early Church (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Freyne, S. (1988), Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels: Literary Approaches and
Early Christianity (London: SCM). Murphy-O'Connor, J. (1983), St Paul's Corinth: Texts and Archaeology
(Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier). Rivkin, E. (1984), What Crucified Jesus (London: SCM). Robinson, J. A. T. (1976), Redating the New Testament (London:
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SCM). Rowland, C. C. (1982), The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in
Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Lund: Gleerup). Goulder, M. D. (1974), Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London:
Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK). Sanders, E. P. (1985), Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM).
SPCK). Harvey, A. E. (1982), Jesus and the Constraints of History (London:
(1992), Judaism, Practice and Belief, 6jBCE—66cE (London: SCM). (1993), The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, Penguin). Schneemelcher, W. (ed.), (1991; 1992), New Testament Apocrypha
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(1990), Strenuous Commands: The Ethics of Jesus (London: SCM). Hengel, M. (1974), Judaism and Hellenism (London: SCM).
(1981), The Charismatic Leader and his Followers (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). Holmberg, B. (1978), Paul and Power: The Structure of Authority in
(Cambridge: James Clarke), i and ii. Sherwin-White, A. N. (1963), Roman Society and Roman Law in the
New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon). Staniforth, M., and Louth, A. (eds.) (1987), Early Christian Writings
the Primitive Church as Reflected in the Pauline Epistles (Lund: Gleerup).
(Harmondsworth: Penguin). Stanton, G. N. (1974), Jesus of Nazareth in New Testament Preaching
(1990), Sociology and the New Testament: An Appraisal (Minneapolis: Fortress). Houlden, J. L. (1973), Ethics and the New Testament (Edinburgh: T. &T.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
(1995), Gospel Truth? New Light on Jesus and the Gospels (London: HarperCollins). Stendahl, K. (1968), The School of St Matthew and its Use of the Old
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(1986), Connections (London: SCM). (ed.) (1995), The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (London: SCM). Lentz, J. C. (1993), Luke's Portrait of Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge
Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress). Sweet, J. P. M. (1979), Revelation (London: SCM). Theissen, G. (1982), The Social Context of Pauline Christianity (Edin-
University Press). Lindars, B. (1961), New Testament Apologetic: The Doctrinal Significance
burgh: T. & T. Clark). Vermes, G. (1973), Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels
of the Old Testament Quotations (London: SCM). Marxsen, W. (1970), The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (London:
(London: Collins).
(1977), The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective (London: Collins).
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Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press).
(1986), 'The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism', in J. Ashton (ed.), The Interpretation of John (London: SPCK), !4!-73Meier, J. P. (1991), A Marginal Jew: Rethinkingthe Historical Jesus (New
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57. Matthew DALE C. ALLISON, JR.
A. Authorship. 1. Eusebius, Hist. Ecd. 3.39, attributes to Papias, a second-century Bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, the earliest testimony to Matthew's authorship: 'Now Matthew made an ordered arrangement of the oracles in the Hebrew [or: Aramaic] language, and each one translated [or: interpreted] it as he was able.' These words and the traditional title, 'According to Matthew', show that not long after it was written people attributed our gospel to the disciple named in Mt 9:9; 10:3. Because the tradition is so early, and because the apostle Matthew is a relatively unimportant figure in early Christian literature, the traditional attestation still has its defenders; see e.g. Gundry (1982).
thean authorship with a Semitic original; but this gospel is unlikely to be the work of a translator. (2) It is improbable that a Semitic document, such as Papias speaks of, would have incorporated a Greek document (Mark) almost in its entirety. (3) Would an apostle who accompanied Jesus have used so little personal reminiscence but rather have followed Mark so closely? (4) Papias' tradition might have originally referred to an early version of lost sayings (source known as Q) and then, when Q disappeared, have been connected with Matthew. It was common enough for a document to carry the name of the author of one of its sources (cf the evolution of Isaiah).
2. Most, however, now doubt the tradition. For (i) from Papias on, Christian tradition consistently associated Mat-
3. These points are sufficiently strong that in the present commentary 'Matthew' will be used of the author without
«45 MATTHEW
any claim to his apostolic identity. On one point, however, the tradition appears quite correct: the author was a Jew. The gospel has numerous Jewish features which cannot be attributed to the tradition—e.g. gematria (see MT 1:2-17), OT texts seemingly translated from the Hebrew specifically for this gospel (e.g. 2:18, 23; 8:17; 23:18—21), concentrated focus on the synagogue (e.g. 6:1—18; 23:1—39), and affirmation of the abiding force of the Mosaic law (5:17-20). Matthew alone, moreover, records Jesus' prohibitions against mission outside Israel (10:5; 15:24) and shows concern that eschatological flight not occur on a sabbath (24:20). These and other Jewish features have not been sprinkled here and there for good effect: they are an organic part of the whole and imply a Jewish-Christian author and audience.
but the period after the destruction was not such a time for formative Judaism.
2. Matthew's mainly Jewish community had to come to terms with such a Judaism—a fact which helps explain the great interest in the scribes and Pharisees. That community seems, on the one hand, to have demanded its own inclusion within Judaism, whose faith it thought to share, and, on the other, to have sought the expansion of Judaism beyond strictly Jewish confines by challenging that faith to shed its tendency to ethnic privacy. But scholars disagree whether Matthew's community was still—as 23.3 so strongly implies—within Judaism or whether it had recently declared itself independent of its parent faith so that it had become a sect outside Judaism or, again, whether, having long been regarded as deviant by the Jewish community, it was in the process of deciding if it should leave while yet remaining under the authority of the local synagogue.
B. Date and Place of Origin. 1. Although there has recently been a slight tendency to date Matthew before 70 CE, the majority opinion rightly holds that Matthew was written in the last quarter of the first century CE. (i) Ignatius of Antioch, the Didache, and Papias—all from the first part of the second century—show knowledge of Matthew, which accordingly must have been composed before 100 CE. (See e.g. Ign., Smyrn. i; Did. 8.2.) (2) 22:7 (a seeming allusion to the fall of Jerusalem) and the dependence upon Mark (written £.60—70 CE) indicate a date after 70 CE. (3) Matthew reveals points of contact with early rabbinic Judaism as it struggled to consolidate itself after the Jewish war; see esp. Davies
3. Whatever the exact status of Matthew's community in relation to Judaism, his writing points to a process of differentiation which took place between his community and 'their synagogue'. Believers in Jesus may have preferred to refer to their own gatherings not as 'synagogue'—in Matthew the expression is 'their synagogue'—but as 'church'. Again, Christian leaders were not to be called 'rabbi', a term which was, in the Jamnian Judaism of Matthew's day, becoming an official title (23:7—8). Along with the differentiation went outright, polemical criticism, especially of the Pharisees. The cohesion of the believers in Jesus was no doubt strengthened by such criticism: a common enemy unites the divided and insecure.
(1964).
2. Many have urged that Matthew originated in Antioch in Syria. Peter's prominence harmonizes well with his undoubted status there (cf. Gal 2:11), and the mixture of Jew and Gentile in a large urban area is consistent with composition in Antioch. Further, Ignatius may be the earliest witness to Matthew, and he was bishop of Antioch. But these and additional considerations do not add up to proof, and patristic tradition places neither this gospel nor the apostle Matthew in Antioch. So other suggestions have been made—Jerusalem, Galilee, Alexandria, Caesarea Maritima, Phoenicia, or, more generally, east of the Jordan (on the basis of 4:25 and 19:1, which may view Palestine as being on the other side of the Jordan).
4. The establishment of group identity also involved legitimizing belief in Jesus over against Jewish criticism. Explicit aboutthe existence of such criticism is (28:15), which no doubt helps account for the formula quotations, the parallels between Jesus and Moses, and Jesus' endorsement of the Torah. One detects in all this a sort of apologetics. Christians claimed to be vindicated by antiquity, to have a lawgiver like Moses, and to keep Torah.
5. The need for group identity made the need for unity a paramount concern. This illuminates the emphasis in both the Sermon on the Mount and ch. 18 on forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness up to seven times is advised in Luke, but 'seventy times (and) seven' in Mt 18:22. Despite its often violent polemics, perhaps no other ancient document shows more sensitivity to the desperate need for love and peace rather than hate and vengeance than does Matthew. The tendency towards reconciliation appears also in Matthew's desire not to give away too much of his Jewish heritage but to bridge as sensitively as possible the gulf between Jewish and Gentile believers. He tried to preserve both the old and the new (8:17; 13:52). While he called for a mission to Gentiles, he also recognized Israel's special place (10:5—6; 15:21—8) and insisted on the demands for a righteousness even higher than that of the Pharisees. The proof of Matthew's ecumenical character is that both Jewish and Gentile Christians welcomed it as their own: it became the chief gospel of both groups.
C. Matthew's Purpose and its Setting in Judaism. 1. Following the revolt of 70 CE the Pharisees emerged dominant. They set in motion a process which was to allow Judaism to continue and even thrive after defeat. To the early stages of this process the rabbinic sources apply the term 'Jamnia', after the place where, according to tradition, Pharisaic sages congregated after the war. These sages were concerned with the disunity of the Jewish people and with the attraction of movements from without, including Christianity. They accordingly promoted unity, began the process of collecting their oral laws, sought to establish a standard calendar for the religious year, and tried to transfer to the synagogue rites previously performed in the temple itself. So in Matthew's time a highly self-conscious and probably aggressive Pharisaism was asserting itself to reunite Israel; and this involved defining itself in opposition to others, including Christians. It probably also involved activities Christians interpreted as persecution. Tolerance comes in times of self-confidence;
6. Despite both the polemic and the ecclesiastical tactics, the gospel remains eloquent testimony to the faith that inspired Matthew. Further, we cannot doubt that while he had one eye on his own social setting, he also envisaged a broader readership. For it is only through a studied neglect of
MATTHEW 846
believed that the Mosaic law was still in effect. This can only have meant that Matthew expected Jewish Christians to keep it. But this was also the position of Luke, who had no trouble passing on stories in which even the apostle to the Gentiles keeps the law. Moreover, the idea that Jewish Christians should observe the precepts of the Torah from which Gentiles Christians were free, was not unknown. So much is clear from the decree reproduced in Acts 15 (see ACTS 15:29). Whatever its precise origin, that decree was not Luke's invention, and it assumes that while Jewish Christians will observe the law, Gentiles need only follow a few general proscriptions. This position was probably the dominant one in first-century Christianity. Here too then, Matthew swims in the mainstream.
the obvious that one can miss that a major and perhaps the primary impulse behind the First Gospel was the natural desire to record what Jesus said and did and to preserve that memory for posterity. Matthew was composed so that the story of Jesus, rightly interpreted, might continue to be heard beyond as well as in his own time and place.
D. Theology. 1. Although there are aspects of a theology in Matthew they do not present themselves as a coherent or abstract edifice; there is no systematically developed body of thought. Despite the book's theocentricity, a theology of Matthew, in our sense of the term, is not really possible. Like the rabbinic corpus Matthew contains much implicit theology but is primarily concerned not with correctness of belief but with obedience.
E. Story, Structure, and Plot. 1. Mt 1-4 opens with the title (1:1) and Jesus' genealogy (1:2—17). Thgre follow infancy stories (1:18—25; 2:1—11, 12—23), me section on John the Baptist (3:1— 17), and three additional pericopae that directly prepare for the ministry (4:1—11,12—17,18—22). All this material constitutes an extended introduction. We are told who Jesus was (1:1—18; 2:1, 4; 3:11, 17; 4:3, 6), where he was from (2:6), how he came into the world (1:18-25), why he came into the world (1:21; 2:6), when he came into the world (1:17; 2:1), and what he proclaimed (4:17).
2. Matthew did not offer a theological system as an expression of his faith in Jesus. Rather he drew upon and applied texts he had reflected upon—the OT, Mark, Q, M. As pastor he was above all an exegete and commentator. That is, he was primarily concerned to pass on the traditions handed to him. His gospel is less a statement of personal opinions than the expression of a traditional faith. He told a story more than he authored it, or rather he retold his community's story to which he added commentary.
3. Matthew's genius was not that of theological invention. He was not a Paul or an Origen. To judge from his gospel the evangelist's religious convictions were traditional. Along with all the NT authors his God was the God of the OT, that is, the God of Israel. In other words his theology, in the proper sense of that word, was Jewish theology as transmitted to him by his Jewish education and the church. There was also nothing much original about his Christology. All the Christological titles found in his gospel appear in other early Christian texts; and even his story of a virgin birth has its parallel in Luke. Matthew also contributed nothing new to soteriology The gospel says only that Jesus gave his life as a ransom for many and saved his people from their sins—convictions common enough in primitive Christianity.
2. The Sermon on the Mount, the first major discourse, opens with a short narrative introduction (4:23-5:2) and closes with a short narrative conclusion (7:28-8:1). The discourse proper, 5:3—7:27, is also symmetrically centred: blessings (5:3— 12) are at the beginning, warnings (7:13-27) at the end. In between there are three major sections, each one primarily a compilation of imperatives: Jesus and the law (5:17-48), Jesus on the cult (6:1—18), Jesus and social issues (6:19—7:12). The sermon contains Jesus' demands for Israel.
3. If the Sermon on the Mount presents us with Jesus' words, Mt 8 and 9 recount his deeds. The chapters are largely a record of Jesus' acts, particularly his compassionate miracles, which fall neatly into three sets of three: 8:1—4, 5
—I3> 14-15 + 8:23-7, 28-34; 9:I~8 + 9:18-26, 27-31, 32-4. Jesus also speaks in this section, but the emphasis is upon his actions, what he does in and for Israel (cf 8:16—17).
4. One could, if the non-Markan material in 16:13-20 were thought redactional, make a case for a novel contribution to ecclesiology But here the evidence again points to tradition. It is the same with Matthew's Deuteronomistic view of history and his eschatology The former reminds one of Q, and regarding the latter, while certain themes receive special accent, one can easily find parallels to every strand of Matthean eschatology—to Matthew's hope for a near end, to his realized eschatology, and to his use of apocalyptic expectation to tender encouragement, offer paraenesis, and explicate Christology. Also in Matthew's moral teaching we find, first of all, tradition. The demand to love, the call to non-retaliation, and the imperative to imitate Christ were standard in the early church.