The Jewish Gospel

Of the four Gospels, Matthew is the most Jewish in idiom and concern — the Gospel that Origen says was written “for those who came to the faith from Judaism” (Eusebius, HE 6.25). This file examines the marks of that character: the fulfilment-formulae and the appeal to prophecy, the title “Son of David,” the reverent circumlocution “the kingdom of heaven,” the close engagement with the Law and with the scribes and Pharisees, and the way the most Jewish Gospel ends by opening the door to all nations.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

“Written for the Hebrews”

The early Church was unanimous that Matthew’s Gospel had a Jewish-Christian origin and audience. Origen, quoted by Eusebius, says the first Gospel was written by Matthew “for those who came to the faith from Judaism” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.25.4; NPNF II/1); Irenaeus says Matthew issued his Gospel “among the Hebrews in their own dialect” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1; ANF 1); Eusebius elsewhere reports that Matthew preached first to his own people and, when about to go to others, “delivered to them in their native tongue his Gospel” as a substitute for his presence (HE 3.24.6; NPNF II/1). Whatever is to be made of the language claim (treated in Section 05), the testimony to the Gospel’s Jewish-Christian milieu is consistent and early, and it matches the internal evidence: more than any other Gospel, Matthew presupposes a reader at home in the Scriptures, the institutions, and the controversies of Israel.

The Fulfilment of Prophecy

The signature feature of Matthew is the fulfilment-citation, the formula “that it might be fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet” introducing an Old Testament text shown to be realized in Christ. There are some ten to fourteen such formula-quotations, concentrated in the infancy and Galilean sections: the virgin who conceives (Matt. 1:22–23, citing Isa. 7:14); Bethlehem (2:5–6, Mic. 5:2); “out of Egypt have I called my son” (2:15, Hos. 11:1); Rachel weeping for her children (2:17–18, Jer. 31:15); “he shall be called a Nazarene” (2:23); the land of Zebulun and Naphtali (4:14–16, Isa. 9:1–2); “he took our infirmities” (8:17, Isa. 53:4); the servant who will not break the bruised reed (12:17–21, Isa. 42:1–4); the teaching in parables (13:35, Ps. 78:2); the king coming on a donkey (21:4–5, Zech. 9:9); and the thirty pieces of silver and the potter’s field (27:9–10). The cumulative effect is to present Jesus as the one in whom the whole prophetic Scripture converges. This is not proof-texting in the modern pejorative sense but the Gospel’s deepest argument: that the Law and the Prophets find their meaning and end in Christ — the same conviction the risen Lord articulates in Luke (Luke 24:27, 44) and that the Fathers make the foundation of the Christological reading of the Old Testament (see Christology).

Son of David, Kingdom of Heaven

Two further idioms mark the Gospel as Jewish. The first is its insistence on Jesus as Son of David: the title opens the genealogy (Matt. 1:1), and it recurs on the lips of the blind, the Canaanite woman, and the crowds (9:27; 15:22; 20:30–31; 21:9, 15), framing Jesus as the awaited royal Messiah of David’s line. The second is the phrase “the kingdom of heaven” (hē basileia tōn ouranōn), which Matthew uses some thirty-two times where Mark and Luke say “the kingdom of God.” The substitution of “heaven” for the divine name reflects the reverent Jewish avoidance of pronouncing or writing “God,” and its prevalence in Matthew is among the surest internal signs of the Gospel’s Semitic-Christian sensibility; the two phrases are equivalent in meaning, as Matthew himself shows by using “kingdom of God” in a few places (e.g. Matt. 12:28; 21:31). The “kingdom of heaven” is the master-theme of the Gospel — proclaimed by John (3:2) and Jesus (4:17) in identical words, taught in the parables (Matt. 13), and sought before all else (6:33).

The Law and the Scribes and Pharisees

Matthew engages the Law and its official interpreters more closely than any other Gospel, and with a double edge. On the one hand it affirms the abiding authority of the Law in the strongest terms: “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:17–18); the Lord tells his hearers to do what the scribes and Pharisees, who “sit on Moses’ seat,” teach (23:2–3). On the other hand it confronts the scribes and Pharisees more sharply than any other Gospel, in the six antitheses of the Sermon (5:21–48), in the repeated charge that they neglect “the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith” (23:23), and in the great chapter of woes, “scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” (Matt. 23). The Gospel thus stands within the world of first-century Judaism precisely as it argues with it — a debate, in W. D. Davies’s reading, conducted across the line that was hardening between the synagogue and the Church in the decades after 70 (W. D. Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, 1964). The Orthodox reader holds the two emphases together as the Gospel does: the Law is fulfilled, not abolished, and its fulfilment is the deeper righteousness of the Kingdom, not its abrogation.

The Most Jewish Gospel Opens to the Nations

The paradox of Matthew is that the most Jewish of the Gospels is also the one that most explicitly opens the Kingdom to the Gentiles. The magi from the East worship the newborn King while Jerusalem is troubled (Matt. 2:1–12); the centurion’s faith is greater than any in Israel, and “many will come from east and west” to the feast of the Kingdom (8:10–11); the Canaanite woman’s faith is praised (15:28); the parable of the wicked tenants ends, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing its fruits” (21:43); and the Gospel closes with the command to “make disciples of all nations” (28:19). The same evangelist who roots Jesus most deeply in Israel’s Scripture and hope is the one who shows that hope reaching its term in the gathering of the nations — the Son of David revealed as the Son of God for the world. This movement, from Israel to the nations without the rejection of Israel’s Scripture, is the theological spine of the Gospel and the reason the Church placed it first: it is the bridge from the Old Covenant to the New.

See Also

• The Gospel of Matthew — the structure and arc within which these features appear
• The New Moses and the New Law — “I have come not to abolish but to fulfil” (Matt. 5:17)
• Papias and the Logia — the testimony to a Hebrew origin
• The Mission Traditions — “to the Hebrews first” (Eusebius, HE 3.24)
• Holy Scripture — the fulfilment of the Old Testament in Christ

References

• The Holy Gospel according to Matthew 1:1, 22–23; 2:1–23; 4:17; 5:17–18; 8:10–11; 12:28; 21:43; 23; 28:19. Cited by chapter and verse.
• Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History 6.25.4; 3.24.6. Trans. McGiffert. NPNF II/1.
• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.1.1. ANF 1.
• Davies, W. D. The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
• Davies, W. D., and Dale C. Allison. Matthew (ICC). Vol. 1, Introduction (the fulfilment-quotations; “kingdom of heaven”). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988.