The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction, Stephen L. Harris

            This Chapter starts out by explaining why Matthew’s Gospel was placed at the beginning of the New Testament.  It then moves on to talking about Jesus’ lineage and the connections Matthew makes to the Old Testament.  A large part of this chapter focuses on who wrote this gospel, where and when they wrote it, and where they drew their information from.  It then proceeds to focus on the infancy narrative.  It next focuses on Jesus’ five major discourses along with Matthew’s five narrative sections.  It finally covers the way Matthew told of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and also of his post resurrection appearances.

            The key idea of this chapter is a focus on Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as a teacher and miracle worker.  The Gospel of Matthew was written after that of Mark, and is based extremely closely off of Mark’s, and in fact almost summarizes it.  It includes many of the same stories as the Gospel of Mark, but they are extremely condensed in Matthew’s version.  Matthew also takes extreme measures to establish Jesus as a descendent of King David and to prove that Jesus was the fulfillment of many Old Testament prophets.  Matthew’s Gospel presented Jesus to his contemporary Jewish Christians in a way that related to many of the events happening in their world.

            This chapter contains many key terms throughout its text.  The first key term encountered is church, meaning the Christian community.  Another key term was logia, which referred to the sayings of Christ.  Other key terms included pesher, which meant commentary, midrash, “a detailed exposition of the underlying meaning of a biblical text,” Halakah, which was the Scripture’s legal rules for daily life, and Haggadah, an explanation of non-legal things.  The Q (Quelle) source was a document used by Matthew and Luke which held many of Jesus’ sayings.  Matthean means information which came from Matthew’s Gospel.  The antitheses were a set of Jesus’ sayings.  Lex talionis, or law of retaliation, was a central concept of justice.  Gehenna is a term which has been translated to mean Hell.  Parousia was a term which meant Jesus’ second coming.

            The author gives many examples of prophecies fulfilled and Jesus’ lineage by quoting from Old Testament books such as Genesis and Samuel.  One table illustrates the writings in the Gospel of Matthew and shows the exact sources for those quotes from the Old Testament.  Another table illustrates the parallels and shows how Matthew edited Mark’s Gospel.  An early painting of Jesus was included which shows how he was portrayed to be similar to Greco-Roman images.  Another image illustrates Jesus separating sheep from goats, which could perhaps make a parallel to separating Jews from Gentiles.

            There are many wuotes which illustrate the main point of this chapter.  To show how much Matthew uses the Old Testament in establishing his Gospel, Harris says, “Matthew quotes from, paraphrases or alludes to the Hebrew Bible at least 60 times.”  According to Harris, the writes was “thoroughly versed in the Hebrew Bible,…remarkable skilled at its exegesis(the explanation and critical interpretation of a literary text).”  To show just how much of his Gospel Matthew get from the Gospel of Mark, Harris says, “he incorporates about 90 percent of the earlier Gospel into his account.”

            There are many interesting points raised in this chapter.  The first was the painstaking measure which Matthew took to tie his Gospel to the Old Testament.  Another was the extreme similarities between the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.  Another interesting point was the way in which Matthew strived to make Jesus look better to his contemporary Jewish Christians.  The ways in which Matthew bent the truth to achieve this goal were very interesting.

            I believe that the most important concepts of this chapter for our class are those that deal with the author of Matthew’s Gospel; who it was, where and when they wrote it, and why they wrote it the way in which they did.  Also the similarities and summaries of Mark’s Gospel which created Matthew’s Gospel are very important concepts of this chapter.

            I believe that there are many differences between my reading of the Gospel passages and the author’s interpretation of them.  I believe that these are due to our different eras.  Matthew wrote his Gospel to fit the beliefs of his first century Jewish Christian counterparts.  I am reading his Gospel almost 2000 years later in a world that is almost completely different.  When Matthew interpreted what was written, he interpreted it with a mind that was still heavily steeped in Jewish tradition.  When I read it, I have almost no Jewish traditions, only Christian and Catholic ones.  I believe that these major differences are the causes for our differences in interpretation of the Gospel passages.

            The three most important contributions of this chapter are Matthew’s close connection with the Hebrew Bible, the similarities and differences between the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and the way Matthew bent the rules and the truth to make Jesus more appealing to his followers.  Although one of this chapter’s largest contributions was is comparison of Matthew and Mark, I believe that that is also one of its biggest limitations; it seems to be resting almost too much faith on the comparison.