Matthew, Disciple and Scribe

The First Gospel and Its Portrait of Jesus

Patrick Schreiner

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780801099489
• eBook ISBN: 9781493418121
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This fresh look at the Gospel of Matthew highlights the unique contribution that Matthew's rich and multilayered portrait of Jesus makes to understanding the connection between the Old and New Testaments. Patrick Schreiner argues that Matthew obeyed the Great Commission by acting as scribe to his teacher Jesus in order to share Jesus's life and work with the world, thereby making disciples of future generations. The First Gospel presents Jesus's life as the fulfillment of the Old Testament story of Israel and shows how Jesus brings new life in the New Testament.

Part 1
The Scribe
DESCRIBED

Scribes speculated about the beginning and the end and thereby claimed to possess the secrets of creation. Above all, they talked, they memorized and remembered, they wrote.

Jonathan Z. Smith

1
Matthew, the Discipled Scribe

Placing Matthew

Open your Bible and turn to the first page of the NT. There you will find the Gospel of Matthew speaking about the messiah in an unexpected form: a genealogy.1 The Gospel’s first words unveil Jesus through the prism of OT characters. Jesus is messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. In the genealogy, Matthew depicts Jesus not through the judgment of an ignorant disciple, an agnostic politician, or the questioning crowd but through the eyes of a Jewish scribe who is convinced Jesus is the messiah, the hope of his people. To read the Gospel of Matthew well is to read it with the Jewish story line—all twenty-four books that precede it—rumbling in the mind.2 It is impossible to take two steps in Matthew’s narrative without also taking a few steps back to see how each new tale interacts with a previous one.3

By beginning this way, Matthew tips his hat toward his method. Matthew functions as the scribe who learned from his teacher and sage how to make disciples by illuminating how Jesus fulfills the old. Without understanding the fluctuation between the new and the old, Matthew’s narrative can be a confusing and curious piece. The database of a genealogy makes little sense unless one sees this as a historical and theological retelling. The temptation and baptism before Jesus’s ministry warp into moralistic tales unless one relates these stories to Israel’s past. The Sermon on the Mount is a beehive of misunderstanding unless one sees Jesus as the true and better Moses, David, and Solomon. And Jesus’s death is merely a tragedy unless one sees that he fulfills all the Scriptures. Matthew’s genealogical opening reveals that he is requesting his readers to engage his narrative through the lens of the new and the old.4

Matthew’s persuasion is that “the shadows of the Old Covenant are not deceptive wraiths; they are ‘fore-shadows’ which enable readers to understand better that which comes in Christ.”5 The old system needed the moment of maturation, and that moment came in the messiah. The Gospel of Matthew is best understood with one eye looking back and the other eye attuned to the tectonic shifts from the old story. The form and content of the genealogy reminds readers of the old account while also introducing them to the new story. Like any good writer, Matthew depicts the familiar but with a twist; the Gospel, after all, is a furthering of the story, not a repackaging. To put this most simply, one can read Matthew’s Gospel ably by asking three questions of the text: How does this echo Israel’s story? How does Jesus fulfill Israel’s story? How does it move the story of Israel forward?

Matthew reads both history and current events in a certain way, and any reading of this Gospel that neglects quotations from, allusions to, and echoes of Israel’s Scriptures misses Matthew’s lesson. The Gospel presents a figural reading of Jesus’s life as the master discourse.6 Through images and metaphors, he shows how Jesus walks in Israel’s shoes while also bringing them to their destination. The genealogy instructs readers that the content of Matthew’s Gospel is contained in its form. As Hans Urs von Balthasar argues, “The content [Gehalt] does not lie behind the form [Gestalt] but within it. Whoever is not capable of seeing and ‘reading’ the form will, by the same token, fail to perceive the content. Whoever is not illuminated by the form will see no light in the content either.”7

Through his form, Matthew clarifies things about the Jewish narrative that were shadowy while also revealing new turns in the plotline. Matthew provides explanation by emplotment. His organization of the Jesus event explains the significance of the Jesus event. Events that are solitary and singular do not innately tell a story nor do they shape identity or culture. Yet when they are connected with other events and put into a plot, they then become intelligible and noteworthy. Narratives are stories that arrange and shape events into a coherent whole; they are like the numbering system in connect-the-dots children’s books; if the numbers are removed, all that remains is a chaotic set of dots. However, if the numbers are followed, they will create a coherent picture.

For too long Gospel scholars have been prone to look away from the numbers rather than opening themselves up to the narrative itself. This appears in many forms: sometimes by comparing discrepancies between Gospel writers, other times by trying to figure out the “correct” order of historical events, and other times reaching for the community or tradition from which the stories sprang. Yet each of these methods peers through the narrative rather than at it. The beginning of Matthew’s Gospel instructs us to look at the form and the content through the history of Israel. This book attempts to look at the narrative of Matthew as a whole through the numbering system Matthew himself provides: the new and the old.

Matthew, the Discipled Scribe

My argument is that Matthew is the discipled scribe who narrates Jesus’s life through the alternation of the new and the old. The image I employ has its source in Matt. 13:52:

Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.

διὰ τοῦτο πᾶς γραμματεὺς μαθητευθεὶς τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν ὅμοιός ἐστιν ἀνθρώπῳ οἰκοδεσπότῃ, ὅστις ἐκβάλλει ἐκ τοῦ θησαυροῦ αὐτοῦ καινὰ καὶ παλαιά.

The word usually translated as trained (μαθητευθείς) is related to the Greek word for disciple (μαθητής). Matthew’s verse could therefore be translated: “Therefore every discipled scribe for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out his treasures new and old.”8 Jesus tells them that a scribe (someone who works with texts) who becomes a disciple (following Jesus as a teacher of wisdom) can produce great things for the kingdom of heaven.9 The metaphor “master of a house who brings out treasures” is an image for interpretation, for the entire chapter is about right interpretation and understanding of Jesus’s parables.10 The word picture suggests strategic selection in what is new and old.11 Treasures must be presented, stored, and organized in some sort of structure. In the words of one scholar, Matthew here betrays his method.12 The Gospel itself demonstrates how Matthew accomplishes the scribal task mentioned in 13:52. Though this is not the only perspective through which one should view Matthew’s writing, it does provide a helpful grid to lay over his presentation. Several indications suggest that Matthew presents his readers with the modus for his entire Gospel, but I will limit myself to two brief comments here.

First, both early and modern interpreters have argued that γραμματεὺς μαθητευθείς (the discipled scribe) depicts Matthew. Origen, one of our earliest commentators on Matthew, viewed this verse as representing the disciples as scribes of the kingdom.13 B. W. Bacon and Krister Stendahl also argue for a form of this theory, but from a redaction critical perspective.14 In addition to Origen, Bacon, and Stendahl, many modern commentators also provide a passing comment to the same effect.15 Second, a larger contextual hint also confirms my suspicion that Matthew is the scribe: the first word of his Gospel. Many argue that the beginnings of Matthew and Mark are actually their titles. Thus Mark’s title would be “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the son of God.” Matthew’s would be “the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Βίβλος γενέσεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ Δαυὶδ υἱοῦ Ἀβραάμ, Matt. 1:1). The Greek word that Matthew begins with is βίβλος, which can also be translated as “scroll” or “record.”

If this is the title for Matthew’s Gospel, then he is describing his entire work as a scroll.16 Even if ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Scribe DESCRIBED
• Part 2: The Scribe AT WORK
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects
• Back Cover