Lection and Liturgy

In yesterday’s post on Matthew , I looked at some of his key themes. Today I want to develop that further, by looking at what seems to be a fairly complicated relationship between what we would nowadays call Christians and Jews. In Matthew’s context, both communities are made up of Jews, one a community that believes in Jesus as the Messiah, and one that doesn’t. Matthew’s group of Jesus-believing Jews may include some non-Jews, but his book seems mainly directed to Jewish believers in Jesus. Matthew – page from the Lindisfarne Gospels As he writes, Matthew seems keen to refute any suggestion that Christianity is a more relaxed approach to God’s demands for a holy life. He is quite clear that the new covenant promised by the prophets, and sealed by Jesus’ death and resurrection, is a more perfect way of obedience to God. In the polemics between Jesus and various Jewish teachers, we probably hear an echo of arguments between Matthew’s church assembly and his local s...

This will be the first of two posts on Matthew’s gospel. As he tells the story, Matthew showcases both his admiration for, and frustration with, Mark’s version of Jesus’s life. We see his admiration, because he adopts Mark’s basic idea, and often follows him almost word for word. We see his frustration because while Mark describes Jesus as a teacher, he includes very little of Jesus’ teaching. Matthew, by way of contrast, has gathered together a wide range of Jesus’ teaching, which he often presents in extended teaching sessions, beginning with the collection we now know as the sermon on the mount. 1 St Matthew and the Angel, attr. Karel van der Pluym (c.1660) via Wikimedia Commons However, Matthew does not begin there, but with an introduction skipped over by most modern readers, which is also omitted from the lectionary. Matthew begins with that Old Testament standby, a stylised genealogy. Jesus, who do you think you are – a potted family history. This neatly divides ...

The order of the biblical books is is not accidental but deliberate. The Old Testament ends with prophecy. The New Testament begins with the gospel that puts the greatest stress on Jesus as the fulfilment of prophecy. This is Matthew’s version of the story of Jesus. The canonical order is almost certainly not the order in which the gospels were written. In a rare instance of near universal academic agreement, biblical scholars think that this sub-genre of ancient biography was invented by Mark: the first person to write a gospel. The four evangelists, gospel book cover. Photo © Philip Barrington There is also universal agreement that the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are in some way interrelated. After that scholars begin to part company. The majority think that one key relationship between the gospels is that Matthew and Luke both adapt Mark in different ways. They tidy up his story (and his grammar!) and supplement it with a range of additional stories they val...