MATTHEW AND JESUS

For Matthew, to be a Christian is to be a pupil of Jesus. Jesus and his commandments are the standard by which he wishes to be measured. But does Matthew himself live up to this standard? For Matthew, ‘Jesus’ is what he found handed down in his sources, especially Mark and Q. Today we know both more and less about Jesus than he did. We know more because we have gone some way towards distinguishing between Jesus and his post-Easter interpreters. We know that Jesus and the post- Easter Lord who spoke through his prophets are not simply identical. Yet we know less because the corpus of genuine Jesus material has shrunk. We also know less because our discretionary leeway for deciding what is or is not authentic to Jesus is very large. At all events, by asking about the relation between Matthew and Jesus we are applying a modern question to our Gospel – a question which, however, is not alien to its original intention. On this matter I would like to offer the following points for consideration.

(1) For Matthew, ‘Jesus’ meant the living Jesus who accompanies his community on its way in the present. When Matthew equated the gospel Jesus intended for the Gentiles with his commandments (rather than, say, with the voice of the Spirit!), he did not simply mean a Jesus who was dead and immutable.