Preface

In keeping with the stated purpose of the New Cambridge Bible Commentary, I have written the present commentary on Matthew for a “wide range of intellectually curious individuals.” It is not written primarily for the scholar, though I hope scholars will find it useful. My commentary is not an example of what is sometimes called a “commentary on commentaries,” which given the modest size of the commentaries in this series would not have been possible had I wished to do so. I have therefore kept the engagement with scholarly literature to a minimum.

Although I benefited greatly from many learned commentaries on Matthew, I refer to them only occasionally in the notes. Other studies, usually specialized studies in certain passages or themes in Matthew, appear in the footnotes, though again only sparingly. Because it is anticipated that not too many readers of this commentary read languages other than English, references to literature in foreign languages have been kept to a minimum. My constant companions were the weighty commentaries by John Nolland (2005) and Dick France (2007). I benefited also from the detailed redactional analysis of the text offered in Robert Gundry’s commentary (1982, revised 1994) and from the rich selection of primary materials related to the Mediterranean world found in Craig Keener’s commentary (1999).