Tonight we discussed the Gospel of Matthew which presents a living Jesus. The book of Matthew isn't a history of Jesus, but is instead a faith proclamation of a living Jesus. It was written for the Jews, and the stories are intended to suggest the fulfillment of the story begun by Moses and continued by David. Matthew treated Mark as a good outline, but he developed that outline by filling in the details. For instance, in the Gospel of Mark it is unclear what Jesus was teaching (Mark 1:22) but Matthew spends most of chapters 5, 6, and 7 on the details of Jesus' teaching (Matthew 7:28).
Matthew honors and adapts previous traditions by redacting the earlier written and oral works known to the author. Redaction is the process of editing, deleting, correcting, combining, and adding that results in a new work. The author was aware of and used the Markan documents as well as another common tradition known as "Q". We have no copies of “Q”, and it's unclear whether it was written or oral, but the two-source hypothesis does make sense of the similarities and differences between the two Gospels. It's interesting to note that although Mark spread the guilt around, Matthew focuses the guilt on the Pharisees. This may be because by the time that Matthew was written, the Temple had been destroyed and the Scribes and Sadducees were gone; only the Pharisees were left.
Matthew was convinced that Jesus was the Messiah expected by the Jews. It was obvious to him that Jesus was the fulfillment of Jewish scripture. Whereas Mark had depicted Jesus as a conduit of God's power, Matthew depicts Jesus' Word as the power of God. Matthew presents a living Jesus, using phrases such as "As it was written ... ", and "This was to fulfill ..." to show that Jesus was not only a great teacher, but the ultimate interpreter of the Torah.
No comments:
Post a Comment