I don’t think I quite understood the beauty of the Gospels until I grasped that they were laced with the Jewish Scriptures. Don’t get me wrong. It was not that I had been reading them in isolation from the OT, for I understood that the Gospels continued the story of Israel. I read them as answering the hopes of the Jewish people. I comprehended that the evangelists presented Jesus as the solution to Israel’s plight, and I sought to read Jesus in light of his historical and ethnic background.
What I had failed to see was that Jesus was presented as the continuation of the story in the form the story was written. The truth of a story is often carried in its arrangement, in the inspired world it evokes. It was not merely Matthew’s words, but also the placement of those words, the portraits the evangelists painted, the way they told their stories that revealed their convictions about him. If we can compare the First Gospel to an oil painting, earlier I understood that I was looking at a Jewish painting through which the author expressed certain convictions about Jesus of Nazareth, but I neglected to step closer and concentrate on the brushstrokes to see that each drop of paint was chosen with care and had certain resemblances to previous portraits.1 The artist had put together a portrait that made sense if you stepped back, but treasures could be brought forth if one moved a little closer and lingered for a moment.
This book is simply an attempt to step closer to the First Gospel’s portrait. My claim is that a close analysis of Matt. 13:52 reveals that Matthew becomes a teacher in the style of Jesus:2 “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.” Luke 6:40 says, “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” Matthew expounds the wisdom of Jesus by becoming a scribe and teacher to future generations, mediating the instruction of his sage. To put this in the First Gospel’s terms, Matthew is a “discipled scribe” who learned to bring out treasures new and old from his teacher of wisdom (13:52).3 Jesus formed an alternative scribal school; one of the main ways he instructed them in the paths of wisdom was to reveal the relationship between the new and the old, with himself at the center.4 Matthew was one of these trained scribes who passed on Jesus’s teaching to future generations. He wrote about Jesus’s life in a rich and multilayered way, incorporating the new (found in Jesus), and the old (how Jesus’s life fulfilled the story of Israel).
| Person | Description | Task |
| Jesus | Teacher-Sage | Offers wisdom instruction concerning the new and the old (the secrets of the kingdom) |
| Matthew | Discipled Scribe | Learn, write, distribute, and teach the material from his sage |
Though Jesus as a teacher of wisdom plus Matthew as a scribe is not the only lens through which we should look at the First Gospel, and these images certainly don’t exhaust the content of Matthew, they do provide an entry point into Matthew’s aims and theology.5 This study could take many detours and turns, some of which I was tempted to explore, but my aim is specific and narrow: to focus on how Matthew as the scribe passes on the wisdom of Jesus—listening to his use of the new and the old.6 I attempt to pay close attention to the OT echoes in Matthew’s writing style and attend to the development of the Jewish story in and around Jesus. In this sense, I am asking questions revolving around the topics of biblical theology and hermeneutics.
The first two chapters argue Matthew is the disciple and scribe following his teacher and sage of wisdom.7 This becomes the metaphor I employ for the rest of my study of the Gospel. Through Jesus’s life and teachings, he instructed his disciples on the nature of the relationship between the new and the old. I also explore Matthew’s convictions and method in a more summative fashion because doing so allows for a more comprehensive summary and analysis than the later chapters will afford. The initial chapters also form the basis for the second half, giving some methodological parameters and a lens through which to view the rest of the study. The first part is therefore titled “The Scribe Described.”
I extend the argument in part 2 (the bulk of the book), but in a different way. Rather than continuing to argue that Matthew is the scribe, or further supporting Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, I turn to “The Scribe at Work.” If the first part “tells,” then the second part “shows.” Part 2 of the book thus demonstrates how Matthew brings out treasures new and old by examining some themes and characters in his writing. Therefore, it does not develop the argument in the same fashion, but attempts to argue by illustration. I examine Matthew’s presentation of Jesus as David, Moses, Abraham, and Israel. Though I have separated these people (David, Moses, Abraham, Israel) and concepts (kingdom, exodus, family, exile), they ultimately interweave. In the ancient world, teaching through comparison (σύγκρισις) was ubiquitous.8 This technique was even part of the preliminary exercises in rhetorical education. Each of these portraits will examine the new, while continually going back to the old to see the treasures of Matthew’s literary style and the wisdom he gained from his teacher.
While studies on Jesus as the new (fill in the blank) are accumulating as fast as apps on an iPhone, my analysis is distinctive in two respects. First, I enclose the study with the argument that Matthew is the discipled scribe instructed by his teacher of wisdom on how the new and the old interact. Looking at Matthew’s style and form instructs readers about the nature of Jesus’s teaching and the content of Matthew’s discipleship. Matthew was forming a certain type of person through his narrative—or making disciples and thus fulfilling Jesus’s command in the Great Commission. A study like this is not merely a search-and-find game or a study in parallelomania, but an attempt to view Jesus as his apprentices did, learn from their wisdom, and thereby appropriate this type of thinking into our intuitive processes.
Second, though I will examine titles and trace phrases, I will do so through the narrative presentation and connect figures to their great acts in redemptive history. To divorce a person from their great acts is to empty them of their importance. Who is Achilles without the Trojan War? Who is Odysseus without the odyssey? And who is Alexander the Great without his conquests? For Matthew, character and plot forge a close connection. Jesus’s characterization is inherently tied to his participation in the plot. Or maybe better, Jesus’s characterization is tied to character(s) and plot(s). And Matthew’s canvas is larger than the first and last words of his book (and everything in between), for it both stretches backward, pulling from Israel’s Scriptures, and points forward to the new creation. As Graham Stanton says, “The Old Testament is woven into the warp and woof of this Gospel; the evangelist uses Scripture to underline some of his most prominent and distinctive theological concerns.”9
1. Paul Ricoeur describes a text not as a reproduction of reality but a re-presentation of it. Thus texts are like paintings rather than photographs. While a photograph holds everything in it, a painting focuses on essentials and eliminates uninterpreted material. Ricoeur and Klein, Interpretation Theory, 40–42.
2. Bauckham, James, 30.
3. There is debate about whether Jesus is better described as a “teacher of wisdom” or “wisdom incarnate.” I will focus on the reality of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, but I don’t think the two ideas are mutually exclusive. See the argument of James Dunn, “Jesus: Teacher of Wisdom or Wisdom Incarnate?”
4. A sage or teacher is someone who offered various forms of teaching that could be called wisdom, while a scribe (though related) is someone who put such material in writing and so preserved it for later audiences. Sometimes the two categorizes do collide, since a sage can also be a scribe. Jesus ben Sira is described as a sage and scribe.
5. Jesus being a teacher-sage-rabbi is not opposed to Jesus being the Son of God, Son of Man, messiah, and king. Allison (Constructing Jesus, 31) is right to call one of his chapters on Jesus “More Than a Sage: The Eschatology of Jesus.”
6. Admittedly, this book is not meant to be a full theology of Matthew. There are portions of Matthew not covered and topics significant to Matthew never broached.
7. Jesus as a teacher for Matthew uniquely highlights his pedagogical function. He is also a sage in that he is the dispenser of wisdom (though sage as a distinct class of people is debated). He is also a rabbi, which technically means “my great one” but functions as an honorific for teachers. Thus John 1:38 transliterates rabbi as “teacher.” See the short section on Jesus as teacher (rabbi) in Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 354–55. The Gospels collectively affirm that Jesus is a rabbi (Matt. 26:25, 49; Mark 9:5; 11:21; 14:45; John 1:38, 49; 3:2; 4:31; 6:25; 9:2; 11:8) and teacher (Matt. 8:19; 9:11; 10:24, 25; 12:38; 17:24; 19:16; 22:16, 24, 36; 23:8; 26:18; Mark 4:38; 5:35; 9:17, 38; 10:17, 20, 35; 12:14, 19, 32; 13:1; 14:14; Luke 6:40; 7:40; 8:49; 9:38; 10:25; 11:45; 12:13; 18:18; 19:39; 20:21, 28, 39; 21:7; 22:11; John 1:38; 3:2, 10; 8:4; 11:28; 13:13, 14; 20:16). Keener (Historical Jesus, 187) says, “It is unlikely that Galilean Jews who saw themselves as faithful to God’s law would have made a hard-and-fast distinction among the categories like charismatic sage, teacher of wisdom and teacher of Scripture.”
8. Hermogenes, Progym. 8; Quintilian, Inst. 9.2.100–101.
9. Stanton, Gospel for a New People, 346.