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.
Part 1
The Scribe
DESCRIBED
Scribes speculated about the beginning and the end and thereby claimed to possess the secrets of creation. Above all, they talked, they memorized and remembered, they wrote.
Jonathan Z. Smith
1
Matthew, the Discipled Scribe
Placing Matthew
Open your Bible and turn to the first page of the NT. There you will find the Gospel of Matthew speaking about the messiah in an unexpected form: a genealogy.1 The Gospel’s first words unveil Jesus through the prism of OT characters. Jesus is messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. In the genealogy, Matthew depicts Jesus not through the judgment of an ignorant disciple, an agnostic politician, or the questioning crowd but through the eyes of a Jewish scribe who is convinced Jesus is the messiah, the hope of his people. To read the Gospel of Matthew well is to read it with the Jewish story line—all twenty-four books that precede it—rumbling in the mind.2 It is impossible to take two steps in Matthew’s narrative without also taking a few steps back to see how each new tale interacts with a previous one.3
By beginning this way, Matthew tips his hat toward his method. Matthew functions as the scribe who learned from his teacher and sage how to make disciples by illuminating how Jesus fulfills the old. Without understanding the fluctuation between the new and the old, Matthew’s narrative can be a confusing and curious piece. The database of a genealogy makes little sense unless one sees this as a historical and theological retelling. The temptation and baptism before Jesus’s ministry warp into moralistic tales unless one relates these stories to Israel’s past. The Sermon on the Mount is a beehive of misunderstanding unless one sees Jesus as the true and better Moses, David, and Solomon. And Jesus’s death is merely a tragedy unless one sees that he fulfills all the Scriptures. Matthew’s genealogical opening reveals that he is requesting his readers to engage his narrative through the lens of the new and the old.4
Matthew’s persuasion is that “the shadows of the Old Covenant are not deceptive wraiths; they are ‘fore-shadows’ which enable readers to understand better that which comes in
Christ.”5 The old system needed the moment of maturation, and that moment came in the messiah. The Gospel of Matthew is best understood with one eye looking back and the other eye attuned to the tectonic shifts from the old story. The form and content of the genealogy reminds readers of the old account while also introducing them to the new story. Like any good writer, Matthew depicts the familiar but with a twist; the Gospel, after all, is a furthering of the story, not a repackaging. To put this most simply, one can read Matthew’s Gospel ably by asking three questions of the text: How does this echo Israel’s story? How does Jesus fulfill Israel’s story? How does it move the story of Israel forward?
Matthew reads both history and current events in a certain way, and any reading of this Gospel that neglects quotations from, allusions to, and echoes of Israel’s Scriptures misses Matthew’s lesson. The Gospel presents a figural reading of Jesus’s life as the master discourse.6 Through images and metaphors, he shows how Jesus walks in Israel’s shoes while also bringing them to their destination. The genealogy instructs readers that the content of Matthew’s Gospel is contained in its form. As Hans Urs von Balthasar argues, “The content [Gehalt] does not lie behind the form [Gestalt] but within it. Whoever is not capable of seeing and ‘reading’ the form will, by the same token, fail to perceive the content. Whoever is not illuminated by the form will see no light in the content either.”7
Through his form, Matthew clarifies things about the Jewish narrative that were shadowy while also revealing new turns in the plotline. Matthew provides explanation by emplotment. His organization of the Jesus event explains the significance of the Jesus event. Events that are solitary and singular do not innately tell a story nor do they shape identity or culture. Yet when they are connected with other events and put into a plot, they then become intelligible and noteworthy. Narratives are stories that arrange and shape events into a coherent whole; they are like the numbering system in connect-the-dots children’s books; if the numbers are removed, all that remains is a chaotic set of dots. However, if the numbers are followed, they will create a coherent picture.
For too long Gospel scholars have been prone to look away from the numbers rather than opening themselves up to the narrative itself. This appears in many forms: sometimes by comparing discrepancies between Gospel writers, other times by trying to figure out the “correct” order of historical events, and other times reaching for the community or tradition from which the stories sprang. Yet each of these methods peers through the narrative rather than at it. The beginning of Matthew’s Gospel instructs us to look at the form and the content through the history of Israel. This book attempts to look at the narrative of Matthew as a whole through the numbering system Matthew himself provides: the new and the old.
Matthew, the Discipled Scribe
My argument is that Matthew is the discipled scribe who narrates Jesus’s life through the alternation of the new and the old. The image I employ has its source in Matt. 13:52:
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.
διὰ τοῦτο πᾶς γραμματεὺς μαθητευθεὶς τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν ὅμοιός ἐστιν ἀνθρώπῳ οἰκοδεσπότῃ, ὅστις ἐκβάλλει ἐκ τοῦ θησαυροῦ αὐτοῦ καινὰ καὶ παλαιά.
The word usually translated as trained (μαθητευθείς) is related to the Greek word for disciple (μαθητής). Matthew’s verse could therefore be translated: “Therefore every discipled scribe for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out his treasures new and old.”8 Jesus tells them that a scribe (someone who works with texts) who becomes a disciple (following Jesus as a teacher of wisdom) can produce great things for the kingdom of heaven.9 The metaphor “master of a house who brings out treasures” is an image for interpretation, for the entire chapter is about right interpretation and understanding of Jesus’s parables.10 The word picture suggests strategic selection in what is new and old.11 Treasures must be presented, stored, and organized in some sort of structure. In the words of one scholar, Matthew here betrays his method.12 The Gospel itself demonstrates how Matthew accomplishes the scribal task mentioned in 13:52. Though this is not the only perspective through which one should view Matthew’s writing, it does provide a helpful grid to lay over his presentation. Several indications suggest that Matthew presents his readers with the modus for his entire Gospel, but I will limit myself to two brief comments here.
First, both early and modern interpreters have argued that γραμματεὺς μαθητευθείς (the discipled scribe) depicts Matthew. Origen, one of our earliest commentators on Matthew, viewed this verse as representing the disciples as scribes of the kingdom.13 B. W. Bacon and Krister Stendahl also argue for a form of this theory, but from a redaction critical perspective.14 In addition to Origen, Bacon, and Stendahl, many modern commentators also provide a passing comment to the same effect.15 Second, a larger contextual hint also confirms my suspicion that Matthew is the scribe: the first word of his Gospel. Many argue that the beginnings of Matthew and Mark are actually their titles. Thus Mark’s title would be “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the son of God.” Matthew’s would be “the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Βίβλος γενέσεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ Δαυὶδ υἱοῦ Ἀβραάμ, Matt. 1:1). The Greek word that Matthew begins with is βίβλος, which can also be translated as “scroll” or “record.”
If this is the title for Matthew’s Gospel, then he is describing his entire work as a scroll.16 Even if one isn’t convinced that the first eight words of Matthew’s narrative contain the title, Matthew begins his description of the life of Jesus by speaking about his scroll. The scroll was a primary tool of the scribe. If anything defined what the scribe did, it was the surface on which the scribe wrote (βίβλος), the tool employed (σχοῖνος), and the action of writing itself (γράφω). Therefore, Matthew begins his narrative by referring to his work as a scroll. He lets his readers know that he is the scribe penning the life of Jesus. Before we explore Matthew’s work under this banner, a few key concepts from 13:52 need more analysis if we are to move forward: disciple, scribe, and treasures new and old.
Discipled by the Teacher of Wisdom
Matthew is a disciple.17 The term μαθητής (disciple) occurs only in the first five books of the NT and appears the most in Matthew and John. Seventy-eight times it appears in Matthew’s work.18 The term means that someone is an adherent, pupil, apprentice, or follower.19 More specifically, a “disciple” is regularly defined in the realm of knowledge and learning. Jesus even said, “It is enough for the disciple [μαθητῇ] to be like his teacher [διδάσκαλος]” (10:25). According to BDAG (609), μαθητής is “one who engages in learning through instruction from another” or “one who is rather constantly associated with someone who has a pedagogical reputation.” A disciple is thus someone who learns, who understands, who gains wisdom. This lines up with Matthew’s presentation of the disciples as a whole, for as Markus Barth (and many others after him) has noted, Matthew omitted or interpreted differently all of the passages in Mark’s Gospel that speak of the lack of understanding on the part of the disciples.20 Barth even claims that the “faith” (πίστις) concept in Paul, John, and Mark is transferred to “understanding” (συνίημι) in Matthew.21 Regardless of whether the entirety of Barth’s claim is true, the characterization of the Matthean disciples does uniquely highlight their understanding of Jesus’s teaching.22
My proposal is Matthew is gifted in knowledge and wisdom by his teacher, Jesus.23 Jesus’s statement in Matt. 23:8, “You have one teacher,” carries with it significance that goes far beyond the immediate context.24 The idea of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom becomes an important concept for Matthew’s presentati
on as a whole and also informs readers how to view Matthew’s role.25 Yet a brief survey of the titles of “rabbi” or “teacher” in the Gospels doesn’t quite clarify what type of teacher Jesus is. Is he a teacher like those in the synagogues? Some scholars compare him to the Pharisees Hillel or Shammai. Others draw a correlation between Jesus and the Teacher of Righteousness or the eccentric John the Baptist. Should his pedagogical function be a subcategory of his prophetic role? Or is the best comparison with the Greco-Roman philosophers of the day? Is he a teacher and wise man primarily like the Jewish kings of the past? And if he is a teacher, then what wisdom did he pass on to his scribe? These are all legitimate questions, and while I won’t address all of them, Matthew as a whole, and 13:52 more specifically, gives some assistance along these lines.26
Though no title or term can fully capture who Jesus is, and Matthew uses many descriptions, Jesus as the teacher of wisdom makes sense both in the context of Matthew and in chapter 13.27 In fact, Matthew reserves the title of “teacher” for Jesus alone in his Gospel.28 But Jesus as a sapiential teacher has somewhat fallen out of use because of reactions to the Jesus Seminar’s use of it. Yet a wisdom approach to Jesus (and Matthew) brings some clarity to Matthew’s intentions.29 By wisdom, I mean more than a genre—it is a skill and a concept.30 As Raymond van Leeuwen claims, wisdom is a totalizing statement.31 Maybe even more appropriately for this project, Barton puts wisdom under the lens of a hermeneutic: “Wisdom is not just a body of knowledge, it is also a way of seeing which attends to what lies hidden as well as to what lies on the surface.”32 Four arguments justify viewing Jesus as a teacher, and more specifically a teacher of wisdom, in Matt. 13 and the Gospel as a whole: (1) the Hebrew Scriptures’ promise of a sapiential messiah, (2) the titles given to Jesus and his opponents in the First Gospel, (3) the specific content of the teaching of Jesus in Matthew, and (4) the immediate context of chapter 13.
Matthew, Disciple and Scribe Page 2