Abstract
Jeannine Brown, Professor of New Testament and Director of Online Programs at Bethel Seminary, and Kyle Roberts, Professor of Public Theology and the Church and Economic Life at United Theological Seminary, have co-written the volume on Matthew’s Gospel for Eerdmans’s Two Horizons Commentary series. The series presents theological commentaries that seek to bridge the gap between biblical and theological studies. Brown and Roberts have produced a readable, wide-ranging study of Matthew’s Gospel that combines biblical study with theological reflection.
In the volume’s introduction, Brown and Roberts present their approach to the text of Matthew. Brown analyzes the text through a narrative critical lens, recognizing that the Gospel was composed within a particular historical context, namely one of Jews living within a Greco-Roman, first-century culture, and is to be read and understood as a theological document. For Brown and Roberts, reading Matthew theologically means that Matthew is part of the greater biblical canon and that their interpretation takes place within the Nicene tradition; additionally, Matthew’s Gospel informs the life of the church and individual believers. Thus, Brown and Roberts hold a high view of the authority of Scripture and recognize that their interpretation comes out of a place of privilege and must, therefore, also include voices from outside their personal context(s).
Brown and Roberts understand Matthew’s Gospel to be a bios of Jesus, in which the author portrays Jesus as the Davidic Messiah who fulfills the Torah and is a source of God’s Wisdom. Jesus in Matthew is the representative Israel and the “embodiment of Yahweh.” The Gospel also attempts to explain what it means to follow Jesus as a disciple. Ultimately, the overarching theology of the Gospel is that Jesus has come to fulfill the purposes of God; his earthly ministry is the inauguration of God’s kingdom, represents the fulfillment of the Jewish Scriptures, and signals the inclusion of the gentiles in the people of God.
Regarding authorship, Brown and Roberts do not exclude the possibility of a disciple of Jesus as the author. They do, however, focus on the implied author, a Jewish follower of Jesus. The author wrote the Gospel to communities of fellow Jews who recognized Jesus as the promised Messiah (it is, therefore, an “intramural conversation”) and who are in the initial stages of reaching out to Gentiles. The date of composition is between 70 and 90 CE.
The first half of the volume is Brown’s narrative-critical commentary on the text of Matthew. Brown argues that the Gospel is tripartite, finding breaks at 4:17 and 16:21, and focuses on the question of “What is God doing now in relation to Israel and the nations at the advent of the Messiah?” (p. 22). The answer in the first section is that Jesus is the Davidic Messiah, the representative of Israel and “presence of God” through whom God initiates God’s mission to the gentiles. While the first section of the Gospel focuses on Jesus’s identity, the second major section, 4:18–16:20, describes Jesus’s Galilean ministry of word and deed, through which Matthew portrays Jesus as inaugurating the kingdom of God. Within the last section one finds three passion predictions that focus the reader’s attention on the death of Jesus. As Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem, he teaches the disciples, implicitly informing the lives of the communities to which the Gospel was directed.
The second half of the volume is dedicated to various theological topics and issues that arise out of the Gospel, broken out into two sections: “Thinking Theologically” and “Constructive Theological Engagement.” In the first, the topics discussed include the kingdom, Christology, Holy Spirit, discipleship, and Jesus’s deeds in Matthew. Here I especially appreciated the chapter on Jesus’s deeds, in which the authors emphasized the significance of the human Jesus living out the values and ethos of God’s kingdom. In the second section, Roberts and Brown present chapters on Matthew’s particular contribution to the theology of the NT, feminist and global/liberation theological understandings of Matthew, and finally reading Matthew pastorally, politically, and in a post-Holocaust context. In this section the highlight is the chapter discussing feminist and majority world readings of Matthew.
This volume is a solid addition to the Two Horizons series. The commentary, however, would benefit from a slightly less rigorous narrative critical reading and also explore redaction-critical understandings of the text. Further, within the commentary (and theological discussions) there is a strong emphasis on reading the “least of these” in Matt 25:31–46 as a general term for those on the margins, thus arguing that ministry to the oppressed is a major theme in Matthew. The parable, however, may be describing how non-believers (“the nations”; 25:32) have treated “the least,” who are emissaries of Jesus (cf. 10:42).
Finally, the intent of this commentary and the series in which it has been published is to pair theological exegesis of the text with theological reflection on the text. This particular volume is weighted more toward the latter. The commentary on the text is not expressly theological; to its credit, it is a thoroughly narrative critical reading of Matthew that takes into account the first-century context within which it was written and first heard. As presented, however, the book as a whole somewhat ironically reinforces the division of biblical studies from theology. These minor critiques notwithstanding, I can recommend this resource to pastors and scholars of Matthew’s Gospel.