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THE STRUCTURE OF THE GOSPEL
The Gospel according to Matthew ends abruptly, leaving the conclusion to the reader. The story of Jesus does not end, because, according to the evangelist’s intention, it continues in his community: “I will be with you always until the end of the world,” says the Risen One. From that moment on, the disciples move, live, work, and speak, and the Risen Lord works with them. The community with whom the evangelist Matthew worked, probably in the city of Antioch, received the Gospel of the Twelve through Barnabas and reworked it; they continued to reflect on this apostolic preaching for many years.
The definitive text, known as the Gospel according to Matthew, was published around the 1980s. But regarding the other gospels, this is not the first. Ancient tradition has repeatedly stated that Matthew wrote first. Still, perhaps it was not about the current text of Matthew but to some of its predecessors, that is, to a text composed earlier that served as the basis for a further redaction.
Still, it is the first Gospel because it is the first in the order in which the New Testament series begins. It is the mature work of a school of Christian writers who lived in Antioch in the latter part of the first century after Christ. It is the ripe fruit of a Christian community that reconsiders Jesus’ preaching, restructures the apostles’ teaching, and systematically organizes an authentic catechesis about Christ and his church.
According to Matthew, the text is a meditation on the work of Jesus. It is important to recognize that ancient tradition has titled the gospels after a person’s name, using the preposition ‘kata,’ which in Greek means ‘according to.’ ‘According to’ the interpretation of, or mediated by… We read the Gospel according to Matthew; that is, we receive the Good News of Jesus Christ, which is Jesus Christ, but ‘according to’ the vision of Matthew.Therefore, it is important to value this human mediation.
The one Gospel of Jesus Christ has been handed down to us in four ways. It is interpreted by four disciples: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These mediations reveal the importance of human thought, communal reasoning, and historical updating that transmit the unique teaching of Jesus and the presence of the risen Christ amid his Church, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, which enables this intelligent reworking, adapted to new situations and applied concretely to the life of the disciples. The Gospel, according to Matthew, is therefore a great reworking of the apostolic tradition.
When we speak of the gospels and try to define them, we must avoid the banality of calling them the ‘Life of Jesus.’ They are not biographies. The gospels are the written repository of apostolic preaching. Before the written text, there is the oral word. First, there is the Jesus event. According to the great biblical scholar Harold Rowley, it began as preaching. But I would say, even better, that in the beginning it was the man Jesus, his historical experience, his person, and his life; the fact that he met men and women and had a concrete historical experience, culminating in his death and resurrection. We have the experience of these people at the beginning, as lived by many witnesses who became disciples of the only Master and recounted their own experiences.
They did not formulate religious theories but recounted their experience of encountering the man Jesus of Nazareth, recognizing that he is the Son of God. They have gradually come to recognize Him as the Lord Himself, the divine ‘I am’ revealed to Moses on Sinai. Jesus is one with the God of Sinai.
They slowly came to understand and testify, and, as disciples, they recounted it many times to others so that others would become disciples. Therefore, the gospels, as written texts, are the repository of preaching.
First, the apostles preached for many years, and then, slowly, the writings emerged from their preaching. It is very likely that short texts came first, including fragments, simple narratives, collections of teachings, parables, episodes that we might call miracles, and the primordial nucleus, the story of the passion of Jesus, culminating in the tragic experience of death, the surprising discovery of the empty tomb, and the encounter with the Risen One. Given the apostolic preaching, these parts were probably written separately and developed in different ways.
The collection of these elements, little by little, produced the most complete texts. It is the job of the editors. The last author who compiled the text, in our case, Matthew, is the one who did the final writing. He is not an author who wrote everything on his own initiative; instead, he collected pre-existing materials. But he compiled them with his own criteria, choosing what and how to include. This work makes the copywriter a genuine author who gives his own cut and maintains the distinct theology of Matthew, which is different from that of Mark, not in opposition, not antagonistic, nor contradictory, but different because Matthew is a different person from Mark. And the two, who are disciples of the only Master, have two ways of seeing, two different characters.
There are two narrative styles, and this difference is clearly evident in their texts. Could everything have been put into one text? But this is not what the Church considered appropriate. In ancient times, a certain Tatian attempted to compose a work that put together the four gospels: ‘Diatessaron’ = ‘one of four’. But it was not accepted. Recently, someone produced a ‘fused’ gospel, as if there were only one story, by putting the four texts together. It is incorrect; the four gospels are distinct books that must be known, read, and loved. There is no need to merge them to build a hypothetical fifth gospel the way we like. We must learn to read the Gospel according to Matthew, recognize its autonomy, and not use it to reconstruct the story of Jesus by putting a piece of Matthew and a piece of Luke together and remaking a new book.
We have to value the literary history of Matthew to see what the evangelist narrates and how he narrates it, and to appreciate this literary text. Therefore, the last editor who put together the great anthology of apostolic preaching, which we call the Gospel according to Matthew, is a school of Christian learned writers and experts in the Judaic tradition, who probably reside in Antioch, the great capital of Syria and one of the first Christian churches in the Hellenistic world.
In this Gospel, in chapter 13, at the end of the parabolic discourse, we find a kind of self-portrait of the evangelist or the later editor who definitively organized the written storehouse of the apostolic tradition. Jesus asks the disciples, “Do you understand all these things?” They answer, “Yes.” He replies, “Then every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.” Here’s the ‘autograph’ of the last editor, a scholar who became a disciple of the kingdom of heaven. ‘Scribe’ is a technical term for a letter expert. In Greek, it is ‘gramateus.’ ‘Grama’ means the letter, not only the written letter but also the figure of a literary scholar, the expert in literary culture, and, in this case, of biblical culture.
The scribe is what we would today call the theologian, the biblical scholar, one who by nature is a teacher, knows literature, and teaches it to others. But here it is about a scribe who has become a disciple. We find the verb that marks the end of the first Gospel: ‘walking.’ Jesus says to the disciples, “Make disciples of all peoples” – ‘μαθητεύσατε’ = ‘mazetéuzate… to ‘discipling’ all peoples. And here, in the center of the Gospel, we find the reference to this very verb. In the original Greek, there is an aorist passive participle: ‘mazeteuzéi’ = ‘discipling.’ He is a scribe who has been transformed into a disciple. By hearing the word ‘mazeteuzéi,’ one can recognize a possible allusion to Matthew. It is an allusion because Matthew in Hebrew means ‘Gift of God.’ ‘Matamía’ should be the original form; however, this symbolic allusion is possible to the Greek ear. Matthew is the disciple, the ‘matzeteus,’ the ‘discipleshing,’ the scribe who has agreed to learn the theology of the kingdom of heaven, of which only Jesus is the Teacher.
In this way, the scribe-turned-disciple is the head of the family, the head of a household.This describes a person in charge of the early Christian community. He is a priest, a parish priest, the head of a household, the oldest, the person in charge of a group of people, and a homeowner who must provide for the house’s maintenance and needs and has the means to support the family. This landlord’s treasure contains new and old things. We notice that he puts new things first and old things second. It is an obvious reference to the Old and New Testaments, that is, to the tradition of Israel, the ancient heritage, which is still the inheritance of this family. Still, there are also new things: the novelties brought by Jesus.
His person is the novelty that does not abolish or replace the old but fulfills, accomplishes, and brings to perfection what God promised and revealed. It becomes the integration of the heritage, and the head of the family draws out of his treasury new and old things. This head of the family, the scribe-disciple in charge of the Christian community, compiled an orderly collection of apostolic preaching. Thus, the Gospel according to Matthew is born, with a particularly interesting structure centered on five speeches.
In Matthew’s Gospel, we have some verses repeated five times in the same way. At the end of the first great discourse, the discourse on the mountain, at the end of chapter 7, we find this indication: “When Jesus finished these words, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” Notice that he mentions the teaching and refers to the scribes, but Jesus is new and different from the scribes—he has authority.
These are words we have already identified as characterizing Matthew’s theology, but we are interested in this expression: “When Jesus finished these words.” The same formula appears again at the end of chapter 10: “When Jesus finished giving these instructions….” At the end of chapter 13, we see it as well: “When Jesus finished telling these parables.” Then, at the end of chapter 18: “When Jesus finished these speeches.” We find it at the end of the gospel text, at the beginning of the passion, in the first verses of chapter 26: “When Jesus finished all these words, he said to his disciples, ‘You know that in two days’ time, it will be Passover.’” The fifth time the standard verse occurs, it brings them all together, meaning: ‘All the discourses end here.’ This refrain allows the identification of five discourses.
The final editor compiled the teaching of Jesus into five large, editorially organized blocks, that is, five anthologies of sayings, ‘loggia,’ words with which Jesus educates, forms, and instructs his disciples. He also collected the first great discourses, placed on the mountain, in chapters 5, 6, and 7. The second, about the Church sent on mission, is in chapter 10. The center, chapter 13, collects seven parables: the mystery of the kingdom. In chapter 18, the fourth discourse parallels the second: within the church, fraternal relationships. And the last discourse, in parallel with the first, is in chapters 23, 24, and 25: the break with the scribes and the Pharisees, and the eschatological announcement, the final fulfillment of the kingdom.
Five great discourses form the backbone, the skeletal framework, of this evangelical body.Why five discourses? Probably because five are the books of the Law and five are the fingers of the hand. Therefore, unity and integrity are characterized in the Jewish world by the Law, the Torah, the Pentateuch, and the five-fifths of the Law, as the Jews say.
Matthew presents Jesus’s new law, interpreted through a Jewish key and in a Christian way: the five discourses that constitute the Christian Pentateuch. This scribe’s treasure contains both new and old things. The disciple is learning the mystery of the kingdom of heaven.