Matthew

52 Episodes

Matthew is a late first-century gospel that reworks earlier Jesus traditions into a more explicitly scriptural and Jewish literary argument. It is especially concerned with presenting Jesus as the authoritative interpreter and culmination of Israel's traditions, often through fulfillment citations, Mosaic typology, and sustained engagement with law, prophecy, and eschatology.

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Why this book matters

Matthew comes up on the show as the Gospel most overtly interested in tying Jesus to the Jewish scriptures while also reshaping earlier traditions to make that case. Discussions of Matthew regularly turn on fulfillment citations, the birth narrative, Moses typology, and the way Matthew sharpens or revises material from Mark in order to foreground law, prophecy, and Jesus’s authority as an interpreter of scripture.

That makes Matthew a recurring flashpoint for questions about literary dependence, scriptural reuse, and intra-Christian disagreement. The hosts return to it when tracing how the gospel constructs Jesus as a new Moses, how it handles law observance in tension with Pauline trajectories, and how its most famous prooftexts often work better as rhetorical and compositional moves than as straightforward predictions fulfilled by history.

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Quotes from the Data

“So Matthew, the author of the Gospel of Matthew, has wrenched [Isaiah 7:14] out of context now with the help of the Septuagint's translation, because the Septuagint wants it to be relevant to its own time and place hundreds of years later.”

Dan McClellan Episode 141

“Yes, it's— he's Jesus of Nazareth, everybody knows where he came from, uh, but we somehow got to have him born in Bethlehem. Okay, so, so we have two completely different stories about how Jesus of Nazareth was actually born in Bethlehem.”

Dan McClellan Episode 141

“Moses is there. And Moses— obviously Jesus is the new Moses. Like Deuteronomy 18, one like Moses, you know, a prophet like Moses. Oh, that's Jesus.”

Dan McClellan Episode 143

“I think that's a reasonable way to interpret what's going on. Matthew is coming around 80 to 90 CE, somewhere around there. Paul was mostly active in the '50s and early '60s CE, and so the followers of Paul are probably getting pretty large, and I think the Gospel of Matthew is probably pushing back from the other end of the spectrum, saying, no, it turns out Jesus doesn't want you to not follow these laws.”

Dan McClellan Episode 146

All episodes

Every episode currently tagged with Matthew.