GOS-02 The Gospel of Matthew

In 1919 King Albert of Belgium was traveling across the United States by train. He was something of an authority on locomotives, so for a ten-mile stretch he dressed as an engineer and ran the train. At the next stop, the cheering crowd looked for King Albert but couldn’t find him. They expected the king to look a certain way, and to act in a certain way. So, they didn’t realize that the tall man dressed in a flannel shirt and a railroad cap was actually the king of Belgium.

From one perspective, the Gospel of Matthew tells a similar story. It’s the story of a king — Jesus, the King of the Jews. But many in his day didn’t recognize him because he didn’t look the way people expected him to look, and he didn’t act as they expected him to act. He was a different kind of king.

This is the second lesson in our series The Gospels. We have entitled this lesson “The Gospel According to Matthew,” because we will focus our attention on the first gospel, the book of Matthew. Our study of Matthew’s gospel will divide into three parts. First, we’ll consider the background of Matthew’s book. Second, we’ll explore its structure and content. And third, we’ll look at some major themes in Matthew’s gospel. Let’s begin with the background of the Gospel According to Matthew.

A lot of people ask the question, “Why do I need to know all of this contextual stuff about the Bible? Can’t I just read the Bible in a good English translation and figure out what it means?” I like to say a text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean. The problem is that all ancient texts are given in certain kinds of historical, literary, rhetorical, archeological, religious context, and those contexts are all different from ours… The past is very different from the present and the greatest hedge we have against anachronism, of reading back into the past all of our modern assumptions, is careful contextual study of the Bible.

It’s important to understand background issues such as who the author is and what the historical context is when we’re interpreting books of the Bible precisely because when authors write books, they assume that their audience is operating in a shared culture, and they take for granted that their audience is going to know much of the broader context of the statements that they make. And so, our task, in many cases, is to discern who this author is and what his culture is so that we can get some more light from the broader culture and history so that we can fill in some of these assumptions and given realities.