GOS-02 The Gospel According to Matthew

Why is it important to understand the historical setting in which Matthew and the other gospels were written?

In some ways, the book of Matthew may be thought of as the most difficult of the Gospels to interpret since it assumes so many things that most modern readers don’t understand. This is true of all four gospels to some degree. But Matthew in particular assumes a great deal of knowledge about its historical setting in 1st century Palestine. Why is it important to understand the historical setting in which Matthew and the other gospels were written?

Well, any biblical book is set in a particular context and it’s really helpful to have an opportunity to work out why the author was writing and when he was writing. At the same time, I think we need to be a little bit careful not to overplay that. You know, what’s written is the most important thing, and you could spend a lot of time looking behind the scenes to try and work out exactly when it was written and what the purpose of it was. If we can get some idea of the exact location of it or the timing of it, then that can help us to understand the context which he was writing in, and then we can probably then work out what our context is and reapply the same message to our different context.

I think that most of the books of the Bible in one way or the other simply assume a certain amount of historical context. They assume we know something about geography and relevant history and the culture and customs of the time. In other words, they take for granted a lot of things that they don’t spell out, and therefore, it’s very useful to know something about these things. I mean, an example for the Gospels is that the Gospels keep referring to people of the Pharisees. They don’t actually tell us who the Pharisees are, but you know, we have material outside the Bible that tells us more about the Pharisees and simply filling in things like that. Or think about the way that Matthew’s gospel tells us about Herod, and then there’s another Herod, and there’s another Herod in Acts. We might get very confused as to which kings these are. They’re taking for granted that we know it, we know something about the Herods; we can fill in that background information. So there are just lots of ways in which these writers simply assume that their readers know things, that since we are reading them in a much later period of history, we have to supply that knowledge.