Matthew
Is Jesus the fulfilment of everything Israel was waiting for, or a break from it?
Why this book matters
Matthew was written for readers who knew the Jewish Scriptures well and needed to know whether Jesus fit them. It quotes the Old Testament more than any other Gospel, roughly sixty times, usually with the line 'this happened to fulfil what was spoken'.
It contains the largest single block of Jesus' teaching in the Bible: the Sermon on the Mount, chapters 5 to 7. If you want to know what Jesus actually taught about anger, lust, money, revenge, prayer and worry, it is here in about twenty minutes of reading.
Matthew organises Jesus' teaching into five big discourses, which many scholars read as a deliberate echo of the five books of Moses. The claim is not subtle: a new authority is speaking, and He is not contradicting Moses but completing him.
Who wrote it?
DebatedAnonymous in the text. Early tradition, again from Papias, attributes it to Matthew the tax collector, one of the twelve.
Many modern scholars question this, mainly because the book appears to draw on Mark, which is odd for an eyewitness. Others answer that an eyewitness might still use an existing written account he trusted, especially one carrying Peter's testimony.
The author is clearly Jewish, literate, and deeply at home in Scripture.
When was it written?
Most scholars agreeMost place it in AD 80–90, after Mark. A minority argue for the 60s.
Its intense engagement with Pharisaic teaching fits a period when Judaism was reorganising after the temple's destruction, and two communities were arguing over who had inherited Israel's story.
Who was it written for?
Jewish Christians, probably in or around Antioch in Syria — people paying a social price for following Jesus and being told by their own community that they had abandoned their heritage.
Matthew's answer is not 'we left'. It is 'we stayed, and He is the point of it all.'
What was happening?
The temple was gone. The sacrificial system had ended. Every Jewish group was arguing about how to be faithful without it.
Matthew ends with a scene where the risen Jesus sends His followers to every nation, promising He is with them. A book that began with a Jewish genealogy ends with the whole world in view.
What to watch for
- Fulfilment
Jesus does not cancel the Old Testament; He is where it was pointing.
- Kingdom of heaven
Matthew's phrase for God's reign breaking into ordinary life now.
- Righteousness
Not rule-keeping performance, but a rightness that begins in the heart.
- Teaching authority
'You have heard it said... but I say to you.' Nobody talked like that.
- Discipleship
The book ends with a commission, not a conclusion.
How this connects to the Bible
- Genesis 12 — the promise to Abraham that Matthew's genealogy opens with.
- Exodus 20 — the Law that Jesus intensifies rather than relaxes.
- Isaiah 7 and 9 — the promised child, quoted in the birth narrative.
- Micah 5 — Bethlehem.
- James — the New Testament letter that sounds most like the Sermon on the Mount.
- The historic Christian catechisms, most of which are built around Matthew's teaching blocks.
Matthew argues, Scripture in hand, that Jesus is the promised King of Israel whose teaching goes straight past behaviour to the heart.
View sources
- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39
- R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (Eerdmans, 2007)
- Craig Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Eerdmans, 1999)