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The structure of Matthew’s gospel

Look at Matt 1:23: “They shall name him ‘Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us’.”
Of course, Jesus is not actually named “Emmanuel”. This is a quotation from the (Greek Septuagint) version of Isaiah 7:14. It is a characteristic of Matthew that he presents the story of Jesus as the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies and hopes.

Matthew tells his story of Jesus with reference to the Old Testament stories in order to show the connections between what God has done in the past and what God is doing in Jesus. This is the sense in which Jesus is “Emmanuel”: he is the presence of God – both in the sense that he is the Son of God and also in the sense that he is God’s continuing presence with us: it is the same God who was “with us” in the Exodus, the creation and calling of Israel and the People of Yahweh, the Exile and return, and the One whose promised future was Israel’s hope. The constant reference back to the great stories of Israel’s faith is a way of showing both the continuity and discontinuity between the past and the present: both the way in which Jesus is part of the past and is also something “new”.

One way in which Matthew does this is his presentation of Jesus as the New Moses. Let’s look at a key example. Think, for a moment, of the Sermon on the Mount: Matthew tells this story in a way that quite deliberately evokes memories of Israel at Sinaii. Moses goes up the mountain. When Moses is on the mountain, Yahweh speaks and gives the Law. Moses then comes down the mountain as God’s mouthpiece, so that the “Law of Moses” is actually “The Law (and exact words) of Yahweh”. Moses’ authority lies in the fact that he has communed directly with God. He, alone of all mortals, has seen God; he has been given the words of God verbatim.

Now look at the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus, like Moses, goes up a mountain. Unlike Moses, he doesn’t go to get the Law but to give the Law! He sits down and teaches. Jesus, then, is like Moses – but in Matthew’s story, Jesus also takes the place of Yahweh! Jesus gives the Law on his own authority. This is Matthew’s way of telling us, “Jesus is God!” This is the radically new, unthinkable bit. It is when we remember the old stories that we see the bits that don’t fit – the new things that break open the boundaries. And the new thing is that Jesus is giving the New Law (of the Kingdom) to the New Israel (the Church). Jesus is nothing short of God with us – Emmanuel.

The 5-fold structure of Matthew’s gospel
One way of picturing the structure of Matthew’s gospel is to see it as comprising 5 main blocks of speeches – discourses, each ending with the same formula: “When Jesus had finished saying all of these things, he …”. Imagine these as 5 books on a shelf, with two bookends: the birth narrative and the passion narrative. It looks like this:

Bookend 1: The Birth Narrative (chapters 1-2)

Chs 5-7 The Sermon on the Mount
Ch 10 Instructions to the disciples (the mission of the 12)
Ch 13 Parables about response and judgement
Ch 18 Instructions to the disciples (Christian community)
Chs 24-5 Final discourse

Bookend 2: The Passion Narrative (chapters 26-28)

Some commentators have suggested that we ought to read Matthew as using the 5 discourses to parallel the 5 books of the Pentateuch. One thing is clear: Matthew is writing a very “Jewish” gospel, shaped closely by the Old Testament and the tradition. As a rule of thumb, the more closely we see parallels between the “old” and the “new”, the more closely we are following Matthew’s thought and the more likely we are to spot the ways in which his narrative “works”.


Lawrence Moore
December 2007

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