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Begin Typing VigilIt is essential, at the outset, to feel the massive unity of this book, if any justice is to be done to it either from the literary or from the religious standpoint. Jesus the true messiah, born and trained under the Jewish law, and yet Lord of a church whose inward faith, organisation, procedure, and world-wide scope transcended the legal limitations of Judaism—this is the dominant conception of Matthew’s gospel from beginning to end.
The book is compiled from at least two sources, and their different nuances are more than once unmistakable; but these discrepancies and variations do not blur the final impression made by the writer’s clear-cut purpose. He wishes to show that, in spite of the contemporary rupture between Judaism and Christianity, there has been a divine continuity realised in the origin and issues of faith in Jesus as the Christ: 1. Thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his People from their sins, ‘That People is no longer Israel (21:43), but a wider community. 2. A greater than the temple is here, one who is also 3. the promulgator of a new Law which transcends the old (5:17, 28:20), The three sacred possessions of Judaism have thus passed into higher uses, as a result of the life of Jesus the Christian messiah. It is Matthew’s aim to justify this transition by showing from the life of Jesus how it was not the claim of a heretical sect who misread the Bible by the light of their own presumptuousness, but the realisation of a divine purpose and the verification of divine prophecies in the sphere of history.
This timeline combines the three Synoptic Gospels, Acts, and the five Johnannine works.