Monday 25 October 2010

Interpretation 64, 4 (October 2010) on Matthew’s Gospel


The latest edition of Interpretation takes as its theme ‘“God with Us”: Perspectives from the Gospel of Matthew’, with the following main articles:


Benedict Thomas Viviano

God in the Gospel According to Matthew

The God of biblical revelation is present everywhere in the Gospel according to Matthew, but often in a self-effacing way, receding behind Jesus, Emmanuel, God-with-us. God’s presence is veiled by divine passives, hidden behind the reverent circumlocution ‘heavens.’ This gospel usually speaks on a horizontal plane of everyday life, where the Transcendent awaits us at every turn as the horizon.


M. Eugene Boring

Matthew’s Narrative Christology: Three Stories

Matthew’s Christology is theocentric, presenting God’s rule as manifest in the life of Jesus as an alternative to the sovereignty and power of this-worldly rulers. This Christology is expressed in the narrative mode. It can be appreciated and appropriated better in the context of the narratives in which contemporary interpreters are embedded.


F. Scott Spencer

Scriptures, Hermeneutics, and Matthew’s Jesus

Eschewing a truncated focus on single proof-texts, Matthew’s Jesus interprets Scripture by Scripture across the canon in creative and provocative ways. His hermeneutical methods and aims resist narrow profiling. Above all, Matthew’s Jesus emerges as the church’s authoritative biblical exegete and teacher.


Barbara E. Reid

Which God is With Us?

There is a tension in the Gospel of Matthew between two very different images of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, God is portrayed as being boundlessly gracious and forgiving, while in eight Matthean parables, God is seen as vindictive and punitive. This poses an ethical dilemma: which God is with us and whom should we emulate?


Dorothy Jean Weaver

‘Wherever This Good News is Proclaimed’: Women and God in the Gospel of Matthew

A careful examination of Matthew’s narrative reveals a striking portrait of those who in the patriarchal world of first-century Palestine are largely people of little power and low esteem. To bring God into the story of women is ultimately, for Matthew, to grant women extraordinary and unanticipated significance for the life and the faith of the people of God.

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