How Accurately Did Matthew Use the Old Testament?

HOW ACCURATELY DID MATTHEW USE THE OLD TESTAMENT?

Introduction

The Bible contains two parts, which are the Old Testament, the so-called the Jewish Bible, and the New Testament. Though many different writers involved in writing the Bible, the two Testaments are not independent; they are cross-referenced to each other. Christians often treat the Old Testament not only as the historical documents or literatures of the Israelites, but also as an important element of the foundation of the New Testament, because the writers of the New Testament lay strong emphasis on the relationship of Jesus with the prophecies of the Old Testament, which includes “the birth of Jesus, the place of His birth, the flight into Egypt, the return to Nazareth, the role of John the Baptist in preparing Jesus for His public ministry,” the crucifixion of Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus.

The New Testament is a collection of different spiritual literary works, which includes the Gospels, a history of early church, the epistles of Paul, other epistles and apocalypse. Without deeply thinking or researching of the chronological order of the Gospels, a reader should not have problem to observe that the Gospels begin with the Gospel of Matthew, and to notice that there are many common areas, including content and literary characteristics, among the first three Gospels, the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

The reason that the Gospel of Matthew is in the first place among the four Gospels is due to the early church tradition that Matthew was the earliest one who recorded Lord’s word and Jesus stories. In the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo claimed that “the canonical order of the four Gospels was the chronological order.” In the late-eighteenth century, J. J. Griesbach stated that The Gospel of Mark was a short version of the combination of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. In the nineteenth century, German scholars concluded that the Gospel of Matthew was preceded by the Gospel of Mark and Matthew used the Gospel of Mark as his primary source. No matter which theory that most New Testament scholars accept, Matthew did not simply copy sources from other Gospels, but also included his own ideas and quoted verses from the Old Testament. So the question of readers should rise is “How strong relationship did the Gospel of Matthew have with the Old Testament?” or “How accurately did Matthew use the Old Testament?”

Background

Matthew was a social man, with high education, both in Greek and Hebrew, and also had a talent on literatures. He as a good social position, a publican, had been working hard on collecting revenues from a population for Roman Emperors, so he was rich but had been despised by his peoples, because of taking advantages from others. As a tax collector, “Matthew seemed the general Palestine public to be perpetually writing things down,” Levi was his name, of Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27-29, before the time of his calling from Jesus, then, Matthew was his new name as a symbol of the change in the heart and life as a disciple. He is more as a gospel author than as a disciple in the view of Christians. After Jesus’ resurrection, Matthew started to preach to Hebrews, so he wrote God’s words in Aramaic for those believers who were Jewish origin. But when he got to the point of delivering Jesus’ teachings to others, he recorded the messages in Greek and gave it to those whom God led him to. The Gospel of Matthew primarily was for Jews, but Matthew also had a global vision from God for all origins in the world.

The biggest purpose of the Gospel of Matthew was to prove to Jews that Jesus is the Messiah whom they were waiting for, and He is the one who fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. In order to achieve this goal, Matthew tried to quote the scriptures from the Old Testament to support what he reported the events in Jesus’ life. So the study of the quotations from Old Testament is a fundamental technique to the understanding of God’s inspiration in the Gospel of Matthew. The Old Testament is not just the foundation of the Gospel of Matthew, but also is the backbone and the structure of it.

Citations

Before finishing the first two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, readers will soon notice that there appears a common using when Matthew wanted to introduce the Old Testament to support Jesus’ story, which is “this happened to fulfill the words spoken by the prophet,” even though the citation is not always verbatim. This is so-called the “fulfillment formula” or “formula quotation,” which was a trend of Jewish-Christian collection. There are total eleven Old Testaments verses introduced with the “fulfillment formula” in the Gospel of Matthew, which are 1:22; 2:15, 17, 23; 4:14; 8:17; 12:17; 13:14, 35; 21:4; and 27:9.

Infancy Narrative (1:23; 2:15, 18, 23)

Matt. 1:23 is quoted from Isa. 7:14, which was the prophecy that Yahweh wanted to give a sign to king Ahaz through Isaiah and offered a salvation for the Israelites in the year 734 B.C. The phrase that Isaiah used in Hebrew is “the young woman pregnant and bearing”, which contains words of an adjective and a participle, and the verb of “shall call his name” is in a feminine form. The Greek word that Matthew used to translate “the young woman” is parqe,noj, “the virgin,” which limited the possibility of the fulfillment to the birth of Hezekiah, son of king Ahaz. Angel Gabriel spoke to Mary that recorded by Luke fits the verb form used in Hebrew. Matthew tried to convince the readers that Jesus being born of a virgin has a salvation plan to save his people and is the true Messianic king that fulfills Isaiah prophecy announced in several hundred years ago.

Matt. 2:15 is quoted from Hos. 11:1. Hosea referred Israel to the God’s “son” as a “child” or “infant”, which is nh,pioj that Matthew translated in Greek, and that is the reason why Matthew related this verse to the infancy narrative. He tried to emphasize that Jesus is the true Israelite and had almost the same experience of old Israelites; furthermore, Jesus is “a second and a greater Moses.”

Jer. 31:15 that Matthew quoted in Matt.2:18 was not a prediction; Matthew used this to show readers a love from God for