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Studies in Matthew: Interpretation Past and Present
The author of a leading major critical commentary on Matthew here offers further insights into the Gospel and the history of its interpretation. Writing with theological sensitivity and a deft literary touch, he presents thirteen essays--nine previously unpublished and four thoroughly revised--on key passages, on structural features of the Gospel, and on patristic and modern interpretation. Exegetes, preachers, students, and other lovers of biblical narrative will read "Studies in Matthew" with profit and delight.
282 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2005
2 people are currently reading
91 people want to read
About the author
Dale C. Allison Jr.
33 books68 followersDr. Dale C. Allison Jr., an Errett M. Grable professor of New Testament exegesis and early Christianity, has been on the faculty of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary since 1997. Before then he served on the faculties of Texas Christian University (Fort Worth, Texas) and Friends University (Wichita, Kan.).
His areas of expertise include Second Temple Judaism, and he is the author of books on early Christian eschatology, the Gospel of Matthew, the so-called Sayings Source or Q, and the historical Jesus.
He has also written The Luminous Dusk, a book on religious experience in the modern world, and a full-length commentary on the Testament of Abraham. His most recently published works are The Love There That’s Sleeping: The Art and Spirituality of George Harrison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, and Constructing Jesus: History, Memory, and Imagination. He is currently at work on a full-length commentary on the Epistle of James. He is married to Kristine Allison and they have three children.
His areas of expertise include Second Temple Judaism, and he is the author of books on early Christian eschatology, the Gospel of Matthew, the so-called Sayings Source or Q, and the historical Jesus.
He has also written The Luminous Dusk, a book on religious experience in the modern world, and a full-length commentary on the Testament of Abraham. His most recently published works are The Love There That’s Sleeping: The Art and Spirituality of George Harrison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, and Constructing Jesus: History, Memory, and Imagination. He is currently at work on a full-length commentary on the Epistle of James. He is married to Kristine Allison and they have three children.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 17, 2022
Thirteen elegantly-written essays examining different aspects of the Gospel of Matthew.
Allison is an astute reader of the text, sensitive to both ancient and modern interpretations of the texts he examines, and able to bring insight from a wealth of secondary literature without overwhelming the reader.
As with all essay collections, the reader's mileage will vary when it comes to the essays you prefer. For me, the essays on "The Magi's Angel" (spoiler: the star of the nativity is an angel), on "Murder and Anger, Cain and Abel", "The Configuration of the Sermon on the Mount and its Meaning", and "Structure, Biographical Impulse and the imitatio Christi", were real standouts. Yet my admiration for these essays in particular is just a slightly sharpened appreciation for what Allison does consistently. His essays are clear and, despite their density, written with grace and concision. And his exegetical insights into the texts are often extremely penetrating, sometimes upending conventional wisdom with sharp insight and other times affirming received views with new insight and argument.
Highly recommended for any students of Matthew and those strange biographies of Jesus at the start of the New Testament.
Allison is an astute reader of the text, sensitive to both ancient and modern interpretations of the texts he examines, and able to bring insight from a wealth of secondary literature without overwhelming the reader.
As with all essay collections, the reader's mileage will vary when it comes to the essays you prefer. For me, the essays on "The Magi's Angel" (spoiler: the star of the nativity is an angel), on "Murder and Anger, Cain and Abel", "The Configuration of the Sermon on the Mount and its Meaning", and "Structure, Biographical Impulse and the imitatio Christi", were real standouts. Yet my admiration for these essays in particular is just a slightly sharpened appreciation for what Allison does consistently. His essays are clear and, despite their density, written with grace and concision. And his exegetical insights into the texts are often extremely penetrating, sometimes upending conventional wisdom with sharp insight and other times affirming received views with new insight and argument.
Highly recommended for any students of Matthew and those strange biographies of Jesus at the start of the New Testament.
April 8, 2013
One of my favorite books read in seminary. Insofar Allison stays close to the text, his observations are brilliant. His writing is clear, even beautiful. His mastery of secondary literature is impressive but not overwhelming or off-putting. And his exegetical insights are eye-opening. Read with a tinge of healthy discernment, this book will change how you read Matthew and the Gospels in general.
December 31, 2024
Deeply valuable engagement with the text, and sane interaction with a wide variety of biblical commentators. One might not agree with every conclusion, but the clarity of thoughtful interaction is deeply appreciated.
June 28, 2020
I'll 'review' the book only to say that it lives up to what its endorsers say: Dale Allison, Jr. is today's premier exegete on the Gospel of Matthew. This book, as a collection of his essays on key parts of Matthew, is dense, meticulous, and anything but a casual read. That said, it was one of the most enlightening works epitomizing 'how to read Scripture well' I've read in recent memory.
Below are some of his theses and insights I gleaned.
Chapter 2
(this chapter is the only one that left me with more questions that answers. I'm not sure I currently have a similar enough theological framework to agree with his thesis in this chapter).
1. Allison argues (using seven historical interpretations of Matthew 5:8b—the pure in heart “shall see God“—as a test case) that when modern commentators neglect historical interpretations of a biblical passage they inevitably miss out on the ongoing and dynamic ‘divine dialogue’ God is having with his people in Scripture throughout history.
2. Such a tendency further overlooks the fact that biblical texts themselves are in transition, not only being shaped by their own context but being shaped in collision with later contexts that result in new and valid interpretations fitting to that era.
3. This fundamentally contradicts the assumption that differing interpretations cannot both (or all) be right, underestimating the possibility of multiple, fitting interpretations in different contexts of different people to whom God is revealing himself.
Chapter 3
1. Allison argues for an intertextual reading of Matthew 5:21-24, as an appropriation of Genesis 4:1-16 (the classic story of the first murder—of a brother by his brother), as he addressed and condemns fraternal anger.
2. Not only is such an interpretation very well represented among early church fathers and historical theologians, and by noteworthy parallels in the the texts themselves (e.g. brothers, altar, anger, murder, judgment, etc.) but elsewhere within Matthew’s gospel itself—as Matthew later makes similar allusions to Genesis in general (e.g. Gen. 2:4 and Matt. 1:1) and to the story of Cain with reference to vengeance, in particular (Matt. 18:21-22).
3. Matthew’s allusion to Cain is perhaps most clearly seen in the later text of 1 John 3:11-17, in which the apostle John, with evident knowledge of Matthew‘s gospel, wrote a strikingly parallel text and directly named Cain, treating the first murderer as the archetypal brother who hated his brother and murdered him.
Chapter 6
1. Allison argues that reading the church Fathers improves our efforts to understand the original senses of NT passages, because they were closer in era and culture to the NT writers than we are today.
2. He reasons specifically that the early church Fathers’ hermeneutics (which most modern commentators overlook) have often been his guide in discovering possible intertextual allusions in the Gospel of Matthew that the writer does not spell out explicitly but likely assumed his Jewish readers would naturally infer.
3. This is seen in how Allison’s reading of Gregory of Nyssa pushed him in new theological directions regarding the (“perpetual progress”) nature of the otherwise seemingly unattainable demands Jesus’ Sermon placed upon Matthew’s readers.
Chapter 7
1. The structure of Matthew’s gospel, Allison alleges, is comprised of five divisions, each containing a narrative and a discourse, and each new division signaled by the phrase “and it happened when Jesus had finished”.
2. These five divisions of alternating coverage of what Jesus did and said reflect, for Allison, the alternating narrative and discourse portions of some of the five books of the Pentateuch.
Allison narrows his claim further: the canonical gospels represent, in terms of literary analysis, a sub-type of Graeco-Roman biography—biographies of Jesus Christ.
3. Jesus is much more than a moral example, but he is not less, even as in Matthew Jesus functions for Jews and Gentile believers alike as the new model par excellence for believing and living, perfectly embodying the Torah, personally incarnating the precepts he taught others to observe in his Sermon on the Mount.
Chapter 10
1. For Allison, many scholars miss important observations regarding the structure of the Sermon on the Mount that he argues have not only hermeneutical implications but signal important facets of Matthew’s historical setting.
2. For example, Matthew’s retelling of Jesus’ sermon (Matt. 5-7) employs a strikingly similar tact as Moses’ blessings and curses to Israel so long before—he begins his remarks with a list of makarisms and ends the sermon with a series of warnings.
3. While many bible commentators hold that Matthew’s gospel was written by a Jew for Jews, the basis for this assumption goes far beyond Jewish vocabulary and theology to include the structure itself (especially numerous triadic patterns throughout the sermon possibly modeled after the Maccabean writings of Simeon the Just).
Chapter 11
1. There are five Matthean passages that foreshadow the passion of Christ that are often overlooked by commentators: “a collectivity” of five passages foreshadowing and augmenting the significance of the eventual death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
2. Matthew’s ‘turn the other cheek’, ‘go the extra mile’, ‘do not rest evil’, and ‘give away your cloak’ passage (5:17-20) shares numerous parallels with Isaiah’s suffering Servant of Yahweh (Is. 50:6-9) and foreshadows Jesus being ‘smitten’, Simon of Cyrene being ‘conscripted’ to carry Jesus’ cross, Jesus’ his ‘coat being taken’, etc.
3. Likewise, the specifics of the persecution of Christian missionaries of which Jesus warned his disciples (Matt. 10:17-23) strikingly parallels his own passion not long thereafter: he was betrayed by a companion, handed over to the authorities, appeared before the Sanhedrin, was whipped, led, gave testimony before a governor, and was killed.
4. These foreshadowings hint that at least one of the unifying themes in Matthew, for Allison (if not the central theme) is the death and resurrection of Jesus—given that Christ’s passion and subsequent glory is in this light not merely the climax of the gospel but the climactic event(s) to which Jesus himself and Matthew point all along the way within the Gospel.
Below are some of his theses and insights I gleaned.
Chapter 2
(this chapter is the only one that left me with more questions that answers. I'm not sure I currently have a similar enough theological framework to agree with his thesis in this chapter).
1. Allison argues (using seven historical interpretations of Matthew 5:8b—the pure in heart “shall see God“—as a test case) that when modern commentators neglect historical interpretations of a biblical passage they inevitably miss out on the ongoing and dynamic ‘divine dialogue’ God is having with his people in Scripture throughout history.
2. Such a tendency further overlooks the fact that biblical texts themselves are in transition, not only being shaped by their own context but being shaped in collision with later contexts that result in new and valid interpretations fitting to that era.
3. This fundamentally contradicts the assumption that differing interpretations cannot both (or all) be right, underestimating the possibility of multiple, fitting interpretations in different contexts of different people to whom God is revealing himself.
Chapter 3
1. Allison argues for an intertextual reading of Matthew 5:21-24, as an appropriation of Genesis 4:1-16 (the classic story of the first murder—of a brother by his brother), as he addressed and condemns fraternal anger.
2. Not only is such an interpretation very well represented among early church fathers and historical theologians, and by noteworthy parallels in the the texts themselves (e.g. brothers, altar, anger, murder, judgment, etc.) but elsewhere within Matthew’s gospel itself—as Matthew later makes similar allusions to Genesis in general (e.g. Gen. 2:4 and Matt. 1:1) and to the story of Cain with reference to vengeance, in particular (Matt. 18:21-22).
3. Matthew’s allusion to Cain is perhaps most clearly seen in the later text of 1 John 3:11-17, in which the apostle John, with evident knowledge of Matthew‘s gospel, wrote a strikingly parallel text and directly named Cain, treating the first murderer as the archetypal brother who hated his brother and murdered him.
Chapter 6
1. Allison argues that reading the church Fathers improves our efforts to understand the original senses of NT passages, because they were closer in era and culture to the NT writers than we are today.
2. He reasons specifically that the early church Fathers’ hermeneutics (which most modern commentators overlook) have often been his guide in discovering possible intertextual allusions in the Gospel of Matthew that the writer does not spell out explicitly but likely assumed his Jewish readers would naturally infer.
3. This is seen in how Allison’s reading of Gregory of Nyssa pushed him in new theological directions regarding the (“perpetual progress”) nature of the otherwise seemingly unattainable demands Jesus’ Sermon placed upon Matthew’s readers.
Chapter 7
1. The structure of Matthew’s gospel, Allison alleges, is comprised of five divisions, each containing a narrative and a discourse, and each new division signaled by the phrase “and it happened when Jesus had finished”.
2. These five divisions of alternating coverage of what Jesus did and said reflect, for Allison, the alternating narrative and discourse portions of some of the five books of the Pentateuch.
Allison narrows his claim further: the canonical gospels represent, in terms of literary analysis, a sub-type of Graeco-Roman biography—biographies of Jesus Christ.
3. Jesus is much more than a moral example, but he is not less, even as in Matthew Jesus functions for Jews and Gentile believers alike as the new model par excellence for believing and living, perfectly embodying the Torah, personally incarnating the precepts he taught others to observe in his Sermon on the Mount.
Chapter 10
1. For Allison, many scholars miss important observations regarding the structure of the Sermon on the Mount that he argues have not only hermeneutical implications but signal important facets of Matthew’s historical setting.
2. For example, Matthew’s retelling of Jesus’ sermon (Matt. 5-7) employs a strikingly similar tact as Moses’ blessings and curses to Israel so long before—he begins his remarks with a list of makarisms and ends the sermon with a series of warnings.
3. While many bible commentators hold that Matthew’s gospel was written by a Jew for Jews, the basis for this assumption goes far beyond Jewish vocabulary and theology to include the structure itself (especially numerous triadic patterns throughout the sermon possibly modeled after the Maccabean writings of Simeon the Just).
Chapter 11
1. There are five Matthean passages that foreshadow the passion of Christ that are often overlooked by commentators: “a collectivity” of five passages foreshadowing and augmenting the significance of the eventual death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
2. Matthew’s ‘turn the other cheek’, ‘go the extra mile’, ‘do not rest evil’, and ‘give away your cloak’ passage (5:17-20) shares numerous parallels with Isaiah’s suffering Servant of Yahweh (Is. 50:6-9) and foreshadows Jesus being ‘smitten’, Simon of Cyrene being ‘conscripted’ to carry Jesus’ cross, Jesus’ his ‘coat being taken’, etc.
3. Likewise, the specifics of the persecution of Christian missionaries of which Jesus warned his disciples (Matt. 10:17-23) strikingly parallels his own passion not long thereafter: he was betrayed by a companion, handed over to the authorities, appeared before the Sanhedrin, was whipped, led, gave testimony before a governor, and was killed.
4. These foreshadowings hint that at least one of the unifying themes in Matthew, for Allison (if not the central theme) is the death and resurrection of Jesus—given that Christ’s passion and subsequent glory is in this light not merely the climax of the gospel but the climactic event(s) to which Jesus himself and Matthew point all along the way within the Gospel.
March 30, 2024
A collection of excellent, very short essays which I really enjoyed reading over the course of the semester. I found chapter 6 on Reading Matthew through the Church Fathers to be especially helpful methodologically.
September 7, 2011
As with every book that consists of a collection of essays, this book has some good and some not as good chapters. What I appreciate about this book is his use of imagination in interpreting Scripture. This book represents a great approach to reading the Bible, and is a must read for anyone who is wanting to do work in Matthew. His familiarity with the book of Matthew is obvious, as well as much of the intertextuality relevant for Gospel studies.
August 13, 2013
I was after a book that would look into the aspect of "seeing God" in the beatitudes. I was a little disappointed that I had to revert to a book that is overly critical of the text. However, I was engaged by the section of Matt 5:8 (pp. 43-64) which was what I was after. Although I struggled to read the book due to its critical nature I learned quite a bit from it. I will reference it again I am sure.
September 25, 2015
Dale Allison is, in my opinion, the greatest living Matthean scholar. This collection covers a lot of ground, and Allison's observations about the patterns in Matthew are amazing. Matthew is a great book for understanding "intratextuality," and Allison has mined the book for just about every possible example. Insightful. Required reading for anyone looking to understand Matthew better.
November 22, 2021
As a whole, this book is uneven. Some of the essays are phenomenal, others not so much. The three chapters I'd recommend most highly would be:
-“Structure, Biographical Impulse, and the Imitatio Christi”
-“The Configuration of the Sermon on the Mount and Its Meaning”
-“Foreshadowing the Passion”
-“Structure, Biographical Impulse, and the Imitatio Christi”
-“The Configuration of the Sermon on the Mount and Its Meaning”
-“Foreshadowing the Passion”
November 10, 2015
I liked Allison's approach to the scriptures and his commentary is very helpful for us Orthodox in understanding the scriptures.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews