Status Updates From Matthew within Sectarian Ju...

The Sermon on the Mount takes the reader/listener back to Sinai to understand what God requires of the people of Israel in the first century CE. (91)

The analysis of religion in antiquity has first and foremost to do with practice. (86)

The first gospel constitutes an argument about how the followers of Jesus at the conclusion of the first century understood the requirements of the law and the rationale for their understanding of its requirements. (68)

It is apparent that [Matthew] is linked to Jewish sectarianism in the traditions known by [the] church fathers. Matthew as a sectarian Jewish composition must find its place in the conflicted and complicated developments of the emerging Jewish and Christian worlds of the second century CE and immediately thereafter. (65)