Lecture 3: The Messianic Hope, Why Four Gospels, and Meeting Matthew

The lecture, section by section

1. Torah, temple, and the shape of the hope

   Picking up the unifying beliefs, Essex sharpens how the parties differed over Torah: the Pharisees held its laws inviolable, with a God-given oral tradition to unfold their meaning, while the Sadducees stressed the Torah's own provision for judges, seeing the Sanhedrin's rulings, which they controlled, as God's continuing guidance. Both honored the temple; many Pharisees who suspected the chief-priestly families still held the sacrifices themselves more important than the men who offered them. Asked about the claim that Second Temple Judaism was about staying in rather than getting in, Essex answers that the literature can be read that way, but in practice, since being a Jew meant doing rather than believing, most Jews, leaders and people alike, sensed they were doing these things to earn God's favor and establish their righteousness.

2. The messianic hope above the line

   Against scholars who deny the Old Testament a clear messianic revelation, Essex charts what the Old Testament itself taught. The Torah and the latter prophets look to the end of the days, a time of distress for Israel and the nations, Deuteronomy 4, Numbers 24, Deuteronomy 31, that becomes a time of restoration and blessing, when the knowledge of the Lord goes out from Zion and Gentiles join Israel in worship, Genesis 49, Isaiah 2, Zechariah 14. At the center stands a coming king: the scepter of Judah in Genesis 49, the Davidic line in Hosea, the virgin-born son and the child on whose shoulders the government rests in Isaiah 7 and 9, the rejected stone become cornerstone, the suffering servant who becomes the conquering warrior in Isaiah's later chapters.

3. The hope below the line

   Second Temple Judaism expressed those ideas in its own vocabulary: the present time is this age, or the former age; the coming time of distress is the wrath to come, a phrase used more than the day of the Lord, and aimed in the literature more at the nations than at Israel; beyond it lies the age to come, the world to come, the messianic age, the kingdom. But the hope had not congealed: whether the Messiah was personal, whether he would establish the kingdom or arrive after it, whether he was a second Moses, a priestly figure, or a Davidic ruler, the literature does not answer with one voice, which is why Essex draws the coming of the king above the line, in the Old Testament's own hope, and not below it.

4. What a gospel is

   The Gospels read like the narratives Israel already knew, God-directed accounts of what God has done as the foundation for what he is saying now, the pattern of the Torah and the former prophets. Yet the four carry a distinctive title. Only Mark uses the word in his opening, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and throughout the New Testament gospel, noun and verb, names something verbal: proclaimed, heralded, preached. Early in the second century the church came to understand these four narratives as the written representatives of the proclamation about Jesus that had been heralded on earth and in the early church, and had brought faith.

5. Why four gospels

   The Old Testament had already taught its readers to expect multiple accounts of a great event. Chronicles retells about half of Samuel and Kings, and the destruction of Jerusalem's temple is narrated four times, in 2 Kings, twice in Jeremiah, and in 2 Chronicles. If the destruction of the temple deserved four narratives, the incarnation of God himself surely would not receive fewer. Luke's preface acknowledges that many had compiled narratives resting on the apostles' eyewitness testimony; those accounts have not survived, and Luke does not claim them as sources, for he investigated everything carefully from the beginning. God bore four authors along by the Spirit to give inerrant Scripture, and there is no fifth gospel, no Thomas, that fills in what these four lack.

6. The genre debate

   If genre governs interpretation, the stakes are high: call the Gospels mere written preaching, kerygma, as Dodd did by laying Peter's Acts 10 sermon over Mark, and preachers' license swallows the history. Essex walks the options: Justin Martyr's memoirs of the apostles; history, the very claim Luke makes to Theophilus, that you may know the exact truth of the things you have been taught; and the ancient life, the bios, as Plutarch described his own work, the man's character seen in his deeds. His verdict: Luke is definitely history, the others lean toward biography, but the working model for all four is not a Gentile genre at all; it is the historical narrative of the Old Testament. And Dodd's outline proves too much, since it is the outline of all four Gospels alike.

7. Four gospels for four kinds of people

   Reading the four discloses four audiences. Matthew is unmistakably Jewish, opening with a genealogy and speaking of the kingdom of heaven without ever defining it; Mark explains Jewish customs, translates Aramaic, and drives at evangelism; Luke writes to Theophilus, a Gentile, with the discourses fully told; John declares his evangelistic purpose outright, that you may believe, yet assumes a reader who knows the Old Testament. Mankind divides two ways, Jew and Gentile, believer and unbeliever, and one gospel is written to each of the four resulting kinds: Matthew for Jewish believers, John for Jewish unbelievers, Luke for Gentile believers, Mark for Gentile unbelievers. Fittingly it is the Gentile believer's gospel, Luke, that carries the sequel, Acts, for the church of this age, as Romans 11 reminds us, is largely a Gentile phenomenon.

8. Dates, priority, and the four portraits

   With the early church, Essex holds Matthew the earliest gospel, written in the 40s before the church became predominantly Gentile; Mark, by tradition, for the believers at Rome facing the Neronian persecution; Luke, since Acts ends near the close of Paul's first Roman imprisonment about AD 62, in the late 50s or AD 60; John in the late 80s or early 90s. House's chart assumes Markan priority and so must reorder the dates; Essex holds Matthean priority. The four traditional portraits, Messiah and Son of David in Matthew, servant of the Lord in Mark, son of man in Luke, Son of God in John, are sound as emphases but false as razors: every gospel presents Jesus as Messiah, suffering servant, true man, and God in flesh, and John himself writes so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

9. The Gospels open into the rest of the New Testament

   Each gospel leads into later books: Matthew into James, written to dispersion Jews with language echoing Jesus's discourses; Mark into 1 and 2 Peter and Jude, for Peter led Mark to faith; Luke into Paul's letters and Hebrews, penned within Paul's missionary circle of which Luke was part; John into the Johannine letters and Revelation. All twenty-three books after the Gospels flow out of them, which is why Essex laments that evangelicals have become Acts-to-Revelation people. The Gospels are harder work than the epistles, but he presses the charge: early in a ministry, preach through a gospel, and give your people a sense of who the Jesus of the letters really is. The Gospels belong to the New Testament, not the Old, because the Old Testament canon closed around 400 BC looking forward; the Gospels stand after the cross.

10. Meeting Matthew: author and readers

    All four Gospels come to us anonymously, and the earliest external evidence of authorship is the titles themselves, according to Matthew and the rest, affixed as the four were gathered, with the fathers consistently naming Matthew. Inside the text, at the banquet of chapter 9 Matthew names himself Matthew the tax collector, the despised collaborator whose testimony a Jewish court would throw out, where Mark and Luke, writing for Gentiles, use his Jewish name Levi. The readers are Jewish Christians: the gospel speaks the reverent Jewish vocabulary of the Father in heaven and the kingdom of heaven, leaves Aramaic terms like raca and korban untranslated, opens with a genealogy, and presupposes Jewish knowledge, content to say Herod the king where Luke anchors Herod in world history.

11. Date and language

    Carson allows anywhere from AD 40 to 65, but Essex, with the weight of early tradition that Matthew is the earliest gospel, puts it in the 40s, whether from Palestine or, on the later and fuller tradition, from Antioch or Syria back to Palestine. The original language is Greek, not Aramaic: a translator does not transliterate some Aramaic terms while translating the rest, and the book reads as an original Greek document, whatever Papias's disputed remark about the Hebrew dialect meant. Greek was the one language the whole eastern empire shared, which is why Paul wrote even to Latin Corinth and to Rome in Greek: write in Greek, and everyone will understand.

12. Matthew's first themes: the Triune God, the King, the kingdom

    Matthew is a God-centered book: theos appears 48 times in 28 chapters, first in the citation of Isaiah 7:14, where Matthew makes sure his readers know Immanuel means God with us. Most uses refer to the Father, named as father 43 times; but some refer to Jesus, Immanuel, the Son of God; and the Spirit of God, by whom Jesus casts out demons and who can be blasphemed, is God as well, so that a Jewish apostle writes to Jewish believers affirming the Triune nature of God, sealed in the baptismal formula of chapter 28, the one name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The gospel is about the Son, Son of God, Son of David, son of Abraham, son of man, the Messiah, and at the book's beginning and end the King of the Jews. The kingdom of heaven appears 32 times, never defined, and four times Matthew writes kingdom of God, as in chapter 19 where the two stand side by side over the rich young man, while the same word serves for human kingdoms, all of it laced with the language of Old Testament fulfillment.

1. Essex warns against using the four portraits of Christ as a razor, as though Mark's Jesus were not Messiah or Matthew's not the servant. Where have you met, or made, a lopsided picture of Jesus, and how does reading all four Gospels correct it?

2. He observes that evangelicals have become Acts-to-Revelation people, and that the epistles are easier than the Gospels. What would change in your reading and your church's teaching if the Gospels carried the weight he assigns them?

3. Matthew names himself by the title of his shame, the tax collector, while the other evangelists spare him with his Jewish name. What does that self-description model about how a forgiven person tells his own story?