JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today, Patrick Schreiner joins Jason DeRouchie and Tom Kelby to talk about the book of Matthew. In this conversation, Patrick, Jason, and Tom discuss the undercurrents running throughout the book of Matthew—even as he tells us about Jesus, Matthew wants us to be thinking about David, Moses, Abraham, and Israel. If you find this conversation helpful, be sure to check out Patrick Schreiner’s 2019 book titled Matthew, Disciple and Scribe: The First Gospel and Its Portrait of Jesus. This is a great resource for anyone wanting to understand the themes Matthew weaves throughout the book. You’ll find a link to Matthew, Disciple and Scribe in the show notes.

TK: Welcome to GearTalk. Jason and I are sitting in a room with one of Jason’s colleagues, Patrick Schreiner today. So welcome.

PS: Good to be with you guys.

TK: I also have his book sitting in the room with us too. He wrote a book called Matthew, Disciple and Scribe: The First Gospel and Its Portrait of Jesus. So that’s what we wanted to talk about today—we want to talk about Matthew.

JD: Yeah, the Gospel of Matthew. Eager to see how you have found him to use his Scriptures and how he portrays Jesus and how he himself followed Jesus.

PS: Yeah, this was a really fun book for me to write. I did my work in seminary on Matthew, so this was kind of birthed from me recognizing, I think when I stepped into Gospels courses, especially with the Synoptics initially, I thought they all kind of…

TK: Can you explain what Synoptics are?

PS: Yeah, sorry. Matthew, Mark, Luke. I thought they’re all kind of saying the same thing. And I think the beauty of those books really came to me when I recognized no, they’re all doing something somewhat unique and they’re all using the Old Testament Scriptures. They’re all telling the story of Jesus in a way that alludes to and echoes the Old Testament story.

So when Jesus does something, you should constantly be thinking, did someone in the Old Testament do something like this? And how does Jesus do this in a greater way? And that was just huge for me in terms of reading the Gospels and seeing they’re not just historical accounts—they are historical accounts, they recount the historical Jesus. But they’re told in a way that Old Testament readers would recognize: I’ve heard this story before, or at least a story like this before.

So I might even use it in this book, but if you watch the Star Wars movies, even the older ones versus the new ones, they’ll have scenes in there where it’s like the old scene but it’s a new scene. And that’s really a lot of what the Scriptures are doing. They have very similar scenes and they want you to ask the question, how is this different? How is this similar? And really, how does Jesus come and complete that old story?

JD: Now we in our past podcasts have talked about that reality. We’ve called it typology—relationship of a type to an antitype. For our listeners, how would you define this idea of typology? And then feel free to take us right into Matthew.

PS: Yeah, I think typology—I’m not great with definitions, but you know, there’s patterns, historical patterns that you see in the Old Testament and the New Testament that are then repeated, but usually escalated. So there’s a sense of it growing to a greater fulfillment in the New Testament. You can see that with events, people, institutions.

What I think is important here is a type can be an event or it can be a person. So it can be something that happens that’s like Moses, or something that happens that’s like the new exodus. And so that’s the difference between an event and a person. But what’s really key here, I think, is you know, there’s a progress of revelation, but also that it’s divinely intended. And so if we believe the Scriptures have one author, and this one author—the divine author, although there’s many human authors—is telling us one big story, then events will have certain correspondence between one another.

So it’s a way of looking at, in simple layman’s terms, it’s patterns in the Scriptures that you see repeated.

TK: I like that. So the book is named Matthew, Disciple and Scribe and I’ll put in the show notes a spot where you can find the book and buy the book. I think it would be worth it. It’s written at a level where pastors, leaders will be able to understand the book and use the book in their preaching. You use a phrase—you call them shadow stories, and then you describe it’s almost like there’s an actor on a stage and something’s happening behind them. Can you play out, because it fits with where we’re going in Matthew, can you play out what you were imagining as you described that? Or do you want me to play it out?

PS: You play it out. I don’t remember what I said about that. I do use shadow stories because typology can be a hard word for people. I think shadow stories make sense—that there’s a new story that echoes an old story, and so it seems like there’s almost a shadow with this story of something else happening.

So I’m fine with the words typology or inner-biblical exegesis, or figural interpretation or inter—these are a lot of big words, I know—but intertextuality. These are some of the terms that people will use, but I just use shadow stories because I think it’s more immediately obvious what’s happening.

TK: And the picture—so correct me where I get it wrong—but the picture you had is if Matthew is telling his story and events that are happening, so something happening with Jesus, he’s going somewhere, it’s almost like he’s telling the story in such a way that there’s a TV screen or a movie playing behind them and you’re seeing a different story playing in the background. And you’re supposed to be seeing the story in the foreground—Jesus going somewhere—but you’re catching this movie playing in the background behind them. Is that fair?

PS: Yeah. And I think that, you know, we can talk about theory, but it’s always helpful to go to the Scriptures. And so famous examples in Matthew are when Jesus goes up on the mountain, begins teaching the Sermon on the Mount. And even if you go into the weeds of that text in Matthew 5, even some of the Greek language behind it—it’s that he’s going up the mountain just like Moses went up the mountain to receive the Torah. But now there’s a difference in this scene. So going up a mountain, you should think of somebody else went up a mountain. Now he’s not only receiving the Torah, but he is giving the Torah because he is Yahweh himself.

And so there are similarities between what Moses is doing and Jesus is doing, but it’s also heightened. And I’d say the same thing for Matthew 2 when Jesus and his family go into Egypt. Matthew then says, “Hey, this is just like Israel, who went into Egypt and then was called out of Egypt as kind of a new exodus theme.” And so Matthew, right away, even in those first two chapters, he’s telling us everything that Jesus does is somehow completing, fulfilling, filling up this old story—that something wasn’t quite right with that old story, wasn’t complete yet, and Jesus had to come and complete that.

So everything from Jesus’s geographical movements—I would argue—to the things that Jesus says. You go to the end of the Gospel when Jesus is crying out and he’s suffering, there’s a lot of links to the Psalms there with David calling out to the Lord. Psalm 22 is a big Psalm for Jesus when he’s near the cross and on the cross. And so it’s not just the beginning, it’s not just the end, it’s really everything that Jesus does.

I’m working on the transfiguration right now. And again, there’s Moses echoes, where he’s going up on the mountain. But there’s Elijah echoes too, because Elijah goes up on a mountain and he’s in a cave. And he’s also wanting to hear a word from the Lord or have the Lord revealed to him. So all these stories—this is I think when I was talking about the beginning—the beauty of the Gospels came. You can understand it—one scholar talks about kind of surface level interpretation versus kind of a deeper level. You can understand the narrative in one sense just at a surface level, and it makes sense. You know what Jesus did, where he went, what he spoke. But there’s also a depth to all of these books. I’d say all of the books in the whole Bible where you can, my blow phrase, double click on that, right. And you can begin to see there’s a richness to it.

It doesn’t—seeing Jesus as a new type of Moses who goes up on the mountain to deliver the Torah doesn’t contradict kind of the plain meaning of those words. It actually brings a depth to them and you understand in a greater sense that Jesus is the one to whom the Torah pointed to all along, and that’s why he can, I think, explain the true intention of the Torah. He’s not going against it, he said “I didn’t come to abolish it, I came to fulfill it.” So of course he would explain what this meant all along. If I am one with Yahweh, then I would be the one who can explain to you exactly what this meant. And so then there’s different responses to Jesus and so forth and so on.

TK: Yeah, so in the book you mentioned if we use that same shadow story language and there’s stories that would be plain—you’re watching Jesus do something, go somewhere—and then there’s something in the background. And you mentioned David, and you mentioned Moses and Abraham and Israel. Can we start with David and you can tell us that sort of thing that’s in the background that maybe I wouldn’t see or wouldn’t know?

PS: Sure. Yeah. So one of the things with this book is that a lot of people have noted the fulfillment quotations in Matthew, which is where Matthew will say, “This happened to fulfill this text.” And they’ll quote from Old Testament text. Those are really clear quotations to the Old Testament. Hey, I’m picking up on this. What’s interesting about Matthew—so I’m going to set this up in a longer way—but what’s interesting about Matthew is he has a lot of those at the beginning of his book. And then he kind of drops them off. They don’t occur as much.

But what I think Matthew’s trying to do is he’s teaching us how to read his Gospel at the beginning, so he throws a bunch of them in at the beginning and then in some sense he lets you go figure it out as you go on. Not that he’s not still dropping hints, but it’s not as explicit. And so in this book, what I wanted to do was not just take individual verses or even individual sections, although I do some of that, but take like large swaths of the narrative and say if this is true with Jesus’s movement into Egypt that this is fulfilling a greater pattern in out of Egypt, then could that be true for his maybe larger geographical movements?

So when you read Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus begins—he’s born in Bethlehem and he’s born in the South, and then he’s in some sense, he has to move from there because of persecution and people seeking to kill him. And he ends up doing most of his ministry in Galilee, Nazareth of Galilee. And he doesn’t return to Jerusalem in these Gospels until the very end. So he’s rejected in some sense in Jerusalem at the beginning and at the end. And so that should be—if he’s, Matthew 1:1 says he’s the son of David, so he should be the king who’s residing in Jerusalem.

TK: The proper place for the king.

PS: And I think as he goes to Jerusalem proper, the proper place for the king to be. That’s right—like the capital city. He should be in the South, not in the North, in one sense. And so I just began to think, oh, is that like someone else that we’ve seen in the Old Testament?

And if you read through David’s life consistently, David is on the run from his own family members. He’s on the run from Saul, he’s on the run from him. He’s not always in the capital city for various reasons because there are people after him. And so there’s this large theme in the Old Testament that David is kind of a suffering king. He’s a reigning king, he’s a glorious king, but he’s also a suffering king. You get that in the Psalms, and I’d argue you get that in the narrative of his life.

And so I began to think, well, maybe Matthew’s doing something similar to that, that there’s a sense in which Matthew portrays Jesus—rightly, historically, but also with the shadow story—as being born near the capital city, Bethlehem, right. But then there’s persecution. So he has to leave. And so in one sense, he’s exiled, and then he comes back to his city to be enthroned. But what happens at his enthronement? Well, it isn’t enthronement, but it’s through the cross.

And so noticing that the first 2 chapters and then I think it’s the last 3 chapters or so are kind of our Jerusalem-ish narratives, or near Jerusalem, and the rest of it’s Galilee—that actually is going to match the geographic journey of David himself. So that’s widening our lens to the whole book and saying, wow, Jesus’s movements—there’s something really important about this. And I don’t think I’m making—of course, I don’t think I’m making this up out of thin air, that I’m just putting things together. Matthew is using quotations to say he was supposed to be in Nazareth. “He shall be called a Nazarene,” Matthew 2:23, I think it is. And he’s using quotations for him going into Egypt. So I think initially, Matthew is telling me pay attention to the geography, right, pay attention to where he’s going and that that’s—you can also see Davidic themes.

So often when you come to Matthew, a lot of people say, oh, he’s the new Moses. That’s very true. But again, go to Matthew 1:1. He is the son of David, the son of Abraham. He doesn’t mention Moses, right? And so I wanted to put like, wait, Matthew is telling me how to read Jesus right now. And he says, David, Abraham. Now, that’s not the exclusion of Moses. But I really wanted to begin with kind of that kingship theme because I think as you actually trace the Gospel, it’s very clear one of his major emphases is Jesus’s kingship.

Think at the end of the Gospel, what’s hanging above Jesus’s head? The title—This is the King of the Jews. And so it’s all leading to that moment. And then in the midst of the Gospel, you have shepherd-type imagery. Jesus continually refers to himself, I think five times, maybe explicitly, that there’s a reference to Jesus as a sort of shepherd. And who is described in the Old Testament as a type of shepherd, even to Israel? Well, of course, it’s David. He was a shepherd of sheep. He was called to shepherd God’s people, who is Israel. And so for Jesus to describe himself as a shepherd would be another kind of Davidic theme that you see laced through the whole Gospel.

JD: So on the surface we have Matthew open by saying Jesus is the son of David, the son of Abraham. We get this long genealogy that is bathed in Old Testament history and anticipation. Then Matthew distinctively includes the story of the wise men who come in looking for the king. So that really sets us up for this David idea and then the book ends with Jesus having all authority in heaven and on earth. He is that reigning king. Moving through Abraham, there’s all the anticipations in Genesis, not only for this deliverer, but a royal deliverer who would come. But what you’re adding to this is that Jesus’s even geographical movement outside of Jerusalem and then culminating in Jerusalem is in some way recalling for the reader who has eyes to see the life of David himself, who was a royal figure and yet never able to rest as it were because he was on the move in light of the terrors that were trying to overcome his reign. [17:00]

PS: That’s right, yeah. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And as I said earlier, Matthew, as you pointed out, beginning with the genealogy—Matthew is telling us this is very much like the Old Testament. I’m writing a book that’s in the same even form as, you know, Genesis has a lot of genealogies. It’s actually structured, many people think, by genealogies. Same with First and Second Chronicles, the last two books of the Hebrew ordering of the Old Testament has a lot of genealogy, so it’s very appropriate for him to begin with the genealogy.

So we sometimes read the genealogy—what a terrible way to start a book.

JD: You’re really hooking the readers this way, right?

PS: But this is—this is the story of Israel told by a disciple of Jesus who’s summarizing the story of Israel for us. This is, I mean, like, really helpful biblical theological lesson.

I would argue in Matthew 1:1, who should you pay attention to? Well, it’s all leading to Jesus Christ. There’s a theme of seed genealogy, right? And you need to pay attention—a lot of attention to David and Abraham. And who are those two figures? Those are the two main covenantal figures. There’s a covenant made with Abraham. There’s a covenant made with David.

So I like to say to my students, I think there’s 8 words in the Greek New Testament. We have in eight words a whole summary of the Old Testament from a disciple of Jesus, a Jewish man who learned from Jesus and said, let me give it to you all in one sentence.There’s more to say obviously. This one is going to go and die. But what a great biblical theological lesson. And if you go through all of these names, there is a sense in which he is just showing us—here’s the story. And here’s what you need to pay attention to.

But for this book, I wanted to say, isn’t that interesting? That he begins with a form of a genealogy that some of the point is not just in the words, but in the way that he says those words. In other words, the form is a genealogy itself, and so therefore we need to pay attention to the form as the Gospel unfolds. So, so many times I think we think maybe the Gospel writers are just copying down like they knew exactly what to write, but they are authors who are inspired by the Holy Spirit who are composing literary works. They’re composing by themes and they are putting their own kind of stamp on it, while still speaking about what truly happened, but they’re forming it in a way to say something. And so we need to pay attention not only to what is written, but how it’s written.

TK: So what you’re saying is Matthew knows that obviously David is really important, but he’s writing in such a way that, like you said, a careful reader would say you’re telling the story so that I will start thinking about David’s physical…

PS: Yes.

TK: Yeah, you’re crafting the story—not meaning inventing because it really did happen. But you want me to see…

PS: This. Right. And you think about—we don’t know exactly who Matthew’s audience was. This is a very Jewish Gospel. Right. But think if he is writing to a Jewish audience, maybe a mix of Jewish-Gentile audience. He’s trying to convince them—I think I said this in class, but I think John 20:31 is a great purpose for all of the Gospels—that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. If that’s the purpose, in one sense, of Matthew—a Jewish audience especially would wonder, was this really the Messiah? Because he died upon a Roman cross. We were expecting someone to come to rescue us. And they’re saying he rose from the dead. But I don’t have any evidence of that. I didn’t see him, and he died.

And Matthew steps back and says—but look at his life. Doesn’t he look a lot like David? Doesn’t he look a lot like Abraham? Doesn’t he look a lot like Moses? And so there is a kind of apologetic purpose. I don’t think it’s the only purpose, but there’s an apologetic purpose to say—we go back. People who are reading your Old Testament, read your Old Testament and then read this about Jesus and see all of the connections that are there and maybe this will convince you he was the Messiah. He was so much like David, he was the one that was promised.

I think that’s kind of the main thrust of him writing in this way. This isn’t just for kicks and giggles, right, for us to be like, oh, this is a really cool piece of literature that he did it this way. No, this is because he wants to convince us of something—that Jesus is the Messiah. He’s more than Messiah. He’s the Son of God. But that would be convincing to them that they say oh—where is he from? Matthew just proved he’s from the line of David. He’s from the line of Abraham. So this is all very important to his kind of purpose in writing. I don’t know if I answered your question. I forgot it now. But here we go.

TK: Here we go. I guess the question I would have for both you guys is—so I’m a preacher and you’ve convinced me he’s following David geographically. How do I use that with my people? What do I do with that? Because I’m telling the story of Jesus. But you’ve just said it’s almost like changing from a movie screen to a soundtrack. Matthew is purposely playing a David sound, a music behind the story. How would you suggest this helps in preaching, teaching, and how do I use it? Or if I’m a parent telling the story to my kids or Sunday school class, whatever I do.

JD: Or if I can build on that and then we’ll toss it back to you—as we recognize David is in the backdrop, are we supposed to view this simply as the type, this original figure named David? Are we supposed to view him merely as predicting Christ? A pointer to Christ, or are we also supposed to read Matthew recognizing that David in some way clarifies things about Christ—that he’s not only a pointer…

PS: That’s good.

JD: So that once we arrive at Jesus, we don’t need David, or do we still need David in order to properly fully understand what Matthew is wanting to tell us about Jesus? So reflect on that a little bit.

PS: Yeah. Try to get to both questions, but beginning with your question—yes, I think David clarifies. As you learn more about David, you suddenly see more about Jesus, but it’s the same way around too, right? As you learn more about Jesus, you see more about David. So we talk a lot about reading backwards and forwards. And so you have to do both. You have to read both forward to Jesus because he is predicting—Acts 2 talks about David was prophesying about this one to come. But there’s also a sense in which sometimes it’s not always just prophecy, sometimes it’s just patterns in his life. And so some of that is going on in David’s life where he’s just going through things that the divine author and the human author in the Old Testament is going to write about that will then be fulfilled in Jesus.

And then you go to Jesus and you’re like, oh, now I understand more about this Jesus figure because of David and now I understand more about this David figure because of Jesus. And so I think it’s always like you’re going back and forth, back and forth and continuing. I like the language of this is Jewish meditation literature. Right. You’re supposed to continually go back and say what do I learn about Jesus here and then go forward. Here’s Jesus. Now what? How does that help me understand even what happened before? And so it’s always a conversation back and forth.

In terms of preaching and teaching—yeah. How do you do this? Well, I would say it’s important in the Gospels and in narratives to preach large texts. There might be a tendency sometimes to take a few verses here, a few verses there, but especially with narrative stories, it’s important to get the flow of what’s actually happening. That’s hard. I admit that’s hard to do, but it would be an encouragement to begin to maybe take larger chunks as you’re teaching and preaching and saying watch what’s happening through this whole section so they can get a sense of the scope of the book because I really think these were meant to be read as whole narratives together. Now you can break them down into little pieces sometimes and study them. That’s really helpful too. But I think if you’re doing that, you’re able to see these large themes and what Matthew is trying to do.

And when you come to texts like this and you say, how is this helpful for me with my people? I think I go back to the comment maybe I just made—it’s showing you Jesus is the one you’ve been waiting for as well. So not just that Israel’s been waiting for, but the story of the Scriptures is that we’re all in need of help. And so Israel is just a picture of us in our fallen condition. And so they were longing for someone to rescue them, just like we are longing for someone to rescue us. And as we are convinced that he is the one that they were waiting for, we should also be convinced that oh, he also came to deal with everything that’s wrong in my own heart and everything that’s wrong in this whole world.

And so I think just kind of pressing into that idea that he’s the king, he’s the Messiah, he’s the Lord, he’s the savior. And that these Gospel writers, especially Matthew, are showing that not just through what they say, but how they say it will actually bring an attractiveness to your people that I want more of this Savior. When you see how beautiful these pieces of literature are, in one sense that points you to the beauty of God himself, because God was the one who ultimately authored these.

JD: So, you’ve given us a picture of David in the book, and I’m sure many of our listeners are like, wow, I never saw that before. You started to mention Moses. We have not just the Sermon on the Mount, but actually 5 mountaintops, right, in this book. And Jesus is being portrayed—are there any other ways that you would draw attention to the Moses piece in the Gospel of Matthew?

PS: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot to say about Moses. You notice at the very beginning of Matthew’s Gospel in Matthew 2, Jesus is born and there’s a king on the throne who is not excited about Jesus being born, and so Jesus has to leave and that king wants to kill all of the children who are in Bethlehem.

JD: That king seeks to kill.

PS: And so you should immediately be thinking, does that remind me of a previous story?

Well, in the exodus, that’s exactly what happens. Moses is born under a foreign regime with a pharaoh who is called a king who is killing all the male Hebrew boys. And so Moses, miraculously, sovereignly escapes right by being put in the basket and floating down the river. So you get at the very beginning—Moses is going to be a figure who redeems Israel through Yahweh. Yahweh does it through Moses, right. In the same sense, Jesus is the Redeemer. And he is also preserved. Yahweh preserves him by having his family go out.

And so at the very beginning you have this kind of movement. And what’s really interesting is if you begin tracing—OK, we’ve got this Moses echo right at the beginning, right. And then you go through and what happens to Jesus? Well, Jesus then goes through water in his baptism and then he goes into the wilderness and he’s tested. Now that’s very much like Israel, but it’s like Moses. Moses was with them as well. And then what happens after he goes through the water, tested for 40 days…

JD: And he’s tested 40 days instead of 40 years. Yeah.

PS: After he goes through the water, he goes up on the mountain, as we talked about. And that makes sense for Sinai. And so some of those echoes, you know, they—it’s like, OK, is this following the whole story of Moses all the way through? Sometimes he goes in and out, but already you have chapters, really one through 7, one through 8, right, that are very closely mirroring Moses’s ministry.

And so that means you should begin to think—oh, Jesus—and what I tried to do in this book is note that Jesus is not just like Moses, but Moses is associated with that redemption, the new exodus. And so you want to put that theme over Matthew’s whole Gospel and say—oh, Jesus is not just the new lawgiver, but he’s the one who will come to redeem his people from their sins. So you want to trace that throughout the whole book.

Some of the more detailed ones that I think we talked about even in class this week—when Moses is given certain signs, he’s given 3 signs. If I’m remembering correctly, I might be able to remember all of them off the top of my head. But he has the staff that he throws down that becomes a serpent and he picks up that serpent and it becomes a staff. And you know, we might just think, OK, that’s a nice little image, but staff and serpent are pretty loaded terms and loaded images in the Old Testament. And so even that sign of him picking up the serpent and it becoming a staff—you’ve got, he’s going to lead his people, right? Which I think pushes forward to David. And he’s going to do that by crushing the serpent and defeating the serpent. And I think that theme is actually shown in Jesus’ ministry in the temptation as he encounters Satan himself.

You also think about the miracle of he puts his hand in his pocket, right, and it comes out leprous. And Jesus goes around and he does what? he heals people of their leprosy. And so he has a water miracle and Jesus has water miracles that he does. So even those little details of what Jesus is doing as he heals the leper, as he walks across the waters—these you should be thinking back to Old Testament stories and saying—oh, is there something there? So I could say much more, but I’ll pause.

JD: In a previous episode we looked at, we talked about the role of the first exodus anticipating a second exodus, and that Moses himself, even in Exodus 15—he first—Israel sings the song. And this is intriguing. It’s written by the prophetess Miriam. That’s what she’s called. They sing the song of the defeat of Egypt, and then the second half of the song anticipates the destruction of all of those in Canaan—all the enemies that would be. Yet Israel isn’t even there yet. It’s that the song is already reading the first exodus as setting a pattern of future deliverance.

Moses anticipated greater exodus imagery to come in Israel’s history, but then Moses himself also was told that there would be a prophet like him. And yet this prophet is one to whom they will listen. Moses called them—“Hear, O Israel. Listen, listen.” And then God says—God declares God hasn’t given you ears to hear. But when this prophet, this new Moses figure arrives, God declares to him you will listen. That’s Deuteronomy 18:15, and that’s exactly the statement that we read about in the Gospel of Matthew at the Transfiguration scene. “This is my Son. Listen to him.” He’s being—Jesus is being elevated as this new Moses that Moses himself was anticipating would supersede him as a new covenant mediator.

PS: Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Lord’s Supper—our Last Supper as he has the Last Supper with his disciples. And he’s talking about taking his blood into him, right, the cup and the bread. It’s a new covenant ceremony, I think, alluding back to the covenantal ceremony they had at Mount Sinai.

JD: Exodus 24. That’s right. Yeah.

PS: So you just—it’s like throughout the whole Gospel. It’s all there. And even that phrase “listen to him” in the transfiguration—what’s so interesting in that context is it’s “listen to him,” I think in terms of all of his teaching of the Torah, but more specifically in that context, it’s listen to him because he’s just predicted his death too. And so with Matthew’s Gospel—what sort of Messiah should we expect? He’s going to go and he’s going to die on your behalf. And remember what the Passover, right? The blood that was spilt on your behalf. And it was put on your doorpost so that you could go free, right. And there had to be a substitute for those things.

So it’s—what’s interesting about that text—it’s not that the Mosaic and the Davidic, the Moses and the David echoes, are in opposition to one another. They’re actually coming together there, right. They’re coming together because David was that suffering king. And then you have this new Moses figure saying, listen to that new David figure who’s talking about his suffering, which is like the kind of redemption that you went through. And so it’s all so interconnected and that’s why it’s so important to read, read the Scriptures as the unity.

JD: Yeah. David, we’ve got Moses. We gotta bring this to an end, but I want to hear about Abraham. How do you see Abraham in this book?

PS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I see Abraham? I wrote this a while ago—well. The emphasis that I put in this chapter are on Abraham’s new family. So if we just begin in the genealogy, the promise to Abraham is that his family would be a blessing to all nations. And you see just right at the beginning of Matthew that he’s called the son of Abraham. And then in the genealogy itself you have Gentile figures who are included in the line of Jesus.

TK: And that was a point actually that I know, because sometimes specifically the women in the genealogy—people will make a point they all have some level of questionability, maybe. And you argued something different—which is the emphasis is more of a Gentile emphasis on the people of God.

PS: Yeah. Yeah, I think these figures, there’s some debate about some of them, but many of these figures, especially the women, are coming from Gentile backgrounds and they’re being included. So this is a very Jewish picture of Jesus. However, at the same time throughout the Gospel, there are hints. There are hints that the Gentiles will and are coming in. That obviously comes to a climax in the Great Commission when he says to go into all nations. But throughout, even John the Baptist is saying watch out, you sons of Abraham, the ax is laid at the root of the trees. And then Jesus is speaking to a Canaanite woman, and he welcomes her into the Kingdom. And he has lines like “many shall come from the east and the west, and sit and recline at the table of Abraham.”

And so throughout the Gospel, you actually get the kind of hints—more, some are more explicit than others—that Jesus is, as Matthew 1:1 says, the true son of Abraham who is going to welcome all nations to his side. And I think that’s evident even as I mentioned with the genealogy itself. How do you define the family of Jesus? Well, it includes Gentile figures right at the very beginning. So Jesus will still say to his disciples go only amongst Israel, but there’s indications that he’s at a shifting point in salvation history—that actually that is starting to change where they’re going to go to Gentiles as well.

JD: Yeah, yeah, this is really beautiful. In Genesis 12, there are two commands—go, be a blessing. And the first command is related to Abraham becoming a great nation, having a great name, God blessing him. The second command is ultimately going to result in all the families of the ground being blessed. And in the old covenant, Abraham gives rise to Israel. He’s the father of one nation in one land. But for him to become a father of a multitude, as is promised in Genesis 17, even Genesis itself links that to an individual royal seed, an individual descendant of Abraham through whom the world would be blessed. Abraham will only become the father of a multitude when he arrives, and it’s as if Matthew is saying, OK, we’re moving into stage two of the Abrahamic covenant. Stage one was Israel, and the land, and even for Israel, the nation becomes a nation in the Book of Exodus. Therefore, that book with all the genealogies is like their foundation. And now we get a new book of genealogy that leads us not just to Israel, the nation, but now to a new Israel. And Jesus is this new Abraham figure who’s now bringing in not only some from the Jews, but the fold is bigger. And there’s even some from the Gentiles who are being gathered in.

PS: That’s right. And biblically, theologically, the whole story of the Bible—it’s really important to point out that Jesus is the true son of Abraham because Israel was not a blessing to the nations as they should have been. And it’s because of their sin. And so you had to have a true Israelite come, one who is faithful in all the ways, which therefore was, as Jesus describes himself, a light to the nations, a light to the Gentiles, that he would come. And you have that—like he goes to Gentile territory in some sense even to preach to them. And so he becomes that light that Israel was supposed to be, but they couldn’t accomplish it because they needed God himself to accomplish that on their behalf.

JD: And in those texts that you’re mentioning with Jesus as light, I just think about Matthew 4 and how it alludes back to Isaiah, that really is focusing, anticipating on that child King. Isaiah 9 opens “a people that are sitting in darkness have seen a great light,” and that light in that very chapter is focused on a child who would be born. A son will be given and his name will be Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. This is Jesus.

PS: Yeah. And some people are like, wait, I thought we were talking about Abraham. You’re talking about kings. But Genesis 17, I think it is, says to Abraham, “Kings will come from you.” And so Matthew 1:1 again—I keep on going back to it—that link between Jesus, the son of David, the son of Abraham. All of these themes are coming together. Right, Abraham—kings were supposed to come from him. So David is coming in the line of Abraham and then Jesus is coming in the line of David and Abraham. And so it’s not that you have to divorce these things. Sometimes it’s Abraham. Sometimes it’s David. That could be the case at times, but actually they’re all interconnected.

TK: So can we turn to the—so I’m looking at your book at Matthew, Disciple and Scribe.

Part of your book is about the book of Matthew. It’s not just about the book of Matthew, it’s about the man Matthew as well, and an idea—and wrapping up, can you give us your idea about him as a disciple and scribe and what he felt like his job was doing in the book? Because that relates to the people we’re talking to.

PS: That’s right. Yeah. So my argument in the book is from Matthew 13:52, which Jesus says, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of heaven”—and that word “trained” actually comes from the word to be discipled or disciple. So every scribe who is discipled for the Kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old. This comes in Matthew 13:52, after Jesus has told his kind of Kingdom parables and he’s asked them, “Do you understand these things?” And I think the emphasis in Matthew, a little different than Mark actually, is that they do understand. They say “Yes, we have understood these things” because he’s revealed it to them. They are insiders.

So Jesus is discipling them in terms of how to bring out treasures both new and old. So Matthew, as a disciple of Jesus, is listening to Jesus teach and watching him live his life. And I think things are clicking for him in terms of the Old Testament story. And I think he’s finally understanding as he’s being discipled by his true teacher.

One of the things in Matthew is that there’s five key discourses of Jesus’s teaching throughout the Gospel. So he goes back and forth—Matthew does—between Jesus’s deeds and Jesus’s teaching, Jesus’s deeds and Jesus’s teaching, and so he pairs these things. But there’s a huge emphasis upon Jesus as a teacher. So that verse I think indicates that it’s actually Matthew’s little signature that he is the scribe who has been trained by his teacher. I would even call him a teacher of wisdom, like Solomon, the son of David, right, who has been trained, discipled for the Kingdom of heaven to bring out treasures new and old. And that’s exactly what he does. His whole Gospel is laced with the new—Jesus himself—and the old, the Old Testament.

And so that’s the lens that I put over it because I think Matthew—later on in Matthew 23, Jesus says “I will send you prophets and wise men and scribes.” he will send them scribes—I think Matthew’s the only one to use scribes in that text. And so he’s going to send them future scribes. So I think Jesus—this gets me excited—Jesus was creating a new scribal school because the scribes at the time—these are the scribes in Matthew 2 who read the Scriptures and are like “Jesus is that Messiah.” They read from Micah 5:2 and they don’t understand that it’s Jesus. It’s the scribes that Herod calls. And so Jesus is saying these scribes don’t understand. So I need to create a new scribal school.

I know that sounds strange. But while all that means is he’s creating new disciples who understand. And the role of Jesus in redemptive history and what that means is he’s teaching us in terms of how to understand in Matthew’s Gospel and throughout the whole Scriptures how Jesus fits into the whole story as well. We likewise are to learn from Jesus the teacher and his disciple who was a scribe how Jesus completes his whole story.

TK: And we then, like Matthew, should be bringing out treasures…

PS: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.

TK: New and old. But the old is not bad.

PS: No, no, it’s not. Yeah. New and old. You’re bringing them out. And Great Commission—“Go forth, teaching them to observe everything that I’ve commanded you.” So what are we to go out and do? Well, Matthew is teaching us in this and we are to go forth teaching others these same things. And so yes, we didn’t walk and talk with Jesus, but we’re taking a play out of Matthew’s book and saying we want to explain these things to others too. So this isn’t something for us to just think about and kind of keep to ourselves. That I think Jesus is saying this is actually how you make disciples of others. You explain to them what’s happening in these pages.

TK: I think something I love as we’ve talked about this and thinking about the Gospel—Matthew then is Matthew was doing both the new and the old at the same time. And modeling that. And one of the critiques of scholarship sometimes is that Old Testament is an Old Testament thing almost in its own building, and New Testament is New Testament. And you’re saying no, that that’s not what we’re talking about.

PS: Yeah. And I think just spending a lot of time in the Sermon on the Mount, you can see that Jesus is saying this is all good and true, but you haven’t understood it rightly. So I need to tell you about it. I need to have it point to me. Yes. And I need to truly explain it. So sometimes we’ll get—this is probably trying to end—but when he said “You have heard it was said, but I say to you,” some people take that as oh, he’s totally contradicting that. No, you’ve heard it was said by your own teachers. But let me teach you really what it means. Right. Let me tell you what the true intention was all along.

TK: Final thoughts, Jason?

JD: Well, I think this has been a rich conversation. I’m super grateful for you, Dr. Schreiner. Thank you. Look forward to our next podcast.

PS: Thanks for having me. Fun to be with you guys.

JY: Thanks for joining us for GearTalk. If you have questions about biblical theology you’d like us to address on future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Also check out handstotheplow.org for resources designed to help you understand the Bible and its teachings.