Abstract

The central mission of the Christian Church is the proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ. This essentially consists of his Person and his redemptive work . This is what is called the kerygma or Gospel. The New Testament gospel writers seek to explain this kerygma by using Old Testament categories like Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man and others. The New Testament, along with the Old Testament, remains the ultimate authority on matters of Christian faith and practice. In the search for an understanding of the concept of Messiah in the Gospel according to Matthew, a study of the evangelist’s fulfilment quotations offers one of the most significant alternative approaches. This approach is exactly what the present inquiry, in the following pages, seeks to apply in an attempt to determine how this particular evangelist understands Jesus as the Messiah. Once we grasp what the evangelist understands by the concept of Messiah, we can proceed, safely, to apply that meaning to our contemporary situations. The study of fulfilment quotations in the Gospel according to Matthew is not a new development. As early as 1885, E. Massebieau argued that they have an apologetic function, designed to contribute to Christian “vindication” over against Judaism. Throughout the past century, scholars have in many ways contributed to our understanding of these special Matthean quotations. The primary focus in these studies was, however, on the literary problems of these quotations. To my knowledge, none of these previous scholarly attempts focused on their theological significance in light of their Old Testament prophetic word. The objective of the present research is to investigate how an understanding of these quotations, in view of their Old and New Testament contexts, would contribute to our understanding of the evangelist’s theology, especially in terms of his views of Jesus as the Promised Messiah. It also aims at investigating the problem of origin, and character, of the fulfilment quotations under study. In the process, the research seeks to contribute to the on going documentation of Matthean theology. The research presents to us quite a significant challenge. It demands that we engage in a five-step hermeneutical procedure required in the investigation of any genre of Scripture. These are, according to Virkler, historical-cultural and contextual analysis; lexical-syntactical analysis; theological analysis; genre identification and analysis; and application. This analytical method is later referred to simply as an exegetical literary approach or as grammatical-historical method. As the reader will soon discover, these hermeneutical concepts are used as tools and instruments in the exegetical-theological process of the present 9 inquiry. These analytical tools are applied to the quotations in their double settings of Old Testament prophecy and Christian gospel. The results of the research shed new light on the role of the prophetic word in the evangelist’s Christological understanding of the Messiah. The results also have implications for the manner in which the evangelist wrote his gospel, and these are likely to stimulate further discussion, especially on Matthean authorship and the Synoptic Problem in general. The study does not claim to be exhaustive, let alone conclusive, at all the crucial points. Despite this limitation, however, the research provides a new perspective on the role of prophecy in the Christological understanding of the New Testament writers, especially the evangelist Matthew. It also presents the evangelist as an independent Christian theologian with the ability, like his New Testament counterparts, to construct a Christology of his own, using the raw materials of gospel tradition (both oral and written) and Biblical prophecy, a role which Matthean critical scholarship has for long denied him. Previous Matthean critical scholarship, with a few exceptions, has generally seen the evangelist as a Marcan “disciple.”

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School	: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Issued Date	: 2001

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