Canter Bridge

The gospel according to Matthew, one of the four canonical literary glimpses of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that are afforded us, peers attentively into Israel’s past. Indeed, this portrait of Jesus and his way in this world finds its guiding framework in the Old Testament. Matthew will frequently refer to a word or action of Jesus with a ‘this is that’ formula that anchors the thing to some fixed point in the witness of the Hebrew Bible.

During that period of the nineteeth and twentieth century when a cavalier or dismissive attitude towards the biblical text sometimes seemed to be a credential of the biblical scholar, it was common to sniff at the employment of Old Testament allusions and citations by the New Testament writers. It was alleged without much evidence that the New Testament writers simply ‘prooftexted’ the Old, tearing off a clause here, a prophetic dictum there, and applying these willy-nilly—if conveniently—to the point they wished to make.

By and large, scholarship has experienced a sea change in this regard. Students of the Old Testament echoes in the New are now likely to invest the required time and energy in discerning behind such parallels a knowing allusiveness, ‘figural’ or echoing patterns, and the like. It is still possible for such writers to acknowledge a certain aggressiveness in the New Testament writers’ approach to the Old Testament inventory. Yet seldom are these writers accused of crass stupidity or an unrestrainedly arbitrary method.

This is a good thing. The New Testament writers, after all, approached the Hebrew Scriptures–often in Greek translation–as sacred literature. This alone might be assumed to make some impress upon how they utilized the material.

Chapters 3 and 4 of the gospel of Matthew use a ‘this is the word spoken …’ formula to undergird two connections established between events surrounding Jesus’ life and the book of Isaiah. In the first, the appearance of the quasi-prophetic figure John the Baptist in the Judean desert and his unbending message to Israel, is ‘explained’ by a quote from the opening lines of what is often called Deutero-Isaiah. The point in the Isaianic corpus that is being brought to the reader’s attention comprises a powerful literary hinge. On it, the massive book of Isaiah swings from judgment to a divine intentionality that is expressed by vocabulary related to ‘comforting’, ‘choosing again’, ‘return to Zion’, and the like.

This formidable shift in the book is signaled in chapter 40 via an enigmatic summons by an anonymous voice that cries out to a coterie of commissioned voices. ‘Comfort my people!’, the latter are exhorted. The voice that does the calling is identified as just that: ‘a voice calling’. It’s message: ‘In the desert prepare a way for the Lord!’

Clearly, in the first instance, the matter is preparatory to Judah’s return from Babylonian captivity to Jerusalem and adjacent regions. Matthew is not ignorant of this brute fact. Yet he finds in the Baptist’s ‘desert’ proclamation a compelling echo of the Isaiah announcement, so much so that he makes bold to identify it without engaging the complexities of the case in just this way: ‘This is that …’

Again in the chapters before us in Matthew, the evangelist—a term often applied to the writers of the canonical gospels—frames Jesus’ return to Nazareth in Galilee by reference to an obscure Isaianic announcement. This time, the historically northern-Israel regions are told of a light that will dawn upon those localities that had been most profoundly brutalized by the Assyrian armies. Matthew picks up this comforting announcement and employs it to ‘explain’ Jesus’ settling in the unsung town of Nazareth.

The term ‘recapitulation’ is sometimes utilized to abbreviate the pattern often seen in presentations of Jesus’ life in which he ‘walks again’ the path of antecedent Israel. The burden of this descriptive method is to tie Jesus’ life so closely into that of his people that all manner of identifications become possible.

It is not a manipulative method and there is no subterfuge in it when those engaged in the conversation are aware of the possibilities afforded by their shared histories. It requires neither a dull nor a dishonest writer.

It powerfully connects the one whom the gospel text says would ‘save his people from their sins’—so is his name Jesus/Joshua explained—to the plight of that very people. It does not escape the early Christian writers that the book of Isaiah also spoke of a royal child who would be nick-named ‘Emmanuel’, God with us. Matthew, in the texts before our eyes at this moment, seems particularly taken by the wonder of the preposition and its accompanying pronoun. With us, indeed.