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That's why the gospel employs more than half of its Old Testament citations within the gospel's prologue chapters one through four. Although these texts lead Matthew's story, many scholars have long assumed that the scriptural citations have nothing to do with their original Old Testament context. Was Matthew a bumbling her maneuverist? Not so, says Nicholas Piotrowski.
In his book, Matthew's New David at the End of Exile. Nicholas investigates Matthew's Old Testament quotations, and binds that they provide reading and worldview orientation for the gospel's audience. The seven prologue quotations all emerge from Old Testament context concerned with David or the end of the exile for both. A dual theme that provides an interpretive guide for the entire narrative of Matthew's gospel.
You're listening to new books and biblical studies and I'm Michael Morales, your host. Nicholas G. Piotrowski received his PhD from Wheaton College in 2013. He's Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Crossroads Bible College, an academic dean at Indianapolis Theological Seminary.
Nicholas is co-founder and main speaker for the Fox Valley Theological Society, and is also published with Tindale Bulletin and Bulletin for Biblical Research. Nicholas, welcome to the show. Thank you. Very pleased to talk to you today.
Nicholas, tell us about yourself and how you came to write a book on Matthew's gospel. Yeah, thanks. So I was teaching at a Christian high school in Maryland, just north of D.C. I did you a number of topics, but particularly one class was a class on hermeneutics and biblical theology to juniors and seniors.
And we were studying Jeremiah, and then we moved on to study Matthew. I don't remember why the books were in that order, but they were. And as we're studying Matthew, it occurred to me that it seems that in Matthew's perspective, the exile in some sense has not ended. And we know from Matthew 2 that we are already supposed to think of Jeremiah because of the quotation of Jeremiah there.
So putting those two together just providentially got me thinking, I wrote to one of my former professors at RTS Jackson, Dennis Ireland, who was a great teacher. I looked up him greatly. And he put me onto a chapter by NT Wright, the New Testament and the people of God. And as I'm reading that, I'm thinking, wow, so there is something here.
Other people have seen this kind of thing before as well, read some other works. And there you go. It's just got rolling in my mind. When the opportunity came along to study at Wheaton College, to pursue a PhD in the parent was my advisor.
And he's very much interested in that topic as well. So it was easy to settle on that as a dissertation topic. We wrangled for a while about methodology and what particular scholarly avenue I would get into the topic. And we decided after much laboring that perhaps the four-nula quotations were the best way to approach the topic in the gospel of Matthew.
And they seemed in need of exploration for other reasons. And so seven years later, we have the final product. And along your journey of studying the gospel of Matthew, did you get married? You have children?
OK. I was married beforehand. It may not have happened while I was working on it. So I had been married for two years before we relocated to Wheaton.
I did have two children during the process and relocated to Indianapolis. So yeah, life went on. And none of the last ones ever have a carve out time that could happen. Let's turn now to your book first with the big picture in mind.
Your book studies the seven Old Testament quotations found in the prologue of Matthew's gospel. What themes do these quotations have in common? How do they relate to Matthew's story about Jesus? Yeah, good.
Thanks. So I discern that when we explore the Old Testament context from which these quotations come, they have in common either a concern with David and or the end of the exile. And as the prologue moves forward from, I call it the prologue Matthew 1 through 4 17, as the prologue moves forward, it seems like the attention moves from David increasingly more to the end of the exile. And I use the analogy in the book.
I've written the prologue. It would be like coming to a play early and watching the stage hands set up the sets. This prop here and that character there. And so you know, as you watch the stage being set up, that those are going to be important contributors to the rest of the drama.
Well, Matthew 4 17 following is the rest of the drama. And so paying particular attention to those Old Testament formula quotations in the first word chapters gives the reader an insight into what to expect therefore in the rest of the book and what does one expect? Well, have you ever seen David and the end of the exile? And so I think observing the heavy Davidic and end of exile theology in those first couple chapters, first few chapters really opens up our eyes.
What's going on in the rest of Matthew is though Matthew was broadcasting. Hey reader, pay attention. I will now tell you a Davidic end of exile story vis-a-vis the life death and resurrection of Jesus. Now let's look at an example or two of how Matthew uses Old Testament quotations.
Matthew 1 verses 22 through 23. Matthew quotes from Isaiah 7 14. Matthew's text reads, Behold the Virgin, W with child and their son and they shall call his name the manual, which is translated God with us. What is the original Old Testament context for this quote?
How does Matthew employ it for his story? Yeah, you're asking the right questions and in the right order, what is the original Old Testament context? I think usually we start with Matthew 1 and I do to my dissertation. We kind of end there.
We tell Mary's the Virgin, Jesus is the child. What a great miracle and that is some miracle for the Virgin of a child. But the Old Testament context, the concern is not so much with the woman having the child or rather the main character of concern in Isaiah 7 and 8 is David. In fact, A has, the sitting Davidic king at the time is referred to by his own name, A has once, maybe twice.
Every other time he's referred to as O house of David. He's referred to by that redemptive historical institution for which he has a mataan. So I think 2 Samuel 7, the promise is made to the house of David to the problem in Isaiah 7 is that these two kings from the north want to come down to Jerusalem and usurp and supplant A has with this guy named someone from the house of Tabille. Now, who is the house of Tabille?
I don't think anybody knows. But the point is he's not the house of David and that's the key. So an assault on A has is an assault on God's very redemptive purposes through the house of David. Long story short, Isaiah 7 and 8 is therefore a testimony of how God in his province has preserved the house of David so that he can continue his redemptive historical purposes.
In chapter 9, it seems Isaiah takes that historical event and flips it into a prophetic vision of the future where David's house will be forever secured and not worry about these kinds of assaults. Now you move forward to Matthew. You're also moving forward 700 years, whatever, hundreds of years. And the house of David, I should say, has been vacant all these years.
And that has created significant theological and ideological problems for people living in the first century who believe that what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, are the word God and testimony of their covenant God's promises to them. So Matthew comes along and says, just as Isaiah, in Isaiah 7 and 8, the covenant Lord has preserved the house of David for his redemptive purposes. Now he's resurrecting the house of David for his redemptive historical purposes. So as to say that what God did in the days of A has was actually slight compared to what he's going to do now.
Preserving the house of David is one thing. Resurrecting the house of David is a whole other. So we look at Matthew 1 and 2, a lot of the vidic themes. David is just everywhere.
So while Mary is certainly important, of course, Jesus is important. The main character there is David and the promises God made to him, why they've lapsed and what we are to think about that and what it means now that the house of David is back on the historical scene. So I think it's looking at the context of Isaiah 7 through 8 and paying attention to those sort of dynamics. It really opens up Matthew 1 in ways more than we're typically used to.
Thank you. We'll take another example in Matthew 2, verses 5 through 6. Matthew quotes from Micah 5, which says, a ruler will come from Bethlehem. Tell us about this citation and how it functions in Matthew.
Yeah. That's great as well because again, at face value, it looks like a pretty straightforward prophecy. Like Micah says that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. Oh, Jesus is born in Bethlehem.
So there you go. You can check Jesus' birth off the prophetic checklist and move on. But we slow down and we move back to Micah 4 and 5. Really check the 3, 4 and 5 of Micah and explore there.
And we see that Micah is not merely concerned with the location of the birth of the Messiah, but equally why Israel went into exile in the first place, the moral failures of the house of David at the time. The temple is destroyed and so forth. And he says, I'm very interested in Micah 5, believe it's verse 3 in our English Bibles. Yeah.
Micah 5, 3 in our English Bibles, 5, 2 in Hebrew text that this surging of Jerusalem and disciplining of the house of David will continue until the time when this bit Bethlehem King is born. And so it seems to me that Micah is saying that the context of exile will persist until the time of this David a king being born in Bethlehem. And what is the context of exile? Well, that the temple will continue to be decimated and destroyed by the Gentiles.
And so therefore, the end of the exile will mean not only the resurrection of the house of David, part of the Isaiah quote, but equally the resurrection of the temple. That for exile to truly end, the new temple must be raised that is not profaned by Gentiles a legitimate place of worship for the people of God. And Micah also insists that when this happens Gentiles will also come. They will realize their idolatry, turn from the false gods and come and worship the one true living God through the house of David in the new temple.
Matthew of course has some kind of temple theology going on. And the ironic thing is that if the son of David, again, the 2nd Samuel 7 is expected to rebuild the temple, it's very ironic when you get to chapter 2425 that Jesus is predicting the destruction of the temple, not building but a destruction. So where then is the resurrection of the temple as expected by Micah at the end of the exile and long story short, I think Jesus is saying that it would be in the community of his followers, which is powerful, but to work on the fact of course in First Century Jews going forward. And the fact that the quotation of Micah 5 is in the context of the coming of a Magi, they therefore are the beginning of this, I think in the book I call the eschatological pilgrimage of the Gentiles to worship the true living God, which of course climaxes with great commission, where Jesus basically tells go out now and get more Gentiles because that's what David exile is.
It's the coming of the Gentiles to chew temple. That is helpful. Nicholas your book not only considers the context of the various Old Testament passages in the literary context of Matthew's gospel, but also the context of Matthew's original audience. Tell us about Matthew's audience.
What was the message of Matthew's gospel for them? Yeah, thanks for asking that. I've noticed that some of the reviews that doesn't get as much attention, but it's a very important part of this book that I'm trying to use a method that gives weight to the genre of choice that Matthew employs a narrative. However, narrative criticism, literary criticism has been accused of divorcing its studies from its historical locatiness.
And so I'm trying to bring these back together so paying very careful attention to historical context. So to answer your question, we have to imagine, which is not hard to do, but it's often neglected that there was a time when the New Testament did not exist. There was no New Testament. So you have these first century Jews who for generations have been ideologically shaped.
The worldview has been shaped by what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, right? They're an identity of who they are. What is the purpose of history? What's going on in the world?
Who is our God? How is he for us? Why are there problems in the covenant? All these kinds of things are shaped by their understanding of the Old Testament and of course the events in the world surrounding them.
And so far that I'm exploring these axilic themes in Matthew. I'm also asking the question, are other Jews of the first century, second temple Judaism, before Jesus' life, and also concerned with the exile. And it turns out, I think there's evidence that says that long story short is that there are a lot of different views of exile in the second temple period. Some said the exile was over.
Other people said it continued because the diaspora was still in effect. The aspergues were still all over the world. And it wasn't so much that they were an exile, but the whole nation is an exile insofar as a single Jew might be outside the Promised Land. We have a sense of solidarity.
Whereas others look at the temple. Again, this is not a house built by David. It's a house built by Herod. I can't be the true temple and so forth.
So there are all these different interpretations of exile in the second temple Judaism. And the reason the exile is such a concern is because, as I tried to mention brief earlier, it was such a terrible event that completely put the whole Jewish worldview in upheaval. How in the world could our God remove us from the land, cut the house of David off, and destroy his own temple? It really gets you rethinking things.
So years later, people were still wrestling with this and trying to understand themselves in light of those events. Now, here's what I conclude. You have a bunch of different Jewish groups in the second temple period, all vying with each other for the right to the moniker for people of God, or Israel. How in the world does Israel continue if all these covenantal icons are lost or decimated?
The temple breaking the law, house of David, all these kinds of things. So with the Pharisees' having arguments, the Pharisees' having arguments, of course, the people of Kupran have an argument, this is an elephant's having argument. Everybody has an argument for why. They are actually the continuation of Israel.
If it's by law keeping or to the temple or to the desert, to recreate the Exodus or whatever. Now you have the Matthew and community. They are shaped by these Old Testament concerns as well. They have this extra variable, these Jesus sorts, that have been told among them for years.
So they're trying to bring together their understanding of God's purposes and redemption in the Old Testament. Together with their understanding that Jesus is the resurrected Messiah. Matthew, therefore, is the result of bringing these two together in the community. Matthew codifies in written form that has an authoritative place in the community, bringing together the Jesus tradition that they've heard together with an interpretation of that Old Testament meta narrative that has been so formative for so long for them.
This will be Matthew. I'm sorry, this will be Isaiah, Michael, of course, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so forth. So therefore, reading Matthew gives the community the self-identity. Who are we in the world and what time is it?
What time is it? It's the end of the exile. Why is it the end of the exile? Because the house of David has finally been re-inthroned and the new temple resurrected through the labors of this great Davidic Messiah.
And who are we? We have a lot of people who are the people of God, the true of Israel because Israel is always the people subservient to the house of David. So insofar as we have David King ruling over us, we therefore must be the continuation of the people of God and we bring Gentiles in. Therefore, we haven't mentioned this yet, bringing to a conclusion God's purposes also for Abraham.
So tying off these Davidic promises in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus also brings Abrahamic promises to fruition as well. Again, seeing this with the Magi and the believing community and the great commission, all of which are Gentile-focused. Since you brought up Abraham, he appears in the opening of Matthew's Gospel and the genealogy. We have touched on that point for a minute.
Yeah, right. I'll take a moment to shamelessly plug another work in both of our biblical research called After the Deportation, Observations in Matthew's Apocalyptic Genealogy. I wrote that. I think it was published in 2015, so a year before this monograph.
That's actually a piece of the dissertation taken out. So there's a lengthier consideration of the genealogy in the dissertation, but to publish it, it was just getting too long, it felt a little bit off focus because the main focus is the formula quotations. So I took that out and put it in VBR where I look at the structure of the genealogy, and long story short, I conclude that a lot of people have concluded things similar to this. The deportations of Babylon in verses 11 and 12 are serving as the historical barrier as to why promises to Abraham and David have gone unfulfilled.
So by evoking Abraham and David, in the very first verse, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, Son of Abraham, is to invoke these not just Jewish, but cosmological concerns of the Old Testament and so far, they're both David. David is to rule over the nations, Abraham is to bless the nations. And so why have these promises not come to fulfillment as well as because the exile is this barrier that promises God so speak cannot get passed. Therefore, with the birth of the Son of David and the Son of Abraham, Matthew is already forecasting that my story will now be a fulfillment story, a fulfillment story that also explains how the exile is being rolled back through the preaching of Jesus, his death and his resurrection, to bring Abraham and David, Abraham and David, to fulfillment.
So even before the formula quotations get going, Matthew is already priming the pump for us to think about these things. And so therefore, when you get to the end of Matthew in chapter 28, that Jesus says all authority and heaven and earth has been given to me, and he just falls and thinks about it. He's saying, everything and heaven belongs to me, and how can you make that claim? Well, because of things like Psalm 2, which is a Dibitic Psalm, where the Son, I think 2nd, saying, you know, the Son of God, who's promised to rule not just Israel, but all of the world, which would dovetail right in with Genesis 12 and all the nations would bless.
So the teaching of the apostles, therefore, is the form of blessing that God has intended through Abraham for the world, and therefore the means by which the Son of David rules the nations, not by politic, not by sword, not by sphere, but by his teachings on the lips of his people, which goes on eschatological, on and on, as on more people are drawn into this community who can think of themselves as the end of exaltasical God. Like this, are there any other projects you're working on that you can tell us about? Yeah, I'm working on a hermeneutics book for IVP, because the world needs one more hermeneutics book. But the reason this one would be different is because I'm targeting it at undergraduates and educated late, so it's really a beginner level book, and the hermutics is so important to consider, but I don't think about how they're reading, so I'm trying to make something brief, but interesting that I'll get people interested in hermeneutics.
Then after that, I hope to turn back to some of these sort of considerations in the way New Testament books quote Old Testament texts early in their books that then have a hermeneutical effect for the rest of the book. So, then with Matthew and booklaying form, but you are in chapter length forms from remark, Luke X, John, and Romans to see how the sort of hermeneutical dynamic is working itself out in other places. That all sounds great and useful. Nicholas, it's been a pleasure talking biblical studies with you.
It's all my pleasure. Thank you for your interest in the book. All right, friends, you've been listening to New Books and the Biblical Studies. As we talk with Nicholas Pieltrowski about his recent book, Matthew's New David at the end of exile.
Until next time.