An Ethnography of the Gospel of Matthew: A Critical Assessment of the Use of the Honour and Shame Model in New Testament Studies

Louise Lawrence provides a reading of Matthew’s Gospel from an ethnographic perspective. Her book submits that the dynamic paradigm of ethnography constitutes an important modification of recent exegesis that seeks to take account of cultural anthropology. Building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas of culture as an open-ended dialogue between different individuals and voices (dialogism and heteroglossia), the author suggests that one should not take as ‘given’ that all worlds presented in the New Testament submit to a unitary Mediterranean social script as currently defined. She critically appraises the current Mediterranean script used in Biblical Studies in light of data collected from specific interactions with character informants in Matthew’s world.