Matthew’s Theological Grammar: The Father and the Son

To say that the first Gospel is about Jesus is to state what any reader knows from the most cursory glance at Matthew’s narrative. Yet the scholarly discourse about Jesus’ identity in Matthew reveals a fundamental confusion about how to articulate the identity of Jesus vis-a-vis God in the narrative. In this work, Joshua Leim attempts to bring greater clarity to the articulation of Jesus’ identity in Matthew by attending more precisely to two linguistic patterns woven deeply into the entire narrative’s presentation of Jesus: Matthew’s christological use of worship/obeisance language (proskyneo) and his paternal-filial idiom. Along with exploring the role these linguistic patterns play in the narrative, the author attempts to hear such language in relation to early Judaism and its articulation of the identity of the God of Israel. The study of these various elements yields the conclusion that the identity of God and Jesus Christ are inseparably related in Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew articulates the identity of Israel’s God around the Father-Son relation.