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Matthew the Storyteller

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Warren Carter has produced an introduction to the gospel of Matthew which should be both accessible to a wide audience and instructive to biblical specialists. Carter's concerns are primarily narrative. He has made significant progress in applying Chapman's model of narrative structure along with the narrative theory of Iser to Matthew's gospel. For those who are not initiated in issues of narrative hermeneutics, Carter explains and applies his method very clearly and deliberately. While interpreting the final form of the text, Carter does not ignore historical concerns. The implied reader of Matthew's gospel is the intended audience of the first century. Therefore, the informed reader of Matthew's narrative should know what they knew. To this end, Carter supplies a reasonable reconstruction of this audience and attempts to bring twentieth century readers as close as possible to the same reading location. A good example is his explanation of the likely tensions which existed between Jews and Christians at the time Matthew was written. The often harsh anti-Jewish polemic of this gospel is then carefully placed within this context. At the same time, Carter is aware that twentieth century readers bring their own life experiences to the text. This is not a verse by verse commentary, but a thorough exploration of the gospel's plot, characters, and events. Some readers may feel that certain parts of the story, particlarly the resurrection and crucifixion, receive too little attention. Nevertheless, this is a first-rate application of narrative criticism to the gospel of Matthew, which may also serve as a model for reading the other gospels.

Warren Carter's MATTHEW: STORYTELLER, INTERPRETER, EVANGELIST is a one volume introduction to the Gospel of Matthew. Carter intends it primarily for those studying the gospel in an academic setting. He divides the book into three sections: the first called before reading Matthew, the second reading Matthew, and the final after reading Matthew. Carter includes a good deal of historical research in the work, but looks at the gospel in the context of its original audience, which he believes to be the ostracized Jewish Christians in Antioch. He spends a good deal of time looking at the genre of the gospel and how its first hearers would have reacted and responded to it. He challenges those who are studying the gospel to try and do the same. Finally, he looks at how the gospel influenced other areas and what this can mean for believers today.

Carter includes an extensive bibliography which will make it helpful for anyone researching Matthew. It also has a biblical reference index that will aide the preacher or teacher in finding specific information on texts from the gospel.

This book was not available when I was formally studying scripture, so I never read it for a class or used it for research. I purchased it at a later date and have used it as a reference for preparing homilies during the Matthew cycle and in the preparation of Bible studies. I have found the book to be informative and helpful from a pastoral perspective. What I have done in the past is reread and reviewed the book in November in the years that Matthew's Gospel will be preached. Carter's scholarly information helps me understand the gospel better and his focus on the culture and people who would have first heard these words helps me better gear my homilies toward the people in my congregation.

It was interesting to see how the Evangelist used his local situation, background, the storyline objective and bending the work of Luke to capture an audience's interest and subsequently their belief and support in carrying on the work of establishing the church in a large population where they were the minority. But as I proceeded 1/2 way into the story; the way the writer explained these methods in a step-by-step repetitive manner, and/or the author's detailed explanation when dissecting various aspects and forms as to how they fit into the various categories in telling the story from The Old Testament, stories remembered, and written gospels--got burdensome and a little stale--like a long lecture without drama or hiking a hard trail without rest.

I appreciated the comparisons between Mathew and Luke--side-by-side to illustrate the differences. I wish there was more of that in the following chapters. I spent a lot of time going back and forth between the book and bible citations, and at the end it got too cumbersome to continue. I liked the deductions made by the author, like a detective investigating a case, for example how he observed and deduced why Mathew dropped the use of the word "Rabbi"; the use of "teacher" and "lord"; Jesus preaching on a mountain top, when he really went into the Synagogue (again an attempt to minimize the importance of Jewish leaders of the time); minimizing use of negative incidents to in order to portray Jesus in the best light yet keeping those that depicted the Jewish leaders in a negative way. Not too different of the tactics used today in our political debates on issues of our time. At times I felt a little uneasy and wondered at the validity of the Gospel: like is this correct to copy and change things in the Gospel as Matthew did, albeit, changing words, changing sequence, leaving out passages, etc.--is that honest? Then at Sunday mass I listened to my own priest reading Matthew and in his sermon, interpreting the meaning to fit our times--no different than what Matthew was doing during his times. In the end, it was worth reading for the insights and struggle those 1,900 years ago in establishing the early church in dangerous and difficult political times, but one needs to be patient and work hard to pay attention after you read half-way into the book.