Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:2 (Summer 2024)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

Book Reviews

Jesus as Teacher in the Gospel of Matthew. Edited by Charles L. Quarles and Charles Nathan Ridlehoover. Library of New Testament Studies 644. London: T&T Clark, 2023, 244 pp., $115.00 hardcover.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a handful of scholars explored Jesus’s role as teacher in Matthew’s Gospel. However, “this important topic” still had numerous “lacunae” that remained to be filled (2). Charles L. Quarles, a widely published Matthean scholar, and Charles Nathan Ridlehoover, a rising voice in Matthean studies, have brought together in this book sustained reflections by authoritative Matthean scholars on Jesus’s teachers, his teachings, and his students, based on their presentation in the Gospel of Matthew.

Setting the stage for the whole book is Craig Keener’s chapter, “The Implications of Jesus as Teacher for the Historical Memory of His Teachings” (3–16). This chapter is a condensation of parts of his earlier published book, Christobiography. Katherine Davis, Daniel M. Gurtner, and John Y. H. Yieh investigate to what extent the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and John the Baptist respectively influenced Jesus. Charles L. Quarles reflects on Jesus’s Mosaic stature in the Sermon on the Mount. Lena Lütticke describes how Matthew portrays Jesus as a positive role model in his actions as well as in his teachings. Charles Nathan Ridlehoover compares the Lord’s Prayer to a Bildungsroman. John Nolland (from a historical perspective) and Patrick Schreiner (from a literary perspective) each investigate Matthew 13:52. Jon Coutts shows how significant Jesus’s teachings on forgiveness are in Matthew. Finally, essays by Dennis R. Edwards, Bruce Henning, David Wenham, and Mariam Kovalishyn examine how Jesus’s Matthean teachings influenced Peter’s letters, John’s Gospel, Paul’s letters, and James’s letter, respectively. Of this book’s fourteen essays, those by John Nolland, Dennis R. Edwards, and Mariam Kovalishyn were most stimulating to this reviewer.

Nolland’s essay, “Discipled to Be a Scribe for the Kingdom of Heaven,” examines “the metaphorical use of scribe language in Matt 13:52” (109). He

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writes independently of Patrick Schreiner’s earlier book length treatment of this subject in Matthew, Disciple and Scribe (and Schreiner’s essay on this topic later in this book). After contrasting the variegated roles of scribes in Second Temple Judaism with the uniform role of scribes in Rabbinic Judaism, Nolland explains that in Matthew’s Gospel, scribes are “custodians of the Mosaic Law” (118). By contrast, Jesus’s disciples are to be scrib...