Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology

Couple of thoughts, in no particular order:

First, antiskeptic mentions in the OP that the gospel of Matthew predates St. Paul’s letter to the Romans.

This is not so. While it’s conventional in bibles to print the letters of Paul after the four gospels, this convention arose long after the texts were written, and was never intended to reflect the order of composition. A number of factors are taken into account in the conventional grouping and ordering the New Testament works - authorship, subject matter, degree of confidence the early church had in their authenticity, even length - the letters of Paul are arranged in descending order of length, longest to shortest. But the order of composition doesn’t feature at all.)

So far as the order of composition goes, all of the letters of Paul were written before any of the four gospels. Romans in particular was probably written in the mid-50s AD, and Matthew between 20 and 50 years later than that.

This is more than just a nitpick. It’s possible to ask the question “Did Matthew write his gospel uninfluenced by Romans?” But a much more challenging question is “Do we read Matthew’s gospel uninfluenced by Romans?” And in one sense that’s very difficult; you can’t un-know what you have already learned, understood or believed.

This relates to antiskeptic’s point: “if we import our Christian knowledge of the final product into the text and read it through that lens, then we get another outcome from our reading”. And this raises for him the question as to how we should approach Matthew - “On its own merits as any reader would or pulling what we know, reading it through a Christians lens?”

The thing is, Matthew is written to be read through a Christian lens. This was not a world, remember, in which you could author a book and offer it to the general public through booksellers. Everyone who wrote, wrote for a clearly-identified readership. You would have a reason for writing for that particular group (and a reason for thinking that they would read what you wrote), and you would write against a background of what they already knew or believed and of what you knew was being said to them by others.

Matthew isn’t introducing Christianity to unbelievers. (Why would unbelievers have any interest in reading anything Matthew wrote? How would they even hear of it?) He’s writing for a group of Greek-speaking second-generation Jewish Christians, located somewhere in Asia Minor - maybe Antioch, maybe some other Greek town with a Jewish community in it. He’s writing against the background of the relatively recent destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the crisis of identity that this produced in the Jewish community and the resulting stresses and pressures that emerged for Jewish Christians - torn between, on the one hand, the emerging Rabbinic Judaism and, on the other hand, Pauline Christianity with its emphasis on salvation by faith and its relative downgrading of the significance of law. Matthew’s purpose may be to affirm the centrality and validity of the Jewish tradition as a foundation for a Christianity that is becoming increasingly gentile.

If he doesn’t build on Paul’s themes, therefor, this is not because he is writing before Paul - he isn’t - or because he is unaware of Paul’s themes or because he rejects them, but because he wants to move attention away from Paul’s themes and to other, equally valid and important themes within Christianity. We can read Matthew as a reaction to Paul - not in the sense of reacting against Paul, rejecting what Paul says; but more in the sense of supplementing Paul, calling attention to aspects of revelation that Paul has not stressed.

This means that we can read Matthew on its own. Matthew is offering a coherent presentation of Christianity that stresses themes that Matthew regards as important, and in need of attention. You don’t have to have read Paul to understand what Matthew is saying. But equally we shouldn’t read Matthew as though it stands alone, because it never did. Matthew’s gospel focusses on matters that, in Matthew’s view, this particular community needs to hear at this particular time. (This doesn’t mean that Matthew is of just transient or local interest; if it were, Matthew would not have been received as canonical scripture by the whole church.) But these are matters which Matthew offers to his readers as well as the wider body of Christian belief already held by the community, not instead of it.