Re-Judaizing Jesus: Remembering the Sacrificial Cult in the Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel of Matthew is commonly regarded as ‘the most Jewish’ of the four New Testament Gospels. Some biblical scholars who specialize in the Gospel of Matthew now hold it to be a relatively faithful account or representation of Jesus’s own ‘Jewishness’. This article questions the relationship between the historical Jesus and the narrative representation of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, particularly vis-à-vis Jesus’s relationship to the Temple. Here I seek to problematize facile assessments of Jesus and Matthew’s ‘Jewishness’ by delineating the chronologically successive stages in which the figure of Jesus was conceptualized through sacralization in the pre-Gospel period, the de-Judaization of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, and the re-Judaization of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. I also challenge recent assertions that ‘social memory’—in contradistinction to the traditional ‘criteria of authenticity’—provides a more methodologically and historiographically reliable approach to the Quest for the Historical Jesus vis-a-vis the historical author of the Gospel of Matthew.