Matthew

Author Elaine Wainwright
Publisher T&T Clark £14.99
Format pbk
ISBN 9781350008793

Scholarship does not stand still. If you thought that redaction and form criticism were transformative, here is more to challenge you. We already know that Matthew wrote firmly from within the Jewish tradition and showed God at work in the community with its emperors and in cosmic phenomena like earthquakes and comets. This dense book seeks to update us on recent scholarship from the mid-1990s to the present, including feminist, masculinity readings, wisdom studies, reader-response theory, post-colonial studies and queer theory. If your shelves are out of date, this will guide you to recent publications. It ends with an (unconvincing) ecological reading of the Beatitudes. This is only an introductory survey and, since the academics quoted write papers in learned journals rather than commentaries, Readers are better off reading them on the internet.

DEREK JAY