Why does Matthew's Gospel continually quote the Old Testament prophecies?

Answer 1

AnswerAs with Luke's Gospel, the author of Matthew's Gospel used two main source documents for his knowledge of the life, mission and sayings of Jesus. The first of these was Mark's Gospel, written approximately 70 CE. Matthew contains most of the verses in Mark, and whenever it does so, the sequence is the same and the actual words in the original Greek are almost identical. The 'Q' document was a Greek-language book of sayings attributed to Jesus, that the authors of Matthew and Luke both drew from. However, Q is only a list of sayings and does not provide the time or context for those sayings. Whenever Matthew and Luke provide a saying believed to come from Q, they use the same words in Greek, but usually report Jesus as saying them in different times and places.

Matthew was written during the 80s of the first century, at a time when the antiquity and authenticity of the new religion appear to have been coming under scrutiny. The author resolved this by making frequent references to the Old Testament, in order to show, if possible, that the New Testament stories were prophesied or prefigured in the Old Testament, thus demonstrating antiquity for the Christian story. These scriptural references and frequent portrayals of the Old Testament as prophesying or foreshadowing the life of Jesus may also have been intended to show Christianity as the natural successor to Judaism, in the turmoil after the disastrous end of the First Jewish-Roman War.

Many Christians believe that Matthew was written for the Jews, but since it was written in Greek, the author of Matthew was unlikely to have been writing primarily to Palestinian Jews, who spoke Aramaic, not Greek. His evident lack of knowledge of Jewish customs suggests that he was not even writing to Jews of the diaspora.