Sound familiar?  It would to most of Matthew’s Jewish readers.  Matthew has shaped these opening stories of Jesus in order to show that Jesus’ life is a fulfillment of the stories of Moses (read Exodus 1-20).  The parallels are too obvious to ignore: Herod is like the Egyptian Pharaoh, Jesus’ baptism is like the crossing of the Red Sea, the forty days of testing are like the forty years the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness, the Sermon on the Mount is like the Law of Moses delivered on Mount Sinai.  These parallels tell us something significant about Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus.  Certainly he agrees with Mark that Jesus is the suffering Son of God, the messiah.  But here Jesus is also the new Moses, come to set his people free from their bondage (to sin 1:21), come to give them the new law, his teachings.

At this point I should stress yet once again that among Jews in the first century there was not just *one* set of expectations concerning their future deliverer.  I have already indicated that many hoped for a future king like David, who would lead his people to military victory over their oppressors and establish Israel as a sovereign state in the Promised Land; others anticipated the appearance of a cosmic figure on the clouds of heaven, coming in judgment on the earth; yet others looked forward to an authoritative priest who would guide the community through divinely inspired interpretations of the Mosaic law.  One other form that the future deliverer sometimes took is of particular relevance for understanding Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus.  For some Jews hoped that a prophet would appear who would be like Moses, who had not only brought salvation from the hated oppressors of Israel, the Egyptians who had enslaved them for 400 years, but had also disclosed the law of God to his people.  Indeed, according to the ancient traditions, Moses himself had said that there would be another prophet like him who would arise among his people (Deut 18:15-19).  The hope for a messianic figure like Moses, one chosen by God to bring salvation and new direction, was very much alive among some Jews in the first century.

This is important to recognize if we are to understand the overarching portrayal of Jesus in Matthew.  For one thing, unlike later Christians like Marcion (see Chapter 1), who insisted that a person had to *choose between* Moses and Jesus, Matthew maintains that the choice is instead between Moses without Jesus and Moses with Jesus.  For him, false religion involves rejecting Jesus — precisely because Jesus is a new Moses.  But this new Moses does not do away with the old one.  Quite the contrary, he is the true and final interpreter of what the earlier Moses recorded in his law.  Jesus too gives the divine law in this Gospel.  But for Matthew, it is not a law that stands at odds with the law of Moses; it is a fulfillment of that law (5:17).  Followers of Jesus must follow the law of Moses, not abandon it; moreover, they must follow it by understanding it in the way prescribed by the new Moses, Jesus the messiah.

Just as Moses was a prophet who was confronted and rejected by those who refused to recognize his leadership — like all of the prophets in the Jewish Scriptures, according to Matthew — so too Jesus in Matthew is constantly opposed by the leaders of his own people.  We have already seen this basic motif of Jesus’ rejection in Mark.  In many respects, Matthew emphasizes the antagonism even more; and here Jesus engages in a far more active counter-attack, accusing his opponents of placing a higher value on their own traditions than on the law of God, attacking their wicked motives, and above all charging them with hypocrisy, that is, for knowing and teaching the right thing to do, but failing to do it themselves.