Matthew
The Book of Matthew: An Introduction
The short answer
The book of Matthew opens the New Testament by telling the story of Jesus in a way that never lets you forget the story of Israel. From the genealogy in its first verses to its final scene on a mountain, Matthew keeps setting Jesus against the backdrop of the Old Testament—its promises, its patterns, its unfinished hopes. To read Matthew well is to read with one eye on the older story it constantly echoes.
One of the clearest patterns is Jesus as a new Moses. Moses led Israel through the wilderness, where God fed the people with manna, bread from heaven. So when Matthew shows Jesus feeding a crowd in a deserted place—and notes that twelve baskets of leftovers were gathered—the details are doing quiet work. Twelve baskets, twelve tribes: the scene hints that Jesus has come to gather and restore God's scattered people. Matthew is a carefully patterned composition, and details like these are keys that unlock the whole book.
Matthew is also the story of a vocation being tested. Right after his baptism, Jesus goes into the wilderness—again, Israel's old proving ground—where he faces the devil's temptations. These aren't random trials. They probe what kind of Messiah he will be, and he answers each one with Scripture, choosing the path of the obedient Son and Servant. Where Israel faltered in the wilderness, Jesus holds firm.
Put those two threads together and you have a good map for the whole Gospel. Matthew presents Jesus as the one in whom Israel's story reaches its goal: teaching from a mountain like Moses at Sinai, feeding people in the wilderness, gathering twelve disciples, and walking a tested, faithful road all the way to the cross and resurrection. Every chapter rewards a reader who asks, 'What older story is Matthew retelling here?'
What scholars say
These two excerpts open up Matthew from different angles: N. T. Wright shows how a small detail—twelve baskets left over from a wilderness feeding—signals Matthew's deliberate portrait of Jesus as a new Moses restoring Israel's twelve tribes, while Rhodes and March explain the temptation account as Jesus thinking through his messianic vocation and confronting the evil one he came to overcome.
“Within Matthew’s story, of course, there is much more going on than simply a remarkable example of Christian vocation. The twelve baskets left over may point to Jesus’ intention to restore God’s people, the twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus feeding people in the wilderness fits so well with Matthew’s theme of Jesus as the new Moses (God gave the Israelites manna, special bread from heaven, when they were in the desert in the time of Moses) that we can be sure Matthew intended us to see this too.”
“We follow the order given in Matthew. Read the eleven verses carefully . After his baptism, Jesus chose to go apart and think through his messianic vocation, and this involved temptation. Of course temptation was by no means confined to one period in his life. The Gospels make that clear, and the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that he was tempted in every respect as we are (4:15). The temptations recorded in Matthew and Luke are representative of the temptations that came to Jesus as the Son-Servant-Messiah. Jesus was led by the Spirit to this encounter with the evil one because he had come into the world to engage him in battle and overcome him. Some think that the devil (Satan) is only the personification of human sin, but the New Testament writers seem to have a different view.”
What it means for you
Matthew invites you to see your own life as part of a longer story. The Gospel insists that God's purposes unfold over generations, through patterns you can learn to recognize—which means your ordinary faithfulness today may matter in ways you can't yet see. And the temptation account offers something practical: testing isn't a sign that your calling is false. Jesus' own vocation was clarified, not canceled, in the wilderness. When you face seasons that press hard on your identity and purpose, Matthew's Jesus shows a way through—rooted in Scripture, patient, and unwilling to trade the long obedience for a shortcut.
In context
Matthew is the first of the four Gospels and was placed first partly because it bridges the Old and New Testaments so deliberately. It opens with a genealogy tracing Jesus back through David to Abraham, then moves through his birth, baptism, and wilderness temptation (chapters 1–4) before the Sermon on the Mount (5–7). Five major blocks of teaching—a structure many readers see as echoing the five books of Moses—alternate with narrative, including the wilderness feeding in chapter 14, leading to the passion and resurrection in chapters 26–28.