In the latest New Testament Studies, D. C. Sim continues his effort to make Matthew the Magna Carta of early pro-Torah, anti-Pauline Christianity. His latest article is entitled “Matthew 7.21-23: Further Evidence of its Anti-Pauline Perspective,” NTS 53.3 (2007) 324-343. In sum, because Matthew notes the charismatic practices and confessions of Jesus here, and goes on to condemn them (in Sim’s interpretation presumably) because they have disregarded “the Law and the Prophets”, we are dealing here not with non-Pauline Christianity, but with anti-Paulinism. This is supposedly confirmed further by the way in which Matthew intentionally omits Mark 9:38-40 and the phrase “he who is not against me is for me” (presumably opening the door for licentious charismatic prophets relying on “what they’ve done for Jesus”). Presumably Matthew is writing well after Paul. Does this not mitigate the frontal assault? Sim says no, since Matthew may be going after Pauline communities (think Corinthian supernatural players) or later (Acts) traditions which depict Paul as an exorcist.

Several comments can be made about this.

(1) If Matthew is worried about licentiousness in general, he may well be targeting post-Pauline communities. But Paul himself combats licentiousness (see part two), so we need to be more specific in order to find anti-Paulinism. Paul also combats miraculous gifts apart from ethical obedience (see Corinth). Matthew then must be worried about the crucial points of Torah for 1 c Judaism. But if Matthew is so concerned with Law-keeping in an anti-Pauline sense, why does he never come out and say, “Circumcise!!!” “Don’t eat PORK!” “Keep Sabbath and festivals.”

(2) The “nations” are not judged based on Moses’ Torah, but on the basis of Jesus’ words and Jesus’ agenda, in the Sermon on the Mount and in, say, Matthew 25 and 28:16-20. In the latter, Jesus commands them not to obey Torah, but to obey what he commanded.

(3) Sim is missing the Matthean theme of “Jesus as new-and-greater Moses” (or whatever we might call it), I think, and he is missing the discontinuity present in Matthew. Paul’s opponents always come clear out with the chief Mosaic requirements; Matthew never does. Furthermore, Matthew is very clear on the distinction between ethnic Israel and the nations, such that the nations in Matt 28 are told to obey what Jesus commanded, which presumably in Matthew is only such commands as we find in Matthew’s Gospel. To make any of Jesus’ commands in Matthew (beyond say Matthew 10:5-6; and 23:23, an address to the Pharisees) a command to obey Torah in the proto-rabbinic Jewish sense, is to miss the decidedly non-ethnic way in which the Law as interpreted by Jesus is applied throughout Matthew.

See the following post (below) for more.

Picking up from the previous post:

(4) Finally, Sim fails to appreciate the implications of what Paul actually does with the Law: he follows Jesus’ Matthew in throwing fidelity to Jesus as Lord and the love command front and center, the latter appearing not only in Matthew 22 but in a different form in the Sermon itself. Sim’s account requires that Matthew does not accept or appreciate such passages as Romans 6:17-23, 8:2-4, 13:8-10; and Galatians 5:13-15, 6:2-5; 6:7-9, to cite the two most “licentious” letters, wherein Paul informs his readers that true law and the goal of the “Spirit” and “freedom” consists in obeying the same love commandment Jesus put front and center in Matthew 22.

Matthew, like James, could well be writing against distortions of the Pauline gospel. But he cannot be said to be writing against Paul himself (or even Acts’ Paul, which has Paul insisting on “fruit in keeping with repentance” just like Matthew’s John the Baptist and Jesus in the paragraph before the one on which Sim is focused), and thus the caricature “anti-Pauline” is misleading and unhelpful in describing Matthew’s thrust here and elsewhere. He combats licentiousness, yes, but not the circumcision-diet-and-calendar free Christianity on offer in Paul.