5
yet true, and divine Messiah-King. Matthew's ethos, logical appeals made upon the basis
of Scripture, and, most importantly, Jesus' ethos comprise the means by which
persuasion was accomplished.
14
Their adherence to Messiah Jesus would have then
altered the exigency of the tensions in their world-view: defining their sense of identity
within Israel, their basis for authority for facing their own contemporary controversies, and
the messianic movement's trajectory toward the horizons of Gentile mission.
Matthew 21-23 as a Rhetorical Unit
A rhetorical unit is defined by its rhetorical time and space, that is, the place,
persons, and topic under consideration.
15
Most Matthean specialists take chapter 21 as
the head of a new narrative section where the transition from Jesus' Judean ministry ends
and the Passion begins.
16
Several commentators think chapter 23 is part of Matthew's
fifth great discourse
17
for they find that the theme of judgment binds chapters 23 together
with chapters 24 and 25.
18
Granted Jesus does begin an extended, direct discourse in
chapter 23 that touches on the theme of judgment to befall Jerusalem and the Temple, the
rhetorical time and space changes as he left the Temple (23:39-24:1), for he had finished
debating Israel's leaders directly and then began private exposition to the Disciples. Far
from private, chapters 21-23 are arguably the most public of Gospel narratives embedded
with discourse. As a rhetorical unit, the narrative of Matthew 21-23 flows through a series
of verbal altercations with the priests and elders, the Herodians, the Sadducees, and
Bible Commentary (Zondervan, 1984), 22-25; Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Handbook
for a Mixed Church under Persecution (Eerdmans, 1982), 601-06.
14
Or `rhetorical constraints,' to follow Bitzer and George A. Kennedy's nomenclature.
15
Kennedy, 33.
16
Hagner, 591; Morris, 478, 517; Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew, vol. 22 in New American Commentary
(Broadman, 1992) 310; W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the
Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 3 vols., in ICC (T. & T. Clark, 1988-97), 3:111-12.
17
Several have posited that there are five blocks of discourse around which the rest of the Gospel's
narrative units work such as: D. C. Allison, "Matthew: Structure, Biographical Impulse, and the Imitatio Christi,"
in The Four Gospels 1992: Festschrift Frans Neirynck, 2 vols, ed. F. Van Segbroeck, C. M. Tuckett, and G.
Van Belle (Leuven: University Press, 1992), 1:1203; B. W. Bacon, "The `Five Books' of Matthew against the
Jews," The Expositor 15 (1918): 56-66.
18
Francis Wright Beare, The Gospel according to Matthew (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 445; Scot
McKnight, "Matthew," in Dictionary of Jesus and Gospels , ed. J. B. Green, S. McKnight, and H. Marshall
(InterVarsity, 1992), 531; Blomberg, Matthew, 23, 49; and Keener, 37.