THE PROLOGUE AS THE BEGINNING OF THE JESUS STORY

The Gospel of Mark opens with the story of the appearance of John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus. Matthew prefaced this opening with a genealogy (1:2–17) and an infancy narrative (1:18–2:23), both of which he presumably took from the oral traditions of his community. It would thus seem logical to limit the Prologue of Matthew's Gospel to chapters 1 and 2, as indeed most interpreters have done. Nevertheless, there are many good reasons for viewing the Prologue as coming to an end in chapter 4. For one, 4:23 clearly marks the start of a new section; the introductory summary in 4:23 is repeated in 9:35, bracketing the intervening chapters 5 to 9 and adumbrating their contents. Conversely, 3:1 does not mark a break in the narrative; instead, Matthew leaps over a gap in narrative time of perhaps some thirty years by casually remarking ‘About that time’. Verses 2:1 and 3:1 open in much the same way. Moreover, the section from 1:1 to 4:22 is self-contained in its subject-matter, even if it records two quite distinct periods of time. It is here that Matthew tells the story of the Son of God (1:18–25; 2:15; 3:13–17; 4:1–11). Fulfilment quotations of geographical import pervade the entire section (2:6, 15, 18, 23; 4:15–16). Nor should we let ourselves be misled by the nature of the source material: only today are we aware that Matthew simply prefixed chapters 1 and 2 to his Marcan source.