Faculty Book Reviews

The Hidden Gospel of Matthew: Annotated & Explained

By Ron Miller, William B. Bross Associate Professor of Religion
Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2004
Review by Daniel Meyer

Jeshu, Jochanan the Immerser, and Shimon Rock—names unfamiliar to most modern readers of the Bible—are an important part of Ron Miller’s new book, The Hidden Gospel of Matthew: Annotated & Explained. Miller, the chair of the Religion Department at Lake Forest College, seeks to uncover the “hidden gospel” within the familiar text of Matthew, removing layers of tradition and embellishment to recover the authentic expression of the messianic message. Miller’s Matthew is actually two books in one: his new translation of the original Greek text is displayed on the right-hand pages; and his extensive annotations on Matthew’s sources, themes, and interpretive issues are printed on the left.

Miller’s use of original Hebrew names emphasizes the centrality of the gospel’s first-century Jewish setting. Miller reinforces this perspective with his thoughtful and provocative commentary. The Gospel of Matthew, he points out, reaches back and forward at the same time. Matthew firmly links Jeshu (Jesus) to Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah by citing more than 100 supporting passages from the Hebrew Bible. Yet the Gospel of Matthew was also intended to be an effective means of religious propaganda, in the root meaning of the term—an agent for expansion and extension of Christianity beyond its Jewish roots throughout the full extent of the Roman Empire. “This Gospel,” says Miller, “is, at once, the most Jewish and most anti-Jewish of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.”

The tension between Christianity’s Hebrew past and its Gentile future shapes the text of Matthew, and at its heart lies the complex figure of Jeshu, the Messiah whose message of love is expressed in sometimes confounding parables. In untangling these spiritual puzzles, Miller has produced a fresh, unexpected portrait of the first-century carpenter of Nazareth, giving his readers what the cover of the book rightly claims to be a Jesus who “will surprise you.”

Daniel Meyer, associate curator of Special Collections and university archivist at the University of Chicago, is coauthor of Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest: Architecture and Landscape Design 1856–1940.