Saint Matthew refutes Paul's Christ

By: Suresh Shenoy

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Saint Matthew refutes Paul’s Christ includes the thesis that Matthew helped to identify the essence of Christianity by refuting Paul’s creation of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God and divine.
The book has three parts:
Part One: In Chapter 1, I discuss that Matthew’s Gospel is contrarian in correcting the traditional Christian expectations placed on it. In Chapters 2, 3 and 4, Matthew is shown to reject the virginity of Mary, the resurrection of Christ and the authenticity of the Lord’s Prayer.
Part Two: I have identified two background texts behind the foregrounded Gospel. Chapter 5 explains how the first background text is in the classical history mode developed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his Roman Antiquities. Chapter 6 demonstrates how Matthew on his own structured the Infancy Narrative in the Homeric Monomyth. Chapter 7 shows that Matthew structured the Public Life Narrative as a Monomyth following Mark’s first attempt of doing it. Luke later made it his own with more additions. Chapter 8 exposes how Mark, Matthew and Luke structured the Passion Narrative as if they worked in tandem, adding and completing each other’s efforts.
Part Three: I explain in Chapter 9 that the Values of Jesus constitute the essence of Christianity as Matthew has demonstrated it and later supported by Luke. Chapter 10 draws out the conclusions from the study. And finally, Chapter 11 explains the strategy I have used for reading the classical texts for meaning. This is intended to assist interested readers to pursue New Testament research on their own. The strategy may also be used for all classical texts.