The project, “Expanding the Gospel according to Matthew: Continuity and Change in Early Gospel Literature,” takes an integrative approach to early Christian literature that intervenes in ongoing debates about textual continuity and change. Recent scholarship has challenged conventional conceptions of Gospels as stable texts, pointing to porous constellations of Gospel material in the first centuries of the Common Era. This renewed critical attention disrupts reductive analytical frames and invites fresh questions. Nonetheless, emphasis on fluidity risks concomitant fragmentation, obscuring connections between diverse instances of Gospel tradition. Both continuity and change characterized early Gospel literature.
This project has addressed the tension between continuity and change in two ways. First, through a series of soundings in the reception history of the Gospel according to Matthew, the project illuminates how early Christian readers responded to Gospel similarity and difference. As the project has demonstrates through a range of examples, Matthew is a fruitful locus of investigation because of its centrality to Gospel scholarship and because it is richly attested in early expansions and reconfigurations. These early receptions and reconfigurations of Matthew illuminate its possibilities and tensions as a text. Second, the project locates the reception of Matthew in a broader landscape, the series of debates through which early readers conceptualized “Gospel literature” as a category. By interrogating how Roman intellectuals , Christian and otherwise, categorized bibliographic difference — between texts, between artifacts, between distinct works — the project makes visible the invention of “Gospel literature” as a category, uncovering how early Christian literary scholarship participated in the vibrant intellectual culture of the Roman Mediterranean. The method and results of this project thus enrich broader conversations about the production and reception of early Christian literature.
