1. Introduction

During his ministry, Jesus seems to have been the leader of a kind of rural and village-based sectarian faction of wandering charismatics.(1) However, within a few decades a gradual change took place. Those followers of Jesus who before had been mobile were becoming sedentary or house-based. A transition was being made from the rural and village culture of Palestine to Greco-Roman city culture, from an ethnically homogeneous constituency which was largely unlearned, relatively poor, and of low social status, to an ethnically heterogeneous one that included people more educated, more financially secure and successful, i.e., persons of higher status.

It is generally held that the Gospel attributed to Matthew was written around 80-90 A. D. for just such an audience living in an urban setting. Some scholars have located this urbanized community more exactly at Antioch in Syria. That Matthew's community, at least in comparison with Mark's, was more urbanized seems evident from an analysis of various words in the two gospels. While Mark used the word polis, "city", eight times and the word kome, "village", seven times, Matthew uses "village" only four times but "city" at least twenty-six time. Furthermore, Matthew often connected houses (oikoi) and city (polis) (Mt 10:14; 12:25; 17:24-25; 23:28; 26:18). Thus socio-historical data as well as text criticism point to Matthew's community as more urbanized. Consequently it can be called both a "household church" and a "city church."(2)　

Urbanization led to a degree of prosperity and it has been argued on various grounds that Matthew's audience was a generally prosperous community. Indeed, if we take, for example, the three terms "silver," "gold," and "talent," we discover that they occur in Matthew's gospel no fewer than twenty-eight times, compared with the single occurrence of the word "silver" in Mark and the four in Luke.　

While Matthew's house churches had a degree of material security, the historical reality of urbanization and increasing exploitation of the poor would have introduced deepening economic polarities, and possibly even conflicts. Yet the special Matthean material (M) contains very few sayings about wealth or problems connected with wealth. Where they are found, they do not reveal the kind of severity toward possessions that can be observed in the other gospels.(3) Where Matthew does make redactional comments about wealth, we can conclude:

An examination of Matthew's treatment of sayings about wealth shows that such changes as there are usually seem slight. On the other hand the tendency of the redaction seems clear. Matthew does not intensify the severity of the sayings about riches, but rather he makes such sayings somewhat less severe. This tendency may be related with the fact that the economic circumstances of Matthew's church seem to have been less harsh than those of the earlier Christian communities.(4)

Although the majority of its households were generally financially secure, Matthew's community also seems to have contained a significant group of poor. But rather than making a futile and misplaced call to his community to be poor, Matthew's gospel offered a challenge for it to be just toward the poor. Matthew's use of dikaios ("just") more than all other gospels combined, reinforces this conclusion (Mt 3:15; 5:6, 10, 20; 6:1, 33; 21:22). While Luke's has been called the gospel of the poor, Matthew's has often been called the gospel of justice.

Some features of Matthew's community are tolerably clear. He writes in Greek for a Greek-speaking church, probably in an eastern city; most scholars think this was the great metropolis of Antioch in Syria, sometime in the last quarter of the first century. There may have been many small household groups of Christians in Antioch at that time, however, and quite likely there was a certain diversity among them. Not all may have shared the history and perspectives that Matthew assumed.(5)　

1.Gerd Theissen, The First Followers of Jesus. A Sociological Analysis of the Earliest Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1978).

2.Michael H. Crosby, House of Disciples. Church, Economics and Justice in Matthew (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis Books, 1988) 36-40.

3.But see Thomas E. Schmidt, Hostility to Wealth in the Synoptic Gospels (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987) 121-134.

4.David L. Mealand, Proerty and Expectation in the Gospels (London: S.P.C.K.,1980)16.

5.Wayne Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1986) 137.