Matthew

Anna Case-Winters' Matthew (Belief series, WJK, 2015) is a pastorally warm and accessible commentary, written with genuine care for how the text speaks to communities on the margins. Its limitations, however, are exegetical. The author draws almost exclusively from socio-political interpreters — Warren Carter, Donald Senior, Eugene Boring — while major critical commentaries are essentially absent, producing a work that reads Matthew through contemporary denominational concerns rather than the Gospel's own redemptive-historical logic. The recurring weaknesses follow from this. The claim that the Canaanite woman "teaches Jesus about a wider divine embrace" (pp. 201–202) requires ignoring everything Matthew has established before 15:21–28: Jesus has already envisaged a multi-racial people of God (8:11–12) and helped a Gentile on precisely the same faith-based exception (8:5–13). His stated priorities in vv. 24 and 26 are nowhere retracted; what changes is his recognition that this particular woman's extraordinary faith warrants an exception — which is not the same thing as learning a new theology. The claim that "Matthew does not present Jesus' death as something that must happen so that God could be forgiving" (p. 309) is self-undermining: she acknowledges 26:28 yet treats it as peripheral, when Matthew's own addition of γάρ makes the shed blood explicitly the reason for Jesus' directive, and the ransom saying of 20:28 — deeply rooted in Isaiah 53 — frames that death as representative and substitutionary. One cannot cite 26:28 and simultaneously deny Matthew connects Jesus' death to forgiveness. She flatly denies any supersessionist element, citing PCUSA policy rather than exegesis, but 21:43 — found only in Matthew — states the kingdom will be taken from "you" and given to another people bearing its fruit; policy cannot dissolve a Greek text. The demonic is demythologized on the grounds of modern incredulity, but Matthew's own summaries carefully distinguish demonic from natural causation as separate categories — the demythologizing imports a premise the text itself refuses. Divine omnipotence is redefined in Whiteheadian process terms despite Matthew's consistent presentation of Jesus exercising sovereign authority from the baptism to the Great Commission. For exegetical substance, readers should turn to France (NICNT), Nolland (NIGTC), Carson (REBC), or Davies and Allison (ICC).