of the law and the prophecies; to connect the past with the present ; to show that Jesus was the Messiah of the Jews, and that in the Old Testament the New was prefigured, while in the New Testament the Old was revealed. Hence his gospel has a more decidedly Jewish flavor than any other of the synoptics. The sense of Jewish nationality appears in the record of Christ’s words about the ‘“ lost sheep of the house of Israel” (xv. 24); in the command not to go into the way of the Gentiles nor into the villages of the Samaritans (x. 5); in the prophecy that the apostles shall sit as judges in “the regeneration” (xix. 28). Also in the tracing of the genealogy of our Lord no further back than to Abraham; in the emphasis laid on the works of the law (v. 19; xii. 33, 37); and in the prophecy which makes the end of Israel contemporaneous with the “ consummation of the age” (xxiv. 3, 22; x. 23).
On the other hand, a more comprehensive character appears in the adoration of the infant Jesus by the Gentile magi; in the prophecy of the preaching of the Gospel of the kingdom to all the world (xxiv. 14), and the apostolic commission to go to all nations (xxviii. 19) ; in the commendation of the faith of a Gentile above that of Israel (viii. 10-12; compare the story of the Syrophcenician woman, xv. 28); in the use of the word “ Jews,” as if he were outside the circle of Jewish nationality 5 in the parables of the laborers in the vineyard (xx. 1-16), and of the marriage of the king’s son (xxii. 1-14); in the threat of taking away the kingdom from Israel (xxi. 43), and in the value attached to the moral and religious element of the law (xxii. 40 ; xxiii. 23). The genealogy of Jesus contains the Gentile names of Rahab the Canaanite, and Ruth the Moabitess. To Matthew Jesus is alike the Messiah of the Jew and the Saviour of the world,
It being his task to show how the law and the prophets were fulfilled in Christ, his allusions are frequent to the Old Testa- ment scriptures. He has upward of sixty references to the Old Testament. Tis citations are of two classes: those which he quotes himself as fulfilled in the events of Christ’s life, such as i. 23; ii. 15, 18; iv. 15,16; and those which are a part of the discourse of his different characters, such as ili. 3; iv. 4, 6,