A Review of the Rationale for Jesus’ Use of David’s Example in Matthew 12: 3-4 in Contemporary Scholarly Debate

Abstract

The rationale for Jesus’ use of David’s story in Matt 12:3-4 has attracted varied views in biblical scholarship. The text records Jesus’ use of David’s example in the first Sabbath conflict in Matthew’s Gospel. This article attempted to sample prominent scholarly views on the Matt 12:3-4. This article adopted a descriptive and evaluative approach to sample views of contemporary scholars in Jesus’ use of David’s example, Matt 12:3-4, in the first Sabbath conflict. The aims were to describe and evaluate contemporary scholarly views on why Jesus used David’s story in Matthew 12:3-4. This article used the descriptive and evaluative qualitative method of research. This article surveyed the literature on the hermeneutical appraisal of David’s example in Matt 12:3-4. It centered on scholarly arguments and appraisal of the rabbinic hermeneutics of Matt 12:1-8. Two prominent views on Jesus’ methodology are identified as: (1) rabbinic hermeneutics and (2) typological hermeneutics. Scholarly arguments centered mainly on the Christological and authority approaches to the text. The authors concluded that the above postulations of scholars do not adequately explains why Jesus used the example of David in answering the Pharisaic query. Hence, a critical look at the text requires a hermeneutical review of the arguments advanced by scholars for these approaches. As such, further study to explore the possible reason why Jesus used David’s example in Matt 12:3-4 would be in order. This research has contributed to scholarship on the Sabbath controversy in Matt 12:1-8.

Keywords

• david’s story in matt 12:3-4
• jesus’ methodology
• rabbinic hermeneutics
• typological hermeneutics
• christology.