In Matthew 16:13, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” In response, the disciples tell Jesus, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (Matt 16:14). Why would the Jews identify Jesus with Jeremiah, the weeping prophet of the exile?(1) This paper will compare the prophetic ministry of Jesus to that of Jeremiah.(2) The seminal work Michael Knowles on Matthew’s use and portrayal of Jeremiah’s as OT prophet provides an important starting point and spring board for this conversation, but the comparisons must extend beyond the Gospel of Matthew.(3) Points of comparison will be drawn in the following areas: 1. Condemnation of corrupted religious and political leadership; 2. Pronouncements of impending judgment upon those who reject God’s oracles; 3. Presentation of the New Covenant as God’s plan for overcoming the corruption of the human heart; 4. Lamentation over rejection of God’s oracles and the execution of God’s judgment on Israel; 5. Use of prophetic “object lessons” as pedagogical and oracular devices. The paper will contribute to ongoing scholarship by further explaining why Jesus’ Jewish listeners would have made connections between the gospel of the kingdom that he proclaimed and the prophetic ministry of Jeremiah at the time of the exile of Judah.
1 France asks this same question, and in response says, “The answer may be found in the peculiar nature of Jeremiah’s message, which has made his name proverbial as a prophet of doom, and in the sustained opposition he encountered among his own people.” R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 616.
2 See Patrick Schreiner, Matthew, Disciple and Scribe: The First Gospel and Its Portrait of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 228–235; Patrick Schreiner, The Transfiguration of Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Reading (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024), 119–128; David L. Turner, Israel’s Last Prophet: Jesus and the Jewish Leaders in Matthew 23 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015).
3 Michael Knowles, Jeremiah in Matthew’s Gospel: The Rejected Profit Motif in Matthaean Redaction, JSNTSS 68 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993).