Shifting boundaries: Religious conversion in the matrix of Matthean Christianity

While modern New Testament scholars have reached near consensus that the Gospel of Matthew was written in a Jewish-Christian context, the precise nature of the relationship between the Matthean and Jewish communities remains unclear. This dissertation proposes that attempts to place Matthew and his community either completely inside or outside Judaism have tended to oversimplify religious and social realities. Rather, these predominantly Jewish Christians continued to struggle to define their identity and relationship with Judaism. In short, they remain torn between traditional and recently acquired religious perspectives. Thus, their debate with Judaism is neither precisely intra nor extra muros; they are "riding the fence" between Judaism and Christianity. This is consistent with the experience of religious conversion, a process that generally takes place over a significant period of time.;This dissertation uses a cross-disciplinary approach that draws upon both narrative-criticism and social-scientific criticism. The narrative-critical analysis focuses on Matthew's story for what it reveals about the nature and function of religious conversion. The social-scientific approach has two components. The first part is an investigation of conversion experiences found in ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish writings. The discovery of analogous processes enables reasonable inferences to be made about the general nature of the phenomenon and provides a necessary check on the analysis of conversion in Matthew's Gospel. The second part focuses on the stage model of conversion developed by Lewis Rambo in his recent book, Understanding Religious Conversion . Rambo's model describes religious change as a progression through several stages that assumes some movement back and forth, which has significant heuristic value when applied to Matthew's social situation. For if, as some scholars have argued, boundaries between Christianity and Judaism remained fluid in the late first century, one would expect some vacillation and indecision over religious and social commitments.;Rambo's model offers a helpful response to the debate among Matthean scholars over the boundaries between the Jewish and Matthean communities. What this analysis reveals is the image of a complex, multi-faceted religious experience, one that resists rigid boundaries or clear lines of demarcation between former loyalties and newly acquired perspectives.