The Gospel of Matthew is not a biography of Jesus. It is a first-century description of how his followers made sense of him, which is historical but not historiographical in our modern sense of a critical study of the past using modern research methods. It does, nonetheless, offer us insights into what the Jesus Movement about Jesus, that is its Christology.On the face of it, this brief bit of commentary in Matthew 8:16-17 seems to portray him as a miracle worker and a healer who had become very popular as a result. The early church, however, had learned that this profile was only one side of the coin. Jesus' own teachings about who is great and who is not, his intense struggle with the Jewish power structures, and the paradigm-shattering events of his death and resurrection—all of this had convinced his earliest followers that he was not your standard miracle-worker Messiah. The Spirit was doing something very different in him.
The earliest church began as a Jewish sect-movement, and it was only natural that they thought Jesus was the Messiah—and maybe something more than that, but that's where they started. However, he didn't fit the usual image of the Messiah. There had been no army of angels. He was not a conquering hero in the usual sense of the term. So they turned to the (Hebrew) scriptures to sort things out, and one of the places that helped them make sense of Jesus was Isaiah's prophecy concerning a different kind of Messiah, namely a suffering servant who was humble, seemingly weak, despised by the powerful, and yet took on the suffering of the people and healed them (Isaiah 52:13-53:12). It is that prophecy that the author of Matthew cites here in the midst of several stories about Jesus' prowess as a healer. Jesus really was humble, seemingly weak, and despised by the powerful. On the cross, he took on their suffering. And he healed them, as these stories demonstrate. The inescapable conclusion was that God's Messiah, no question. The author's research into the scriptures proved the case.
The gospel is not a biography, but that does not mean that the compiler/author did not conduct research in writing it. In fact he or she, did a great deal of research especially in collecting and collating the stories contained in the gospel. She or he also did the necessary secondary research into the scriptures, and from this research crafted a cogent, well-argued portrait of Jesus, the Messiah-plus, a portrait the churches have long believed shows evidence of the Spirit.
The Spirit can be present even in the work of researchers. Amazing.
