“Doing the Will of the Father in Heaven” in the Gospel of Matthew: The Confluence of Law Observance and Moral Behaviour

This thesis examines the Gospel of Matthew's emphasis on the “will of the Father in heaven" in light of the recent scholarly focus on the Gospel’s Jewishness. It explores the semantics of the “will of God” in Jewish thought in biblical, apocryphal, pseudepigraphal, intertestamental, and Tannaitic literature, and then traces the continuities and developments of these semantics in the Gospel of Matthew and the New Testament. I argue that Matthew’s emphasis on “doing the will of the Father in heaven” exhibits the standard confluence of Law observance and moral behaviour found in Jewish textual traditions.