Lost, Found, and Still to be Explored: Text and Context of the Commentary on Matthew

This chapter gives an overview of the history of Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on Matthew and the problems with its reception. The first part explains the transmission of the manuscript and the status of a reportatio. In the second section, a practice of contextualization and cross-referencing is developed to study the text. This will show that the commentary gives us valuable insights into the vita apostolica, the place of the beatitudes in Aquinas’s theology, and his understanding of the Sermon on the Mount as a written expression of the New Law. The third section proposes three ways in which the commentary might contribute to further developing Biblical Thomism: it complements our understanding of Aquinas’s view of a given topic or text, it reveals what structures underlie other works of Aquinas, and we can trace the development of Aquinas’s theology through exegesis.