Matthew arranges Jesus' teaching into five great discourses, the Sermon on the Mount, the missionary charge, the parables of the kingdom, instruction on community discipline, and the Mount of Olives discourse on the end times, each closing with a near identical formula, "when Jesus had finished these sayings." Five blocks of teaching framing a life story echoes the five books of the Torah, and the effect is deliberate: Jesus delivers a new law from a mountain, as Moses once did from Sinai.
The Gospel opens with a genealogy tracing Jesus from Abraham through David, addressed to readers anxious to show that the story of Jesus continues, rather than breaks, the story of Israel. No New Testament book quotes Hebrew scripture as insistently; the recurring phrase "this was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet" ties one episode after another back to Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, and the Psalms. The Sermon on the Mount, chapters 5 through 7, supplies the fullest single statement of Jesus' ethical teaching in the New Testament: the Beatitudes, the Lord's Prayer, and a set of antitheses, "you have heard it said, but I say to you," that intensify rather than abolish the Law. The book ends on the Great Commission, sending the disciples to "all nations," a universalizing turn that stands in real tension with the Gospel's earlier, more Israel centered instructions, and scholars read the tension as evidence of a community working out its own boundaries in real time.