Matthew’s Decolonial Desire (Matt. 12:42; 27:19)

With a postcolonial postulation that Matthew might be a border-work written in a (de)colonizing context, this essay argues that Matthew employs the Queen of the South and Pilate’ wife, the female colonizer, as a decolonizing strategy to cope with the identity crisis that his community was undergoing in transitioning from deviant Jews to true heirs of Israel in the context of the Roman empire. In the border-land of the colonial contact zone, Matthew, as a border-writer, constructs the subjectivities of Jesus in a hybrid space, and tries to subvert Roman as well as Jewish authority through his re-conceptualization and mimicry of either side of his opposition. Since the presence of these two powerful women disrupts the established male power through their disapproval of male governance, Matthew utilizes them not only in order to affirm Jesus’ authority but also as a sign of Roman decline.