Jewish hermeneutic approaches in the polemical stories of the gospel according to St. Matthew

The canonical Gospels contain a series of disputes between Jesus Christ and the Jews. The greatest number of polemical stories is in the Gospel of Matthew. Often the argument of Christ is based on the arguments from the Scriptures - an approach, after which the dispute usually ends The article discusses the Jewish hermeneutic techniques that are used in the narration of St. Matthew in the polemical speeches of Jesus Christ. In order to briefly introduce the reader to the Jewish hermeneutic tradition, which is closely related to the development of polemics, the author first discusses the origin, development, and peculiarities of the Jewish interpretation. In order to investigate the methods of interpretation that Jesus Christ applied, the seven rules of interpretation formulated by Hillel were taken for comparison (middle of the first century BC to beginning of the firstcentury AD). Based on an analysis of the polemical stories in the Gospel of Matthew, several cases were discovered where Christ applied some of Hillel’s hermeneutic techniques: kal va-chomer, a generalization from one verse, a generalization from two verses, an analogy from another place in Scripture...