The adoption of the narrative-critical paradigm requires a change in reading strategy. For narrative critics, the centre of authority shifts from the author or text towards the reader, in recognition that the reader participates with the story-teller and tale in producing meaning from the narrative world. The following reading adheres to the sequential flow of Matthew's narrative, and focuses on plot elements like anticipation–fulfilment and acceptance–rejection. The limitations of this study have precluded the luxury of a sustained, moment-by-moment story of reading which incorporates the many details of the narrative. The agenda here is to highlight those significant features which illuminate Matthew's presence motif.

This study is concerned less with a reader-response analysis than with story and rhetoric. In so far as the reader's experience is integral to the construction of the story world and meaning, reference will be made to the implied reader's participation and responses. I am assuming that, in Iser's words, the implied reader

Or, as Howell words it, the implied reader is ‘both textual structure to be realized and structured act of realization’. In other words, the implied reader as textual structure already inhabits the narrative text as the audience which ‘embodies all the predispositions necessary for the literary work to exercise its effect’.