Did Matthew know how to read the Old Testament?

Doing some work on the birth narrative in Matthew at the moment, and enjoying the recently published commentary on Matthew by R T France.

He has a brilliant (if long) paragraph arguing that Matthew was not a poor Old Testament handler at all, but knew exactly what he was doing. So brilliant, it’s worth quoting in full (from page 45)

In an article I published in 1981 I explored Matthew’s argument from Scripture with special reference to the four formula-quotations of ch. 2. It is often suggested that Matthew was quite cavalier in the uses to which he put OT texts, uses which would never have occurred to their original authors, and that his apparently arbitrary interpretations can have little to convey to modern readers who are used to a more “principled” handling of Scripture. If I was right in arguing above for an apologetic aim in these chapters, Matthew must have thought that at least some of his readers would be able to follow his scriptural allusions and find them convincing, and my article aimed to explore what the putative readers might be expected to get out of these particular formula-quotations. I concluded that we must allow in Matthew, as indeed in a great deal of other literature, ancient and modem, for different classes of readers who might be expected to engage at different levels with Matthew’s argument, from the relatively superficial level of direct promise and fulfillment to a much more nuanced and allusive appreciation of themes and strands of OT prophecy and type, and that Matthew deliberately provided “bonus” meanings accessible only to the more “sharp-eyed” or better instructed among his readers since “it is a poor author who aims to communicate only with the lowest common denominator of his potential readership” (p. 241). I shall suggest some of those “bonus meanings” in the comments below on each of the quotations, but would like to record here my conclusion that while Matthew’s way of interpreting OT texts is not the same as ours, and sometimes leaves us puzzled because we do not share his cultural background, it is very far from haphazard or unprincipled. These chapters show a remarkably detailed knowledge of the OT text and a subtlety of thought which perceives and exploits verbal and thematic connections. And the author seems to assume that at least some of the original readers of the book would have been able to follow such sophisticated patterns of thought, and would delight as much as he did in tracing the fulfillment of God’s purpose through the details as well as in the essential events of the Messiah’s coming. What we have in these chapters, in other words, is not a random gathering of embarrassingly inappropriate texts, but the product of a sophisticated and probably lengthy engagement with Scripture in a way which goes beyond our concepts of “scientific exegesis” precisely because it believes in God’s purposeful control of both the words and the events of the OT, so that it is only in the light of their ultimate fulfillment in the Messiah that their significance can be appreciated by Christian hindsight.