This article explores the literary relationship between the Matthean tradition and the Ascension of Isaiah, a second-century pseudepigraphon detailing Isaiah's visions of the ‘Beloved’ and his polemical (and fatal) engagement with the ‘false prophet’ Belkira. While the lexical affiliation between these texts has been a point of interest, the discussion has oscillated between types of sources utilised, whether gospel material mutually shared with Matthew or Matthew itself. Though this paper details lexical contact, it pushes beyond philological similarity and posits narrative imitations as well as shared polemical strategies. The result is that Isaiah is more readily seen as a figure fashioned after the Matthean Jesus, and the ‘martyred prophet’ motif that ripples throughout the Gospel of Matthew as appropriated and narrativised by the Ascension of Isaiah for a second-century conflict over prophetic practices.

In their 1920s expatriate theologies, Paul Althaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer claim to be bound by a conflictual international ‘law’, which mandates violent competition while authorising the strong to displace weaker peoples. We argue that acknowledging such correspondence helps to reveal a surprising turn in their diverging ecclesiological judgements over the 1933 Aryan Paragraph. Ironically, although Althaus holds to the productivity of conflict between peoples, he supports the exclusion of Jewish pastors in Germany as a concession to fragile völkisch identity. In contrast, Bonhoeffer's new pacifist leanings coincide with his incitement to conflict on behalf of Jewish colleagues, overriding the use of Pauline admonition to defer to the ‘weak’ conscience.