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This study has the purpose of understanding authorial audience criticism and evaluating its pros and cons with a case study of Warren Carter’s works. Cater employs authorial audience criticism to interpret the writings of the New Testament (NT) with a counter-narrative reading against the social, political, cultural, economic, and religious value systems of the Roman Empire. He adopts the concept of “authorial audience” that refers to the reader whom the author keeps in mind. He first determines who the audience is and what situations they were placed under and experienced; and then the texts are read and interpreted along with this audience and their experiences. According to Cater, authorial audience indicates neither the real (or flesh-and-bone) reader nor the implied reader. As for the real reader, it is impossible to identify who this historical reader is; and as for the implied reader, there exists a limitation because this reader is only projected by the text with the exclusion of the historical contexts. Authorial audience, however, is not only the real reader who was actually reading the author’s writing, but also the implied reader whom the text projects in that the authors bear in his mind. Carter first defines the identity of the authorial audience by examining both text and context, and then interprets the NT writings in view of authorial audience. In this study, I investigate and evaluate Carter’s works, especially in relation to the study of the Gospel of Matthew that is his major field in the NT. He argues that Matthean community (audience) was located in Antioch on the Orontes River in Syria, which was one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire at that time. Matthean community, however, belonged to a lower class in this urban city and suffered under the opposition, contempt, and isolation, while living as a marginal group. Carter also suggests the counter-narrative reading which is to find the resistance of Matthew’s community against the evils of social, economic, political, and cultural structures in the Roman Empire. In so doing, there happen tensions between the theology of the Roman Empire and the theology of the Kingdom of God, which lead to discover the alternative worldview of God’s reign by rejecting the Roman imperialism.