AUTHOR

Nowhere does the first Gospel name its author. Though the title, “According to Matthew,” was probably added early in the book’s history, most likely around the beginning of the second century, the book was not quoted as Matthew’s Gospel until Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, did so around AD 180. Earlier documents quoting Matthew (going back to the same period as the title or earlier) do not name the Gospel from which the quotes came.

According to the sources available, the early church was in unanimous agreement that the apostle Matthew was the first to write a Gospel and that he originally did so in Hebrew (or Aramaic). Irenaeus was the first to explicitly claim this, and it was repeated thereafter with relative frequency. The claim seems to stem, at least in part, from Papias, a bishop in Asia Minor, writing around AD 130.

The fourth-century church historian Eusebius cited Papias as affirming that Matthew arranged Jesus’s sayings in Hebrew or Aramaic and each interpreted them as best he could. This sentence from Eusebius has provoked considerable scholarly debate. Was Papias saying that Matthew wrote a Gospel or merely that he wrote an orderly collection of Jesus’s sayings? Was he claiming Matthew wrote in Hebrew (or Aramaic) or in Greek with a Semitic flavor? Did people try to translate Matthew’s work into Greek? At one end of the spectrum, Papias may have been saying that Matthew arranged, in Hebrew, the sayings of Jesus (or perhaps just Old Testament testimony about Jesus). At the other end of the spectrum, Papias may have been talking about a complete Gospel account, such as the Gospel of Matthew that we know. Certainly the church fathers understood the latter to be the case, and Jerome who translated the Bible into Latin (ca 380) even insisted that he was given access to the Hebrew original possessed by the Nazareans, a Jewish-Christian sect.

The problem for modern scholarship is that Matthew’s Gospel shows few signs of having been translated into Greek from an earlier Semitic text. It appears much more likely to be an original Greek composition. Scholars thus disagree over whether Papias was wrong to insist on a Matthean Hebrew original or whether he was correct but was referring to something written in Hebrew that was different from our first Gospel. (Other church fathers besides Jerome reported a Hebrew Gospel existing in their day associated with Jewish Christians. They agreed that it was in many respects different from the biblical Matthew, though connected with that apostle.) If the latter is the case, our first Gospel was either not written by Matthew or is a second work written by him, this time in Greek. It could be that Papias confused the two works and assumed one was the basis for the other.

The best evidence from the Gospel itself that Matthew was its author is that only in this Gospel is Levi the tax collector (Mk 2:14; Lk 5:27) identified as the apostle Matthew (Mt 9:9; 10:3). At the very least, this suggests the author presents Matthew’s witness. The Gospel also contains clear evidence that the author possessed a strong command of both Aramaic and Greek, something that would be a prerequisite for most tax collectors. Furthermore, the author of Matthew used the more precise term nomisma for the coin used in the dispute over tribute (Mt 22:19) than Mark’s and Luke’s denarion (Mk 12:15; Lk 20:24). This linguistic specificity strongly implies that the author was conversant in the fine details of money and finance, a point that would lend credence to the proposition that the author was a tax collector.

Nevertheless, most critical scholars still reject Matthean authorship of the first Gospel. Some argue that an apostle and eyewitness of Jesus’s ministry would not have used a secondary source, yet the first Gospel relies on Mark for much of its material. Others claim that the perspective of the book shows a fuller development of traditional material and of relations with the Jews than one might expect in an early Gospel.

Neither of these objections is telling. One could just as easily speculate that Mark’s Gospel, associated as it was with Peter, had gained so much acceptance as the first accurate narrative of Christ’s life that Matthew saw no need to disregard it in compiling his own Gospel. Another objection to Matthean authorship is the highly developed relationship between Jews and Gentiles. The same can be said for Paul’s letters, which are indisputably from the apostolic age. Thus there is no compelling reason to overturn the unanimous external evidence associating the first Gospel with the apostle Matthew.

DATE

Matthew was quoted by the church father Ignatius around AD 110 (perhaps fifteen years earlier in 1 Clement) and thus could not have been written much later than about AD 90. Most critical scholars opt for a date not much earlier than that for the same reasons that lead them to deny Matthean authorship. Because Matthew seems to betray knowledge of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, any date before AD 70 is presumed impossible.

But besides prejudicially disallowing that Jesus could have predicted Jerusalem’s fall, the evidence for “prophecy” after the fact is not as clear as some suggest. First, the words of Christ (Mt 22:7; 24:15) are so general that one could easily understand them as indicating no knowledge of the actual destruction of Jerusalem. Second, certain episodes in Matthew give pre-AD 70 perspectives that would at least require clarifying comment from the Gospel writer if the temple had already fallen (e.g., the discussion of the temple tax in 17:24-27). There is no reason, therefore, that the Gospel could not have been written before AD 70. Irenaeus reported that Matthew was written while Peter and Paul preached at Rome, placing at least early versions of the Gospel in the AD 60s, assuming Irenaeus had a reliable tradition. The precise date of the writing of Matthew is uncertain, but some time in the 60s is not unreasonable.

THEMES

Each Gospel, though broadly compatible with the others, emphasizes something different about the significance of the life and ministry of Jesus. For Matthew, that significance clearly lies in Jesus’s status as the promised messianic son of David, the king of Israel. Several features of the Gospel are related to this primary theme. Foremost is Matthew’s citation of Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in the life of Jesus. Matthew is often faulted for taking these “prophecies” out of context and misapplying them. However, his practice must be understood in terms of the conventions of first-century citation generally, and the charge is less appropriate than is often thought (see the notes, esp. 2:15). Other features related to the theme of Jesus as promised King include long teaching discourses in which the word of Jesus becomes a new law for the church, a confession of Jesus as the Son of God in divine (as opposed to merely messianic) terms, and an extension of kingdom promises from the Jews to the Gentile nations in fulfillment of the covenant with Abraham.

For more on the similarities and distinctions between Matthew and the other Gospels, see the Introduction to Mark.