I Hated the Gospel of Matthew

Jimmy hated the Gospel of Matthew when he first read it. Today it may be his favorite. In this episode he traces the man behind it: why a tax collector carries two Hebrew names, why Matthew ranks as a mid-range apostle, and why tax collectors were despised. Then he takes up the hard question—did Matthew write the Gospel at all? Jimmy works through the objections from date, literacy, and Matthew’s use of 90% of Mark, and argues that the strongest evidence for his authorship is the one thing a forger would never have chosen: his name.

TRANSCRIPT:

Coming Up

When I first became a Christian, I started reading the New Testament, and I hated the Gospel of Matthew.

But today it may be my favorite!

So . . . what changed? And is Matthew really the person who wrote it?

Let’s get into it!

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Howdy, folks!

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How I Came to Matthew

Today I want to talk to you about Saint Matthew the Apostle and the Gospel that he wrote.

When I first became a Christian years ago, I decided to read the Bible.

Since I knew the New Testament was the part most directly relevant to the Christian faith, I decided to start with the New Testament and then go back and read the Old Testament.

I later discovered, as I was on my way to becoming Catholic, that there were also 7 “hidden” books that are also part of it—the deuterocanonicals—so I read them too.

But in the beginning, I started with the New Testament, and that meant I started with the Gospel of Matthew.

And when I began to read it . . . I hated it.

I had never read any literature like this before, so I didn’t understand how this Genre or Type of literature worked.

I didn’t know the rules it uses, it was very difficult to understand, and I didn’t enjoy it at all.

Then I read the Gospel of Mark . . . and I hated it even more.

At least Matthew, when he records Jesus telling a parable, will often include a little clue that tells you what the parable is about.

He’ll have Jesus say, “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .” and then he’ll tell the parable.

That lets you understand that this parable is going to teach me something about the kingdom.

But Mark doesn’t tend to do that. He just presents Jesus launching into the parable, and there’s no clue signaling what the parable is about.

Then, by the time I started to read Luke’s gospel, my perception began to change, because I started to understand how this kind of literature works.

I was learning the rules of the genre, and so I was appreciating it more.

In subsequent years I’ve done a lot of work reading and studying the Gospels, and I understand how they work in vastly more detail now.

And, today, Matthew may be my favorite Gospel of all.

One of the reasons for that is that Matthew is an organizer.

He has an organized mind, and he organizes material.

I really appreciate that, because I have an organizing mind too.

I organize material and concepts, and reading Matthew and how he does things is appealing to me.

Levi and Matthew

Now let’s take a detour for just a moment and look at a story that occurs in 3 of the gospels—in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

You’ll find this story in Mark 2. At this point, Jesus is in Galilee, and Mark says:

Mark 2:13-14

[Jesus] went out again beside the sea, and all the crowd was coming to him, and he was teaching them. And as he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.

So in this incident, we meet a figure known as Levi the son of Alphaeus.

But that’s not all Mark tells us. He continues:

Mark 2:15-17

And as [Jesus] reclined at table in [Levi’s] house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

So this is the famous story where Jesus says, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Luke 5:29

And Levi made him a great feast in his house; and there was a large company of tax collectors and others sitting at table with them.

We find this same story in Luke 5, where Luke records that it was indeed Levi himself who made a great feast in his house for Jesus.

And we find the same story in Matthew 9, in the same Galilean scene—but there Matthew says something different:

Matthew 9:9

As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.

And then Matthew goes on to tell the same story about the feast at Matthew’s house.

Now, what’s different about Matthew’s version is that he has a different name for this figure.

Both Mark and Luke call him Levi—Levi the son of Alphaeus, in Mark’s case.

But in Matthew’s gospel, he calls this figure Matthew.

So it looks like we have one figure with 2 names.

That’s a little unusual, because they’re both Hebrew names.

The name Matthew in Hebrew means Gift of Yahweh

The name Levi means Joined. It’s more famous, though, as the name of one of the 12 tribes.

The tribe of Levi was the priestly tribe, and it descended from a patriarch named Levi.

So it’s possible that this figure—Matthew Levi—could have been a Levite, a member of that tribe and was named after its patriarch.

The Lists of the Twelve

In the next chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, he records the calling of the 12 apostles.

Matthew 10 says:

Matthew 10:1-4

And [Jesus] called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction. The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector;

James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

We find parallel lists in 2 other Gospels: in Mark 3 and in Luke 6. There’s also a fourth list in Acts 1.

And in the case of the three Gospel lists, we have the figure of Matthew introduced first—when Jesus calls him from the tax booth—and then we have him recorded among the 12 apostles who were called.

Now in Matthew’s case, we have a deliberate callback to when Matthew was introduced.

In the list of the 12 apostles, we’re told that one of them is Matthew the tax collector, and that’s a reference to the same figure, Matthew the tax collector, that we just met in the previous chapter.

So Matthew is making it explicit: this is the same Matthew.

That’s something you would not have known from Mark or Luke.

In both Mark and Luke, it’s recorded that one of the 12 is named Matthew, but we’ve never met anybody by that name before in their gospels, because when they introduced the tax collector, he was called Levi—and you wouldn’t know that Levi is the same person as Matthew.

That’s a connection that only Matthew’s gospel makes.

One of the things that a lot of people don’t notice about these lists of the 12 is that they are arranged in 3 blocks of 4 names.

In each list, the 4 names are the same in each block.

For example, the first block is always Peter, Andrew, James, and John. They’re the core disciples. They’re the ones closest to Jesus, and so they’re the ones listed first.

In the second block, the names are always Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, and Matthew—they’re kind of mid-range apostles.

And then in the third block, the names are always James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus—whom Luke and Acts call Judas the son of James—Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who is always listed last, except in the Acts list, where he’s dead.

The sources may change the order of the names within a block, but the same names are always in the same block.

So you can kind of rank the apostles based on which block they’re in.

The core apostles are always in the first block, the lesser apostles are always in the last block, including the betrayer Judas Iscariot, and the mid-range apostles are in the middle block.

Matthew is one of those middle apostles, and that’s going to be important going forward.

Why Two Jewish Names?

A question remains, though: why does Matthew have these 2 names?

It’s not unusual in the New Testament for people to have more than one name.

One of the reasons that was common is that people were interacting across cultural boundaries.

So, for example, when Paul is working among fellow Jews, he originally used the name Saul, which is a Jewish name.

But he was also a Roman citizen, and he had the Roman name Paul that he used when he was interacting with Gentiles, and that eventually became his more famous name.

In the same way, the author of the second gospel is a young man that is most commonly called Mark.

Mark is a Roman name, but his Jewish name was John, and so he’s sometimes called John Mark.

So you have this situation of people using one name when they’re interacting with one community and another name when they’re interacting with another community.

And the names are based on the culture that they’re interacting with.

People may have a Jewish name when they’re interacting with Jews, and then they have a Gentile name for when they’re interacting with Gentiles.

But that wouldn’t apply to Matthew Levi, because both Matthew and Levi are Jewish names.

So why would he have 2 Jewish names?

One possibility that’s been proposed is that he was renamed.

This would be analogous to Simon the son of John being renamed Peter by Jesus.

John 1:42

He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him, and said, “So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter).

We’re explicitly told that Jesus gave Simon the new name Peter, and that means we could explain Matthew’s 2 Jewish names the same way.

It’s possible that his birth name was Levi, and that he then became a tax collector—tax collectors being people who take money from people.

And then when he became a follower of Jesus, Jesus may have renamed him Matthew, meaning Gift of Yahweh, a gift being a symbol of generosity, which is kind of the opposite of what a tax collector is normally regarded as being.

A Brother of James?

You may also wonder whether he is a relative of the apostle known as James the son of Alphaeus, who’s mentioned in all 3 of the lists in the Synoptic Gospels and is identified that way to distinguish him from the more famous James the son of Zebedee.

Mark 2:14

And as he passed on, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.

Well, Levi is called the son of Alphaeus in Mark, and Alphaeus is not the most common name, so it is possible that he was a brother of James the son of Alphaeus.

But there’s a problem with that, which is that these apostle lists tend to keep brothers together.

Matthew 10:2

The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother.

In the first block, it’s mentioned that Andrew is the brother of Peter and that James is the brother of John.

In the same way, if Matthew and James of Alphaeus were brothers, you would expect them to be mentioned together, and likely to be mentioned as brothers—and that doesn’t happen.

So although it’s possible that they were brothers, it would not be certain, because Alphaeus was a name that more than one person had, and it might just be coincidence that their fathers had the same name.

Tax Collectors Were Despised

In the account of the feast that Matthew gave for Jesus, it mentions that many tax collectors and sinners were present, and this reflects the fact that tax collectors were themselves regarded as sinners.

Why would that have been?

Well, even today, IRS agents are not the most popular people.

They take money from others, and people don’t like their money being taken, so they tend not to like IRS agents.

The same thing was true back in the first century, only tax collectors were even more disliked.

And there were a few reasons for that.

A big one is that almost everybody was a hardscrabble farmer living a hand-to-mouth existence, barely scraping by.

And so taking money from people like that was a much bigger burden than it would be to someone today who is better off, and so there was even more resentment for the people who took their money.

Another reason is that they were working for the Romans, and the Romans were regarded as foreign dominators who were oppressing Israel.

So tax collectors were viewed as collaborators with the foreign oppressors, and they weren’t liked for that reason also.

Then there was the fact that the Romans practiced a system known as Tax Farming.

The way tax farming worked was the government auctioned off the right to collect taxes in a particular region, and whoever won the auction paid the government a lump sum that was guaranteed income for the government.

They then collected taxes in the region where they had been authorized to collect them, and they would collect more than the money they paid the government, and they kept for themselves whatever extra they were able to raise.

And they had little day-to-day oversight.

A tax farmer was like a regular farmer, who could raise as much food as he could off of his land, and in the same way a tax farmer could collect as much in taxes as he could raise off the people in his land.

So tax farmers ended up trying to collect a lot more money than they were actually paying the government, and this meant they were imposing an even heavier burden on the people they were collecting taxes from.

That was another reason for the unpopularity of tax collectors.

There’s a reference to this kind of system in Luke 3. When John the Baptist was baptizing:

Luke 3:12-13

Tax collectors also came to be baptized and said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Collect no more than you are authorized to do.”

So tax collectors were understood to collect more than they were authorized to.

A Popular Gospel

Now let’s talk about Matthew’s Gospel.

One of the things we know about Matthew’s Gospel is that it was extremely popular in the early church.

We know that because of the number of copies of Matthew that have survived, because the more copies of a gospel people made, the more copies were likely to survive down through the last 2,000 years.

So we can estimate—from the number of copies of a book that have survived—how popular it was.

And it’s clear that Matthew and John were the 2 most popular gospels.

Luke was not quite as popular, and then Mark was the distant fourth.

Matthew’s Interest in Money

One of the things that’s been argued is that Matthew’s gospel displays a special interest in money, which is something you would expect from a tax collector.

And it’s not unexpected that the author of each gospel would relate the story of Jesus in a way that reflects his own interests.

For example, in the account of the woman with the hemorrhage, here’s how Mark 5 tells it:

Mark 5:25-26

And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.

So that sounds pretty negative about physicians.

They cause this woman a lot of suffering, they don’t cure her, they take all her money, and she only gets worse.

Luke, being a physician, doesn’t want to be that harsh on doctors.

And so Luke 8:43 puts it this way:

Luke 8:43

And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and though she had spent all her living on physicians, she could not be healed by anyone.

So Luke tones down the statement about physicians.

What he says makes it sound like the problem is not with the physicians but with the illness.

It’s so tough that nobody can cure it, and she had to spend all of her money trying to get it cured—but it was not the physicians’ fault that they couldn’t do it.

Well, in the same way, people have argued that Matthew’s gospel displays an unusual interest in money.

One place where that happens is in the Beatitudes.

Luke 6:20 says:

Luke 6:20

And [Jesus] lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

So here the blessing is pronounced on the poor.

The parallel in Matthew reads differently.

Matthew 5:3 says:

Matthew 5:3

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

So it isn’t “blessed are you who are poor,” but “blessed are the poor in spirit.”

That means that Matthew wants us to understand it’s not just any poor people that inherit the kingdom of God.

There can be poor people who are selfish and cruel, and so obsessed with their own needs that they never think of anybody else.

They don’t have the spirit that should truly characterize poor people who are living in a way that’s consistent with God’s kingdom.

And so to clarify that it isn’t just any poor that are blessed, Matthew adds the words “in spirit.”

People who display a true spirit of poverty that’s consistent with the kingdom—they’re the ones who are going to be blessed.

And that’s the kind of thing people point to as evidence that Matthew was a tax collector.

The Objection from Date

However, not everybody agrees that Matthew wrote this gospel, and to be frank, the evidence for Matthew’s authorship of his gospel is not as strong as the evidence for the other 3 gospels.

But I still think he did write it.

There are, though, several objections that we should consider.

One objection to the idea that Matthew wrote his gospel is based on its proposed date.

There are many scholars today who propose that the Gospel of Matthew was written late—that it was written after the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

You’ll find many scholars who date Matthew to the A.D. 80s or 90s, and that’s 50 or 60 years after the crucifixion.

So it would be unlikely, if Matthew was written at that late date, that it would have been authored by an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, like Matthew the Apostle.

However, I don’t think that that dating is correct.

On completely other grounds than the idea Matthew wrote it, I think that Matthew’s gospel was actually written earlier than that.

In my book The Bible Is a Catholic Book, I date it to the year 63, though I’m open to other dates, including earlier ones—say, in the A.D. 50s.

And the 50s or 60s would only make it 20 or 30 years after the crucifixion, which makes it much more possible that an eyewitness could have written it.

I went through the dating of Matthew in detail in episode 93, so check that out if you want to go deeper.

But I don’t think that this objection succeeds.

The Objection from Literacy

Another objection is that Jesus’ disciples would not be expected to write gospels, on the grounds that they wouldn’t have been literate.

In fact, Acts 4:13 describes Peter and John this way:

Acts 4:13

Now when [the Jewish leaders] saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus.

Some Bibles render the word translated “uneducated” differently.

The Greek word is Agrammatoi, which means Unlettered

And that literally would mean they didn’t have letters—they didn’t know how to read.

It could also mean uneducated, so the interpretation of the passage is not certain.

But I also don’t think that this is a good objection to the traditional authorship of Matthew’s gospel, for 2 reasons.

The first is that you don’t have to know how to write yourself in order to be able to compose a written document.

In the ancient world, people could and did employ scribes.

So, for example, people who didn’t know how to write letters would hire a scribe, and they would tell the scribe what they wanted to say in the letter, and then the scribe would write it down and they could send it off.

Now, writing a short letter—and the letters in the ancient world were extremely short—is different than writing a gospel.

But that leads to a second point, which is that if Matthew or the other disciples had spent 20 or 30 years or more preaching the gospel, they would have had all that time not only to figure out how they wanted to tell the story, but also to figure out more about how to write.

And so even if they didn’t know how to write during Jesus’ ministry, they could have learned it over time as part of their ministry.

Then there’s the fact that Matthew is a tax collector, and many people have said, “Oh, well, being a tax collector requires literacy. You have to keep financial records and things like that.”

So Matthew would have known how to write for that reason.

In fact, uniquely among the disciples, he would have been the one who knew how to write.

That argument is not conclusive, though, because there were different kinds of tax collectors.

There were some who needed to know how to write, but that wasn’t everybody.

Other tax collectors were basically thugs who would simply put the squeeze on people to pay their taxes, and they didn’t need to know how to write.

However, the fact that the Gospels record Matthew sitting at a tax booth suggests that he had some kind of records in front of him that he would have consulted.

And so I think it probable that Matthew did know how to write—even though it’s not certain simply from the occupation of being a tax collector.

The Objection from Mark

Another objection to the idea that Matthew wrote his gospel is that it’s based on Mark.

Now, this is a fairly recent objection in church history.

For many centuries—from the second century until very recently—it was commonly held that Matthew was the first gospel to be written and that the other gospels, like Mark and Luke, were based on it.

However, in recent centuries, it’s been argued that Mark was actually the first gospel to be written and that Matthew used Mark.

Personally, I used to tentatively accept and argue for the idea that Matthew was written first.

However, a long and careful study of the evidence convinced me that the modern view is correct—Mark did write first, and then Matthew used Mark.

I laid out the case for that in episode 61, on which gospel was written first.

In fact, Matthew used a lot of Mark. He used basically 90% of it.

So the objection that has been mounted in recent times is that if the author of Matthew were an eyewitness, he wouldn’t use 90% of somebody else’s work in writing his own Gospel.

But I’ve never been convinced by that argument, because I’ve had experience working in a field where one does not have the same kind of personal stake in authorship credit that people do today.

For decades, I’ve worked at Catholic Answers, and Catholic Answers has published a lot of material that does not carry a byline, that does not indicate who its author was.

And a lot of that material, especially in the early days, was written by me.

One of the things I would do—because my name wasn’t going to be on it, so I wasn’t invested in who got credit for it—was take something that had been written previously by someone else and rework it to fit the purposes I was writing for.

So if I found something that did a lot of what I wanted but not everything I wanted, I would take what the other person had written anonymously and then modify it to achieve the purposes I wanted to accomplish, and then it would be published—not with my name, but without any name on it.

That’s similar to the way the Gospels work, because the text of the Gospels does not contain the names of the authors.

And so I think that what happened is that Matthew had the Gospel of Mark, he realized it did a lot of what he wanted in telling the story of Jesus, and so he used a large majority of Mark, but then added to it and supplemented it and restructured it a little bit to accomplish his own goals.

And since Mark didn’t have the author’s name on it and Matthew didn’t have the author’s name on it, that was something that was perfectly acceptable.

Some people have also argued that since Mark’s gospel is based on the preaching of Peter, maybe Matthew knew this, and since Peter was the head apostle, maybe that’s an additional reason that Matthew felt comfortable using Mark.

And that’s possible, though I don’t think it would have been a big factor.

Matthew also modifies a bunch of what Mark says—such as to make it shorter and more polished. He also leaves out some things Mark records. So he didn’t treat it like an unmodifiable text that was just a transcript of Peter’s words.

However, I think there is another reason that Matthew would have been comfortable using Mark, and that is that we have evidence that Mark may not have been meant to be a complete, polished literary work.

Instead, it may have been what was known in the Greek world as Hupomnemata, which means Notes, Memoranda

In the Latin world these were called Commentarii.

These were works that were basically collections of notes that could be used as the basis for later, more polished works.

And that would explain why Mark is so short and unpolished.

Matthew and Luke then took Mark and expanded and polished it.

So Mark looks like a set of commentarii, and if it was meant to be used as a basis for other, later, more polished works, that’s another reason that Matthew would have been comfortable using it—and for exactly that purpose.

So I don’t think that the idea that an eyewitness wouldn’t have used Mark is successful.

The Argument from the Name

A key reason that I think Matthew likely did write the gospel attributed to him is because of his name.

And there are 2 reasons for this.

The first one is that if Matthew was not the original author, then someone would have had to put his name on it, either intentionally or unintentionally.

It was common in the ancient world to attribute new literary works to famous figures from the past in order to give them more authority.

But in the first century, people wouldn’t have been inclined to do that with Matthew.

Today Saint Matthew is famous, and the reason he’s famous is because of the famous gospel that goes by his name.

But if the gospel did not go by his name in the first century, then he wouldn’t have been famous at that time.

People would have known him as one of the 12 apostles, but he was only a mid-range apostle, as we’ve seen.

So if you wanted to put the name of some famous person on your work, you would have picked someone more famous than Matthew.

You might have called your gospel the Gospel of Peter, or the Gospel of Andrew, or something like that, instead of naming it for a mid-range apostle like Matthew.

But there’s another, more compelling reason, though, which is that Matthew’s gospel, of all of them, is the most Jewish.

This is acknowledged by scholars of all persuasions, and it’s very clear that Matthew’s gospel is uniquely concerned with Jewish interests and was written for a group of Jewish Christians.

But that means that of all of the 12 apostles, Matthew would be the least likely to have his name put on a gospel meant specifically for a Jewish audience—because he was a tax collector, and tax collectors were despised by people in general but especially by Jewish people.

So if you wanted to give your gospel more authority for Jewish people, you would have picked anybody but Matthew the tax collector.

Did Matthew Write in Hebrew?

One idea about Matthew’s gospel is that he originally wrote it in Hebrew, and this idea is based on something that was said very early in church history.

There was a figure at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second century named Papias of Hierapolis, and he wrote a 5-volume work, now unfortunately lost, called Exposition of the Logia of the Lord.

Logia is a word that means Sayings, Oracles

Papias’s work is lost, but the church historian Eusebius quotes what he said about Matthew:

Eusebius, Church History 3:39:16, quoting Papias

Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew dialect, and everyone interpreted them as he was able.

Many people have understood the phrase “the Hebrew dialect” to refer to the language commonly spoken by Hebrews, which would be either the actual Hebrew language or the Aramaic language that was common among Hebrews at the time.

However, this is not certain, because the key Greek term in the phrase “the Hebrew dialect”—dialectó—doesn’t have to mean a language. It can also mean style. “In the Hebrew dialect” may mean “in the Hebrew style.”

And it’s absolutely clear that Matthew’s gospel is written in a Hebrew style that would require non-Hebrews to interpret it.

So what Papias may have actually said was that Matthew wrote the oracles—the logia, the sayings of Jesus or about Jesus—in the Hebrew style, and everyone interpreted them as he was able.

So it is not clear that Matthew was written in Hebrew rather than Greek.

The evidence we have suggests that it was written in Greek.

We do not have any early Hebrew versions of it, or early fragments of it in Hebrew, and it involves things like wordplay in Greek that suggest it was written in Greek.

A Sayings Document?

Another proposal is that what Papias is talking about is not the full Gospel of Matthew but just sayings that Jesus gave at different points in his ministry.

The idea here is that Matthew collected different sayings of Jesus into an early sayings document, and this was later incorporated into the Gospel of Matthew, which led people to refer to it as the Gospel of Matthew because it incorporated sayings that had come from Matthew.

Sometimes people link this proposed sayings document to a source that many think was used by both Matthew and Luke, called Q. It’s named after the German word Quelle, which means Source

The idea that there was a Q has been very popular in the last century, but it has come in for criticism.

There are problems with the Q proposal, and there are other ways of explaining the evidence.

I went into the whole question in episode 57, on the synoptic problem.

The reason that people propose Q is that there are around 235 verses in Matthew and Luke that are very similar to each other but are not in Mark.

These verses that Matthew and Luke share in common have been proposed to come from some original source or Q.

The problem is that this is a purely hypothetical proposal. We have no good evidence that a Q source existed.

And there are difficulties with the idea that—if it ever existed—Q was a collection of sayings, because it includes material—for example, about John the Baptist—that is not sayings.

And there are other ways to explain the 235 verses that Matthew and Luke have in common: maybe Luke took those verses from Matthew, or maybe Matthew took those verses from Luke.

In any event, we don’t have good evidence of an original Hebrew or Aramaic version of Matthew.

Fulfillment Notices

Matthew’s gospel has a number of distinctives that set it apart from the other gospels.

One of them is that Matthew incorporates what you can call fulfillment notices.

These are places where Matthew records something happening in fulfillment of something an Old Testament prophet said.

The first one comes in Matthew 2, after the wise men have gone home:

Matthew 2:16-18

Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”

This is Matthew’s first fulfillment notice, but he has a lot more of them, and that’s something that’s characteristic of his gospel.

Even though all of the evangelists are interested in prophetic fulfillment, Matthew notes it in a special way.

Jesus as the New Moses

Another thing that is common in Matthew is the way he portrays Jesus as a new Moses.

Moses had predicted that God would send a prophet like himself.

In Deuteronomy 18, God forbade the Israelites from using certain means to try to get information from the supernatural world.

But that left them with the question, if they didn’t use those means, of how they would get the information they needed.

And so Deuteronomy 18:15 says:

Deuteronomy 18:15

The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen.

In the original context, this just means that God will raise up prophets in the future and you’re going to listen to them rather than using the means God forbade.

But people began to look to this passage as a prediction that there would be a special prophet, one who was uniquely like Moses.

Sometimes this figure was just called “the Prophet.” There’s a reference to this in John 1:

John 1:19-21

And this is the testimony of John [the Baptist], when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.”

So people in Jesus’ time were expecting the arrival of the prophet like Moses, and Matthew is concerned to portray Jesus as that prophet.

Moses was almost killed as a child and had to be delivered from being killed as an infant.

Moses also passed through water with the crossing of the Red Sea.

He then spent a period of 40 years in the wilderness, and as part of that period, he went up on a mountain and gave God’s law to the Israelites.

Matthew notes how events in Jesus’ life recapitulated these same themes.

Jesus was almost killed as an infant and had to be taken down to Egypt to escape that.

Jesus then went through water when he was baptized in the Jordan.

He then spent 40 days in the wilderness being tested.

And then he went up on a mountain to deliver God’s law, which is Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.

So Matthew presents Jesus as the prophet who would be like Moses—as the new Moses.

The Five Discourses

The reason I said that Matthew has an organizing mind is because we see him organizing material about Jesus that is scattered in different places in the other gospels, particularly in Mark and in Luke.

Each gospel contains certain stories and sayings about Jesus, and Matthew especially organizes the sayings into large sermons, or discourses, that Jesus gives.

There are 5 such discourses in Matthew’s gospel.

The Sermon on the Mount is found from Matthew 5 through 7.

There’s another discourse in chapter 10.

There’s a discourse in chapter 13, one in chapter 18, and then one in chapters 23 through 25.

In each of these discourses, Matthew takes material that’s found in different places in the other gospels and groups it together by theme.

He arranges the themes in a literary structure that scholars refer to as a Chiasmus, which in Greek means Crossing

The way a chiasmus works is kind of like a pyramid or a wedding cake.

There is an element at the beginning and an element at the end that correspond to each other.

One step up from that, there’s a second element and a next-to-last element that correspond to each other.

And then in the middle, there’s either 1 or 2 elements.

And just as the top of a pyramid is the most prominent part of the pyramid, and the top of a wedding cake is the most prominent part of the wedding cake—that’s where they put the little figures of the bride and groom—the top of a chiasmus is the most important part.

So what are Matthew’s 5 discourses?

Well, the first discourse, the Sermon on the Mount, is about God’s law.

The last discourse, known as the Olivet Discourse, is about prophecy and the future and how the temple will be destroyed.

The first and the last discourse represent the Law and the Prophets, which were the 2 components of the Hebrew Scriptures.

So Jesus fulfills the Hebrew Scriptures—the Law and the Prophets.

When we move to the middle discourses, the second and the fourth ones, they both deal with the church.

In the second discourse, in chapter 10, Jesus sends out the disciples to preach the gospel and make new converts, and so this is about the external function of the church and how it relates to unbelievers.

But in the fourth discourse, in chapter 18, Jesus deals with how Christians are to relate to each other and how church discipline works—the internal functioning of the church.

So from the Law and the Prophets in the first and last discourses, we’ve moved to the church in the second and fourth discourses and how the church relates to outsiders and insiders.

Then in the very center discourse, in chapter 13, we have a collection of parables that are all about the kingdom of God.

So the central theme in Jesus’ teaching in Matthew’s gospel is the kingdom.

The kingdom is the central mystery, which is why it’s presented in parables.

And it’s also what Jesus came to preach. When Jesus begins his preaching ministry, Matthew 4:17 says:

Matthew 4:17

From that time [after he settled in Capernaum] Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

That’s the gospel—the idea that the kingdom of heaven is at hand and people need to prepare for it.

I talked about the gospel in episode 27.

So it’s natural that the theme of the kingdom would be the central discourse in Matthew’s gospel, because it was the central message of Jesus.

What Happened to Matthew?

You commonly hear statements like all of the 12 apostles died martyrs’ deaths, except for John, who died a natural death.

But that’s a problematic statement.

One reason is that we actually have some evidence that John the son of Zebedee did die a martyr’s death, that he didn’t die a natural one.

If you’d like me to share some of that evidence in a future episode, let me know in the comments.

But the main problem is that we don’t know what happened to each of the apostles with certainty.

We have very good evidence that some of them—like St. Peter—did die martyrs’ deaths, and there are traditions that others of the 12 also died as martyrs.

But the traditions differ and sometimes conflict, so it’s not entirely certain what happened to all of the individual apostles.

We know they all suffered persecution for the faith, and they were willing to suffer that persecution.

But specifically how some of them died is an open question, and that includes Matthew.

According to some early traditions, Matthew did die a natural death; he was not killed as a martyr.

But according to other traditions, he was martyred.

If he did die a martyr’s death, how did that happen?

According to some traditions, he was killed by a halberd, which is a pole weapon that looks kind of like an axe—it’s kind of a combination of an axe and a spear.

And that tradition is why Matthew is sometimes pictured in iconography with an halberd.

On the other hand, there are other traditions that suggest that Matthew was killed by fire.

There’s also the question of where he was killed.

According to one tradition, he was killed in Ethiopia, in Africa.

According to another tradition, he was killed in Persia, in modern Iran.

And according to another tradition, he was killed in Pontus, which is in modern Turkey.

So we’re not entirely sure how Matthew ended his life.

Conclusion

But one way or another, he’s left the church with an important spiritual legacy, found principally in his gospel, which I very much invite you to read.

If you’d like to go further into when the Gospels were written and how they came together, I suggest you get a copy of my book The Bible Is a Catholic Book.

I hope you’ll get a copy, and be sure and let me know in the comments what you think.

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God bless you always!