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Most scholars claim Matthew’s Gospel was written decades after Jesus—late in the 1st century. But is that true? Jimmy Akin dives deep into the evidence, uncovering strong reasons it was actually composed around A.D. 63—within living memory of the events! He examines temple prophecies, early Church Fathers, relations to Mark & Luke, and more in this eye-opening episode that rewrites what you thought you knew about the Bible’s origins. Don’t miss it!
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Most scholars will tell you the Gospel of Matthew was written late in the first century—decades after the events it records.
But is that actually true?
When you follow the evidence, Matthew turns out to be a lot earlier than you might think . . .
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
A Gospel That Scholars Date Late
The date of the Gospel of Matthew is commonly estimated by scholars to fall late in the first century.
The Catholic scholar Raymond Brown, for example, places it in “80 to 90, give or take a decade,” and he sums up the lay of the land this way:
Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 216
The majority view dates Matt to the period 70–100; but some significant conservative scholars argue for a pre-70 dating.
So the majority lands somewhere after the year 70.
But let’s actually look at the evidence and see where it points.
The Latest It Could Be
Scholars have a name for the latest possible date a document could have been written. They call it the Terminus Ante Quem, which is Latin for the = Limit Before Which.
And here, at least, there’s wide agreement: Matthew was written before the beginning of the second century.
I won’t walk through all the evidence for that, but a key piece is St. Ignatius of Antioch, who wrote around A.D. 108 and shows clear awareness of Matthew’s Gospel.
For instance, Ignatius says this about why Jesus was baptized:
Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 1:1
[Jesus was] baptized by John in order that all righteousness might be fulfilled by him.
That exact motive for Jesus’ baptism shows up in Matthew—and nowhere else in the New Testament:
Matthew 3:15
But Jesus answered [John], “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness.” Then he consented.
Ignatius also warns against false brethren in language that echoes Matthew. He says they:
Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Philadelphians 3:1
are not the Father’s planting.
And that, too, lines up with a saying found only in Matthew:
Matthew 15:13
Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.
Now, it’s unlikely that Matthew was written and then immediately quoted by Ignatius.
In all likelihood, some years would have had to pass for the Gospel to circulate and be absorbed—which pushes Matthew’s composition comfortably back into the first century.
The Earliest It Could Be
There’s a matching term for the earliest possible date—the Terminus Post Quem or the = Limit After Which.
Since Matthew describes the death and resurrection of Jesus, it has to be later than those events, around A.D. 30 or 33.
But we can show it’s later than that.
Building a Case for the Gentiles
Matthew is famous for being the most Jewish of the four Gospels, and it seems to have been written for an audience of Jewish Christians.
And yet, from beginning to end, it shows a keen interest in the Gentiles and their place in God’s plan.
Right in the opening genealogy, Matthew breaks the usual rules and lists several Gentile women among Jesus’ ancestors.
In the next chapter, he tells of the magi—Gentile wise men who come to honor the newborn king.
And then there are sayings like this one, after Jesus encounters the faith of a Roman centurion:
Matthew 8:10-12
Not even in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness.
In another place, Jesus warns that the kingdom will be taken away and given to a people who will produce its fruits.
And the mission to the whole world is right there too:
Matthew 24:14
And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations.
It all comes to a climax at the very end of the Gospel, in the Great Commission:
Matthew 28:19
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
And here’s something that often gets lost in translation. The word rendered Nations there is = Ethnê—the very same Greek word that, in other places, gets translated = Gentiles.
So it’s hard not to conclude that Matthew is deliberately building a case—for his Jewish audience—that it’s right to evangelize Gentiles and welcome them into the Christian community.
That case needed making, because in the first century it was hugely controversial.
Many Jewish Christians held that Gentiles had to be circumcised and become Jews in order to be saved.
We can watch that controversy break out in the book of Acts and in Paul’s letters—it flared up at Antioch, intensified after the conversions on Paul’s first missionary journey, and led to the Council of Jerusalem.
That council took place in A.D. 49.
Now, it wouldn’t have been appropriate for Matthew to quote a Church council in a biography of Jesus.
But it looks like he reached back into Jesus’ own life and ministry to find the material he needed to address the issue.
And the fact that he felt the need to address it at all—and built it so carefully into the very structure of his Gospel—suggests he was writing after the council of A.D. 49.
Written After Mark
For many centuries, people assumed Matthew was the first Gospel written, and that Mark then boiled it down.
That idea was entertained by St. Augustine, so it’s known as the Augustinian Hypothesis.
But it’s fallen out of favor in recent centuries.
I used to be very sympathetic to the idea that Matthew wrote first, but a close study of the evidence convinced me of the reverse—that Matthew wrote after Mark, and in fact used Mark as one of his main sources.
We talked about that back in Episode 61 if you’d like more information on that.
The fact that Matthew used Mark as one of his sources matters for dating, because it puts Matthew after Mark, and we can reasonably place Mark in the A.D. 50s.
We talked about that in Episode 64.
You can check that out for more information, but—in brief—two lines of evidence point there.
First, Luke also used Mark as a source, and Luke appears to have been written around A.D. 59, just before he composed the book of Acts—whose story breaks off abruptly in A.D. 60, with Paul awaiting trial in Rome.
This is something we discussed in Episode 63.
Second, Mark based his Gospel on the recollections of Peter, whose companion he became—but he didn’t become Peter’s companion until after he and Paul parted ways following the Jerusalem Council of A.D. 49.
For Mark to write his Gospel and for it to reach Luke in time, Mark most likely wrote in the mid-50s—say, around A.D. 55.
So we can say Matthew was written sometime between about A.D. 55 and 100.
That’s a big range—forty-five years—so let’s see how much we can narrow it.
Was Matthew Written After A.D. 70?
Right in the middle of that range sits one of the most traumatic events in Jewish history.
In A.D. 70, the Jewish War reached its climax, the Romans conquered Jerusalem, and the temple was destroyed.
A great many scholars hold that Matthew was written after that catastrophe.
So let’s test those arguments first—and then ask whether there are good reasons to date it before 70 instead.
A Prediction of the Temple’s Fall?
The first argument is that Matthew shows Jesus predicting the destruction of the temple.
At the start of Matthew chapter 24, Jesus predicts that the temple will be torn down, with not one stone left upon another.
And some people infer from that that Matthew must have been written after the temple’s destruction.
But this is not a good argument, because it simply assumes that Jesus could not have predicted such a thing.
And you don’t even need Jesus to be a supernatural prophet here.
You just need him to be a shrewd reader of the signs of the times, able to see where the rising anti-Roman fervor was heading.
The temple had been destroyed once before, and the fear that it could happen again was very real.
Jesus wasn’t even the only person of his era to predict its destruction in advance.
Many scholars admit this argument is weak, so a more refined version has been proposed—that certain passages in Matthew presuppose the destruction has already happened. Raymond Brown writes:
Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 216
For instance, the omission in Matt. 21:13 of the description of the Jerusalem Temple as serving “for all the nations” (Mark 11:17) and the reference in Matt. 22:7 to the king burning the city may reflect the destruction at Jerusalem by the Roman armies in A.D. 70.
Notice that Brown only says these passages “may reflect” the events of 70, so let’s take these two arguments one at a time and see how persuasive they are.
“For All the Nations”
Here’s the first passage in Matthew:
Matthew 21:13
He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you make it a den of robbers.”
In Mark, the parallel passage reads:
Mark 11:17
And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”
It’s true that Mark’s version adds the phrase “for all the nations” after “a house of prayer.”
But you can’t argue that Matthew dropped those words out of hostility toward Gentiles after the Romans destroyed the temple.
As we’ve already seen, Matthew is anything but hostile to Gentiles. Their salvation is one of his favorite themes.
If we want a reason he trimmed the phrase, we don’t have to look far.
Matthew packs in about ninety percent of Mark’s material, which means he constantly has to shorten things to make room for everything else he wants to include.
Dropping a few words here and there is just what Matthew does.
“And Burned Their City”
Here’s the second passage, from the end of the parable of the wedding banquet, describing a king whose invitation is snubbed:
Matthew 22:7
The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.
This proves nothing either. As the scholars D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo observe:
Carson and Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, 153
The language of Matthew 22:7, including the reference to the burning of the city, is the standard language of both the Old Testament and the Roman world describing punitive military expeditions against rebellious cities. Granted that Jesus foresaw the destruction of Jerusalem (as did many prophets before him), the language he used does not in any detail depend on specific knowledge as to how things actually turned out in A.D. 70. In fact, [John A.T.] Robinson goes so far as to argue that the synoptic prophecies about the fall of Jerusalem, including Matthew 22:7, are so restrained that they must have been written before 70.
That last point is striking: the prophecies are so general, and so much in keeping with ordinary Roman practice, that they don’t betray any knowledge of how things actually played out—which suggests they were written before the event.
Robinson was a liberal English scholar, and the liberal German scholar Adolf von Harnack agreed, saying that chapter 22, verse 7, and many other passages “are rather in favor of composition before the catastrophe.”
And fundamentally, if Jesus could foresee the conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of its temple at all, he could just as easily foresee the burning of the city.
Does Matthew Know “the Church”?
Another argument points out that Matthew is the only Gospel that has Jesus speak of his church. In chapter 16, he says:
Matthew 16:18
And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it.
A couple of chapters later, he tells his followers to take an unresolved dispute to the church.
It’s argued that this reflects a developed understanding of the Church that took time to emerge—so Matthew must be late.
But that hardly requires a date after 70.
Paul uses the Greek word for Church—= Ekklesia—sixty-one times across his letters, and every one of them was written before A.D. 70.
And Luke uses it another twenty-three times in the book of Acts, which was finished around A.D. 60.
So the word “church,” for the community of Jesus’ followers, was well established long before the events of 70.
A Separation from the Synagogue?
Sometimes it’s argued that Matthew reflects the final break between church and synagogue, in passages like these:
Matthew 10:17
Beware of men; for they will deliver you up to councils and flog you in their synagogues.
Matthew 23:34
Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town.
That final break is then dated to around A.D. 85, when a Jewish prayer called the Birkath ha-Minim—Hebrew for “the = Blessing Concerning the Heretics”—is said to have been introduced, shutting Jewish Christians out of synagogue worship.
But there are a whole bunch of problems with this.
First, the history of the Birkath ha-Minim is itself highly debatable. It’s too uncertain to use as a dating marker.
Second, that date of around 85 is really a line of convenience. The separation of church and synagogue was a long, drawn-out process that can’t be pinned to a single year.
Third, these verses don’t describe Jewish Christians being shut out of the synagogue by a prayer. They describe them being beaten in the synagogues.
Fourth, the passages actually point to a time before the separation was complete—when Jewish Christians were still attending synagogue and so could be punished in them.
Fifth, that’s exactly what we see in the book of Acts—Jewish Christians being dragged into synagogues and beaten, again and again, in the years between about A.D. 33 and 60.
And sixth, the whole objection assumes Jesus could not have foreseen what the spread of his message would cost his followers—even though he foresaw his own death and deliberately did things he knew would provoke the authorities.
“To This Day”
Here’s one more after-70 argument. Matthew twice mentions that something has lasted right up to his own time—the field where Judas died is still called the field of blood, and the rumor that the disciples stole Jesus’ body is still going around. Brown comments:
Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 216
Two passages (27:8; 28:15) describe items in the Matthean passion narrative that are remembered “to this day,” using an OT phrase to explain place names from long ago (Gen. 26:33; 2 Sam. 6:8). Such a description would be very inappropriate if Matt was written only two or three decades after A.D. 30/33.
This is a very weak argument.
Yes, the Old Testament sometimes uses “to this day” for things that began in the distant past—but that’s hardly a requirement.
And notice the math. Brown says two or three decades would be “very inappropriate” for the phrase—but he himself dates Matthew to “80 to 90, give or take a decade,” which is only four or five decades after the events.
So two or three decades is so short that it would be very inappropriate for Matthew to say “to this day,” but four our five decades would make it totally appropriate for him to do that?
Really?
It’s not like four or five decades placed these things in the distant past the way the Old Testament references did.
Four or five decades is still within a single human lifetime.
So the argument is just not plausible. All the phrase really tells us is that some stretch of time the author considered significant had passed—and thirty years, a long time in an ancient lifespan, is plenty.
After 70? No.
When you add it all up, there just aren’t any good arguments for Matthew being written after A.D. 70.
So let’s flip the question around. Are there good reasons to think it was written before 70?
Did the Apostle Write It?
The external evidence from the Church Fathers strongly favors the apostle Matthew himself as the author.
And some argue it’s unlikely the apostle would still have been writing after A.D. 70.
Now, I’ve studied the likely ages of the apostles, and Matthew was probably born around A.D. 4.
That would put him in his sixties when Jerusalem fell—which is by no means an unreasonable age for an author in the ancient world.
It’s true the ancients had shorter average lifespans, but that’s mostly because of high infant mortality. Anyone who made it to adulthood—like Matthew—could expect a lifespan close to ours. As Brown notes:
Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 216
Most who think that the apostle Matthew himself wrote the Gospel tend toward a pre-70 dating (although obviously the apostle could have lived till later in the century).
And Carson and Moo say much the same:
Carson and Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 155
If the apostle Matthew is judged, on balance, to be the evangelist, a date before A.D. 70 is more plausible (though certainly not necessary—there is excellent evidence that the apostle John was active for at least two decades after 70).
So this argument has some weight—but it’s far from decisive.
Passages That Assume a Standing Temple
Here’s a stronger line of evidence. Matthew records a number of sayings that only really make sense if the temple is still standing and functioning.
Take this one:
Matthew 5:23-24
So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.
Or this one, about swearing oaths:
Matthew 23:20-21
So he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by everything on it; and he who swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells in it.
There’s also a third passage along the same lines, where Jesus points out that the priests in the temple work on the sabbath and are held guiltless.
Now, someone might say Matthew is just recording things Jesus said during his ministry, and that’s all there is to it.
But that’s open to challenge.
We have to ask: of all the traditions about Jesus that Matthew had to choose from, why did he choose to include these?
Surely because he thought they were relevant to his audience—and they’d be a lot more relevant if the temple were still standing.
This applies especially to the two sayings I just quoted: if the temple were already in ruins, his Jewish-Christian readers couldn’t go to Jerusalem and offer a gift at the altar at all.
And they’d hardly be tempted to swear by an altar or temple that had been demolished as an act of God’s judgment.
People only swear by things that currently exist; not by things that don’t exist anymore.
So these passages add real weight to a date before 70.
The Temple Tax
One passage deserves special attention—the one about the temple tax.
Matthew writes:
Matthew 17:24-27
When they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the half-shekel tax went up to Peter and said, “Does not your teacher pay the tax?” He said, “Yes.” And when he came home, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tribute? From their sons or from others?” And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel; take that and give it to them for me and for yourself.”
So Jesus implies that he and Peter don’t really need to pay the temple tax, but they should pay it anyway, so as not to give offense.
That sets an example for other Christians to follow, which is why Matthew records this incident. As sons of God, Christians aren’t obligated to pay the temple tax, but they should do so anyway lest the give offense to the Jewish authorities.
Now, here’s why that matters for our question, because it’s not just that Jewish Christians wouldn’t need to pay a temple tax once the temple was in ruins.
It’s that—after the war—the Romans took this very tax and repurposed it—so that it now funded the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, the Capitoline Temple in Rome. The Jewish historian Josephus reports:
Josephus, Jewish War 7:6:6
[Domitian] also laid a tribute upon the Jews wheresoever they were and enjoined every one of them to bring two drachmae every year into the Capitol [temple], as they used to pay the same to the temple at Jerusalem.
That tribute came to two drachmae a year—only about two days’ wages for an unskilled laborer, or roughly $100 today—after all the inflation the governments have caused.
Some Jews tried to dodge this tax—even by posing as Gentiles—but it was enforced rigorously, and sometimes humiliatingly. The Roman historian Suetonius reports:
Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, “Domitian” 12:2
Besides other taxes, that on the Jews was levied with the utmost rigor, and those were prosecuted who without publicly acknowledging that faith yet lived as Jews, as well as those who concealed their origin and did not pay the tribute levied upon their people. I recall being present in my youth when the person of a man ninety years old was examined before the procurator and a very crowded court, to see whether he was circumcised.
So they stripped this 90-year-old man naked to see if he was circumcised!
Diverting a tax that once supported the temple in Jerusalem to support the chief pagan temple in Rome was an enormous insult to Jewish sensibilities, and being forced to pay it was a deep humiliation.
So imagine Matthew writing after 70 and portraying Jesus as telling people to pay this tax, just to avoid giving offense.
Jesus could end up looking like he was bankrolling idolatry!
The passage makes far more sense if Matthew was writing before 70, when Jewish Christians were still wrestling with whether to support the temple at all. As Carson and Moo put it:
Carson and Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 156
Even if for other reasons Matthew had wanted to preserve this pericope, it is hard to see how, if he was writing after 70, he could have permitted such an implication without comment.
A Prayer About Fleeing
Matthew chapter 24 is Jesus’ great prophetic discourse about the events leading up to the destruction of the temple.
In it, Jesus warns that when the abomination of desolation appears standing in the holy place, those in Judea should flee to the mountains—immediately, without going back for anything. And then he adds:
Matthew 24:20
Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath.
Now, it’s well known that the Christian community in Jerusalem did flee the Jewish War, settling in a town called Pella, across the Jordan.
And remember, Matthew is always working to save space. He regularly drops words and phrases from Mark just to fit everything on a single scroll.
So why would he go out of his way to keep this little exhortation—pray that your flight isn’t in winter or on a sabbath—if the flight had already happened and there was nothing left to pray about?
The Missing Fulfillment Notice
And here’s an even weightier point.
Matthew chapter 24 is Jesus’ single longest prophecy, and it centers on the destruction of the temple, which he predicts at the very start of the chapter.
And yet Matthew never once tells us that this prophecy came true.
That cries out for an explanation.
The Evangelists love to point out when one of Jesus’ prophecies was fulfilled. It’s a proof of his credentials as a true prophet.
When Jesus predicts his own arrest, death, and resurrection, they’re careful to report those predictions coming true.
And Matthew, of all the Evangelists, is especially fond of fulfillment notices. He sprinkles them all through his Gospel.
And—as we’ve seen—he even interrupts his narrative to comment on conditions in his own day, like in the “to this day” passages.
So Matthew—more than anyone—is exactly the writer we’d expect to note the fulfillment of Jesus’ great prophecy about the temple.
As the German scholar Theodor Zahn observed:
Theodor Zahn, Introduction to the New Testament, 571
If “to this day” (27:8, 28:15) were after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, we would expect that an author who values so highly as does Matthew proof based upon the occurrence of prophecy and its fulfilment for the justification of Christ over against Judaism, would indicate somewhere and in some manner that the prophecy of Jesus had been fulfilled in this judgment.
Yet he never does.
That puts the destruction of the temple in the same category as prophecies that hadn’t yet been fulfilled, like the Second Coming.
And given how much room Matthew devotes to the prophecy, the absence of any fulfillment notice argues strongly for a date before 70.
The Second Coming, Left Tangled
Here’s what may be the most striking point of all.
Matthew makes no attempt to untangle the Second Coming from the events surrounding the temple’s destruction.
Each of the Synoptic Gospels speaks of a “coming” of Jesus within the discourse about the temple.
In my view, that wasn’t the Second Coming at all, but a coming in judgment—the way the Old Testament pictures God riding the clouds when he comes to judge a nation.
As Isaiah says:
Isaiah 19:1
Behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt; and the idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence.
But to the first Christians—and plenty of people since—that “coming” language could easily be confused with the Second Coming of Christ.
So if the Evangelists were writing after 70, we’d expect them either to drop the “coming” language from the discourse, or to clearly explain that it wasn’t the Second Coming.
Otherwise they’d risk scandalizing their readers—making it look like Jesus had predicted the Second Coming for a time when it didn’t happen.
Yet they don’t drop it, and they don’t clarify it. Contemporary scholar Donald Hagner comments:
Donald Hagner, Word Biblical Commentary, p. lxxiv
Matthew’s redaction of the Markan eschatological discourse makes no attempt to disentangle the references to the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the age (chap. 24). . . . We might expect Matthew to do the same had it been written after 70. Indeed, the evangelist aggravates the problem considerably by his insertion of eutheôs, “immediately,” in 24:29, which leaves the clear impression that he expected the parousia of the Son of Man to occur in close succession to the fall of Jerusalem.
The fact that the Synoptic writers neither drop the “coming” language nor explain that it doesn’t refer to the Second Coming strongly implies that they—Matthew included—were writing before the temple fell.
So all of this points to Matthew being written sometime between Mark, around A.D. 55, and the destruction of the temple in 70.
But can we get more specific than that?
Pinning It Down: Matthew and Luke
We have a good date for Luke—around A.D. 59.
So if we can figure out how Matthew and Luke are related, we can sharpen our date for Matthew.
There are basically three possibilities. LIST RIGHT
- Matthew and Luke were written Independently of each other.
- Luke used Matthew, so Matthew came first.
- Matthew used Luke, so Luke came first.
The Independence Hypothesis and “Q”
The first option—independence—is the most common view among scholars today.
On this view, Matthew and Luke wrote without any knowledge of each other’s work.
Both used Mark, but they also share over two hundred verses that aren’t in Mark, and if they really didn’t know each other, they must have drawn that shared material from some common source.
Scholars have given that hypothetical source a name: “Q,” from the German word = Quelle, which simply means “= Source.”
Now, for this proposal to work, Matthew and Luke would have had to be written at about the same time.
Otherwise, whichever came first would have had time to circulate among Christians, and we’d expect to see traces of whichever Gospel was written first to be found in the other.
I’d estimate that spreading would take no more than five years. So on this view, Matthew would have been written within about five years of Luke.
So if Luke came out in 59, Matthew would have been written somewhere between 55 and 65.
That fits what we’ve already found. But is there a way to test the theory?
Testing Q
For the Independence Hypothesis to work, that Q source has to have actually existed.
The two strongest arguments for Q are that Matthew and Luke diverge sharply at the beginnings and ends of their Gospels—in their accounts of Jesus’ birth and childhood, and in their accounts of the Resurrection.
The thinking goes: if each knew the other’s Gospel, why are their Infancy and Resurrection Narratives so different?
I’ve looked at this closely, and I think there are good reasons for those differences that have nothing to do with Q.
So I don’t find the main arguments for Q persuasive. And there are serious arguments against it.
For one, Q is a purely hypothetical document—we have no independent evidence it ever existed.
For another, it’s advertised as a “Sayings Source” preserving the sayings of Jesus, but that label doesn’t actually fit the contents.
The passages attributed to Q actually include narrative material.
Then there are the places where Matthew and Luke blend Mark and the supposed Q together in the very same way. These are called Mark-Q Overlaps.
And there are the “Minor Agreements”: dozens of spots where Matthew and Luke change Mark’s wording in exactly the same way, which is just not what you’d expect if they were working independently.
These problems with Q are laid out in detail by the British scholar Mark Goodacre and his colleagues in books like Questioning Q and The Case Against Q.
If you’d like me to explore them in more detail, let me know in the comments and I can do a video on them.
If Luke Used Matthew
The idea that Luke used Matthew is known as the Farrer Hypothesis.
It keeps the point that both used Mark, but it does away with the need for Q—because Luke could simply have taken those two-hundred-plus shared verses straight from Matthew.
That clears away all the problems of Q at once: its hypothetical nature, the “sayings source” label, the Mark-Q overlaps, and the minor agreements.
Its most forceful defender today is Mark Goodacre, who lays it out in his book The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze.
On the dates we’ve established, the Farrer Hypothesis would squeeze Matthew into a very small window—between Mark, around A.D. 55, and Luke, in 59.
That would let us place Matthew confidently around A.D. 57.
But there’s another possibility.
If Matthew Used Luke
The idea that Matthew used Luke is known as the Wilke Hypothesis.
It also gets rid of the problems with Q.
For a long time the Wilke Hypothesis was strangely neglected, but it’s finally getting some attention.
Several books have appeared on it, such as Robert MacEwen’s overview Matthean Posteriority.
On our dates, the Wilke Hypothesis would place Matthew in the A.D. 60s—between Luke, in 59, and the destruction of the temple in 70.
So now we have to ask the obvious question.
Which Came First?
Which came first? Was it Matthew or Luke?
Like the whole Synoptic Problem, this gets technical fast, so I’ll just hit a few high-level points.
The best argument for Matthew coming first is something called “Editorial Fatigue”—the idea that as Luke copied Matthew, he made changes at first but then slipped back into Matthew’s way of putting things, giving the game away.
I’ve evaluated that argument, and in the end I don’t find it convincing.
My own basic argument for Luke coming first is that Matthew simply looks like the more developed, more polished literary work.
You see it at every level—from the way Jesus’ teaching is gathered into Matthew’s five great discourses, down to tiny refinements.
Where Luke has the blunt:
Luke 6:20
Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Matthew has the more nuanced:
Matthew 5:3
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Here Matthew adds the phrase “in spirit” to clarify what kind of poor people we’re talking about.
It’s not like every poor person is blessed. If you’re a hardscrabble, selfish poor person who envies the success of others and is willing to steal from them out of a sense of entitlement, well . . . that’s not a very spiritual attitude.
So Matthew makes it clear that it’s those who have the right spirit in poverty who will be blessed.
And this refinement looks later than the text Luke has.
Most striking of all is that sayings of Jesus which are scattered all over the place in Luke turn up neatly organized into topical blocks in Matthew—like the Sermon on the Mount, the Kingdom Parables, and the Olivet Discourse.
That’s easy to explain if Matthew wrote later: he was an organizer, so he organized the material he found in Luke.
The reverse is much harder. If Luke had Matthew in front of him, he’d have had to smash those beautifully arranged blocks apart and scatter the pieces around almost at random.
It’s like what the scholar Reginald Fuller called “A case of unscrambling the egg with a vengeance.”
- H. Streeter put it even more bluntly, saying:
- H. Streeter, The Four Gospels, 183
A theory which would make an author capable of such a proceeding would only be tenable if, on other grounds, we had reason to believe he [Luke] was a crank.
Streeter is too harsh. But given the problems with Q—and given that it’s far easier to explain Matthew using Luke than the other way around—I come to the tentative conclusion that Luke wrote first.
And that would place the writing of Matthew in the decade between the publication of Luke and the destruction of the temple—say, around A.D. 63 to 65.
In Episode 91, I looked at the date of John’s Gospel and estimated that it came out in 65.
And if we suppose that John was the last Gospel written, we should put Matthew a little earlier, so I’ll say 63.
A Word from the Church Fathers
It’s always good to back up a deduction from the internal evidence with something external—and here we have a nice piece of confirmation.
Writing around the year 189, St. Irenaeus of Lyons says:
Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3:1
Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church.
Notice that Irenaeus says Matthew wrote “while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome.”
That would place the Gospel between Paul’s arrival in Rome—which I date to A.D. 58—and the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in the mid-60s.
So Irenaeus confirms the general date we’ve arrived at.
Conclusion
So let’s pull it all together.
The arguments for a date after A.D. 70 don’t hold up. The arguments for a date before 70 are strong. And when we line Matthew up against Luke, the evidence points to Matthew coming a bit later, somewhere around A.D. 63.
That gives us a tidy picture of the Synoptic Gospels: LIST RIGHT
- Mark around 55
- Luke around 59
- Matthew around 63
- And John around 65
So Matthew is not some distant, late composition written by people generations removed from the events.
It’s a work from the first Christian generation—written within living memory of Jesus himself.
* * *
Before I let you go, if the story of where the Bible came from grabs you the way it grabs me, I’d like to recommend a book of mine.
It’s called The Bible Is a Catholic Book, and it tells the story of how the Bible came to be—how it grew up out of the life of God’s people, and why, from beginning to end, it’s the Church’s book. THE BIBLE IS A CATHOLIC BOOK
In it, I dig into how the Gospels and the rest of Scripture were written, gathered, and recognized—and the Church’s role in all of it.
I hope you’ll get a copy, and be sure and let me know in the comments what you think . . .
* * *
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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!