Matthew
INTRODUCTION
MATTHEW
F.F. BRUCE
The Earliest External Evidence
The Gospel according to Matthew, like the three other Gospels, is anonymous. The names attached to the Gospels have been so attached since the first half of the second century at the latest, but none of them appears in the body of the work.
Our earliest evidence for the association of Matthew with Gospel-making is a fragment from a lost work of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia (cf. Colossians 4:13) about AD 130. Papias, who lovingly collected and recorded what remained of oral tradition handed down by those who had seen and heard the Lord in person, wrote in five volumes an Exegesis of the Dominical Oracles which is not known to be extant. His work was quoted by various Christian writers of the following generations and centuries. Among these Eusebius, in the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, ascribes to Papias the statement that “Matthew compiled the oracles (logia) in the Hebrew speech, and everyone interpreted them as best he could.” Statements by writers later than Papias which name Matthew as the author of the first Gospel appear to be based on what Papias said. But Papias did not say that Matthew wrote the first Gospel, which is a Greek work, but that he compiled the logia in the Hebrew speech. It is likely that, when Papias spoke of Matthew as compiling the logia, he used the word in the sense which it had in the title of his work. When he composed his Exegesis of the Dominical Oracles, the “oracles” (logia) with which he was concerned were the sayings of our Lord, which Papias was so anxious to collect (at one or two removes) from those who had heard them. If the laws of Moses and the utterances of the prophets were recognized as divine oracles (cf. Acts 7:38; Romans 3:2), the sayings of Jesus, the anointed Lord to whom Moses and the prophets bore witness, were all the more worthy of such recognition.
A Primitive Sayings Collection
Now there is one important element in the Gospel of Matthew which has been discerned as just the sort of composition of which Papias speaks—a digest of the sayings of Jesus, conceived after the fashion of those prophetical books of the Old Testament which present the prophet’s oracles in a minimum of narrative framework, introduced with an account of the prophet’s call but not including any account of his death. Such a “book of the prophet Jesus” appears to have circulated at an early date in the church, more particularly among Hellenists and Gentile Christians, before any of our present Gospels existed. It underlies the Gospel of Luke as well as the Gospel of Matthew, being the source of what are conventionally labelled the “Q” sections in these two Gospels, and has been envisaged as having its contents arranged under four main headings:
Matthew and the Gospel
Who then was the “Matthew” who is said to have compiled “the oracles”? Papias was certainly understood by Eusebius (and probably by Irenaeus a century and a half earlier) to have meant Matthew the apostle, and this was a sound interpretation of his words. What Papias was interested in was apostolic testimony, and he gladly recorded anything that came his way on this subject.
Our tentative conclusion is that it was Matthew the apostle who composed the earlier work, “the book of the prophet Jesus,” and that his name was later attached to our present Gospel, in which that earlier work was incorporated. Happily, our understanding of the Gospel and the interpretation of its contents are independent of such uncertainties as these.
Sources of the Gospel
In addition to “the book of the prophet Jesus,” the evangelist has drawn upon a parallel compilation of sayings of Jesus, circulating not in the area of the Gentile mission but in the stricter Jewish Christian communities of Judea. The narrative framework in which the teaching is set reproduces the substance of Mark’s record, often telescoped and abbreviated, but sometimes amplified by the inclusion of non-Markan incidents (especially featuring Peter), and rearranged in part (Matthew 7:28–13:58, parallel to Mark 1:21–6:13) to conform with the distinctive design of the Gospel of Matthew. This narrative extends from the preaching of John the Baptist (3:1ff.) to the passion and resurrection of Jesus (chapters 26–28); as in the other Gospels so in Matthew the passion and resurrection account is the goal to which everything that precedes leads on. The nativity account in chapters 1 and 2 is peculiar to Matthew and quite independent of Luke’s, with which nevertheless it agrees in theology (Jesus’ virginal conception by the power of the Holy Spirit), geography (he was born in Bethlehem of Judah although he was later brought up in Nazareth) and chronology (his birth took place in the reign of Herod).
It is all too easy, when considering the sources of information on which one of the evangelists might have drawn in the composition of his work, to overlook his personal contribution. Matthew was a man of no mean literary ability, and over and above that he possessed in an outstanding degree the spiritual gift appropriate for his particular ministry. “We must not think of the evangelists as literary hacks producing Gospels by stringing other people’s work together; they were genuine composers, with gifts as authentic as those of the poet or the musician or the artist, and a good deal more important” (T.W. Manson, Ethics and the Gospel, 1960, p.46).
Leading Themes of the Gospel
Matthew gives us five discourses;
In threes and sevens he groups his sources.
He writes to show what O.T. meant,
With an ecclesiastic bent.
These four lines do not constitute elevated poetry, but their memorization has proved useful to many examinees who have welcomed the opportunity to expand the basic facts which they summarize when invited to describe the main features of the Gospel of Matthew. The “five discourses” in which the teaching of Jesus is arranged according to affinity of subject-matter (5:1–7:27; 10:5-42; 13:1-52; 18:1-35; 24:1–25:46), dominate the structure of the Gospel. Matthew’s tendency to group his material in threes and sevens—from whatsoever sources it may have been derived—is illustrated by the seven parables of the kingdom in chapter 13 and the three in chapter 25. His writing “to show what O.T. meant” has special reference to the “formula quotations” from the Old Testament, appearing throughout his work from 1:22f. to 27:9f. As for his “ecclesiastic bent,” not only is he the only one of the evangelists who so much as mentions the word “church” (cf. 16:18; 18:17) but he shows an interest in the life, growth and witness of the Christian fellowship.
Character and Purpose of the Gospel
In the first three chapters of the Gospel Jesus is introduced as King of the Jews, heir to David’s throne, acclaimed as such by Gentiles and anointed by God. The charge inscribed over his head on the cross, “This is Jesus the King of the Jews” (27:37), is thus shown in advance to be no false claim but a well-attested fact. Yet in the body of the Gospel the rôle in which Jesus is chiefly presented is that of Teacher. It is his teaching that constitutes the most prominent feature of this Gospel. Indeed, the Gospel has been envisaged as the “manual of discipline” of a distinct Christian school (cf. K. Stendahl, The School of St. Matthew, 1968), and one can well understand how useful it would have been as a handbook for catechists. It quickly became the most popular of the Gospels: once the four records began to circulate as a collection, the Gospel of Matthew invariably occupied the first place, whatever might be the order of the other three. Its position at the head of the New Testament books in their canonical order has a fitness of its own because of the way in which its opening section dovetails into the Old Testament narrative.
Its original setting appears to have been a Greek-speaking Jewish-Christian community: we may think of some Hellenistic milieu in Syria which preserved the ideals of those Hellenists who first, in the dispersion that followed Stephen’s martyrdom, brought the Christian message to Gentiles. The Gentile mission, entrusted to the eleven apostles, is the note on which this Gospel concludes. It is anticipated earlier in the inclusion of Gentile women in the genealogy of chapter 1, in the epiphany narrative of chapter 2, and in the healings of the centurion’s servant (8:5-13) and the Canaanite girl (15:21-28).
The evangelist himself has his portrait painted in the “scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven” whom Jesus compares to “a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (13:52). He was a man of generous mind and comprehensive outlook, including in his record and weaving into a unity material cherished by Christian groups of varying viewpoint: the stricter Jewish Christians and the more liberal Gentile Christians, with the many intermediate gradations, might all find something congenial here.
Date
The date of the completed Gospel of Matthew is probably to be fixed quite soon after the destruction of the temple and city of Jerusalem (ad 70). Echoes of the catastrophe and its aftermath can be discerned here and there; moreover, the new situation thus created was an opportunity for Christian consolidation and advance, and to this the Gospel of Matthew made its powerful contribution.