The Inspiration of St. Matthew by Caravaggio
Providing an adequate introduction to the Gospel
of Matthew in a single blog post is an impossible task. However, I do want to
give you some idea of where I think Matthew fits with the other Gospels, who
the author is, and so on.
In order to accomplish this as succinctly and hopefully
as accurately as possible, I turn to Michael Green’s commentary on the Gospel
of Matthew in the Bible Speaks Today series published by InterVarsity Press.
Here are some excerpts from Green’s introduction….
We do not know who wrote the Gospel. Like all the
others, it is anonymous. The coming of Jesus sparked off an entirely new
literary form, the ‘Gospel’. It is not biography, though it contains it. It is
not history, though it reflects it. A Gospel is the proclamation of good news:
the good news of salvation which had long been looked for in Judaism, and which
Christians were persuaded had burst upon the world in Jesus of Nazareth. The
Gospels are utterly captivated by him, and none of them mentions the name of
its author.
Second-century writers sought to remedy this
situation. They do tell us who wrote them, and they may or may not have been
right. In the case of Matthew, it is not at all easy to know whether they were
right, because there is a major contradiction in the evidence. The external evidence
points uniformly in one direction, the internal in another.
The external evidence is coherent and clear.
Indeed, it is unanimous. It makes three main points. First, the Gospel
according to Matthew is the earliest of the Gospels. Secondly, it was written
in ‘Hebrew’. This may mean Hebrew or Aramaic: at all events, it means that the
early Christians were confident that it had not originally been penned in the
Greek we have before us today. Most of the second-century writers were also
persuaded that it was written for those who were converts from Judaism, which
is a very likely assumption. The links between the Gospel and the Old Testament
are many and obvious. The third conviction of the second-century church was
that the Gospel was written by Matthew, one of the twelve apostles….
However, the internal evidence is strongly
against this. Indeed, the careful study of the text of the Gospels over the
last 250 years has, until recently, yielded virtual unanimity on the three
points cited above. First, Matthew does not seem to be the earliest Gospel.
Secondly, it does not seem to have been written in Hebrew or Aramaic. Thirdly,
it does not seem to have been written by an apostle, let alone Matthew….
Irrespective of denomination, irrespective of
theological position, those who have looked carefully into this matter are
broadly convinced that the earliest documents about Jesus which have come down
to us are the Gospel of Mark and the sayings of Jesus common to Luke and
Matthew, usually known by the symbol Q. The order of events in Mark is clearly
the basis for the order in Matthew and Luke, for Matthew and Luke never combine
in order against Mark. Mark’s order is primary. Moreover, if Matthew’s Gospel
had been written first, with its clear beginning, teaching, Lord’s Prayer, and
post-resurrection appearances, it would have been almost incredible for Mark to
come and truncate the beginning and end, and leave out marvelous teaching like
the Sermon on the Mount.
Several years ago, I, in my simple way, and with
the help of a computer, laid the Gospels side by side in parallel fashion and
came to the same conclusion that countless scholars have come to over the past
few hundred years. Mark’s Gospel must have been first. Matthew and Luke have
shared material that is not in Mark; this shared material is often called “Q”
for the German word “quelle” or source. Matthew and Luke also have some
material that is not in Mark and is unique to each of their Gospels. These
sources are often simply referred to as “M” and “L”.
So, we do not know who wrote the Gospel of
Matthew, or more properly, who edited it and brought these various sources together, but it seems clear that it was edited by a first century Jew, writing
sometime between 70 and 100 CE (AD) for a Jewish Christian community somewhere
in the Middle East.
Matthew’s Gospel is structured, in a way, to
mirror the first five books of the Bible known as the Torah in that Matthew has
five great blocks of teaching material. The basic outline works out like this
in the words of Michael Green….
Chs. 1-4 Introduction:
genealogy, infancy (chs 1-2); baptism and beginnings of the ministry (chs. 3-4)
Chs. 5-7 Teaching
1: the Sermon on the Mount
Chs. 8-9 Jesus’ miracles of healing (three groups
of them)
Ch. 10 Teaching
2: the mission charge
Chs. 11-12 The rejection of John and Jesus by the
Jews
Ch. 13 Teaching
3: the parables of the kingdom
Chs. 14-17 Miracles, controversies with
Pharisees, Peter’s confession, and the transfiguration
Ch. 18 Teaching
4: the church
Chs. 19-22 Jesus goes up to Jerusalem and teaches
Chs. 23-25 Teaching
5: judgment and the end of the world
Chs. 26-28 The last days, death and resurrection
of Jesus
Whoever wrote this Gospel, he had a very ordered
mind, bordering on perfectionism. He wanted everything arranged just so.
The thing that struck me in today’s reading,
after reading through the major and minor prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, is
how long it has been since we had story, narrative, in our Scripture reading.
Certainly, most readers relate more to narrative than they do to any other type
of literature, and we have a lot of it in Matthew. Here we have in the first
four chapters, some of the most famous stories of the Bible, just as we have
many of these famous stories in Genesis. Another similarity to Genesis is the
use of genealogy. All of this would have been very appealing and very familiar
to “Matthew’s” first Jewish audience.
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