Gospel of Matthew

← Encyclopedia

The Gospel of Matthew is the first of the four canonical gospels and the opening book of the New Testament: an account of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, written in Greek in the later first century. It takes its name from Matthew, the tax-collector named among the twelve apostles, to whom the early church ascribed it; the text itself names no author, and the attribution is a second-century tradition rather than a claim the book makes for itself. Most scholars hold that it was composed anonymously, drawing on earlier sources, around 80 to 90 CE.

Among the gospels Matthew is the most insistently Jewish. It opens with a genealogy tracing Jesus to Abraham and David, and at nearly every turn it pauses to note that something happened “to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet.” Its concern is to present Jesus as the awaited Messiah of Israel and the authoritative interpreter of the Law — a new Moses who gives his teaching from a mountain. The book gathers that teaching into five long discourses, the first and most famous being the Sermon on the Mount, which contains the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Several episodes appear here alone: the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus, the flight into Egypt, and the closing commission to make disciples of all nations.

On the question of how the gospel was made, scholarship has reached a working consensus rather than certainty. Matthew shares so much wording and sequence with Mark and Luke that the three are called the Synoptic Gospels — “seen together.” The dominant solution holds that Matthew drew on the Gospel of Mark and on a lost collection of sayings, conventionally labelled Q, which it shares with Luke. This is a reconstruction, widely accepted but contested at its edges; the hypothetical sayings source has never been found.

The community behind the book remains a matter of inference. Its sharp polemic against the Pharisees, its assumption that readers grasp Jewish custom, and its anxiety over the relation of the new movement to the synagogue have led many to place it among Jewish followers of Jesus in Roman Syria, perhaps at Antioch, in the years after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The same currents run through the Didache, an early manual of church order that shares Matthew’s wording at several points.

For the later church the gospel’s authority was settled. Its ordering of the sayings made it the most quoted of the four in the early centuries, and its narrative of the nativity and the Sermon shaped Christian liturgy, art, and imagination more deeply than any rival account. Whoever the author was, the book he assembled became the church’s first word.

→ Related: St Matthew · The Didache · St Peter · Flavius Josephus