WHO WROTE:  Matthew.

 

 

WHAT TIME PERIOD IS COVERED:  B.C. 4 - 31 A.D.

 

 

WHEN WRITTEN:  The Book of Matthew was evidently written before the destruction of Jerusalem (Matthew, Chapter 24), and some-time after the events it records.  The probability is that it was written between the years 60 and 65 A.D.  Matthew was the Levi, and he was very Jewish in every sense of that term.  The cast of thought and the forms of expression employed by the writer show that his Gospel was written for Jewish Christians of Palestine.

 

 

INTRODUCTION:  First of all, one could argue that because of the added revelation of Jesus after He Came, the New Testament requirements are even more difficult than what was required in the Old Testament.  New Testament believers have been given an example of proper moral behavior in Jesus Christ.  And He and no one else shows the pattern better as to what we are to follow.  Consider:  Let this mind be in you, which was also in [not Moses, not Daniel, not David, not Solomon, not Enoch, not Deborah, not Elijah] Christ Jesus.”  Philippians 2:5.

 

I’d like us to take a look at the differences of the Gospel writers.  First, I find it interesting that even in the rendering of the teaching of how to pray, in other words, what is called, “The Lord’s Prayer,” Matthew, the tax collector, states, “forgive us our debts,” while Luke, the gentile, writes, “forgive us our sins.”  Also, Matthew, when relating the account of the woman who had an issue of blood for 12 years (Mat. Ch. 9; Luke Ch. 8), who touched the hem of our Lord’s garment for healing, he doesn’t even mention the physicians as being unable to heal her, yet Luke, being a physician himself, humbles his own industry by relating that the physicians could not even heal her.

 

In an interesting fact, the New Testament writers quote Isaiah more than all of the other Old Testament prophets combined.  From the Books, 8T:286 and FLB:17, we learn, “All that man needs to know or can know of God has been revealed in the life and character of His Son.”

 

The Book of Matthew uses the phrase, “The Kingdom of Heaven,” 33 times.  But it should be translated, “The Kingdom From Heaven.”  Obviously meaning Heaven is brought down to earth for us to recognize and learn from.

 

Matthew emphasizes what Jesus said, while Mark focuses upon what Jesus did, and Luke centers upon what Jesus felt, with John presenting Who Jesus was.  Matthew emphasizes the Messianic role of Christ, Mark the Servant role, Luke, the human role, and John, His Divine role.

 

Let me support this a little bit.  Matthew, being a devout Jew, wanting to support the Messianic role of Christ, starts off his Gospel with the Genealogy of Christ, from Abraham, notice, not from Adam like Luke does, Matthew thus supporting Christ’s human role.  From the Jewish minded Abrahamic line, through king David, until now, Matthew sets up the credentials, if you will, of Jesus Christ.  He sets up His role and authority as the Jewish Messiah.

 

Whereas Mark, wanting to support Christ’s servanthood, starts his Gospel off with Christ’s public ministry.   So where does Luke start, being interested in Christ’s humanity?  He starts off his Gospel with the nativity seen.  He really dwells and concentrates upon the birth of Christ which none of the other Gospel writers do.  His Gospel is directed more towards the Gentile audience than any of the others.  Luke’s genealogic line, by tracing all the way back to Adam, certainly includes Gentiles; as opposed to Matthew’s lineage.  By contrast, John starts off his Gospel, being focused upon the Deity of Christ, by focusing upon Christ’s pre-existence.  The Word may have become flesh, but It was God before It became man.

 

There are many “Main Themes” that could be expressed.  However, one our Lord seems to express consistently would be the “Kingdom Of God.”  It occurs specifically 5 times in Matthew; 15 times in Mark; 32 times in Luke; and twicein John.  However, if we look at all the specific references to “The Kingdom Of God,” discounting (not using references to) “Heaven,” we have a more realistic number of references:  Matthew = 55 Times; Mark = 19 Times; Luke = 43 Times; John = 3 Times.  Therefore, in order to get there, the “Main Theme,” as expressed throughout the Scriptures, is “Character.”

 

Matthews great object is to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah, and that in Him the ancient prophecies had their fulfillment.  The Gospel is full of allusions to those passages of the Old Testament in which Christ is predicted and foreshadowed as opposed to Marks gospel, which was written mostly for a Gentile audience, and as such has little allusions to the Old Testament.

 

The one aim pervading the whole Book of Matthew is to show that Jesus is He “of Whom Moses in the Law and the prophets did write.”  This Gospel contains no fewer than sixty-five references to the Old Testament, forty-three of these being direct verbal citations, thus greatly outnumbering those found in the other Gospels.  The main feature of this Gospel may be expressed in the key phrase that Matthew uses, which is “that it might be fulfilled by the prophet” so and so.  In fact, this statement is used no less than 38 times in his Gospel.  Thus, a student of the Old Testament would do well to start off with the Book of Matthew, whereas, a non-student of the Old Testament can learn a lot about it from the Book of Matthew.

 

In an interesting fact, Matthew focuses on the fulfillment of quite a few of the Old Testament prophecies, using the term “fulfilled” 82 times.  It is believed that evidently Matthew recorded the discourses of our Lord verbatim.  And the reason he was able to do that was because, as a customs official, he was a “tachygrapher.”  Or, in other words, he, due to his occupation, learned the art of “shorthand.”  Therefore, the reason Matthew’s Gospel is so much longer than Mark’s is the fact that he includes Jesus’ extensive discourses, such as the Sermon on the Mount and the Olivet Discourse.  Without these discourses, Mark’s Gospel would actually be longer.

 

Many scholars now believe that the Gospels were written before Paul’s first imprisonment in 57-60 A.D., and that virtually all of the New Testament Books were written before Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 A.D.  The reason is that there is no hint in the New Testament of Nero’s persecutions after 64 A.D., nor in the Gospels, of the execution of James, our Lord’s brother, in 62 A.D.  There is also not the slightest mention of the Jewish revolt against the Romans, which began in 66 A.D., or of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  These historic events would have been irresistible not to mention in the making of the many arguments in the New Testament documents.

 

“The Bible is not given to us in grand superhuman language.  Jesus, in order to reach man where he is, took humanity.  The Bible must be given in the language of men.  Everything that is human is imperfect.  Different meanings are expressed by the same word; there is not one word for each distinct idea.  The Bible was given for practical purposes.  The stamps of minds are different.  All do not understand expressions and statements alike.  Some understand the statements of the Scriptures to suit their own particular minds and cases.  Prepossessions, prejudices, and passions have a strong influence to darken the understanding and confuse the mind even in reading the words of Holy Writ.”  1SM:20.  This is one of the reasons I believe that there are four Gospel writers.  Some will relate better to Mark, while others may relate better to Luke, et cetera.

 

According to Westcott and Hort’s, “The New Testament in Greek,” they state that references to the Old Testament are in Matthew 100, in Mark 58, in Luke 86, in John 21, and in Acts 107.  Matthew’s rendering of the Seven Kingdom Parables in Chapter 13 are remarkably parallel to the Letters to the Seven Churches in the Book of Revelation, Chapters 2 and 3.

 

As quoted by Eusebius in “Hist. Eccl.” 3.39, Papias states: “Matthew put together the oracles of the Lord in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.”  Textual evidence suggests that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew.  In hundreds of places the Greek sentence structure betrays a Semitic influence and implies a translation from the Hebrew.  Jesus’ teachings in Matthew contain significant numbers of Hebrew/Aramaic puns, alliterations, and word connections.  Even more, The Gospel of Matthew is the most specifically Jewish Gospel of all the four, and is clearly written for a Jewish audience with a focus on Jesus as the Messiah in fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures.

 

In 1994, a segment of the Greek text of Matthew’s Gospel appears to now have been dated before 66 A.D.  Known as the “Magdalen Papyrus,” or better, “P64,” it contains segments of Matthew 26:23, and Matthew 26:31, on both sides of three fragments.  Carsten Peter Thiede, then “Director of the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research in Paderborn,” did the research on the “Magdalen Papyrus.”  Using a scanning laser microscope, it has provided physical evidence that the Gospel according to Matthew.  He then published his findings in “The Times of London,” December 24 1994, determining, “that the Gospel according to Matthew is an eyewitness account written by contemporaries of Christ.”

 

It appears that within five years after the death and resurrection of Christ, most of His words and deeds had been committed to a simple written Hebrew form, and Matthew is, of course, assumed to be part of this compilation.  Within a decade, this corpus would have been translated into a Greek version for Church requirements.  This body of information is often called the “Q-document” (for German, “quelle,” source).  Around the year 50 A.D. the original material was developed into written Greek form and the “synoptic” Gospels were composed; probably since the persecutions were imminent.  The key point is that eyewitnesses WERE STILL AROUND to verify the details.