Why Matthew Didn't Write Matthew: Part Three
Exposing Matthew's Hidden Connection to the Greek Gospel
If Matthew did not write Matthew – as I have argued throughout this series – how did the Gospel come to be associated with him?
One might suspect that the disciple was chosen at random to imbue the text with apostolic authority. Matthew’s name would have filled this function as well as any, especially if Peter’s authority was already connected to Mark, and John’s to John.
Yet this suggestion overlooks an important piece in this puzzle: namely, that Matthew was already remembered as a disciple who wrote something about Jesus’ ministry.
In what follows, I will explore this relatively early tradition and whether it has any connection to the Greek Gospel of Matthew we have today.
Papias on Matthew’s Gospel
In the early second century, Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, wrote a five-volume work which recalls a tradition about Matthew. Painfully, this work - the Exposition of the Logia of the Lord - is largely lost to time.
Only extracts of it have survived, in the work of the fourth century Church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea. These inform us that Papias was someone who claimed to have heard the ‘living voice’ - the oral testimony - of those who had known the Lord.
In one such extract, Papias tells us that ‘Matthew compiled the sayings/oracles (logia) in a Hebrew language’ and that everyone ‘translated/recorded them (hērmēneusen) as best as they could.’
Towards the end of the second century, Irenaeus builds on this tradition: ‘Matthew published among the Hebrews in their language a writing on the Gospel, while Peter and Paul were in Rome evangelizing and founding a Church.’1
Yet when these words are applied to our (Greek) Gospel of Matthew, they are - in the words of one of my favourite scholars - “complete nonsense.”2 It is well recognised that Matthew was not written in Hebrew or Aramaic; rather, it was originally a Greek work which improves the Greek of its predecessor, Mark.
This raises a question: How did this confusion arise? How did the simple notion that Matthew wrote sayings of the Lord in Hebrew/Aramaic morph into the idea that the (Greek) Gospel of Matthew was originally published in Hebrew/Aramaic?
Was Matthew Behind ‘Q’?
A rather tempting prospect is that Matthew was connected with the Gospel: not as its author, but as someone who composed part of one its important sources: ‘Q’.
A Note on Q: Short for the German Quelle (‘source’), Q is used by scholars to refer to the material common to Matthew and Luke that is not found in Mark.
Matthew and Luke often integrate this material into their narratives in very different ways. It seems to most scholars, then, that they did not get this material from each other, but rather independently, from a common source.
In his book, Jesus of Nazareth, Aramaic expert Maurice Casey contends that the way in which Matthew uses this 'Q’ material fits well with Papias’ early tradition.
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