Book of Matthew
The Gospel according to St. Matthew, the first of the four Gospels and the first book of the New Testament, presents Jesus as the Messiah promised to Israel, and the Church has received it from the earliest witnesses onward as the work of the apostle St. Matthew, the tax collector whom Christ called from his customs post.
For Inquirers
If you open a Bible to its second half, the first page you land on belongs to the Gospel of Matthew. "Gospell" simply means "good news," and this book tells the good news by telling a life: where Jesus Christ came from, what He taught and did, how He was killed, and the morning He was found alive. It begins with a family tree, which sounds like the dullest way imaginable to start a story, but the family tree is the whole point. It runs from Abraham through King David and down to Jesus, as though the author were saying to the reader, you have been waiting for this person for a very long time, and here He is.[^mt1-1]
Christians from the earliest days have said that the man behind the book is Matthew, one of Jesus's twelve closest friends. Before he followed Jesus he collected taxes, a trade people looked down on so heavily that the Gospels keep putting "tax collectors and sinners" in the same breath.[^mt9-10] Jesus walked past his booth, said "Follow me," and Matthew got up and went. The book he left behind is full of Jewish things. It keeps pointing back to the old prophets, over and over, saying that this or that happened so that what a prophet had said would come true; it shows Jesus climbing a mountain to teach, the way Moses once had; and it ends on another mountain, where Jesus sends His friends out to every nation and promises, "I am with you always."[^mt28]
Read next to the other three Gospels, Matthew does not always tell things the same way. He and Luke, for instance, give Jesus two different family trees, and people have been asking since the second century how these books came to be written, who wrote first, in what language, and from what memories.[^jant-gen] Believers and scholars answer some of those questions differently. The story itself has held steady all the same: a child born to be king, a teacher who talks as though the Law and the Prophets were His to fulfill, a death, and a morning.
Overview
- Matthew is the first of the four Gospels and the first book of the New Testament, twenty-eight chapters long, and it names its subject in its opening line: "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham" (Matthew 1.1).[^mt1-1]
- The Church's tradition ascribes it to St. Matthew, the tax collector called from his post at Capernaum and numbered among the Twelve (Matthew 9.9; Matthew 10.3). The text itself never names its author.[^levi][^ow-apostle][^osb-intro]
- It stands first in the canonical lists of the Gospels, and an early tradition, which Origen reports as something he had "learned by tradition," holds that it was the first Gospel written, composed in the language of the Hebrews for those who had come to believe out of Judaism.[^lists][^origen-mt]
- Its shape is a genealogy and infancy narrative (chapters 1–2); the preparation of John the Baptist, the baptism, and the temptation (3:1–4:11); a Galilean ministry built around five long discourses (the Sermon on the Mount, the mission of the Twelve, the parables of the Kingdom, the instruction on life in the community of disciples, and the teaching on the end of the age); and the Passion and Resurrection (26–28). Each of the five discourses closes with a formula such as "When Jesus had finished…" (Matthew 7.28; Matthew 11.1; Matthew 13.53; Matthew 19.1; Matthew 26.1).[^shape]
- Its central themes are Jesus as the Messiah, son of David and Abraham; Jesus as the one who fulfills "the law or the prophets" (Matthew 5.17); the Kingdom of Heaven; Jesus as a new Moses teaching from a mountain; the community of disciples and its mission to all nations; and the promise that frames the whole book, "God with us" in its first chapter (Matthew 1.23) and "I am with you always, even to the end of the age" in its last (Matthew 28.20).[^themes]
- Among the Gospels it is the one that sounds most Jewish and leans hardest on the Old Testament. The Jewish Annotated New Testament says it relies on Israel's Scriptures more than any other early Christian text, OrthodoxWiki counts sixty-five Old Testament references in it, and the OCA says its text is "used most consistently in liturgical worship," since it supplies the form of the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer sung and said in the services; in the Church's iconographic tradition it is symbolized by the man among the four living creatures.[^voice]
Summary
Matthew begins by tracing the ancestry of Jesus through Abraham and David and the Babylonian exile down to Joseph, then tells the birth from Joseph's side of the story: his dismay at Mary's pregnancy, the angel in the dream, the child who will "save his people from their sins," and the name Immanuel, "God with us" (Matthew 1.23). Wise men from the east follow a star to the newborn king, Herod answers with the killing of the children of Bethlehem, and the holy family goes down into Egypt and comes back to settle at Nazareth. After John the Baptist prepares the way and baptizes Him, and after forty days in the wilderness, Jesus begins to proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, calls His first disciples, and goes up a mountain to teach what the Church calls the Sermon on the Mount. He heals and casts out demons, sends the Twelve to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel," and answers the Baptist's question from prison, while the hostility of the Pharisees hardens. He teaches the crowds in the parables of the Kingdom: the sower, the weeds, the mustard seed, the hidden treasure, the pearl. At Caesarea Philippi Peter confesses Him to be "the Christ, the Son of the living God" and is promised the rock on which the assembly will be built; Jesus speaks for the first time of the suffering to come, is transfigured before three of His disciples, and teaches the Twelve how the community He is gathering must forgive and correct its own. Then He enters Jerusalem, confronts the temple authorities, pronounces seven woes on the scribes and Pharisees, foretells the fall of the Temple and the end of the age, and closes His teaching with the parables of watchfulness and the judgment of the nations, the sheep and the goats. The Passion follows: the supper, Gethsemane, the betrayal and the remorse of Judas, the trial before Caiaphas and Pilate, the cross with its darkness, its torn veil, and its opened tombs, and the guard set at the sealed sepulchre. The book ends on the morning of the Resurrection, with the report spread among the Jews that the disciples stole the body, and on a mountain in Galilee where the risen Lord gives His last command, to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and to teach them "to observe all things that I commanded you."[^mt28][^mt-summary]
Author, Source, and Intention
Matthew says remarkably little about its own making. It has no preface like Luke's, no signature like Paul's, and no sentence in which the writer steps out from behind the story to say who he is, whom he is writing for, or why. Everything we can learn on those points has to come from two places: from what the earliest Christian writers report about the book, and from what the book itself shows of its habits, its language, and its readers. On both counts the answers are tangled together more tightly than in most Gospels, because the tradition that names the author also supplies the book's language, its audience, and its occasion.
Who wrote it
The text gives a name but does not claim it. In the Gospel's story of the call, a man "called Matthew" is found "sitting at the tax collection office" and rises at the words "Follow me" (Matthew 9.9), and the list of the Twelve describes him once more as "Matthew the tax collector" (Matthew 10.3). Mark and Luke tell the same scene of a tax collector named Levi, the son of Alphaeus, who leaves everything and makes a great feast in his house (Mark 2.14; Luke 5.27-29).[^levi] The tradition reads the two names as one man, and OrthodoxWiki, summing up that tradition, describes a publican at Capernaum who took a new name to mark his new calling, held a farewell feast, and was last named in the New Testament among the apostles in Acts 1.13.[^ow-apostle]
The identification was not made by everyone at once. Origen, answering the pagan Celsus's sneer that Jesus gathered the worst sort of tax collectors and sailors, replies that of the Twelve only Matthew was a tax collector, and then allows that a certain Lebes "may have been a tax-gatherer" too, though he counted as an apostle only on the strength of a reading found in some copies of Mark.[^origen-cc62] The Apostolic Constitutions, a church-order compilation put into the mouths of the apostles, takes the other course and has the Evangelist introduce himself as "Matthew, also called Levi, who was once a tax-gatherer."[^ac-viii] Both agree on what matters here, that the author of the first Gospel was one of the Twelve and that a tax-gatherer's trade was no bar to the apostolate.
One of the earliest outside witnesses to the Gospel's existence says nothing about its author. St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the church of Smyrna in the early second century, confesses that Christ was "baptized by John that all righteousness might be fulfilled by Him," which uses the same phrase Matthew's account of the baptism gives to Jesus (Matthew 3.15).[^ignatius] The Orthodox Study Bible counts Ignatius among the earliest witnesses to the Gospel, and the Jewish Annotated New Testament dates the Letter to the Philadelphians to about 110 and finds in it some Matthean traditions.[^osb-intro][^jant-intro] The Didache, an early church manual, tells Christians to pray as the Lord commanded "in His Gospel" and then gives the form of the Lord's Prayer that stands in Matthew (Matthew 6.9-13).[^didache8] So by the early second century Christians were praying the form of the Lord's Prayer that Matthew preserves and appealing to "the Gospel" as the Lord's own authority, without yet saying whose name stood on it; that question comes slightly later.
Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, is the first to answer that question. He wrote a five-volume Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord in the first half of the second century; the work is lost, and what survives was preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea. In his preface Papias explains how he gathered his material, and the explanation is itself a piece of evidence about how the Gospel tradition lived: he did not think that what could be got from books would profit him as much as "what came from the living and abiding voice."[^eus-3-39] He lists the men he questioned about the sayings of the Lord, and Matthew is among them.
On Matthew himself Papias is brief. After reporting what "the presbyter" told him about Mark as Peter's interpreter, Eusebius gives the single line he found on the first Gospel: "Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could."[^papias] It is a short and odd sentence, and it is the earliest statement about Matthew's authorship that Eusebius preserves. Eusebius, who thought poorly of Papias's intelligence on the evidence of his millennial notions, nonetheless preserved it, and F. F. Bruce observes that the surviving fragments do not say that Papias had his account of Matthew from the presbyter, as he had his account of Mark.[^eus-3-39b][^bruce-papias]
After Papias the testimony thickens, and the early writers who speak to the question name an apostle, Matthew, as the author. St. Irenaeus, describing the Ebionites, names the Gospel according to Matthew as the only Gospel they used, so the title is already in circulation by the late second century.[^irenaeus-i26] Clement of Alexandria, on the tradition Eusebius preserves from his Hypotyposes, held that the Gospels containing the genealogies were written first.[^clement] Tertullian, arguing against Marcion, speaks of the apostolic Gospels without hesitation: "Of the apostles, therefore, John and Matthew first instil faith into us; while of apostolic men, Luke and Mark renew it afterwards."[^tert-am]
Origen, in the preface to his commentary on Matthew, passes on what he calls tradition. Of the four Gospels, the only ones he says are uncontroverted in the Church of God under heaven, he writes: "I have learned by tradition that the Gospel according to Matthew, who was at one time a publican and afterwards an Apostle of Jesus Christ, was written first; and that he composed it in the Hebrew tongue and published it for the converts from Judaism."[^origen-mt] Later writers say the same thing in their own ways. Eusebius reports that Matthew, having first preached to the Hebrews, wrote his Gospel in his native tongue before going to other peoples, to make up to those he left for the loss of his presence; St. Jerome says that Matthew was the first to commit the Gospel of Christ to writing and published it in Judaea in Hebrew characters; and St. Augustine, setting out the order of the Evangelists, gives Matthew the first place and John the last.[^eus-3-24][^jerome-pref][^aug-hg]
St. John Chrysostom adds the occasion, which also explains why the Gospel exists. When Jewish believers came to Matthew, he says, "and besought him to leave to them in writing those same things, which he had spoken to them by word, he also composed his Gospel in the language of the Hebrews."[^chrys1] The tradition is less settled about what became of the Evangelist afterward. A list of the apostles falsely ascribed to Hippolytus says that he published his Gospel at Jerusalem and died in Parthia, while OrthodoxWiki, following the Church's hagiography, has him preach in Syria, Media, Persia, and Parthia and be martyred by fire in Ethiopia.[^ps-hipp][^ow-apostle] That variety is worth noticing because it throws into relief how steady the testimony is about the one thing that bears on the book. The Orthodox Study Bible states it in a sentence: "His authorship is attested by the universal witness of the ancient Church."[^osb-intro]
What lies behind it
Before the Gospel was a book it was a body of memory. Luke, who stops at the opening of his Gospel to tell his readers how he worked, describes the situation in which Matthew's readers also lived: "many have undertaken to set in order a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word delivered them to us" (Luke 1.1-2).[^luke1] The Church's earliest preaching was spoken before it was written. St. Paul's summary of what he "delivered… first of all," that "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures," is a summary of the Church's preaching that he says he "delivered" and had himself "received" (1 Corinthians 15.3-4).[^cor15]
Chrysostom, opening his homilies on Matthew, goes further and says that this was how the Church should have stayed. It would have been best, he says, "not at all to require the aid of the written Word, but to exhibit a life so pure, that the grace of the Spirit should be instead of books to our souls." The Gospels exist because believers fell short of that: in process of time, he says, they "made shipwreck, some with regard to doctrines, others as to life and manners," and so there was need of being "put in remembrance by the written word."[^chrys1] The Gospel of Matthew is, in other words, the written form of something that was already being said, believed, prayed, and lived.
Language is the first thing the tradition says about that written form. Papias, Origen, Chrysostom, and Jerome all place Matthew's composition in Hebrew, and Augustine adds that of the four Evangelists Matthew alone is reckoned to have written in "the Hebrew language," the other three in Greek.[^papias][^origen-mt][^chrys1][^jerome-pref][^aug-hg] The tradition even claims to have handled the thing. Jerome reports that Pantaenus, the Alexandrian teacher sent to India, found there that Bartholomew had already preached the Lord's coming according to the Gospel of Matthew, and brought a copy back to Alexandria written in Hebrew letters.[^jerome-dvi] In his dialogue against the Pelagians, Jerome describes the Gospel used by the Nazarenes: "the Gospel according to the Hebrews, which is written in the Chaldee and Syrian language, but in Hebrew characters… (I mean the Gospel according to the Apostles, or, as is generally maintained, the Gospel according to Matthew, a copy of which is in the library at Cæsarea)."[^jerome-pel]
Theophylact of Ohrid, in a preface, repeats the same report, including that the Hebrew copy was preserved in the library at Caesarea and that the man who later turned it into Greek was unknown.[^theophylact] That remark states the puzzle plainly, since the Gospel the Church actually reads is Greek. The Orthodox Study Bible takes the simplest view, that Matthew "has come down to us in Greek" with a Hebraic flavor, and reports Papias's tradition that Matthew wrote the sayings in Aramaic and that others later translated them freely into Greek.[^osb-intro]
The Orthodox Church in America allows that Matthew may have been written first in Aramaic, and OrthodoxWiki quotes the OCA's remark that the linguistic and cultural-historical peculiarities of the Greek point back to such an original.[^oca][^ow-matthew] Bruce, from outside the Orthodox tradition, notes that "Hebrew" in Papias may mean Aramaic, that the Gospel as we have it shows the signs of an original Greek composition, and that Papias or his informant may simply have been unable to tell translation Greek from original Greek.[^bruce-lang] The Jewish Annotated New Testament says of the first Gospel that it "neither claims Matthean authorship nor reads like a translation from the Hebrew."[^jant-intro] The Fathers agree that something was written in a language of the Jews by a man named Matthew, while Bruce and the Jewish Annotated New Testament doubt that the Greek Gospel is a translation of it. All the sources leave unsettled the exact relation of that thing to the Greek text now read in the Church's lectionary.
Behind the Greek also stand the Scriptures the book is forever quoting. The Jewish Annotated New Testament counts about fifty quotations of and allusions to the Septuagint in Matthew and notes the recurring formula of fulfilment, "to fulfill what was spoken… by the prophet," which turns up in Matthew 1.22-23, Matthew 2.15, Matthew 4.14, Matthew 8.17, Matthew 12.17, Matthew 13.35, Matthew 21.4, and Matthew 27.9-10.[^jant-intro] Bruce points out that some of Matthew's quotations follow a non-Septuagintal form, as at Matthew 12.18-21, and that in other places the Greek translation gave Matthew a word the Hebrew need not have, as with parthenos, "virgin," in Matthew 1.23.[^bruce-lxx] Those quotations are a source in the plainest sense, for the Gospel is built on Israel's Scriptures. Fr. John Behr gives the theological reading of the habit: in Matthew the engagement with Scripture runs throughout, with "prophecy-fulfillment structuring the narrative," in a Gospel centered on the Passion and proclaiming it through the treasury of Scripture.[^behr-55]
Whether Matthew also had other written Gospels before him is a long-disputed question about the book, and each answer comes with its own authorities. St. Augustine, who had no doubt that Matthew came first, took Mark to be Matthew's "attendant and epitomizer," because Mark agrees with Matthew in a very large number of passages and sometimes in nearly identical words.[^aug-hg] The Jewish Annotated New Testament reports that the view now most widely held reverses the order: Matthew depends on Mark, whose material, it says, he reproduces to the extent of about ninety percent, and on a hypothetical lost sayings source called Q, while a minority of scholars argue that Matthew was itself a source for Mark and Luke.[^jant-intro] OrthodoxWiki lists the Two-Source, Four-Source, and Farrer proposals and observes that since scholars in the West began intensive study of the synoptic problem in the late eighteenth century, the hypotheses have not reached "any common resolution or agreement."[^ow-syn][^ow-gospels] OrthodoxWiki adds that Augustine's account, which put Matthew first, went unchallenged until the late eighteenth century. Chrysostom, for his part, stressed that the four Evangelists wrote at different times and in different places, a point that bears on the question of sources without answering it.
Why it was written
The tradition is nearly unanimous about the audience. Origen, in his commentary on John, says that Matthew was "writing for the Hebrews who looked for Him who was to come of the line of Abraham and of David," and that this is why his Gospel opens with the words "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham."[^origen-jn] A fragment ascribed to Irenaeus puts the point more sharply still. "The Gospel according to Matthew was written to the Jews," it says, because they insisted that the Christ would be of the seed of David, and Matthew, who wanted to establish that point more than anyone, began with the genealogy to give them proof.[^irenaeus-frag] Eusebius gives the occasion as Matthew's departure to other peoples, and the Orthodox tradition as OrthodoxWiki reports it says that the apostle wrote at the request of the Jewish converts in Jerusalem.[^eus-3-24][^ow-matthew]
Chrysostom, whose ninety homilies read the whole book, draws the inference that shapes much of what he says about it. Matthew and Luke, he says, begin differently because they write for different readers:
Matthew, as writing to Hebrews, sought to show nothing more, than that He was from Abraham, and David; but Luke, as discoursing to all in general, traces up the account higher, going on even to Adam. And the one begins with His generation, because nothing was so soothing to the Jew as to be told that Christ was the offspring of Abraham and David.[^chrys1]
The genealogy is thus the Evangelist's first act of persuasion, addressed to the reader who needs it most, and the form in which a Gospel opens already tells us for whom it was shaped.
What Matthew wanted those readers to see is easiest to hear in the Lord's own words. The book's thesis, as OrthodoxWiki and the Jewish Annotated New Testament both put it, comes in the declaration, "Don't think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn't come to destroy, but to fulfill," and in the warning that follows, "not even one smallest letter or one tiny pen stroke shall in any way pass away from the law, until all things are accomplished" (Matthew 5.17-18).[^mt5-17][^ow-matthew][^jant-intro] Chrysostom, on the verse, notices that Christ says twice over that He has not come to destroy, and he then counts the ways in which Christ fulfills. He fulfills the prophets by confirming in His actions all that had been said of Him, and he fulfills the Law by keeping every precept, by granting that fulfillment to those who believe, and by what Chrysostom calls "a drawing out, and filling up" of the old commandments in the teaching that is about to follow.[^chrys16]
The Orthodox Study Bible gathers the whole aim of the book under one theme: "Christ, the Incarnate God, Immanuel, has inaugurated the kingdom of God and the new covenant, which is realized in the true Israel, the Church."[^osb-intro] OrthodoxWiki, following the Orthodox tradition's reading, adds that the Gospel presents Jesus in three offices: as Prophet and Law-Giver in chapters 5–7, as Lord of the visible and invisible world in chapters 8–25, and as High Priest offered as sacrifice in chapters 26–27. The Orthodox Church in America likewise describes the book as written to show Jewish Christians from the Old Testament that Jesus is the Christ.[^ow-matthew][^oca]
Matthew's way of carrying that thesis is to set Jesus beside Moses and then above him. The Jewish Annotated New Testament lays out the parallels: an infancy in which the child is rescued from a king's decree and goes down into Egypt, a crossing of water at the baptism, forty days of fasting in the wilderness, a mountain on which Jesus begins to teach (Matthew 5.1), and a second mountain on which the risen Christ gives His final instructions (Matthew 28.16), with the difference that Moses died outside the Promised Land and Jesus returns.[^jant-intro] Fr. John McGuckin, an Orthodox historian, sees the same pattern in the way Matthew sets Jesus's teaching alongside that of Moses, "with a heavy stress on new fulfillments." The clearest case is the refrain of the Sermon on the Mount, in which an ancient commandment is quoted and then taken further: "You have heard that it was said to the ancient ones, 'You shall not murder;'… But I tell you…" (Matthew 5.21-22).[^mcguckin-27][^mt5-21]
The book also draws its own portrait of the sort of person who could have written it. Near the close of the chapter of parables Jesus says, "Therefore every scribe who has been made a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a householder, who brings out of his treasure new and old things" (Matthew 13.52).[^mt13-52] One can read the Gospel as a whole as such a householder's treasury, in which the new thing the Church confesses is laid out beside the old things Israel had been given.
When this was done, and where, is a separate question with a range of answers. The Orthodox Study Bible says that Matthew could have been written as early as AD 50 but was more likely written after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, over a period of years, in Antioch, where the church was a strong, mixed community of Jewish and Gentile Christians.[^osb-intro] OrthodoxWiki gives the range AD 60–65 and notes that more liberal scholars place the Gospel between 80 and 100.[^ow-matthew] The Jewish Annotated New Testament argues that the parable of the wedding feast, in which a king "burned their city" (Matthew 22.7), and Jesus's saying that "one greater than the temple is here" (Matthew 12.6) suggest the Temple has already fallen, and it settles on 80–90, with Antioch a plausible setting and Galilee also possible.[^jant-intro] Every one of these proposals puts the Gospel within the first generations of the Church, in a community that had been Jewish and was becoming mixed, and that is enough to account for the book's double face, loyal to the Law and the Prophets and open to "all nations."[^osb-intro][^jant-intro]
The fourfold Gospel itself needed a defense, and the best-known one is St. Irenaeus's. As OrthodoxBridge quotes him, Irenaeus argued that the Gospels cannot be more or fewer than they are, because there are four zones of the world and four principal winds, and the Church, scattered over all the world, has the Gospel as its pillar, so that "it is fitting that she should have four pillars."[^irenaeus-iii] Behr, who regards this as an argument made "after the fact," because the fourfold Gospel was already part of the tradition Irenaeus had received, finds the theological reason underneath it in what the four share: each is centered on the Passion and each proclaims it through the treasury of the Old Testament.[^behr-55]
Chrysostom asks the same question from the other side and answers it in his first homily on Matthew. "One indeed was sufficient," he says, "but if there be four that write, not at the same times, nor in the same places, neither after having met together, and conversed one with another, and then they speak all things as it were out of one mouth, this becomes a very great demonstration of the truth."[^chrys1] The principle he draws from it is a rule for reading the book: where the Gospels differ on matters of time or place, this does no harm to what they say, because in the chief heads, those that make up our life and doctrine, none of them is found to disagree.[^chrys1b]
Origen reaches for the language of elements: "Now the Gospels are four. These four are, as it were, the elements of the faith of the Church, out of which elements the whole world which is reconciled to God in Christ is put together."[^origen-jn] Behr adds that early Christians preferred four accounts to one smoothed-over account, though Tatian tried to supply a harmony in his Diatessaron.[^behr-42] Matthew's part in that witness is to show the fulfilment of Israel's story in Israel's Messiah, and the reasons the Jewish Annotated New Testament gives for its standing first among the Gospels are three: it was the most cited of them in the early Church, it contains instructions for the life of the church (as at Matthew 18.15-20), and its genealogy makes a smooth transition from the Scriptures of Israel to the story of Jesus. The same order, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, appears in the accounts of Origen, Augustine, and Jerome and in the canonical lists of Athanasius and the Synod of Laodicea.[^jant-intro][^origen-mt][^aug-hg][^jerome-pref][^lists]
Manuscripts and the text
No autograph of Matthew survives, nor of any Gospel. What remains is a large body of copies, of which the great fourth- and fifth-century codices are among the oldest large witnesses to the Greek Bible. OrthodoxWiki describes Codex Sinaiticus as a fourth-century uncial manuscript written between 330 and 350, Codex Vaticanus as slightly older, with both probably transcribed in the fourth century, and Codex Alexandrinus as a fifth-century Bible containing the Septuagint and the New Testament.[^ow-codices] Textual critics sort the surviving witnesses into families: an Alexandrian type of the second to fourth centuries, which includes Vaticanus and Sinaiticus and underlies most modern translations; a Western type attested from the third to the ninth centuries; and a Byzantine type dated from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries, which supplied the textus receptus of Erasmus and which makes up about ninety-five percent of all manuscripts. Modern critical editions such as Westcott–Hort (1881) and the Nestle–Aland series (twenty-eighth edition, of 2013) aim to reconstruct the original text, while one school argues for the priority of the Byzantine text.[^course-textcrit]
The ancient Church knew its copies disagreed. When Pope Damasus asked Jerome to revise the Latin Gospels, Jerome began his preface by observing that "there are almost as many forms of texts as there are copies." He blamed the changes made by confident but ignorant critics and by "copyists more asleep than awake," resolved to go back to the original Greek, used only early manuscripts, and corrected only the passages that seemed to convey a different meaning.[^jerome-pref] The pagan Celsus had already charged that Christians remodelled the Gospel many times over, and Origen answered that he knew of no one who had altered it "save the followers of Marcion, and those of Valentinus, and, I think, also those of Lucian."[^origen-cc27]
A handful of readings in Matthew matter more than the rest, because modern editions and ancient and Orthodox use divide over them. The apparatus used here is the marginal notes of the New Revised Standard Version as printed in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, which record where "other ancient authorities" differ, together with the plain fact that the World English Bible used throughout and the New King James text of the Orthodox Study Bible print all of these passages except the last (the World English Bible numbers the widows' woe as verse 13, where the NRSV note numbers it verse 14).[^variants-web][^ow-osb] The most familiar is the doxology of the Lord's Prayer, "For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever" (Matthew 6.13), which the NRSV leaves out of its text with a note that other authorities add it "in some form."[^jant-apparatus]
The reply to the demand for a sign, with its lines on the red sky at evening and at morning (Matthew 16.2-3), is lacking in some authorities, and the apparatus flags five other readings beside it. The saying on prayer and fasting (Matthew 17.21) and the sentence that the Son of Man came to save the lost (Matthew 18.11) appear in the NRSV only in notes. The woe against those who devour widows' houses (Matthew 23.14) is placed in some authorities before verse 13 and in others after it. The words "without a cause" in the saying about anger (Matthew 5.22) are noted as an addition in some authorities. And at Matthew 27.49 some ancient authorities add a line about another man taking a spear and piercing Jesus's side, so that blood and water came out, which is printed by neither the World English Bible nor the Orthodox Study Bible.[^jant-apparatus]
The Church's own use of these passages gives evidence on both sides, beginning with the doxology. The Didache gives the Lord's Prayer with "for Yours is the power and the glory forever," and the Apostolic Constitutions gives a doxology of its own, "for Yours is the kingdom forever."[^didache8][^ac-vii] St. Chrysostom comments on the doxology as part of the prayer, saying that Christ, having made us anxious as before a conflict by reminding us of the enemy, "again encourages and raises our spirits, by bringing to our remembrance the King under whom we are arrayed, and signifying Him to be more powerful than all."[^chrys19]
St. Cyprian, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, and St. Augustine close their expositions of the prayer at "deliver us from evil," and Cyril tells the newly baptized that after it they say "Amen" as the seal on the petitions, without mentioning any doxology.[^cyprian][^cyril-myst][^aug-sm]
At Holy Week Matins, as the Anastasis translation of Archimandrite Ephrem Lash prints it, the Our Father ends at "deliver us from the evil one," and the priest then completes it aloud: "For yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory, of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever, and to the ages of ages."[^anastasis] The doxology that the NRSV treats as an uncertain addition has become, in Orthodox worship, the place where the Lord's Prayer turns into praise of the Trinity.
Chrysostom preaches on the signs of the sky at Matthew 16.2-3, on prayer and fasting at Matthew 17.21, on the Son of Man's coming to save the lost at Matthew 18.11, and on the woe over widows' houses at Matthew 23.14, and in his homily on the crucifixion he narrates the piercing of the side with the spear in the same run of sentences as the sponge and the cry about Elijah, without saying whether he found it in his text of Matthew or supplied it from John.[^chrys-variants] Of "without a cause," he builds a whole argument on the qualifier, reasoning that Christ "has not altogether taken the thing away: first, because it is not possible, being a man, to be freed from passions."[^chrys-5-22]
What the Orthodox sources cited here offer on how Orthodoxy as a whole treats the question describes a practice more than a policy. The Byzantine type predominates among manuscripts and is "ongoing in the church," the Orthodox Study Bible prints the longer readings, and OrthodoxWiki and the OCA describe the lectionary use of Matthew.[^course-textcrit][^ow-osb][^ow-matthew][^oca] In practice the Church reads the text it has received in its liturgy and its study Bible, and one Father at least, Jerome with the Latin Gospels, was willing to compare copies and correct them against the Greek.
Translations
Translations of the Scriptures into Latin are older than the great Greek codices. Latin versions of the Scriptures circulated by the second century, as OrthodoxWiki's article on the Vulgate says, citing references in Tertullian and Cyprian, though they were thought crude and provincial.[^ow-vulgate] Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to produce a standard text in 382, and Jerome began with the Gospels, arranged "in the following order, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John," and revised against early Greek manuscripts.[^ow-vulgate][^jerome-pref] That revision slowly displaced the Old Latin and became the Vulgate, the authoritative Bible of the Church of Rome, whose Clementine edition of 1592 remained the official Latin text until 1979; OrthodoxWiki adds that its text was repeatedly corrupted in copying and needed correction.[^ow-vulgate][^bruce-vulgate]
In much of the Syriac-speaking East the Gospels were long read in a harmony. Tatian's Diatessaron, composed about AD 175, wove the four Gospels into one narrative, and Bruce reports that it was the favored edition in many Syriac-speaking churches for more than two hundred years, until pressure from bishops in the early fifth century moved them to a version of the four Gospels separately, the Peshitta; Ephrem the Syrian wrote a commentary on the Diatessaron that survives.[^bruce-diat][^wiki-peshitta] OrthodoxWiki credits Rabbula of Edessa with translating the New Testament into Syriac in the version known as the Peshitta, and observes that the Syriac Bible opened that language's golden age.[^ow-rabbula]
Further afield, Wulfila (Ulfilas) made the first translation of the Bible from Greek into Gothic, of which fragments survive in the Codex Argenteus at Uppsala.[^ow-ulfilas] In the ninth century Saints Cyril and Methodius devised an alphabet in order to translate Scripture and the services into what is now called Old Church Slavonic.[^ow-cm]
English translation of Matthew begins early, and the Lord's Prayer gives a convenient sampler. The Wessex Gospels (about 990), Wycliffe (1382), Coverdale (1538), and the Authorised Version (1611) all translate Matthew 6.9-13. The first two end at "deliver us from evil" (Wycliffe adding "Amen"), while Coverdale and the Authorised Version go on to "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever," so that the history of the doxology can be read on a single page of English.[^course-english] The later landscape includes the Douay-Rheims (1582), the Authorised Version and its descendant the New King James Version, which the Orthodox Study Bible uses, the Revised Version (1885) and American Standard Version (1901), and the Revised Standard Version (1946) and New Revised Standard Version (1989; updated 2023), on which the Jewish Annotated New Testament is based, together with a range of dynamic-equivalence and paraphrase versions.[^course-english][^ow-osb]
Translations differ not only in philosophy, whether formal correspondence, dynamic equivalence, or paraphrase, but in the manuscript tradition on which they rest, the textus receptus or Byzantine text on one side and critical texts on the other.[^course-english] Scripture quoted in this entry is from the public-domain World English Bible unless another version is named.
Controversy and Contestation
One of the sharpest recorded attacks on Matthew's authorship came from a Manichaean, and it is close to the argument a modern student makes. The Manichaean teacher Faustus, whose objections Augustine preserves and answers in thirty-three books, noticed that the Gospel speaks of its author in the third person, and he drew his conclusion in these words:
Thus we read: "As Jesus passed by, He saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom, and called him; and he immediately rose up, and followed Him." No one writing of himself would say, He saw a man, and called him; and he followed Him; but, He saw me, and called me, and I followed Him. Evidently this was written not by Matthew himself, but by some one else under his name.[^faustus-17]
His motive is plain from the start of the chapter. Matthew 5.17 has Christ say that He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, which the Manichaeans rejected, and Faustus adds that Matthew was not yet a follower when that sermon was preached and so was no witness to it.
Augustine is not impressed by the grammar. Narrators, he replies, often speak of themselves as if of another: Moses writes "Moses said" and not "I said," John closes his Gospel with a disciple whom Jesus loved and then adds that this disciple has written these things, and the Lord Himself says "the Son of man" where He might have said "I." "Evidently this style is common in writers of narratives," Augustine concludes, and he says it is needless to collect examples from profane authors.[^aug-faustus17]
On the charge that Matthew was absent from the mountain, Augustine replies that Matthew could have learned what he did not see from John, as every later Christian learns what he did not see from John's writing, or the Lord Himself might have told him. Augustine turns the argument back on Faustus with a rule that would cost the Manichaeans their own founder: "If no one can say what is true of Christ unless he has himself seen and heard Him, no one now can be trusted."[^aug-faustus17]
The decisive consideration for Augustine, in a later book, is the custody of the book. The Gospel of Matthew, he says, "has been handed down from the days of Matthew in the Church, without any break in the connection between that time and the present," and it is a poor trade to prefer a teacher born in Persia long after Christ to an apostle who lived with Him.[^aug-faustus28]
The Jewish Annotated New Testament observes that the text of the first Gospel does not claim Matthean authorship and does not read like a translation from the Hebrew, and that most scholars hold Matthew to depend on Mark and on the hypothetical Q. It concedes at once that this dependence "does not preclude Matthean authorship but nonetheless calls it into question."[^jant-intro] It is also the view of that volume that the titles of the Gospels were probably added later to establish their authority.[^jant-mark] A reader who accepts Papias but doubts that his "oracles" were the Gospel can find support in Bruce's note that T. W. Manson argued the oracles were utterances of Jesus, no less authoritative than the oracles of the Hebrew prophets, which would make Papias's Matthew a collection of sayings and leave the Gospel itself unmentioned.[^bruce-papias]
The Church's answer does not deny these observations. It rests on testimony, and it weighs the testimony differently from the critic. The Orthodox Study Bible grants that the Gospel "does not name Matthew as the author" and then says that all the early manuscripts attribute it to him and that the witness of the ancient Church is universal.[^osb-intro] Papias's remark that each one interpreted the oracles as he could gives the Church a way to account for a Greek text standing over a Hebrew original, which the Orthodox Study Bible puts as a free translation by others, and Augustine's argument from custody, that the Gospel has come down in the Church without a break since Matthew's day, applies to every Gospel alike. The Church's own method of interpretation, as St. Vincent of Lérins states it, is to ask not what an isolated text suggests but what has been received, because, as he says, "owing to the depth of Holy Scripture" it can be read in as many ways as there are interpreters.[^vincent]
The date of the book is argued from the Temple. If, as the Jewish Annotated New Testament reads Matthew 22.7 and Matthew 12.6, the Gospel already knows that the city has burned and the Temple has fallen, then it was written after AD 70, perhaps in the 80s, and there is a line from there to Antioch, since Matthew alone among the Gospels mentions the spread of Jesus's fame into Syria (Matthew 4.24) and the Gospel's possible link with Ignatius points to the same city.[^jant-intro][^mt4-24] Against this stands the Church's tradition of an earlier date, which OrthodoxWiki puts at 60–65 and the Orthodox Study Bible allows as early as AD 50, and the Church's reading of the Lord's words as prophecy. Eusebius, summarizing the fall of Jerusalem, says that these things happened "in accordance with the prophecies of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who by divine power saw them beforehand as if they were already present," and he cites the Lord's warning about flight in winter or on the Sabbath.[^eus-3-7] A prophecy that a believing reader receives as the Lord's own foresight, and that a critical reader receives as an after-the-fact interpretation, will lead to different dates. The critical case does not rest on that alone, since the Jewish Annotated New Testament reasons from the Gospel's own wording at 12.6 and 22.7 and from Ignatius, about 110, as the latest limit.
Matthew's facts have also been questioned, beginning with the genealogy in its first chapter. The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that Matthew and Luke give inconsistent genealogies from David to Jesus, that Matthew arranges his list into fourteen generations by leaving out kings, and that two of his names do not match the Old Testament's (Asaph for Asa, Amos for Amon).[^jant-gen] Chrysostom raises these very problems in the opening homily, and he does so with a sort of relish: why trace the genealogy through Joseph, who was not Christ's father; why mention women, and only the women with a notorious history; why omit three kings; why fail to keep the number fourteen in the third division; why Luke's names differ. He tells his hearers that it is not enough to explain the text, since one must first learn what there is to explain.[^chrys1-14]
An ancient answer to the problem of the two genealogies comes from Julius Africanus, who proposed that they trace Joseph's descent by nature and by law: "Matthan, descended from Solomon, begot Jacob. Matthan dying, Melchi, descended from Nathan, begot Hell by the same wife. Therefore Hell and Jacob are uterine brothers. Hell dying childless, Jacob raised up seed to him and begot Joseph, his own son by nature, but the son of Hell by law."[^africanus] Africanus confessed that the explanation lacked testimony, while holding that the Gospel states the truth in any case, and the modesty of the admission is worth noting.
More generally, Chrysostom argues that the Gospels' differences are evidence for them. "That discordance which seems to exist in little matters," he says, "delivers them from all suspicion, and speaks clearly in behalf of the character of the writers," because a perfect agreement in every detail would suggest a human compact.[^chrys1] Fr. John Behr is frank about how far the discrepancies go. He grants that apart from the fact of the crucifixion the four Gospels contain irresolvable discrepancies, from the timing of the cleansing of the Temple to the cock-crow, and he says that some early Christians took them to be divinely placed stumbling blocks directing attention to the theological level of the Gospels rather than the mere letter.[^behr-42]
Matthew says that Jesus's settling at Nazareth fulfilled the saying that "he will be called a Nazarene" (Matthew 2.23), which Bruce notes stands in that form in no known prophetic book, and he attributes to Jeremiah a saying about the thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 27.9-10) that the Jewish Annotated New Testament calls a combination of Zechariah 11 with passages in Jeremiah.[^bruce-nazarene][^jant-27-9] Chrysostom addresses the first directly. Do not be curious, he says, about which prophet said it, because "many of the prophetic writings have been lost," and he reminds his hearers that the apostles themselves call Christ a Nazarene in many places.[^chrys9] That answer is an argument from the history of the books and falls short of proof; it will satisfy those who already trust the Evangelist.
Matthew takes from Isaiah the words "the virgin shall be with child" (Matthew 1.23), and the argument over the Hebrew behind them is among the best known of these disputes. The Jewish Annotated New Testament observes that the Hebrew word almah means a young woman and does not necessarily mean a virgin, and that the Greek parthenos in the Septuagint does not necessarily mean a virgin either, though it usually does.[^jant-virgin] Bruce adds that the Septuagint gave Matthew a word that served his purpose better than the Hebrew, and that Aquila, who prepared a Greek version for Jewish use, chose the less specific neanis, "girl" or "young woman," in order to blunt the Christian argument.[^bruce-lxx] St. Justin Martyr met the same objection in the second century, when Trypho's teachers said that Isaiah wrote "young woman." Justin answers from the shape of the sign: if the child were born of ordinary intercourse like every other firstborn son, why should God call it a sign "not common to all the first-born sons?"[^justin-84] Origen, similarly, thinks it fitting to a Jew to cite Isaiah's prophecy of the virgin and notes that Celsus's Jew does not.[^origen-cc34]
The tradition, in Origen and Augustine and in the canonical lists, places Matthew first and takes the others to follow, and the Jewish Annotated New Testament reports that this view of the relative authority of the first two Gospels persisted until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Mark's lack of literary polish came to be read as a sign of priority and the view that Mark came before Matthew became general.[^jant-mark] The same volume adds a remark about stakes: the priority of Mark, it says, made it easier to downplay the Jewish practices of Jesus, which Matthew treats more prominently.[^jant-mark] The Fathers cited here are less concerned with who wrote first than with how the four fit together, as can be seen in the way Jerome handles John, who by his account wrote to fill the year the other three omit and so removed the apparent discrepancy between John and the others.[^jerome-dvi-john] Nothing in the sources cited here treats the order of the three Synoptic Gospels as a point of dogma, and the OCA calls the interrelation of the three "an ongoing debate among scriptural scholars."[^oca]
The book's Jewishness is also its most disputed feature in the modern world. The Gospel affirms the Law (Matthew 5.17) and has Jesus say of the scribes and Pharisees, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat. All things therefore whatever they tell you to observe, observe and do, but don't do their works" (Matthew 23.2-3). The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that Jesus here acknowledges the Pharisees' Torah knowledge, and then that the chapter goes on to seven woes.[^jant-27-25]
At the trial the whole people answer Pilate, "May his blood be on us and on our children!" (Matthew 27.25). The Jewish Annotated New Testament reads this verse, with the parables of the vineyard and the wedding feast and the invective of chapter 23, as a sign of a relationship between Matthew's readers and the synagogue that was strained if not broken, and it notes that the "blood cry" has been used through the centuries to blame all Jews for the death of Jesus. It reads the verse as more probably Matthew's interpretation of the events of 70, when the children of the Jerusalem crowd saw the Temple burn, and it ties the harshness toward the Pharisees to a competition for survival among those who would lead the people after the destruction.[^jant-intro][^jant-27-25]
Chrysostom's own reading of the verse is severe and also careful. In the homily on the trial he says that the people cried out for the blood to be on themselves and their children, and he asks why, if they cursed themselves, they drew the curse also on their children. He does not say that Christ confirmed the sentence upon the children. The Lord, he says, received those who repented from both generations, "for indeed even Paul was of them, and the thousands that believed in Jerusalem."[^chrys86] In the next homily his severity is plainer, for there he says that the people "themselves did every thing" at the Passion, becoming "accusers, and judges, and executioners"; that severity stands beside his reminder, in the homily before it, that Paul and the thousands of believers in Jerusalem came from that same people.[^chrys87][^chrys86] The sources cited here would not support the claim that the Church's reading of this verse has been a single reading, and they would not support the opposite claim either.
The dispute over the Law took a sharper form in the first Jewish-Christian groups. St. Irenaeus says that the Ebionites used the Gospel according to Matthew only, rejected Paul as an apostate from the Law, practiced circumcision, and adored Jerusalem as if it were the house of God. Eusebius says instead that they used only the so-called Gospel according to the Hebrews.[^irenaeus-i26][^eus-3-27] The two reports can be reconciled, if the Hebrews Gospel was a form of Matthew in Hebrew letters, as Jerome's "generally maintained" suggests, and they cannot, if it was a different book, as Eusebius's own classing of it among the disputed writings and Papias's separate mention of it imply.[^eus-3-25][^jerome-pel][^papias] The Jewish Annotated New Testament adds a methodological caution from a modern scholar: the labels "Ebionite" and "Nazarene" come from heresiologists, and heresiology is to be understood as "a rhetorical technique of polemic rather than as an ethnography of existing groups."[^jant-essay]
Jerome met the same question in his own day. In his letter to Augustine he says of the Nazarenes of the East that they believe in Christ the Son of God born of the Virgin Mary, "But while they desire to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither the one nor the other."[^jerome-ltr75] Augustine replied that both of them denied that Christians may keep the Law now, and that their quarrel was over whether the apostles had observed it sincerely for a time or had only pretended to.[^aug-ltr82]
Justin, in the second century, had been more generous toward Jewish Christians who keep the Law, provided they do not compel Gentiles to do likewise: he would "join ourselves to such, and associate with them in all things as kinsmen and brethren."[^justin-47] The Jewish Annotated New Testament, for its part, reads the Gospel's "all nations" in Matthew 28.19 as extending the mission to Gentiles without ending the mission to Israel.[^jant-28]
Some groups outside the Church answered the Gospel's Jewishness by rejecting it. Marcion made an edition of Luke the basis of his Gospel, and OrthodoxWiki says he removed the parts of it that he thought too Jewish and rejected all other Gospels, while Tertullian answers him by pressing the claim of the apostolic Gospels.[^ow-gospels][^tert-am] Chrysostom says of the Lord's declaration that He came to fulfill the Law that it stops the mouths "of those heretics, who say that the old covenant is of the devil."[^chrys16] Faustus, as his chapter shows, took the other path and suggested that the verse must either mean something else or be spurious, and Celsus's charge that the Gospel itself had been recast was answered by Origen's naming the heretics who had in fact done it.[^faustus-17][^origen-cc27]
The strongest case against the longer readings is the one the apparatus gives: that the doxology of Matthew 6.13, the sky-signs, the saying on prayer and fasting, the sentence about saving the lost, the woe on those who devour widows' houses, and the spear are lacking in some ancient authorities, and that Cyprian, Cyril, and Augustine expound the Lord's Prayer without the doxology.[^jant-apparatus][^cyprian][^cyril-myst][^aug-sm] The Church's answer is the other side of the evidence: the Didache, the Apostolic Constitutions, and Chrysostom treat the doxology as part of the prayer, Orthodox worship completes the prayer with it in Trinitarian form, and the liturgical text is the text Orthodox worship prays today.[^didache8][^ac-vii][^chrys19][^anastasis] On the spear, the position is simpler, because neither the Orthodox Study Bible nor the World English Bible prints it, and Chrysostom, who narrates the spear in his homily on the crucifixion without saying where he found it, is no clear witness either way.[^chrys-variants]
The Jewish Annotated New Testament questions the Trinitarian baptismal formula of Matthew 28.19 on historical grounds. It observes that the formula was not an integral part of Christian theological doctrine until at least the second century, that other accounts of baptism in the New Testament do not use it, and that it may reflect the liturgical usage of Matthew's community. Its apparatus lists no variant for the verse, so the question it raises is one about origin and has nothing to do with the manuscripts.[^jant-28][^jant-apparatus]
The Church's response is that the formula appears early and in use. The Didache tells the baptizer to baptize "into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," and St. Justin, describing Christian baptism in his First Apology, says that those brought to the water "receive the washing with water" in the name of God the Father and Lord of the universe, and of Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit.[^didache7][^justin-61]
St. Basil, answering those who would not rank the Spirit with the Father and the Son, appeals to the command itself: "if our Lord, when enjoining the baptism of salvation, charged His disciples to baptize all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," then those who deny the coordination "openly withstand the commandment of God."[^basil10]
Chrysostom reads the verse as the summary of doctrine that the Lord put into the apostles' hands, "that expressed by the form of baptism," which He commanded them to pour out over the whole world.[^chrys90] Whether the formula was first liturgical or first dominical, the Church has received it from the Gospel and prayed it at the font, and that is the sense in which it stands as Trinitarian teaching grounded in a command of the Lord.
Methods of Criticism
Modern scholarship has approached Matthew the way a surveyor approaches an old house: from the foundations, which are the words themselves; from the materials, which are the sources; from the oldest forms of its parts; from the hand of the builder who arranged them; from the street it stands on; and from the finished building as a whole. Each approach has produced claims about this book, and the Orthodox writers cited here have received them with differing degrees of welcome. Over against all of them stands the way the Fathers themselves read.
Textual criticism asks what the original words were, in a book whose autograph is gone and whose copies disagree. Its claims about Matthew are the ones set out in the manuscripts section above: that the doxology of the Lord's Prayer, the sky-signs, the verses on prayer and fasting and on saving the lost, the extra woe, and the spear are lacking in some ancient authorities, and that the NRSV accordingly prints several of them only in notes.[^jant-apparatus] The apparatus does not name the witnesses on either side. The discipline is called "low criticism" within the historical-critical schools and is said to precede translation.[^course-textcrit] Orthodox reception of it, among the sources cited, is a matter of practice. The Orthodox Study Bible prints the longer readings, the liturgy completes the Lord's Prayer with the doxology, and Jerome, at least, compared manuscripts and corrected them.[^ow-osb][^anastasis][^jerome-pref]
Source criticism asks what written materials stand behind the Gospel, and for Matthew it is the discipline that has proposed the most. The best-known patristic hypothesis is Augustine's, that Matthew came first, that Mark follows him as his abbreviator, and that Luke used both, which OrthodoxWiki reports as the view that "remained unchallenged until the late eighteenth century."[^aug-hg][^ow-syn] The hypothesis that now dominates is the Two-Source theory, in which Matthew and Luke each used Mark and a lost sayings document called Q, with the Four-Source theory adding material peculiar to each Gospel (M and L); the Farrer theory keeps Mark's priority and dispenses with Q by having Luke use Matthew.[^ow-gospels][^jant-intro] According to the Jewish Annotated New Testament, the presumed Q consisted mostly of teaching, such as the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer, and can be reconstructed from the verses shared by Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark.[^jant-intro] A theory that Matthew was the source for the others has defenders, the same volume says, although the volume does not set out their arguments.
A difficulty is pressed against Augustine's view, that wherever Mark and Matthew tell the same story Mark's account is usually the longer, which does not look like abbreviation, and it is said that source criticism has reached its natural end and should take more account of oral tradition.[^course-lecture] Orthodox reception is cautious. The OCA says the Synoptic Gospels are "most probably interrelated textually in some way, exactly how being an ongoing debate among scriptural scholars," and OrthodoxWiki notes the lack of agreement; Chrysostom held that the four wrote at different times and places without meeting, and he took their agreement as a demonstration of truth, which sits uneasily with a theory of literary dependence.[^oca][^ow-syn][^chrys1]
Form criticism explains what lay behind the texts: the patterns and prayers, the sayings and wisdom that circulated before the Gospels framed them. A skeptical critique calls the method "completely hypothetical," since nothing survives from the period that is not already text, and adds that some of the parables in Luke most likely circulated apart from the book before being framed in it.[^course-lecture] Brevard Childs, a Protestant scholar of the canonical method, argues that the reconstructed stages of tradition are largely hypothetical and that no historical community ever heard the material in the form the schemata suppose.[^childs-hyp]
McGuckin accepts that recent study allows us to distinguish the forms of the Aramaic preaching of Jesus and the first generation from the more Greek forms of the second apostolic age, and he insists that for Orthodoxy there is "no great chasm" between the teaching of Jesus and the way his disciples passed it on, which they may have nuanced for their audiences but did not invent.[^mcguckin-28] The ancient witnesses had their own account of the oral stage: Papias prized the living voice of those who had followed the apostles, and Luke speaks of eyewitnesses who delivered the story.[^eus-3-39][^luke1]
Redaction criticism takes the Gospel as it stands and asks what its author has done with his material, which in Matthew's case means chiefly Mark. The method works by comparison, noting what is added, left out, or reworded, and looking for a pattern, because one change shows little and repeated changes show a mind. The first example is this. Where Mark's disciples ask Jesus in the storm, "Teacher, don't you care that we are dying?" (Mark 4.38), Matthew's disciples cry, "Save us, Lord! We are dying!" (Matthew 8.25), and the change is read as Matthew interpreting his source as well as copying it.[^course-lecture]
Mark says that in Nazareth Jesus "could do no mighty work" (Mark 6.5), where Matthew says that "he didn't do many mighty works there because of their unbelief" (Matthew 13.58), a change read as protecting the dignity of Christ's power.[^course-lecture] The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes two more of the same kind: Matthew adds to the story of the grain fields that the disciples were hungry (Matthew 12.1), where Mark says only that they began to pluck (Mark 2.23), and he omits Mark's remark that Jesus was making all foods clean (Mark 7.19) from his own parallel account (Matthew 15.17-18).[^jant-intro]
The Fathers noticed such differences and read them in their own way. Origen, expounding Matthew's account of what defiles a man, brings in Mark's added phrase to confirm his reading, noting that "according to Mark, the Saviour said these things making all meats clean."[^origen-xi] Chrysostom's habit of tying the genealogy and the whole Gospel to Matthew's Jewish readers asks a question redaction critics also ask, why the Evangelist shaped his book as he did.[^chrys1] Orthodox reception turns on the presupposition. In these examples the method works from Markan priority and reads Matthew's changes as theological, and Behr and Childs warn from different sides that a historical-critical reading which looks for the "original" meaning of an ancient text can lose sight of what the text now says to the Church.[^behr-12][^childs-49]
Historical-critical and social-scientific study sets the Gospel in the world that produced it, with a date, a place, a community, and the pressures on that community. For Matthew the principal claims are those of the Jewish Annotated New Testament: a date after 70, a setting at Antioch or in Galilee, a community of Jewish Christians in tension with the survivors of the Pharisaic movement as it recast Judaism after the Temple's fall, and a text whose polemic against the Pharisees and whose "blood cry" reflect that competition.[^jant-intro] The Orthodox Study Bible accepts much of the setting, naming Antioch and a mixed Jewish and Gentile church, while keeping an earlier date open.[^osb-intro] Where the method turns to reconstruction, McGuckin and Behr are warier. McGuckin cautions that the sparse and controverted detail of the Church's first generation has given rise to "a flourishing of speculation passing off as history," and Behr observes that the historical approach of modernity has fragmented theology by asking what the text meant rather than what it means.[^mcguckin-29][^behr-12] Critical realism is proposed as a middle path between a naive recovery of the past and a skepticism that denies knowledge of it.[^course-hist]
Narrative, literary, and canonical approaches read the Gospel in the form in which the Church received it. For Matthew they begin with the arrangement: the five discourses, each closed by a formula, which the Jewish Annotated New Testament says suggests a recapitulation of the Pentateuch, though the topics of the discourses do not match the books of Moses; the frame of "God with us" and "I am with you always"; and the placing of the Gospel first.[^jant-intro][^themes] Childs, in his canonical method, says that a book's structure should be read as it stands, and he names Matthew as an example of a structure that is open to more than one construal and of a historical reconstruction that should not take over the reading.[^childs-49] Behr reads the same shape from the Passion backward, in the way the narrative is structured by fulfilment.[^behr-55] A further point from Orthodox practice is that the Church's liturgical reading has itself "canonically shaped" these texts, so that a book's place in the lectionary becomes part of how it is heard.[^course-canonical]
The Fathers read from inside the Church, and their reading was itself textual and scholarly. St. Basil is quoted on the labor of attending to "every phrase and… every syllable" of Scripture, and alongside it stand the four senses that patristic exegesis distinguishes: the literal, which is never abandoned, and the three spiritual senses, typological or allegorical, tropological or moral, and anagogical or mystical.[^basil-1-2][^course-lecture] Chrysostom's homilies on Matthew show them at work, since he is concerned with the literal facts of the genealogy and the geography of Galilee, with the way Christ fulfills Law and prophets, and above all with the moral, the tropological, sense, the way a text is to be lived.[^chrys1][^chrys16][^chrys9] For the Fathers harmonization is a work of attention: Augustine builds his Harmony of the Gospels on the assumption that the Evangelists were each inspired and not writing in ignorance of their predecessors, and Jerome records the Eusebian lists that show which passages occur in two or more Gospels.[^aug-hg][^jerome-pref]
St. Vincent of Lérins asks why the Church's interpretation need be joined to Scripture when the canon is complete, and he answers that "owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense," so that the rule for understanding the prophets and apostles must be framed "in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation."[^vincent] McGuckin says the same thing from the Orthodox side: for Orthodoxy there is no decisive distinction between Scripture and Tradition, since the written Gospels themselves arise from the Spirit's articulation in the illumined faith of the Church.[^mcguckin-28] McGuckin himself makes use of the newer distinctions, reading Matthew's parallels with Moses and the forms of the Aramaic and Greek preaching with their help, while insisting that Jesus comes to us only through the Spirit in the Church.[^mcguckin-27] The Gospel is read in the Liturgy as the voice of the risen Lord who is "with you always, even to the end of the age," and that promise, which closes Matthew as Matthew 1.23 opened it, is what the Church hears at the head of the New Testament and of the four Gospels that Mark, Luke, and John complete.
Sources
[^mt1-1]: Matthew 1.1 (WEB). [^mt9-10]: Matthew 9.10-11; Matthew 9.9 (WEB). [^mt28]: Matthew 28.16-20; Matthew 5.1; Matthew 1.22; Matthew 2.15 (WEB). [^jant-gen]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Gospel according to Matthew," on Matthew 1.1-17, 3. [^levi]: Matthew 9.9; Matthew 10.3; Mark 2.14; Luke 5.27-29 (WEB). [^osb-intro]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Matthew. [^lists]: St. Athanasius, Festal Letter 39, §5; Synod of Laodicea, canon on the books of the New Testament; Jerome, Preface to the Four Gospels. [^origen-mt]: Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on Matthew, bk. 1, preface (ANF). [^shape]: Matthew 7.28; Matthew 11.1; Matthew 13.53; Matthew 19.1; Matthew 26.1 (WEB). Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Gospel according to Matthew," 1; OrthodoxWiki, "Gospel of Matthew." [^themes]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Gospel according to Matthew," 1–2; The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Matthew; Matthew 1.23; Matthew 28.20 (WEB). [^voice]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Gospel according to Matthew," 1; OrthodoxWiki, "Gospel of Matthew"; Orthodox Church in America, "Gospels." [^mt-summary]: Matthew 1–Matthew 28; esp. Matthew 2.1; Matthew 2.16; Matthew 4.17; Matthew 10.6; Matthew 11.3; Matthew 13.24–Matthew 13.45; Matthew 16.13-18; Matthew 23.13; Matthew 24.3; Matthew 25.31-32; Matthew 26.36; Matthew 26.57; Matthew 27.3-5; Matthew 27.51-52; Matthew 27.66; Matthew 28.11-15 (WEB). [^ow-apostle]: OrthodoxWiki, "Apostle Matthew"; OrthodoxWiki, "Gospel of Matthew"; cf. Acts 1.13. [^origen-cc62]: Origen of Alexandria, Against Celsus, 1.62. [^ac-viii]: Apostolic Constitutions, 8.22. [^ignatius]: St. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans 1 (Lightfoot translation); cf. Matthew 3.15 (WEB). [^jant-intro]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Gospel according to Matthew" (introduction by Aaron M. Gale), 1–2. [^didache8]: The Didache 8. [^eus-3-39]: Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History 3.39.3–4 (NPNF); cf. Papias, Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord, preface (ANF). [^papias]: Papias of Hierapolis, Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord, frag. preserved in Eusebius, Church History 3.39.16 (ANF; NPNF). [^eus-3-39b]: Eusebius, Church History 3.39.12–13. [^bruce-papias]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 124–25 and n. 30. [^irenaeus-i26]: St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.26.2. [^clement]: Clement of Alexandria, Hypotyposes, frag. preserved in Eusebius, Church History. [^tert-am]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.2. [^eus-3-24]: Eusebius, Church History 3.24.5–6. [^jerome-pref]: St. Jerome, Preface to the Four Gospels (to Pope Damasus). [^aug-hg]: St. Augustine of Hippo, Harmony of the Gospels 1.2.3–4. [^chrys1]: St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 1.1–2, 5–8. [^chrys1b]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 1.6. [^ps-hipp]: Pseudo-Hippolytus, On the Apostles and Disciples 7 (attributed to Hippolytus; pseudonymous). [^luke1]: Luke 1.1-4 (WEB). [^cor15]: 1 Corinthians 15.3-4 (WEB). [^jerome-dvi]: Jerome, On Illustrious Men (De Viris Illustribus), on Pantaenus. [^jerome-pel]: Jerome, Dialogue against the Pelagians 3.2. [^theophylact]: Theophylact of Ohrid, Explanation of the Gospel according to Matthew, preface (Patrologia Graeca 123; Greek text, OCR). [^oca]: Orthodox Church in America, "Gospels." [^ow-matthew]: OrthodoxWiki, "Gospel of Matthew." [^bruce-lang]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 125 and n. 31. [^bruce-lxx]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 49–53. [^behr-55]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press, 2006), 55. [^ow-syn]: OrthodoxWiki, "Synoptic gospels." [^ow-gospels]: OrthodoxWiki, "Gospels." [^origen-jn]: Origen, Commentary on John, bk. 1, §6 (ANF). [^irenaeus-frag]: Fragment attributed to St. Irenaeus, no. 29 (ANF; fragmentary transmission). [^mt5-17]: Matthew 5.17-18 (WEB). [^chrys16]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 16.3–4. [^mcguckin-27]: John Anthony McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 27. [^mt5-21]: Matthew 5.21-22 (WEB). [^mt13-52]: Matthew 13.52 (WEB). [^irenaeus-iii]: St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8 (ANF), as quoted in OrthodoxBridge, "Corpus Formation versus Canon Formation"; see also Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 55; Orthodox Church in America, "Gospels." [^behr-42]: Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 42. [^ow-codices]: OrthodoxWiki, "Codex Sinaiticus"; "Codex Vaticanus"; "Codex Alexandrinus." [^course-textcrit]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts; course lecture notes, Gospels and Acts. [^origen-cc27]: Origen, Against Celsus 2.27. [^variants-web]: Matthew 6.13; Matthew 16.2-3; Matthew 17.21; Matthew 18.11; Matthew 23.14; Matthew 5.22; Matthew 27.49 (WEB); The Orthodox Study Bible, Matthew 5:22, 6:13, 16:2–3, 17:21, 18:11, 23:14, 27:49. [^jant-apparatus]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), textual notes on Matthew 5.22 (11), 6.13 (13), 16.2–3 (30), 17.21 (32), 18.11 (33), 23.14 (42), 27.49 (53), 28.20 (54). [^ow-osb]: OrthodoxWiki, "Orthodox Study Bible." [^ac-vii]: Apostolic Constitutions 7.24. [^chrys19]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 19.10. [^cyprian]: St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Lord's Prayer (Treatise 4), 27. [^cyril-myst]: St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechesis 5.18. [^aug-sm]: Augustine, Sermon on the Mount 2.15.35. [^anastasis]: Anastasis: The Services of Holy Week and Pascha, trans. Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, Holy Week Monday Matins. [^chrys-variants]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 53 (on Matthew 16.2-3); Hom. 57 (on Matthew 17.21); Hom. 59 (on Matthew 18.11); Hom. 73 (on Matthew 23.14); Hom. 88 (on Matthew 27.48-49). [^chrys-5-22]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 16.9. [^course-english]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^ow-vulgate]: OrthodoxWiki, "Vulgate." [^bruce-vulgate]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), section on Jerome's translation. [^bruce-diat]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 127–28. [^wiki-peshitta]: Wikipedia, "Biblical canon," section "Peshitta." [^ow-rabbula]: OrthodoxWiki, "Rabbula of Edessa"; OrthodoxWiki, "Aramaic." [^ow-ulfilas]: OrthodoxWiki, "Ulfilas." [^ow-cm]: OrthodoxWiki, "Cyril and Methodius." [^faustus-17]: Faustus the Manichaean, in Augustine, Against Faustus 17.1. [^aug-faustus17]: Augustine, Against Faustus 17.3–4. [^aug-faustus28]: Augustine, Against Faustus 28.2. [^jant-mark]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Gospel according to Mark," 55. [^vincent]: St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory, ch. 2 [5]. [^mt4-24]: Matthew 4.24 (WEB); Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Gospel according to Matthew," 1. [^eus-3-7]: Eusebius, Church History 3.7.1–7; cf. Matthew 24.19-20. [^chrys1-14]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 1.14. [^africanus]: Julius Africanus, fragment on the genealogies of Matthew and Luke; Jerome, On Illustrious Men, on Africanus. [^bruce-nazarene]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 49–52. [^jant-27-9]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), on Matthew 27.9-10, 51; Matthew 27.9-10 (WEB). [^chrys9]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 9.6 (on Matthew 2.23); cf. Jeremiah 36.23. [^jant-virgin]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Gospel according to Matthew," sidebar "The Virgin Birth," 4. [^justin-84]: St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 43, 84; see also 71. [^origen-cc34]: Origen, Against Celsus 1.34. [^jerome-dvi-john]: Jerome, On Illustrious Men, on John; cf. Eusebius, Church History 3.24.7–13. [^jant-27-25]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), on Matthew 23.1-36, 42; on Matthew 27.25, 52; general introduction, xi–xii. [^chrys86]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 86 (on Matthew 27.24-25). [^chrys87]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 87. [^eus-3-27]: Eusebius, Church History 3.27.4. [^eus-3-25]: Eusebius, Church History 3.25.5. [^jant-essay]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), essay "Judaizers, Jewish Christians, and Others," 556–57. [^jerome-ltr75]: Jerome to Augustine, Letter 75 (Augustine's numbering), §13. [^aug-ltr82]: Augustine to Jerome, Letter 82, §16. [^justin-47]: Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 47. [^jant-28]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), on Matthew 28.16-20, 53–54. [^didache7]: The Didache 7; F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 124 n. 25. [^justin-61]: Justin, First Apology 61. [^basil10]: St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 10.24; see also 44. [^chrys90]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 90 (on Matthew 28.19). [^course-lecture]: Course lecture notes, Gospels and Acts, classes 3–4; cf. Mark 4.38; Matthew 8.25; Mark 6.5; Matthew 13.58 (WEB). [^childs-hyp]: Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon (Fortress, 1985); course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^mcguckin-28]: John Anthony McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 27–28. [^origen-xi]: Origen, Commentary on Matthew, bk. 11 (on Matthew 15.10-11); cf. Matthew 15.17-18; Mark 7.19 (WEB). [^behr-12]: Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 12–13. [^childs-49]: Childs, The New Testament as Canon, 49–50. [^mcguckin-29]: McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church, 28–29. [^course-hist]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^course-canonical]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^basil-1-2]: St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 1.2.