The Gospel According to Matthew

The Gospel According to Matthew is neither a gospel nor Matthew's... discuss...

Okay I'm not being entirely fair. It *is* a gospel, because... well, because we say it is. But it wasn't when it was written. The "gospel" was more likely referring to a creed, an oral formula of belief... the "good news" itself and not "a book about the good news."

The Gospels all had to be attributed to apostles to give them authority. Nobody knows who wrote this gospel, or any of the gospels. This particular one is known to be targeted for Jews, as opposed to Gentiles. Though positioned first it was most likely written after Mark, probably in the 90's, about 60 years after the events it portrays.

Together, Matthew and Luke give us the notorious "Q," a document that may or may not have ever existed. Q stands for the German word Quelle, meaning source. It is purported to be a "sayings source" documenting the words of Jesus with no story, just the dialogue, or rather, monologue. It may have been a document, or it may have been an oral tradition, or maybe there is some other explanation for the similar passages in Matthew and Luke.

You could say, "of course there are similar passages, since this is a TRUE STORY told by PEOPLE WHO WERE THERE," but it's not that kind of similarity. It appears in a hodgepodge fashion, and when it does appear, it is verbatim, not the kind of similarity that two eyewitness accounts would share.

And btw, as we go through these gospels, you'll see that they're not "eyewitness accounts" at all. Something very different is going on, something much more structured and deliberate.

The New Testament

Let's start with the title. According to Burton Mack in Who Wrote the New Testament?, the first evidence of the term comes from the second century. "Testament" is a mistranslation of diatheke, which was used in the sense of covenant (qv. etymonline). The new testament is a new promise that God makes to His people. However, it will take another couple of hundred years before it becomes the title of a book. Why? Because there was no "book" until Constantine started asking for one in the 4th century.

You see, Constantine is the first Christian Emperor, though it is disputed whether or not he was a Christian. He certainly made nice with the Christians. In fact, he turned Christianity into a unified, global religion. He called councils of bishops to codify beliefs and settle disputes (Remember the Nicene Creed? It came from the Nicene council.) and he asked his bishop buddy Eusebius to make a Bible for him, a definitive book of what's what in Christianity. The key word then was less "canonical" and more "apostolic." In other words, show me the documents that can be traced back to the apostles. One glaring leftover of this strategy is the rather absurd claim that the apostle Peter was the first Pope. Anyway, eventually Constantine got his canon, with its Old and New Testaments compiled around the same time.

Why include the Old Testament with the New one? The most important reason for this is that the New Testament wasn't "sacred" at first, it wasn't "scripture," just really cool stuff that helped define what Christianity was. The "scripture" was what is now called the Old Testament. When did the New Testament become sacred? I don't know exactly. Maybe it was a gradual process, and certainly it required that they make some decisions and finally say exactly what was in the New Testament... which is starting to bring us into the 5th century.