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.
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Wouldn't it be a hoot if, one of these days, someone pokes around in a cave or an undercroft and finds an authentic dateable copy of the Q?
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, the background of the synoptic gospels presents some fascinating mysteries that are fun to contemplate. Was "Matthew" (whoever wrote it) written in Greek or Aramaic? Does it draw on an earlier Mark supplemented by a healthy dose of plagiarism from the Q? Could Matthew and Luke possibly have been written independently? And so forth.
OTOH, it seems that the more one studies what is actually known about the NT books, the shakier the authorship and origins become. Applied to matters of faith, the actual documentation and evidence of so many of the central tenets of Christianity hang by the thinnest of historical threads, don't they?
I think I'm correct in saying that the story of the Virgin Birth--so central to the the Roman Catholic mythology--is mentioned only in Matthew and Luke. When one then considers that both of these books may in fact be drawn from a single list of annecdotes and stories (the Q?) assembled decades after the death of Jesus by 'editors' whose true identity is dubious, it's a stretch to consider the Immaculate Conception as anything more than a quaint story of unknown origin.
There's a reason why it takes real faith to put any stock in it at all.
What could be more absurd than the image of one of those Televangelists purporting to parse, with utmost precision, individual words and phrases in an English version of the Gospels when it's not known with any certainty what the chain of language translations may have been?
IMO, one on the lamest arguments supporting the reliability of the Christian mythology is that there are multiple, converging, contemporaneous (or near contemporaneous) accounts. Uh huh. Hey, that's the way cults work, isn't it? I mean, like Obama was born in Kenya?