Discuss the authorship of Matthew’s gospel.(25 marks) TOP GRADE A answers It is frequently asserted that the gospel commonly designated as Matthew’s, like the other three canonical gospels, is anonymous. That is formally correct, if the standard of comparison is, say, Paul’s epistle to the Romans, where the opening lines of the agreed text designate both the author and the initial readers. There is nothing comparable in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Nevertheless, we have no evidence that these gospels ever circulated without an appropriate designation, kata; Maqqaion (kata Matthaion, “according to Matthew”) or the like. How early are these titles? Until recently, most scholars tacitly assumed that the four gospels first circulated anonymously and that the present titles were first attached to them about A.D. 125. There is little evidence to support this date as the decisive turning point; it is little more than an educated guess, based only on the presupposition that the Gospels were originally entirely anonymous and on the fact that by about 140, and perhaps earlier, the traditional attributions were widely known, without significant variation. Now, however, this consensus has been vigorously challenged by Martin Hengel. 7Hengel examines the practice of book distribution in the ancient world, where titles were necessary to identify a work to which any reference was made. In this context he studies the manner in which second-century authors refer to the Gospels, calling to mind, among other things, Tertullian’s criticism of Marcion for publishing his own gospel (a highly truncated version of Luke) without the author’s name. Tertullian contends that “a work ought not to be recognized, which holds not its head erect...which gives no promise of credibility from the fulness of its title and the just profession of its author.” 8Hengel argues that as soon as two or more gospels were publicly read in any one church—a phenomenon that certainly occurred, he thinks, not later than A.D. 100—it would have been necessary to distinguish between them by some such device as a title. The unanimity of the attributions in the second century cannot be explained by anything other than the assumption that the titles were part of the works from the beginning. It is inconceivable, he argues, that the Gospels could circulate anonymously for up to sixty years, and then in the second century suddenly display unanimous attibution to certain authors. If they had originally been anonymous, then surely there would have been some variation in second-century attributions (as was the case with some of the second-century apocryphal gospels). Hengel concludes that the four canonical gospels were never even formally anonymous. Objections have been raised against this proposal in four areas. 1. Some of Hengel’s arguments are of the “what must have been the case” variety. That is a fair charge. Even so, “what must have been the case” in the church’s reference to the gospels that were circulating is based on demonstrable second-century practices. Certainly Hengel’s reconstruction makes more sense than any other theory that seeks to explain the unanimity of second-century attribution. 2. Hengel’s arguments are no defense against pseudonymity. Again, that is correct. But most scholars think of the four canonical gospels as anonymous, not pseudonymous. In any case, not only was pseudonymity in the first century largely if not entirely restricted to apocalyptic works, but as soon as the church began to discuss the issue, there was unanimity in rejecting the authority of any work that fell under the suspicion of being a pseudonymous composition. 3. Anonymity was surely less threatening than Hengel intimates. Was not the epistle to the Hebrews, say, written anonymously? Certainly Tertullian overstates the argument. Nevertheless, the epistle to the Hebrews is distinguished from other epistles by a title, namely, its (assumed) addressees; and its adoption by the church into the canon was constrained in part by doubts as to the identity of its author. It is not an accident that it was first accepted in the East, where tradition associated it with the apostle Paul. Hengel himself has discussed this question at length. 9 4. Hengel’s interpretation assumes that kata; Maqqaion (kata Matthaion, “according to Matthew”) is an attribution of authorship, whereas parallels show that the phrase “according to” serves other purposes. For example, in the titles “Gospel According to the Hebrews” and “Gospel According to the Egyptians,” the prepositional expression does not indicate authorship. Plummer says it “implies conformity to a type, and need not mean more than ‘drawn up according to the teaching of.’” 10 Plummer and others acknowledge that by the time of Papias, katav (kata “according to”) is understood to indicate authorship, but they insist that the expression does not necessarily bear that weight. Hengel agrees that katav plus the accusative is not itself a necessary indication of authorship and indeed is only rarely used in that way in contemporary Greek literature. But he draws attention to a telling analogy. In the Greek fathers, the one Old Testament is referred to as “according to the Seventy” or “according to Aquila” or “according to Symmachus,” where the prepositional expression is used to introduce the person or group thought to be responsible for producing the version concerned. In the same way, the one gospel early circulated in four distinct forms, “according to Matthew,” “according to Mark,” and so forth, where the prepositional expression introduces the person understood to be the author. In short, the argument that Matthew was understood to be the author of the first gospel long before Papias wrote his difficult words affirming such a connection seems very strong, even if not unassailable. Before considering Papias’s disputed words, it is important to recognize that the credibility of Papias himself is widely questioned. Although Ireneus, writing in the second half of the second century, insists that both Papias and Polycarp knew the apostle John personally, the fourth-century church historian Eusebius disputes the claim in the case of Papias (H.E. 3.39.). Largely on this ground, modern scholarship tends to date Papias to A.D. 140 or later; but if Ireneus is right and Eusebius is wrong, then there is no reason Papias could not have written twenty or more years earlier, and with excellent access to accurate information. In recent years it has been repeatedly shown that Eusebius misunderstood Papias on several points and tried his best to reduce his importance because he could not stand his millenarian views. (The evidence and arguments are summarized in chap. 5 below.) 11 It is far more likely that Ireneus is correct in his assessment of Papias than that Eusebius is. Whatever the date and knowledge of Papias, what he actually wrote is available to us only in quotations preserved by Eusebius. The five exegetical books of Papias, Logivwn Kuriakwn jExhvghsi (Logion Kyriakon Exegesis, Exegesis of the Dominical Logia), survived into the Middle Ages in some libraries in Europe, but they are no longer extant. It is from this work that Eusebius (H.E. 3.39.14-16) quotes Papias’s two surviving comments on the authorship of the Gospels. The one that bears on the fourth gospel is discussed later in this volume; the one that bears directly on Matthew is notoriously difficult to translate, as indicated here. “Matthew sunetavxeto (synetaxeto, ‘composed’? ‘compiled’? ‘arranged [in an orderly form]’?) ta; lovgia (ta logia, ‘the sayings’? ‘the gospel’?) in JEbrai>di dialevktw/ (Hebraïdi dialekto, ‘the Hebrew [Aramaic] language’? ‘Hebrew [Aramaic] style’?), and each hJrmhvneusen (hermeneusen, ‘interpreted’? ‘translated’ ‘transmitted’?) them as best he could.” 12 There is no doubt that the early church understood this to mean that Matthew first wrote his gospel in Hebrew (or Aramaic; the same Greek word was used to refer to both cognate languages) and that it was then translated by others. But there are serious problems with this view. Although a few modern scholars argue that Matthew’s entire gospel was first written in Aramaic, 13 substantial linguistic evidence is against them. In the first place, the many quotations from the Old Testament do not reflect a single text form. Some are unambiguously Septuagintal; others are apparently translations from a Semitic original; still others are so eccentric as to defy easy classification. Had the gospel first been written in Aramaic, one might have expected that the Old Testament quotations would be either the translator’s own rendering of the Aramaic or standard quotations from the accepted Bible of the early church, the LXX. The mix of text forms suggests an author writing in Greek but knowledgeable in Semitic languages and therefore able to vary his form. Second, assuming that Matthew depends on Mark (see chap. 1, on the synoptic problem), the detailed verbal connections between Matthew and Mark make it extremely unlikely that Matthew was first written in Aramaic. Of course, those who do not accept the priority of Mark or who propose that an Aramaic edition of Matthew preceded the publication of Mark, which then served as the heart of our Greek Matthew, will perceive no problem here. Finally, the Greek text of Matthew does not read like translation Greek. True, there are Semitisms and, more frequently, Semitic enhancements, 14 but these are largely restricted to the sayings of Jesus, and (arguably) they are introduced for effect by an author who is demonstrably capable of writing idiomatic Hellenistic Greek. 15 One could argue that a very good translator could have produced the same effect, but he would have had to be a very good translator indeed. How, then, should the statement of Papias be taken? Among the dominant proposals are these (see also Guthrie, pp. 44-49): 1. Some identify the lovgia (logia, “sayings”) with some independent collection of Jesus’ sayings, perhaps Q (on which see chap. 1, on the synoptic problem). 16 That would make Matthew the author of a sayings source (if Q, about 250 verses common to Matthew and Luke). Papias confused this source with the canonical Matthew. But it is not at all clear how an apostolic source as important as this could have fallen so completely out of use as to be lost to posterity. Indeed, the entire Q-hypothesis, however reasonable, is still merely a hypothesis: however much one may speak of material common to Matthew and Luke, it is far from clear that such material was all drawn from one common source. Besides, as we shall see, Papias does not normally use lovgia to refer only to sayings. 2. Some of the same criticisms can be raised against the view that lovgia (logia) refers to Old Testament “testimonia” books, that is, a book of Old Testament proof texts compiled by Matthew from the Hebrew canon, used in Christian apologetics, and now incorporated in canonical Matthew. 17It is not certain that such books ever existed independently. In any case, it does not explain the diversity of text forms in Old Testament quotations in Matthew, still less the fact that Matthew most closely follows the LXX where he is parallel to Mark. 3. J. Kürzinger, 18 followed by Gundry, 19 thinks that ta; lovgia (ta logia) refers to canonical Matthew but that JEbrai>di dialevktw/ (Hebraïdi dialekto) refers, not to the Hebrew or Aramaic language, but to Semitic style or literary form: Matthew arranged or composed (sunetavxeto [synetaxeto]) his gospel in Semitic (i.e. Jewish-Christian) literary form, dominated by Semitic themes and devices. This is an unlikely rendering, but certainly possible (see LSJ 1:401). In this view, the last clause of Papias’s statement cannot refer to translation, since Semitic language is no longer in view: everyone simply interpreted the text to the world, as he was able. Kürzinger points out that immediately preceding this passage, Papias describes Mark as the eJrmhneuthv (hermeneutes) of Peter; this, Kürzinger says, cannot mean that Mark was Peter’s “translator,” but that he “interpreted” Peter and thus “transmitted” his message to the world. If the same reasoning is applied to the cognate verb in Papias’s statement about Matthew, Kürzinger’s interpretation becomes possible. But however possible, it is not the natural way to read the passage, and it is certainly not what later Fathers in the church understood. Without exception, they held that the apostle Matthew wrote canonical Matthew and that it was first written in Semitic. That is true, for instance, of Ireneus (Adv. Haer. 3.1.1, quoted in Eusebius, H.E. 5.8.2), Tertullian (Against Marcion. 4.2), Origen (quoted by Eusebius, H.E. 6.25.3-6), Eusebius himself (H.E. 3.24.5-6), and Jerome (De vir. ill. 3). 20 There does seem to be increasing agreement as to what ta; lovgia (ta logia) means. Although at this period it would be most natural to use this expression to refer either to Old Testament oracles of God, and thus derivatively to the entire Old Testament, or else to the sayings of Jesus, two bits of evidence suggest that Papias used the term to refer to the words and deeds of Jesus—in short, to the substance of what became our Gospels. First, although the title of his five-volume work is Exegesis of the Dominical Logia, enough is known of this work to know that it was not restricted in scope to an exposition of Jesus’ words : it included exposition also of deeds alleged to have been performed by Jesus. Moreover, in the sequence preserved in Eusebius, just before Papias tells us of how Matthew wrote, he tells us that Mark recorded from Peter’s teaching “the things said or done by the Lord.” This teaching, however, was given as the occasion demanded; Peter was not speaking “as if he were making an ordered collection (suvntaxi [syntaxis]) of the Lord’s oracles (ta; kuriaka; lovgia [ta kyriaka logia]).” Clearly, what Mark was writing was the gospel that bears his name, with its collection of “things either said or done by the Lord,” and the parallelism between this clause and ta; kuriaka; lovgia shows that the latter expression can include deeds as well as words. When a few lines later we read that Matthew ta; lovgia sunetavxeto (ta logia synetaxeto, “composed the logia ” or “put the logia in order”), it is most natural to conclude that what he was doing, at least in Papias’s mind, was composing the gospel that bears his name. It is thus highly unlikely that ta; lovgia should be understood to refer to Q or to a book of “testimonies.” In short, the evidence leads to a difficult conclusion. Unless we adopt the solution of Kürzinger, we are gently nudged to the conclusion that Papias was wrong when he claimed that Matthew was first written in Aramaic. And if he was wrong on this point, what prevents us from supposing that he was likely wrong in his ascription of authorship to the apostle Matthew? Such skepticism, superficially plausible, seems a trifle extreme. The two issues are not integrally connected. Authors have been known to err on one point without erring on all points! Moreover, plausible reasons have been advanced to suggest why Papias may have been led astray on the question of a Semitic original. It may have been an intelligent, albeit erroneous, guess. The early Fathers assumed that Matthew was the first gospel to be written. Since Jesus and his apostles lived and served among the Hebrews, it may well have been a natural conclusion that the first gospel to be written was produced “in the Hebrew [Aramaic] dialect”—the more so if Papias, living in the Hellenistic world, had no real knowledge of just how much Greek was spoken in firstcentury Palestine, especially in Galilee. Moreover, Papias may have confused canonical Matthew with another gospel, written in Aramaic or Hebrew, that was well known in the second century. Reports have come down to us of a “gospel according to the Hebrews,” a “gospel of the Nazareans,” and a “gospel of the Ebionites.” It is uncertain whether these titles refer to three separate books or two or more of them refer to one book. 21 Epiphanius claims that the Ebionites, a group he regards as heretical, based their beliefs on a gospel of Matthew that they called “According to the Hebrews,” written in Hebrew, but (as far as Epiphanius was concerned) falsified and mutilated: for a start, it eliminated the genealogy of Jesus and began with the ministry of John the Baptist. Similarly, Ireneus says that the Ebionites used only the gospel of Matthew but denied the virgin birth—which again suggests that their Matthew did not include Matthew 1-2. The great translator Jerome claims that he translated the “gospel according to the Hebrews” into both Greek and Latin. This book he associates with the Nazareans, who, he insists, gave him permission to copy the Hebrew original of the gospel according to Matthew. Yet as far as we can tell from his frequent references, the actual content is far removed from canonical Matthew. All this suggests that there was ample opportunity for confusion to arise between some “gospel according to the Hebrews” and Matthew, engendering the theory that the latter was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic. We note several other factors in the contemporary debate over the authorship of this Gospel. 1. Only this gospel refers to “Matthew the tax collector” (10:3). On the assumption of apostolic authorship, this is best seen as gentle self-deprecation, an allusive expression of gratitude for the freedom of grace (see 9:9-13). Those who deny apostolic authorship of this book are inclined to interpret the same evidence as the reason why the unknown author(s) chose to associate the book with Matthew as opposed to some other apostle. 2. In Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27, the man whom Jesus calls from his role as tax collector is identified as Levi. In what is transparently the same story, Matthew 9:9-13 identifies the man as Matthew. All three Synoptic Gospels, in their respective lists of the apostles (Matt. 10:2-4; Mark 3:16-18; Luke 6:13-16; cf. Acts 1:13), name a “Matthew,” and Matthew 10:3 identifies this Matthew as the tax collector. The reasonable assumption is that Matthew and Levi are one and the same person. But other suggestions are not lacking. Pesch, 22 followed by Beare, 23 has argued that the calling of the tax-collector concerned one Levi, but that the unknown first evangelist, choosing to identify this otherwise unknown disciple with an apostle, substituted the name of a relatively obscure apostle, Matthew, whom he then dubbed a tax collector. Albright and Mann suggest that “Matthew” is the personal name and that “Levi” refers to his tribe (i.e. that the original designation was “Matthew the Levite” but that at some early point in the tradition the designation was confused and became the common personal name Levi). 24 The theory has its attractions. It would explain why the author has such a detailed command of the Old Testament. As for the likelihood that a Levite would find employment as a disreputable tax collector, Albright and Mann argue that there were far more Levites than were needed to run the temple complex and that many therefore had to seek employment elsewhere. By taking on this task, Matthew the Levite forfeited the esteem of his tribe and his race, the most strict of whom viewed tax collectors not only as traitors (since they were indirectly serving the despised Herods; see Schürer 1:372- 76) but as immoral and rapacious (since the tax-farming system ensured that a fair bit of corruption was bound up with the job). But the linguistic transformation of “Levite” to “Levi” is not very plausible, and no text preserves the designation “Matthew the Levite.” On the whole, the most economical explanation still seems the best: “Matthew” and “Levi” are alternative Semitic names for one person—a phenomenon found not only in Simon/Cephas (= Peter) but also in inscriptional evidence. 25 3. The assumption that Matthew was a tax collector (essentially a minor customs official collecting tariff on goods in transit) and was the author of this gospel makes sense of a number of details. 26 Not all the evidence cited is equally convincing. A number of peculiarly Matthean pericopes do depict financial transactions (Matt. 17:24- 27; 18:23-35; 20:1-16; 26:15; 27:3-10; 28:11-15), but none of them betrays an insider’s knowledge of the customs system. Certainly a customs official in Matthew’s position would have had to be fluent in both Aramaic and Greek, and such fluency must have been important when the gospel was first crossing racial barriers: indeed, it squares with the notion of a gospel written in Greek that nevertheless could draw on Semitic sources. C. F. D. Moule suggests that 13:52 is a subtle self-reference by the author: the “scribe” (grammateuv [grammateus, G1208], NIV “teacher of the law”) who becomes a disciple should not be understood as a reference to a rabbinic scribe but to a “scribe in the secular sense,” that is, a well-educated writer. 27 Goodspeed goes further yet: after compiling impressive evidence that shorthand was widely practiced in the Roman world, he suggests that Matthew’s training and occupation would have equipped him to be a kind of notetaker or secretary for the group of disciples, even during Jesus’ ministry. 28 The theory is plausible enough, but completely without hard evidence. 4. On the assumption of Markan priority, some think it unlikely that an apostle would so freely use the work of a secondary witness such as Mark and believe that this tells against any theory of apostolic authorship. But plagiarism in the modern sense, and the shame associated with it, developed in the wake of the invention of the printing press and the financial gain that could be associated with the mass production of some writing. The wholesale takeover, without acknowledgment, of someone else’s literary work, with or without changes, was a common practice in the ancient world, and no opprobrium was connected with it. In that case it is hard to think of a reason why an apostle might not also find the practice congenial, the more so if he knew that behind Mark’s gospel was the witness of Peter. 5. Among the reasons Kümmel advances (p. 121) for holding that apostolic authorship is “completely impossible” is the insistence that this gospel is “systematic and therefore nonbiographical.” This is a double non sequitur, because (1) a topically ordered (“systematic”) account can yield biographical information as easily as a strictly chronological account, 29 and (2) it is surely a false step to assume that apostles would for some reason prove incapable of choosing anything other than a chronological form. 6. The most powerful reason today for denying even the possibility of apostolic authorship is bound up with an entire array of antecedent judgments about the development of the gospel tradition, about the shape of the history of the church in the first century, about the evidence of redactional changes, and much more. The conclusion drawn from these prior judgments is that Matthew is too late and too theologically developed to be assigned to any of the first witnesses. It is impossible here to address all of these issues. Some of them have been briefly discussed in the first chapter. We must recognize that these interlocking theories not only discount the external evidence, such as it is, but in fact rest on far less tangible support than is often thought. For instance, how far the theology reflected in this gospel has developed is often judged on the basis of Matthew’s Christology. But a high Christology developed very early, as the so-called Christ-hymns in the Pauline corpus (e.g., Phil. 2:5-11; Col. 1:15-20) testify, and it has been shown that Matthew is quite careful to distinguish, at point after point, what the first disciples understood during the time of Jesus’ ministry and what he himself knows to be the case some decades later.30 Such evidence might almost better be taken to support apostolic authorship: only those present at the beginning would be as likely to preserve such distinctions and point out with such sharpness how much the first disciples did not understand at the beginning (e.g., Matt. 16:21-23). Other factors alleged to demonstrate the lateness of Matthew’s gospel are briefly mentioned in the next section. 7. Several scholars have argued that the author could not have been a Jew, let alone an apostle, on one of two grounds: (1) it is alleged that there are too many signs of a profound ignorance of Jewish customs and culture; (2) some have argued that the work is too anti-Jewish (some prefer the more emotionally laden term “anti-Semitic”) to have been written by a Jew. 31 But the alleged ignorance of Jewish culture is sharply disputed. For example, it is alleged that Matthew lumps together the teaching of the Pharisees and the teaching of the Sadducees as if there were no difference between the two (Matt. 16:12). But Matthew himself elsewhere highlights some of the differences (22:23- 33). All that Matthew 16:12 requires us to hold is that in certain respects, allied with their joint failure to recognize the Messiah when he came, the Pharisees and the Sadducees were at one. Groups that differ do not have to differ on everything; compared with some other group—in this case, the group of nascent Christians—they may hold more in common than they themselves at first suspect. Common enemies make strange bedfellows. Many alleged errors (e.g., the use of Zech. 9:9 in Matt. 21:4-5, where Matthew has two animals) are better treated in the commentaries. 32 As for the anti-Jewishness of Matthew, it must be remembered that this book depicts Jesus as being sent only to Israel (Matt. 15:24) and recalls Jesus forbidding his disciples from extending their ministry beyond Israel (10:5-6), while at the same time it reports a commission to spread the gospel to all nations (28:18-20) and looks forward to people from every point on the compass participating in the Jewish messianic banquet (8:11-12). Arguably, the tension in presentation stems from two factors: (1) Matthew attempts to distinguish what happened “back then,” during Jesus’ ministry, from what is happening in his own day; (2) Matthew’s ambivalent treatment of the Jews may well be shaped in part by the confusing cross-currents between Christianity and Judaism at the time of writing. Some Jews were still being converted, and Matthew wants to woo them and stabilize the faith of new Jewish converts; others, especially more conservative leaders, were appalled by this upstart faith and opposed it, ensuring that Matthew would warn his readers against their views, and especially against their rejection of Jesus the Messiah. 33 It must be said that at one level very little hangs on the question of the authorship of this gospel. By and large, neither its meaning nor its authority are greatly changed if one decides that its author was not an apostle. What changes, however, is the matrix of thought in which these and related questions are evaluated. We have seen that strong commitments to the view that this gospel reflects late traditions that cannot possibly be tied directly to any apostle inevitably casts a hermeneutical shadow on how the evidence, including the external evidence, will be evaluated. Conversely, the judgment that in all probability the apostle Matthew was responsible for the work casts a hermeneutical shadow on the reconstruction of early church history. The web of interlocking judgments soon affects how one weighs evidence in other parts of the New Testament. Such problems can be addressed both as large-scale theoretical challenges and at the level of their constituent details. All that can be attempted in this short Introduction is a rather perfunctory statement of how we read the evidence and of why we weight things as we do.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 06:44:53 +0000
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