Hey, my name is Matt Whitman, and this is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We do this every day. We're working our way through the Book of Matthew, or I guess I should say we're about to work our way through the Book of Matthew, but right now we're laying the groundwork so that we're operating from a common set of assumptions or at least a common set of questions as we go and get into the text here coming up really soon. So in the last conversation, we talked about the internal evidence for dating Matthew before 70 AD. And we talked about why that matters, because you interpret things very differently based on when they were written. You can picture the original audience on the receiving end of a book or an article or whatever it might be. And you can assume a lot of things about the conversation based on who that audience is and when that audience existed. So we do want to take some time to nail this down. And in this episode, I want to talk about the external evidence for when Matthew was written and what the early church said and thought about this. We're going to do the quick version here, but I think it's really fascinating. So a lot of people assume that Matthew is the second or third gospel to have been written. There are three Gospels that come at it the same way. We call these the synoptics. There's a fourth gospel that looks really very different, even though it's telling the same story and driving at the same stuff. And that one is John. It's the not synoptic. I guess there's no category for John. It's just John. It's weird. So the common thinking for a hundred years plus has been that Mark came first. Fancy people will say Mark and priority. And the idea here is that Mark operated in close proximity to Peter. He got a whole bunch of details. And then Mark, maybe even drawing on some other written sources that were floating around, put together his very streamlined gospel. And then Matthew and Luke came along after the fact, depended on Mark, used the same sources Mark used, and they wrote their more elaborate gospels. And to that, I would say, maybe there's a reasonable case that can be made, but there's some pretty smart people who make a case for Matthew being first up. And in fact, several of the church fathers seem to indicate that. Papias, and then Will Eusebius quotes several other church fathers, and Augustine. Granted, that's like 350 years after the fact when you're talking about Augustine, but there's a whole lot of church fathers who are saying that Matthew wrote his gospel in the language of the Hebrews. I think that's a direct quote, which would not have been Hebrew at this point. It would have been Aramaic, but you know, same script, roughly the same zip code. What this indicates is that Matthew, who was an eyewitness to the events he was writing about, according to these church fathers, would have tried to communicate with the first immediate audience of the work of Jesus, and that would be Jewish people. And that is why Matthew, as a document, is very concerned with the Jewish understanding of Jesus and how Jesus fits into the bigger story of what Christians call the Old Testament, what Jewish people would call the Hebrew Scriptures. And according to this theory, then Luke comes along and there's a new question that he and his traveling companion Paul would have been wrestling with. And that question would have been: well, okay, we know how the Jews fit into this new family of faith that Jesus is making, but how do the Gentiles fit into this? Because we're traveling around, we're definitely seeing them become Christians. So this is super definitely happening. What do we do? So then Luke, drawing on several sources, starts to put together his gospel. And the theory here goes that maybe he sat on that for a little while to get apostolic approval from people like Peter, because Peter is a big deal. And so then there's this confluence where with Matthew in hand and already floating around out there, Luke and Mark end up in Rome at the same time, probably with Peter and Paul there as well, or maybe a little bit staggered between Peter and Paul's time there. Mark maybe listens to some sermons that Peter gives, recounting everything that happened with Jesus, and he and subscribes go like verbatim from what Peter says, and then Luke operates off of that as well. And Mark effectively is drawing on Peter as well as the already existing gospel of Matthew, as well as the work of Luke, which is maybe just about to go into circulation. This is called the fourfold gospel hypothesis, and David Allen Black, who is a professor in North Carolina, is one of the leading proponents of this right now. He talks about it in his book, Why Four Gospels. So I bring that up, not to say that is definitely how it worked, but to say that the record of the early church fathers puts Matthew early. It puts Matthew initially in the language of the Hebrews, Aramaic is what they would have meant, and that the Greek versions of Matthew that came to circulate very shortly thereafter would have been in some way a translation, or maybe Matthew himself Greekified his own gospel. So there's at least two competing theories as to where Matthew fits in the equation, either coming second or third and drawing on Mark and some other original source documents. Frankly, in that theory, the original source documents may have just been from Matthew himself. He was a tax collector, he had the ability to write and do math and take copious notes. It would have been in his nature to write down stuff that Jesus was saying and organize it up. Maybe the sayings document that went along with Mark was actually just Matthew's initial document. Who knows? So theory number one, once again, is Mark came first, Matthew and Luke draw on that. And if you make a Venn diagram of Mark and Matthew and Luke, it kind of all lines up to support that. Theory number two would be that the church fathers are right that Matthew would have come first, that it was originally in Aramaic, eventually in Greek, and that therefore Luke and Mark would have drawn on that. Now, you might be wondering where does John come in? Well, John is much, much later. John lived a very long life. He was a very young man at the time of Jesus. And my personal opinion is that all of these Gospels answered the next logical theological question that was coming up, and the theological question that John was trying to answer with his gospel was the person of Christ, the godhood of Christ, pushing back on some of the Gnostic beliefs that would separate Christ's deity and humanity. And John is saying, this is God in the flesh, and that's why John structures his gospel around these collections of I am statements. I am being, you know, the name of God in the Old Testament and the Jewish religion. So you got all of that there. In addition, we have got manuscript evidence regarding Matthew. The earliest fragment of the Gospel of Matthew is P64. Sometimes it's called the Magdalene papyrus or the Gregory Allen P64. And this one dates to somewhere in the second century, probably the second half of the second century. And there's a pretty good chunk of Matthew 26 that looks like it was written in a pair of columns. I mean, if you see it, you'd be like, well, I mean, that's not that much, but for how old it is, it's a ton. Remember, we're talking about paper and papyrus. And so you just think about what the odds are of you going and finding a receipt that you really, really needed that you know was in your car like six months ago. Come on, it's probably not there. Paper goes away, things get thrown out. And here we're talking about something that wasn't six months ago in a contained environment like your car. We're talking about a document that dates back close to 2,000 years. And so to find anything in that medium from that age is pretty astonishing. And yet here we have something within roughly a hundred years of the purported date of writing, that's amazing. If there was only one or two copies of Matthew floating around because it didn't really catch on, we'd never find it. The math just doesn't add up. But the fact that we do have early fragments of Matthew cannot indicate that, well, then in about 170 AD, probably the first copy of Matthew was written. No, it would have to disseminate like crazy for us to have any chance of finding any fragment. So to me, it makes a ton of sense to say, look, there's a hundred years of this thing floating around, and that is why we have these early fragments the way we do. Again, that external evidence is something that is always evolving. We haven't had all of these fragments sitting around forever, and we actually have a whole lot more classical early church, early manuscripts of the Bible now, a whole lot more. We have exponentially more of this stuff now than we did 100 years ago, 200 years ago. Look, here's the deal. You can land wherever you want on the age of Matthew or the authorship of Matthew. You can be a Christian and think something different than this. I'm not king of the Bible, but I want to lay out my presuppositions so that you can take that into account as we have this conversation and you can make sense of whatever it is that I'm saying with that in mind. Here's the final thought, though. I know that some of you are going to be listening to this who are pretty skeptical of the whole thing, and wow, I can sure respect that. Just because I feel that we can make a case for Matthew being the author or Matthew having written it around this chunk of time, does not prove that everything it says or everything that Christians believe is now somehow automatically true. If we want to wrestle through that, that's a much longer project. All I'm suggesting is that there is such a document called Matthew, that I think a guy named Matthew wrote it, and that I think it was written about this time. Now, as we look through the thing together, I think what we're gonna find is that it's incredibly powerful, interesting, cohesive, and compelling. And that the stuff that's in there really smacks of legitimacy and is worth our attention. I'm not gonna ask anybody to sign off on that on the front end. Ultimately, I'm probably not gonna ask anybody to sign off on that at all. That'll be up to you. But I think it'll be a lot of fun to game this out together. So, we've still got more to explore about the nuts and bolts of the book of Matthew, but we're getting really close to actually cracking the thing open and getting to Matthew chapter one, which is gonna be a blast, and we're gonna get to that next week. So, in the meantime, I just want to take a second to say thank you for all of you who signed up to support this program at patreon.com slash the tmbh podcast. I had hoped that I could get this to a place where I could bring on a little bit of help and try to work ahead and really make this long term viable over the course of several weeks, and the reality is we're getting close to that already, and we're one week in. Thank you. I mean a whole bunch of you are kicking in, a buck or two here or there, and that it really is gonna be the thing that makes it possible for us to make this thing go long haul all the way through this book, and I hope through several more. I think this is gonna be a blast. All right. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we're gonna do a bunch more of this soon.