Okay, let's talk about who wrote the book of Matthew. In fact, no, let me let me just rephrase that. I'm gonna throw that to you as a question. Who do you think wrote the book of Matthew? It feels like I'm doing the who's buried in Grant's tomb routine here. But the difference is that I think Grant's tomb probably says Ulysses S. Grant on it, whereas Matthew doesn't actually say Matthew's name on it. It seems like it does, because in our Bibles his name is all over it, and really the Gospels all work the same way. They say Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But none of those authors actually acknowledge themselves within the text as being the authors of those books, which you I suppose could be tricky. Now, John of the four, I think, most tips his hand that he's the guy who wrote it. There's a bunch of hints that we're not going to get into in this conversation about that. Uh, Luke, if you extrapolate that out and look at the whole body of his work, Luke and Acts, I think there's some pronoun usage in Acts that indicate that Luke was with the traveling party at times. And you can kind of piece that together to do the math to figure out that there's some internal evidence of Luke as being the author of Luke and Acts. Mark, yeah, it's thin. Some people point to his phrasing on the account of the rich young ruler being different than Matthew's phrasing of that account in Matthew 19. And they suggest that maybe Mark was tipping his hand that he was the rich young ruler, but you can see with all of this, it's thin. We're obviously relying on some other external evidence for who we credit these books to. And Matthew is no different. In fact, I would say Matthew has the fewest hints as to its own authorship, at least in terms of a smoking gun. Matthew talks about himself, as we discussed in our last conversation, in Matthew chapter 9, with that very brief account of his conversion, and that's kind of all you get. Now, that isn't to say that there's no evidence within Matthew of Matthew's authorship, though, because Matthew is a book that is very clearly written to a strongly Jewish audience that is trying to make the connection between all of the stuff that happened in what Christians would call the Old Testament, what Jews would call the Hebrew Scriptures. And so we've got somebody who's really dialed into that world, and that would fit with some things that we know about Matthew, but even there, that isn't totally compelling evidence because that could also be made to fit with some of the other disciples for whom that would have been in their wheelhouse. Matthew is the one of the four Gospels that puts the most emphasis on these great big discourses of Jesus. We'll talk about this in a future conversation, but Matthew is built around five really pretty big long speeches and would fit within Matthew's skill set as a publican, a tax collector, someone who dealt in records, that he might have been able to shorthand the words of Jesus or that he would have been documenting and taking notes because that was just how he would have had to have thought about the world, and it's what he would have brought with him from his old life in terms of how he approached Jesus and kingdom stuff and all of that. So the stronger rationale for why we think Matthew wrote Matthew is simply the historical tradition. And I guess the most glaring thing to me is that there is no, literally no, rival tradition from the classical world, the early centuries of Christianity, suggesting that somebody else wrote Matthew. There is total unanimity as to who the author of that gospel was. The church fathers, anytime they reference him, they make that abundantly clear. It's not like second-tier, insignificant church fathers either. We're talking about the rock stars and the big names. And we're not just talking about people who were writing a couple centuries later. We're talking about authors who were writing within living memory of Matthew or living memory of people who knew Matthew. I mean, the connection between these people is not six degrees. It was like one to two degrees. And so, in the same way, you have a pretty good sense of where your grandparents lived, even though you might not have overlapped with their lifetime that much. And maybe you even have a decent sense of where like a famous great-grandparent lived, or even though you didn't overlap with their life that much. All the more so, these folks had crystal clarity on who would have written these documents, because there is a succession of discipleship and authority that came out of all of these disciples, and people would have been very, very clear on what that was. Also, even though John is kind of the beloved evangelical gospel, I think Matthew casts the longest shadow in the history of the church. Matthew seems to be the most widely circulated of the gospels in the early church. It seems to have been circulated very early on. And it really isn't until a few questions get raised in the early modern age, and then especially in the 19th century about authorship that anybody even questions whether Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote these documents. And even though that 19th century European biblical criticism movement produced a lot of things that I like, and I think there's smart and good biblical scholarship that came out of that, it was also somewhat agenda-driven. And also it was very stunted in terms of the amount of evidence it had to work with. Those, particularly German thinkers in the 19th century, did not have the benefit of all of the manuscript evidence we have now. Yet a lot of the things they said, questioning the authorship of the gospels, etc., gets repeated all the way to this day, when the reality is the evidence hasn't borne out those theories very well. There was a one, in particular, gigantic discovery in the late 19th century, I think, in Egypt. It's called the Oxyrhynchus papyri. It's a basically a dump that has been excavated that was filled with mummies and other scraps and shards that well include a whole bunch of chunks of the New Testament, which indicates that the Bible was in enormous circulation by the second century, third century, even if it wasn't maybe bound up and referred to in the same way that we would refer to it as the Bible proper today. So in your travels on the internet, you'll hear a lot of people saying, Well, hasn't it been proven that none of the gospel authors even actually wrote the gospels? And the answer would be, what? No, not at all. Wow, that's a torturing of the word proof. People make a case, I don't find the case to be compelling, and the data continues to support the suggestion that the Gospels were a product of the first century and they were written by the people to whom they were attributed. We could hash all of that stuff out later, but let's just go back to thinking about the early church and what they would have done with a gospel like Matthew. How would it have been to their benefit to attribute a gospel like Matthew to Matthew? If you had the ability, in say the third century as the church to pick a person to give credit for this completely anonymous thing and to really unify the church behind it and get some power and force behind it, you should give it to Peter. I mean, Peter's the big dog. He's the one who influenced all the stuff and who everybody knew. He's kind of the spokesperson for the disciples. Especially the Roman church had an even higher view of Peter, viewing him as uniquely having received authority from Jesus. I mean, whether you're Roman or anybody else, I mean, I think you'd make the most sense to arbitrarily pick Peter. But that's not what happened. Somebody who's really one of the lesser disciples, and his largest contribution is this gospel. If he didn't write this gospel, he's one of the guys where you get through like the first four or five obvious disciples, and then you're like, oh yeah, and then uh wasn't there one name like Bartholomew or Doug or Randy. So there was no political or strategic benefit for crediting Matthew with this, and there was certainly no strategic benefit for crediting Mark or Luke. John, I can see he was kind of a big deal. And that gives me the hint that these books were attributed to, well, whoever actually wrote them, and that was good enough. There are a few indicators within the text that get us into the date of Matthew's authorship here, and there again, we're going to hold off to our next conversation to get into that, as well as some of the themes that are present that I think also really point to Matthew's authorship. So just to state the obvious, the bottom line is I think Matthew wrote Matthew. I think there's a lot of good reasons to believe that. I think some of the reasons that were trendy to question that a couple hundred years ago have not aged very well. And there's no rival tradition supporting anybody else having written it. So even though, of course, I could be wrong, I still think it's really important to disclose where I'm coming from on the front end of this conversation so that even if you're pretty sure I'm wrong, or even if you think I'm right on this, you can at least take that into account and know that I'm going to be operating under the assumption that we're reading the words of Matthew as we work through this whole thing. Okay, that seems like a good place to pause. I'm really enjoying getting going on this whole thing. Few of you raised questions about podcast availability on some other platforms, and I have doubled my efforts to make sure that gets taken care of. So I think Stitcher and Spotify should come online. Hopefully they're online by the time that you hear this. I think Google Play is already up and running. I mean, I'm getting statistics from them, so I assume that it's working. If there are any other platforms where you're not seeing the podcast and you would like to see it there, let me know and I will do my very best to dig into that and get it sorted for you. Also, wow, a whole bunch of you have jumped in at patreon.com/slash the TMBH podcast. I can't even tell you how encouraging that is to me on the front end of this. Thank you. And I'm going to get cracking on tomorrow's episode, which is going to be about the date of the authorship of Matthew, which you might be thinking to yourself, oh, well, I'll just skip that one. I don't care about dates or whatever. But actually, it's really, really, really important and a very interesting conversation because when this happened has a lot to do with how we interpret some very key parts, and it has a pretty big effect on how we properly put ourselves in the shoes of the people who would have been receiving this text for the first time. Matthew means something very different if this thing is written in the mid or late 100s AD versus if it was written very early in the game in the history of Christianity. So we're gonna feel that out together as well. Really glad we're doing this together. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast.