In my previous post we took the first step in understanding the Gospel of Matthew, grasping its major themes and emphases.  It is also important to situate the book in its own historical context.  For that we need to know something about the author, the approximate time he was writing it, and why he appears to have taken on the task.  In short:  Who, When, and Why?

We start with the “who.”

Our oldest full manuscripts of the Gospel call it “According to Matthew.”  These manuscripts date from around 375 CE, and so were created about three hundred years after the book was in circulation.  We wish we had earlier manuscripts to help us gauge when it was first called this.  This designation (“according to Matthew”) is obviously not the original title.  When I write a book, I don’t title it “According to Bart.”  I give it a title.  Whoever wrote this book either gave it a title that is lost (that seems unlikely), or simply published it anonymously (which happened a good deal in the Bible, both Old and even the New Testaments).  When readers later started calling it “according to Matthew” they were indicating who, in their judgment/opinion, was its author.  That would happen when there were a number of anonymous Gospels floating around with different versions of Jesus’ life, and readers would want to know “whose version is this?”

Long before any of our surviving manuscripts of the book were produced it was thought that Jesus’ disciple Matthew had written an account of Jesus.  The first reference is in a church father named Papias, who around 130 CE indicated that Matthew had produced a book of Jesus’ sayings in Hebrew.  That does not describe our Gospel – which is a full narrative, not a list of sayings, and which was not written in Hebrew but Greek.

Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!

Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!

Learn More!