Wednesday morning at 7H

Our second Sunday of church year A is behind us, heading for Advent Three, with more of John the Baptist, in this year of reading the story of Jesus from the Gospel according to Matthew. 

The evangelist Matthew: who was he? He's anonymous actually, we have no certainty. The name of the apostle Matthew was attached to the writing sometime early, in the second century might be a reasonable guess, perhaps because, where the other gospels name Levi as the tax collector whom Jesus called, this gospel alone calls him Matthew. We don't know that, but it's fair speculation. 

It has been suggested that Matthew originally wrote his gospel in Aramaic, but I think that's absurd because he takes much of it directly from Mark's NT Greek gospel, and the Hebrew bible quotations that Matthew cites are lifted verbatim from the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek language Hebrew bible that was used by Jews in the Holy Land at that time. So, I say Matthew wrote in Greek from start to finish.

This certainly wouldn't qualify on Wikipedia, where citations are so important as part of scholarly theses, and I'm not willing to bother looking up a bunch of citations to substantiate what I'm thinking this morning; but scholarship in general says Matthew, whoever he may have been, seems to have been a Jew, a member of a Jewish Christian church. He had full access to Mark's gospel, which one reasonably, based on what Mark cites Jesus saying, may be dated at the time of or soon after 70 AD when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple; and Matthew used Mark as his basis. To give time for Mark to circulate, maybe date Matthew nearly a generation later, maybe 90-95 AD.

If you don't follow me, get out your Bible and read Mark; if you don't have a decent Bible, come to my Sunday school class and we'll give you a nice study Bible.

So, everyone who's writing something has an agenda, a reason for writing. In Matthew's case, he's writing perhaps half a generation or generation after Mark, and he's writing to persuade members of his Jewish Christian church that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah whom they had long been expecting. 

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There is sense among the intellectual "elite" that getting information from Wikipedia is beneath them, and it's most unfashionable to admit to inquiring of Wikipedia as a source. But the fact is that many Wiki articles are obviously written and posted by scholars and other folks who know their subject. This morning I googled Wikipedia and looked up Matthew. The article is good and quite sufficient for a newcomer to the Bible or anyone who is about to read Matthew and would like to go in somewhat informed instead of totally ignorant of it or, worse, worst, influenced by exposure to literalist, inerrantist Christianity.

So, updated about 12 noon on 5 Dec 2019, this is far better than what I could have written. If it were mine, I might only say more about what to me is Matthew's apparent agenda, in his own situs im leben, of urgently needing to stop the hemorrhaging that was Jewish Christians abandoning the church because of (1) its evolving into high Christology that was anathema to orthodox Judaism but okay with formerly pagan gentiles; (2) infusion of gentiles coming to dominate the originally Jewish cult; (3) demands of their Jewish families, friends and neighbors that they choose: either leave Christianity or be excommunicated from their Jewish roots and ostracized. All of which, not incidentally, resulted in the end of Jewish Christianity by about the middle of the second century AD.

With this simple Wikipedia essay, I don't need to work my fingers trying to introduce Matthew; it's bad enough that I ramblingly try to explain Matthew to my adult Sunday school class:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Matthew 

So. Breakfast two mugs black and one slice good seeds bread toasted and topped with four shrimp and two crab cakes

Life don't git no better'n nis.

W