What are the arguments challenging Matthew as the author of Matthew's Gospel?

Answer 1

A:Scholars do not come to these conclusions lightly, but only after years of research and peer review of every proposition put forward. The four New Testament gospels were all anonymous until well into the second century, when the Church Fathers selected Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the probable authors of the gospels. It has been the role of New Testament scholars to evaluate these attributions and decide whether to accept or reject them, and on what grounds.

Mathew is called a 'synoptic gospel' because when laid in parallel with the Gospels of Mark and Luke, and read synoptically ('with the same eye') in the original Greek language, it can be seen that there is a literary relationship amongst the three gospels. The Church Fathers thought that Matthew was the gospel first written and that Mark and Luke were copied from it.

A careful evaluation of the texts shows unambiguously that Mark was the original gospel and that Matthew and Luke were actually copied from it. Matthew's Gospel contains some 90 per cent of the verses in Mark's Gospel, in the same order and often in exactly the same words in the Greek language. Matthew and Luke also shared a second source, for sayings attributed to Jesus, and this source is now known as the hypothetical 'Q' document - hypothetical because no copy has survived to the present day, but scholars have been able to reconstruct it from the two gospels.

John Dominic Crossan (The Birth of Christianity) says that hespent the 1960s in a monastery, poring over the four gospels in parallel columns, word after word and unit after unit, day after day and year after year. He was studying the scholarly hypothesis that some of those gospels had used sources, seeking to prove or disprove this argument. In the end he found it absolutely convincing.

The second-century decision to attribute one of the gospels to Matthew, one of the disciples and therefore an eyewitness to events portrayed in the gospel, was never more than speculative. Modern scholarship has shown that the author relied heavily on Markand Q, something that an eyewitness would never have had to do. As scholars say, the gospel could not have been written by an eyewitness, and therefor Matthew was not the author.