What are the authorship questions for Matthew's Gospel?

Answer 1

A:The key question would be, who wrote the Gospel of Matthew? If we can not establish who the author actually was, other questions would include where the book was written and for whom.

All the New Testament gospels were originally anonymous and only attributed to the apostles whose names they now bear later in the second century. Scholars say that none of the gospels could have been written by an eyewitness to the events portrayed, which view would appear to rule out the disciple Matthew as an author.

When read on the original Greek language, it can be demonstrated that there is a literary dependency among the gospels. Because of this dependency, the early Church Fathers decided that Matthew was the first gospel written and that Markand Luke were based on Matthew. Scholars now realise that Mark's Gospel was the first to be written, and have demonstrated that Matthew and Luke were based on it. Once again, this militates against the disciple Matthew as an author of the gospel that now bears his name.

Matthew's Gospel has long been thought to be the most Jewish of the gospels, but Jews themselves say that a first-century Jew would have been quite unimpressed with the author's knowledge of Jewish laws and customs. The book's author obviously relied on the Septuagint. an early Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, which would have been known to Jews of the diaspora.