What was happening in the local community at the time Matthew was writing that influenced him?

Answer 1

Three features that make Matthew unique are: the parable about a king sending his men to destroy a city after an unsuccessful wedding banquet (a thinly-veiled reference to the destruction of Jerusalem), the mention of early Christians being expelled from synagogues, and the use of the Greek word EKKLESIA for the church ("Upon this rock, I will build my EKKLESIA"). These date Matthew after the fall of the temple, to an era when the church had achieved the status of EKKLESIAS, or distinct assemblies of Messianic Jews who had been expelled from synagogues for their violation of the first commandment ("Thou shalt have no other gods before Me"). At the same time, the SH'MA ("I, the Lord thy God, am ONE") was consequently being stressed by Pharisaic Jews headquartered in Javneh.

The COMPLETE GOSPELS ed. by Robert Miller (the only translation free of ecclesiastic control and titled the Scholar's Version) provides a detailed description of the Matthean community. They hadn't fully separated from Judaism (they could best be described as Messianic Jews) and the author of Matthew (not the disciple Matthew himself--Irenaeus attached Matthew's name to this anonymous gospel in the 2nd century) is having the characteristic conflict with Pharisaic Judaism that the other synoptic gospel writers portray. Emperor-approved Pharisaic Judaism was the only branch of Judaism to survive the fall of the temple and was in direct competition with Christianity. Vitriol against them was retro-fitted into the gospel dialogue of an otherwise inclusive Jesus.

Yet Matthew is the most Judaic of the canonized gospels and the only one to state that Jesus came to fulfill rather than destroy the Law. Like Luke, he copied from brief, dynamic Mark, adding five sermons or lists of sayings dubbed Q or Source and believed by scholars to be the earliest oral layer of attestation. These sayings appear in Matthew and Luke as the Sermon on the Mount and the Beautitudes. The Matthean community is closely associated with Judaism and its messianic prerequisites but had evidently experienced expulsion from synagogues for their inflation of Jesus into a divine celestial Son of God. This violated monotheism until a later Johannine Trinitarianism blinded everyone with science by concocting a multiplex but mystically-united godhead.

That the author of Matthew used the Septuagint (LXX) or Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures is made obvious by the fact that he describes Jesus as being born of a PARTHENON (Greek for virgin) rather than an ALMAH (Hebrew for young woman). Another strong argument against the disciple Matthew's authorship is the fact that he copied the bulk of the gospel attributed to Mark, considered by scholars to be the earliest gospel because of its lack of birth and resurrection narratives, its exclusion of the Q or Source gospel (consisting of the Sermon on the Mount and the Beautitudes), and its general ungarnished brevity and directness. Matthew and Luke were never intended to sit cheek-by-jowl with Mark, they were intended to replace Mark, with their detailed but variant geneaologies linking Jesus to both David and Adam.