The Book Of Matthew

Who is the Author?

The Gospel of Matthew does not provide the name of its author. Therefore, it is officially anonymous. However, the earliest tradition of the church held that the author is Matthew, one of Jesus’s disciples. Modern New Testament criticism has offered reasons to reject Matthew as the author. If Matthew depends upon Mark’s Gospel as one of his sources (the two Gospels share a large portion of word-for-word material in common), then it wouldn’t make sense that Matthew’s Gospel was penned by an eyewitness. Why would an eyewitness to the events of Jesus’s life need to draw from another account of the same events? This is a fair point and is one to be considered, but there is no definitive proof that Mark’s Gospel was written before Matthew’s (although it seems plausible).

If indeed Matthew wrote this Gospel account, then it would at least make sense of one textual oddity. In Matthew 10:2–4 the list of Jesus’s twelve disciples is given, as it is in Mark and Luke. When mentioning Matthew the disciple by name, however, Matthew’s Gospel adds “Mathew the tax collector.” Tax collectors in first-century Palestine were among the most hated people by the Jews. They were sellouts who collected taxes from their fellow Jews and paid it to the Roman Empire, oftentimes keeping some of the money for themselves. Neither Mark or Luke mentions that Matthew was a tax collector. It seems plausible that if Matthew is the author of this Gospel, his addition of “tax collector” to his own name would be a sort of self-deprecation.1