Matthew: The Teacher on the Mountain

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Nobody signed it. From the 100s on, it was credited to Matthew, the tax collector who followed me. Most scholars doubt that, because the writer copied most of Mark, and an eyewitness would not have needed to. He was probably a Jewish follower of mine, writing for a community of Jewish followers, perhaps in Syria.

When: Most likely between 80 and 90, a decade or two after Rome destroyed Jerusalem. That is some fifty years after I died.

Written for: A community of Jewish followers of mine after Jerusalem fell. They were quarreling with the leaders of their synagogues over who were the true heirs of Moses, and needed to know that I had not abandoned the Law.

What it remembers of me: More of my teaching than any other gospel. The Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer as most people say it, and the sheep and the goats, which only Matthew kept. It also tells my birth, from Joseph’s side.

How close it stays to me: Very close on the kingdom, enemies, debts and the poor. Far in chapter 27, on blaming my people.

If you only read three chapters: Matthew 5, Matthew 6 and Matthew 25.

Words to Know

Gospel — good news. It became the name for a book telling my life.

Kingdom of Heaven — Matthew’s way of saying kingdom of God. Out of reverence, many Jews often said Heaven in place of God. It does not mean a place you go when you die.

Q — scholars’ name for a lost collection of my sayings that Matthew and Luke both seem to have used. It comes from the German Quelle, “source.” No copy has ever been found.

Magi — the “wise men from the east.” The word was used for Persian priests and for star-readers.

Assembly — in Greek, ekklēsia, the word your Bible usually translates church. It meant a gathering of citizens. Matthew is the only gospel that uses it.

The Book in Brief

Matthew begins with my family tree, from Abraham through King David to Joseph, the husband of Mary. Mary is found to be pregnant before they live together, and an angel tells Joseph in a dream that the child is from the Holy Spirit. I am born in Bethlehem in the days of King Herod. Wise men from the east, guided by a star, come to worship me with gold, frankincense and myrrh. Joseph flees with us to Egypt, and Herod has the young boys of Bethlehem killed. After Herod dies, the family settles in Nazareth, in Galilee.

In chapters 3 and 4, John baptizes me in the river Jordan, and the devil tempts me in the wilderness. Back in Galilee, I begin to announce that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, and I call four fishermen.

From chapter 5 on, the book moves between what I do and what I teach, and it gathers my teaching into five long speeches. The first is the Sermon on the Mount, in chapters 5 to 7. Then come healings, and my instructions to the twelve as I send them out. Opposition grows. I teach in parables by the sea. Another ruler named Herod has John beheaded. I feed more than five thousand people and walk on the water. In chapter 16 Peter says I am the Christ, and I call him the rock on which I will build my assembly. From then on I warn my friends that I will be killed in Jerusalem and raised on the third day.

In chapter 21 I ride into Jerusalem on a donkey and its colt, and drive the buyers and sellers out of the Temple. I argue with the leaders and condemn the scribes and Pharisees. On the Mount of Olives I speak of the end of the age, ending with the sheep and the goats.

Chapters 26 to 28 tell my death and what follows. Judas agrees to hand me over for thirty pieces of silver. I share the Passover with the twelve, pray in Gethsemane, and am arrested. Peter denies me three times. Judas throws the silver back and hangs himself. Pilate washes his hands, and the people call my blood down on themselves and their children. I am crucified, the earth shakes, and Joseph of Arimathea lays me in his own tomb. Guards are posted there. On the first day of the week an angel rolls back the stone, and I meet Mary Magdalene and the other Mary as they run to tell my disciples. The guards are paid to say that my body was stolen. On a mountain in Galilee, I send the eleven to make disciples of all nations.

Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. Blessed are the peacemakers. Do to others what you want them to do to you. Where two or three are gathered. Our Father in heaven. I was hungry, and you gave me food.

Some of those are also in Luke, worded differently. Some are only here. If you were raised on my words, you were raised mostly on Matthew’s version of them. For most of Christian history it was the most read and most quoted of the four gospels.

So it matters who wrote it, and how.

Who wrote it

The book never says. The writer never says I. He never claims to have been there.

Early in the 100s, a bishop in Asia Minor named Papias wrote that Matthew collected the sayings in the Hebrew language, and each person translated them as best he could.¹ That is the earliest statement linking this book to Matthew, and it raises as many questions as it answers. The gospel in your Bible was written in Greek, not Hebrew. And it is not a collection of sayings. It is a full story.

There is a stronger reason scholars doubt the tradition. This writer copied most of Mark’s gospel, often word for word. Mark was not one of my twelve. An eyewitness who had walked with me for years would not have needed to copy the account of a man who had not.

Look at one small change he made. Mark tells how I called a tax collector named Levi, son of Alphaeus (Mark 2:14). Matthew tells the same story, almost word for word, but the tax collector is called a man called Matthew (Matthew 9:9). Nobody knows why. It may be the moment the tradition attached this book to that man.

What the writer does tell you is who he was. He knew the scriptures of my people intimately. He read them in Hebrew and in Greek. He cared about the Law. And he once described a kind of man who sounds very much like himself: every scribe who has been made a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a householder, who brings out of his treasure new and old things (Matthew 13:52).

That is a good description of this book. Old treasure and new, brought out together, by a scribe who followed me.

Go deeperThe Hebrew Matthew that nobody has found

Papias was not the only early writer to say that Matthew first wrote in Hebrew. The report was repeated for centuries.

Around 180, Irenaeus, a bishop in Gaul, wrote that Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome. He also says that one group of Jewish followers of mine, the Ebionites, used Matthew alone of all the gospels.² That fits. Matthew was the gospel that kept the Law.

Eusebius, the church historian, passes on a stranger story. Late in the 100s, a teacher from Alexandria named Pantaenus traveled to a land Eusebius calls India. He found believers there who already had Matthew’s gospel in Hebrew letters, left behind, they said, by the apostle Bartholomew.³

In 392 Jerome wrote that the Hebrew original was still kept in the library at Caesarea, and that a group of Jewish followers of mine in the Syrian city of Beroea, called Nazarenes, used it. But the lines Jerome quotes from the gospel these believers used do not match the Matthew in your Bible. Most scholars think it was a different book, one of several gospels used by Jewish believers that now survive only in quotations.⁴

No Hebrew Matthew has ever been found. And the Greek Matthew in your Bible does not read like a translation. It follows the Greek wording of Mark, line after line, which a translation from Hebrew would hardly do. So most scholars think it was written in Greek from the start, and that the old reports either meant some other book or were simply mistaken. Even Eusebius, who saved Papias’s words for us, said that Papias seems to have been of very limited understanding.⁵

Built out of Mark

Lay Matthew beside Mark and you can watch him work.

Nearly all of Mark is inside Matthew. Matthew follows Mark’s order of events through most of the book. He also shares a large body of my sayings with Luke that is not in Mark, the material scholars call Q. And he has stories and sayings of his own that appear nowhere else.⁶

He also tidies Mark as he goes. In Mark, when I went back to my hometown, he could do no mighty work there (Mark 6:5). In Matthew it becomes he didn’t do many mighty works there (Matthew 13:58). Could not became did not. You will find that kind of small correction all through the book. The awkward edges get smoothed.

That does not make Matthew dishonest. It makes him an editor. He had a source, and he made it say what he believed was true about me.

Go deeperQ, the book of sayings nobody has seen

No one has ever held a copy of Q. Scholars worked it out from the gospels themselves.

Matthew and Luke share more than two hundred verses that are not in Mark. Nearly all of them are my sayings: the blessings on the poor, the command to love enemies, the Lord’s Prayer, the warning not to judge. Often the wording is almost the same, word for word. But the two writers put these sayings in very different places. Matthew gathers many of them into the Sermon on the Mount. Luke spreads them out, some in a shorter sermon and many along my journey to Jerusalem. If Luke had Matthew in front of him, most scholars argue, it is hard to see why he would have taken apart Matthew’s great sermon and scattered the pieces. So they concluded that both used a third source.⁶

The idea is old. In 1838 a German philosopher, Christian Hermann Weisse, proposed that Matthew and Luke had two sources, Mark and a book of my sayings. In 1863 Heinrich Julius Holtzmann made it the leading view, and by the end of the century German scholars were calling the lost book Q.⁷

For a long time critics said that nobody would have written a gospel of sayings without the story of my death. Then, in 1945, a farmer digging near Nag Hammadi in Egypt found a jar of old books. One of them, the Gospel of Thomas, is just that: 114 sayings, with almost no story at all. Few think it is Q, but it showed that such books existed.⁸

Not everyone is convinced. In 1955 the Oxford scholar Austin Farrer argued that Luke simply used Matthew, so that Q is not needed. Mark Goodacre and others have argued the same since.⁹ Most scholars still accept Q. In 2000 a team of them published a full reconstruction of it, line by line.¹⁰

Five speeches, like five books of Moses

Matthew arranged my teaching into five long speeches: the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5 to 7), my instructions to the twelve (chapter 10), the parables (chapter 13), how my followers should treat one another (chapter 18), and the end of the age (chapters 24 and 25).

He ends each of them the same way: When Jesus had finished saying these things (Matthew 7:28; compare 11:1, 13:53, 19:1 and 26:1).

Five books of teaching. Many scholars think that is deliberate, because the Law of Moses is five books too. And Matthew tells my early life so that it echoes the life of Moses. A king orders the killing of baby boys, and the child escapes (Matthew 2:16; compare Exodus 1:22). The family goes down into Egypt and comes out again. The teacher goes up a mountain, sits down and teaches (Matthew 5:1).

Matthew was showing his readers, most of them Jews, that I was not abandoning Moses. I was the teacher Moses had pointed toward.

Kingdom of Heaven is not heaven

Mark and Luke have me talking about the kingdom of God. Matthew almost always says the Kingdom of Heaven. He uses that phrase about thirty times.¹¹

He was not changing the meaning. Out of reverence, many devout Jews often said Heaven in place of God, the way you might say the White House when you mean the President.

But for many centuries, English readers have heard Kingdom of Heaven and pictured a place above the clouds where the dead go. That is not what it meant. When I said Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand (Matthew 4:17), I did not mean that a place was nearby. I meant that God’s rule was about to arrive here.

The prayer Matthew gives you says so plainly: Let your Kingdom come. Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10). The kingdom comes down. The will of God gets done on earth. That is the whole point of the prayer.

Fulfilled

About ten times, Matthew stops the story to tell you that something happened that it might be fulfilled which a prophet had said.¹² He loved my scriptures and he wanted you to see them everywhere in my life.

Sometimes it fits beautifully. Sometimes you can see him stretching.

He says that when my family came back from Egypt, it fulfilled the words Out of Egypt I called my son (Matthew 2:15). Those words are from Hosea. In Hosea they are about the people of Israel coming out of Egypt in the time of Moses. Hosea was looking back, not forward.

He says that I was born of a virgin to fulfill Isaiah: Behold, the virgin shall be with child (Matthew 1:23). Matthew was reading the Greek translation of Isaiah, which uses a word for virgin. The Hebrew word Isaiah used means a young woman, and in Isaiah the child is a sign for King Ahaz in his own time.

He says that I grew up in Nazareth so that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophets that he will be called a Nazarene (Matthew 2:23). No such sentence appears anywhere in your Old Testament.

He says that the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas fulfilled that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet (Matthew 27:9). The verse he quotes is mostly from Zechariah.¹³

And here is my favorite. Zechariah says the king will come riding on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey (Zechariah 9:9). That is Hebrew poetry. It says the same thing twice, the way Hebrew poems do. One animal. Mark has me riding one colt. Matthew read the verse as two animals, so in Matthew the disciples bring the donkey and the colt, and laid their clothes on them; and he sat on them (Matthew 21:7).

On both of them, at once.

I am not laughing at him. He was working the way the teachers of my people worked, reading every word of scripture for hidden meaning. But when someone tells you that my life fulfilled exact predictions, it is worth opening the predictions and reading them where they stand.

I did not come to destroy the Law

Matthew is the most Jewish of the four gospels, and it is the one that cares most about the Law.

Only Matthew has me say, Don’t think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill (Matthew 5:17).

Only Matthew has me tell the crowds that the scribes and Pharisees sat on Moses’ seat, so whatever they tell you to observe, observe and do, but don’t do their works (Matthew 23:2–3).

Only Matthew, when I warn my followers to flee before Jerusalem falls, adds this: Pray that your flight will not be in the winter, nor on a Sabbath (Matthew 24:20). Many scholars take this as a sign that Matthew’s community was still keeping the Sabbath, decades after I died.¹⁴

And in the Sermon on the Mount, I do not loosen the Law. I make it harder. You have heard that it was said to the ancient ones, “You shall not murder”, and I go on to say that anger and contempt are already on the road to murder (Matthew 5:21–22). The Law said An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, to limit revenge. I said, don’t resist him who is evil; but whoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also (Matthew 5:38–39). People had heard love your neighbor and hate your enemy. I said, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you (Matthew 5:43–44).

That was not a new religion. That was a teacher of the Law telling people what the Law was for.

When I argued with Pharisees in Matthew, it was not because they kept the Law. It was because they kept the small parts and skipped the large ones: you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith (Matthew 23:23). Notice that I did not tell them to stop tithing their herbs. I told them not to forget justice while they did it.

The prayer you say

The Lord’s Prayer that most Christians know by heart is Matthew’s version. Luke has another, which in the oldest copies is shorter.

Matthew’s version asks God to Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors (Matthew 6:12). The Greek word is the ordinary word for money owed. In my country debt was the thing that took your land and then your children. When I taught people to ask God for release from their debts, I tied it to releasing the people who owed them.

At the end of the prayer, many of you say, For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. The World English Bible prints it (Matthew 6:13). Most modern Bibles put it in a footnote, because the oldest copies of Matthew do not have it. It was a closing line that congregations said together, and it found its way into the text. A very early manual for churches, called the Didache, already gives the prayer with a version of that ending, and tells people to say it three times a day.¹⁵

The only gospel with a church in it

The word ekklēsia, the word your Bible translates church, appears in only two places in all four gospels. Both are in Matthew.

In one, I tell Peter, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my assembly (Matthew 16:18). Peter’s name means rock. Then I give him the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 16:19).

In the other, I tell my followers how to handle a member who wrongs another: go to him alone, then with witnesses, and then tell it to the assembly (Matthew 18:17).

Mark and Luke both tell the scene where Peter says I am the Christ. Neither of them has the words about the rock or the keys. Many historians doubt I said them. My message was about the kingdom of God, not about building an organization. These verses sound like a community a generation later, settling who had authority and how to discipline its members.¹⁶

Whatever their origin, you know what was built on them. The bishops of Rome came to claim that they had inherited Peter’s keys, and those two verses became the charter of the papacy.

Later in the book, Matthew has me saying something that cuts the other way: don’t you be called “Rabbi,” for one is your teacher, the Christ, and all of you are brothers. Call no man on the earth your father (Matthew 23:8–9).

Both are in the same book. Every church that claims Matthew has to decide which one to live by.

The hardest verse in the book

Matthew has one line that no other gospel has, and it may have caused more suffering than any other single verse in your Bible.

At my trial, Pilate washes his hands in front of the crowd and says, I am innocent of the blood of this righteous person. You see to it. Then All the people answered, “May his blood be on us, and on our children!” (Matthew 27:24–25).

Only Matthew has the hand-washing. Only Matthew has that cry.

Remember when Matthew was written. Jerusalem had been destroyed. Matthew’s community of Jewish followers of mine was in a bitter fight with the synagogue leaders of their own towns over who were the true heirs of Moses. You can feel that fight in the woes against the scribes and Pharisees in chapter 23, and you can feel it in this verse. To Matthew’s readers, the burning of Jerusalem looked like the blood coming down on the next generation.¹⁷

It was a family argument, written by Jews about Jews. But within a century or two it was being read by people who were not Jews at all. And for nineteen hundred years, that one verse was used to call my people Christ-killers. It was preached in Holy Week. It was quoted while synagogues burned.

In this one verse, the book is as far from my teaching as it ever goes. The same gospel has me tell you to love your enemies, and to forgive until seventy times seven (Matthew 5:44; 18:22).

I was killed by Roman soldiers, on the order of a Roman governor, by a Roman method of execution. The crowd in front of Pilate, whatever it shouted, was a crowd. It was not a people, and it was not their children.

In 1965 the Catholic Church finally said so in writing: what happened to me cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.¹⁸ It took the church nineteen hundred years to say what should have been obvious from the start.

The birth

Matthew is one of only two gospels that tell my birth. Luke is the other. They tell it very differently.

In Matthew, the story is Joseph’s. Joseph finds that Mary is pregnant, plans to divorce her quietly, and is told in a dream not to. Matthew’s family seems to live in Bethlehem already. Wise men from the east follow a star and ask Herod, Where is he who is born King of the Jews? (Matthew 2:2). Herod, frightened, has all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding countryside, from two years old and under killed (Matthew 2:16). The family flees to Egypt, and only after Herod dies do they settle in Nazareth, to avoid Herod’s son.

In Luke there are no wise men, no star, no massacre and no Egypt. There are shepherds and a manger. The family lives in Nazareth, travels to Bethlehem for a census, and goes home.

No historian of the time mentions the massacre of the children. Josephus, the Jewish historian who wrote at length about Herod’s cruelties, including the killing of his own wife and sons, does not mention it.¹⁹ That does not prove it did not happen. Bethlehem was a small village, and Herod killed many people. But most historians read Matthew’s birth story as he seems to have meant it: as a retelling of Moses’ birth, with me in the place of Moses and Herod in the place of Pharaoh.

Go deeperHow the wise men became three kings

Matthew calls the visitors magoi, magi. He never says that they were kings, and he never says how many there were.

The magi were a priestly class among the Persians. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing around 430 BC, lists them as one of the tribes of the Medes, and says that no Persian could offer a sacrifice without a magus present.²⁰ By my time the word was also used for star-gazers, readers of dreams and sorcerers. Acts uses it for a sorcerer named Bar Jesus (Acts 13:6).

The number three came from the gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. One of the earliest writers to count three visitors is Origen, in the 200s. But the early Christian paintings of the scene, in the catacombs of Rome, do not agree. One shows two magi, another three, another four. Some Eastern churches later counted twelve.²¹

They became kings through other scriptures. Around 200, the North African writer Tertullian remarked that the East held magi to be almost kings.²² Christians read Matthew beside a psalm about Israel’s king, Yes, all kings shall fall down before him (Psalm 72:11), and beside Isaiah: Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising (Isaiah 60:3). A few verses later, Isaiah even mentions gold and frankincense (Isaiah 60:6).

The names came last. Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar first appear, spelled Melichior, Gathaspa and Bithisarea, in a Latin chronicle translated from a Greek original that was probably written in the 500s.²³ In the 1160s, bones said to be theirs were carried from Milan to Cologne, where they are still kept in the cathedral.²⁴

None of that is in Matthew. He says only that wise men came from the east, worshiped, gave their gifts, and went back to their own country another way (Matthew 2:12).

The sheep and the goats

Now the best thing in the book. It is only in Matthew.

At the end of my last long speech, I described the end of everything. All the nations are gathered before the king, and he separates them the way a shepherd separates sheep from goats.

To the ones on his right he says: I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me (Matthew 25:35–36).

They are confused. When did we do that? And the king answers, because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me (Matthew 25:40).

Read the whole scene and notice what is not in it. Nobody is asked what they believed. Nobody is asked whether they were baptized, or which church they attended, or whether they said the right words about me. Neither group even knew it was me. The only question is what they did for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner.

Matthew put that at the very end of my teaching, just before the story of my death. Of all the things he could have left ringing in your ears, he chose that.

The same book has me say it another way: Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he who does the will of my Father (Matthew 7:21).

Only to Israel, then to everyone

Matthew holds two things side by side, and he does not smooth them out.

When I send the twelve out in Matthew, I tell them, Don’t go among the Gentiles, and don’t enter into any city of the Samaritans. Rather, go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 10:5–6). When a Canaanite woman begs me to heal her daughter, I first answer, I wasn’t sent to anyone but the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 15:24). Only Matthew has these lines.

And yet the book ends on a mountain in Galilee, where I send my followers out to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19).

Many historians think the first is closer to my own lifetime. I was a Jew, sent to my own people, and my work was the renewal of Israel. The second is the mission of the church that came after. Matthew kept both, the old treasure and the new.

The end of the book

Matthew’s last scene has one small phrase that I want you to notice. When my eleven friends see me on the mountain, they bowed down to him, but some doubted (Matthew 28:17).

Some doubted. Matthew wrote that down, at the very end, and left it there.

Then the last words in the book: I am with you always, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). The book that began by calling me Immanuel, which means God with us (Matthew 1:23), ends with I am with you.

Go deeperThe guards at the tomb

Only Matthew tells you that there were soldiers at my tomb. The day after I was buried, the chief priests and Pharisees ask Pilate for a guard, lest perhaps his disciples come at night and steal him away (Matthew 27:64), and the stone is sealed. When the angel comes, the guards shake and become like dead men (Matthew 28:4). Afterward the priests pay them to say that my body was stolen while they slept. And Matthew adds, This saying was spread abroad among the Jews, and continues until today (Matthew 28:15).

That last line tells you why the story is there. When Matthew wrote, people were saying that my disciples had stolen my body, and he was answering them. The charge did not go away. Around 160, Justin Martyr wrote that Jewish teachers had sent men everywhere to say that my disciples stole him by night from the tomb.²⁵ Around 200, Tertullian mocked the same story, and another one with it: that a gardener had moved the body, so that the crowds of visitors would not trample his lettuces.²⁶

Later Christians made the guard story bigger. A gospel written in Peter’s name, probably in the 100s, survives in part in a copy found in the 1880s in a monk’s grave at Akhmim, in Egypt. In it, the guards have a centurion named Petronius, the tomb is sealed with seven seals, and the soldiers watch two men from heaven bring a third out of the tomb, with a cross following behind them. A voice from heaven asks a question, and the cross answers, Yes.²⁷

Scholars disagree about Matthew’s guards. Many think the story grew up to answer the rumor, since no other gospel mentions them, and in Mark the women walk to the tomb wondering only who will roll the stone away (Mark 16:3). Others think Matthew drew on an older tradition.²⁸ I will not settle that for you. I will only tell you that the argument over my empty tomb is as old as the gospels themselves.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Zechariah 9:9, then Mark 11:7, then Matthew 21:7.

You will find: one animal in Zechariah’s poem, one colt in Mark, and two animals in Matthew, with me sitting on them.

Then read Matthew 25:31–46 all the way through. Count the questions about belief.

The Short Version

• Matthew is anonymous. Its writer copied most of Mark, which is the main reason scholars doubt it was written by my apostle Matthew.
• It arranges my teaching into five great speeches, and tells my life so that it echoes Moses.
• Its Kingdom of Heaven means God’s rule on earth, not a place for the dead.
• It is the most Jewish gospel, and its one line “his blood be on us” was turned against the Jews for nineteen centuries.
• Its last teaching, the sheep and the goats, judges people only by what they did for the least.