Gospel of Matthew

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The Gospel of Matthew

Matthew gets unlikely boost

Archeological Discovery boosts Credibility of New Testament

WorldNetDaily.com

July 2003

The Book of Matthew has been under attack since the beginning of the alleged "New Thinking" of the late 19th century. It was about that time that it was decided that Matthew wasn't an eyewitness account of the life of Christ, but rather that Matthew was a later forgery.

These alleged New "Thinkers" decided that Matthew wasn't the author, eventually [instead] assigning authorship of the book to a mysterious author, or group of authors, collectively known as "Q" from the German word "quelle," meaning "source."

The New "Thinkers," after much exhaustive study, concluded the following: Most of what Jesus said, He didn't say; He wasn't the Son of God; He didn't perform miracles; He was just a guy to whom people assigned god-like powers after His death.

Recently, the incongruously-named "Jesus Seminar" produced "The Five Gospels" that went into great detail about the things that Jesus never said, as if that would have any meaning, if one accepted the earlier premises that He was a fraud in the first place.

The whole basis for the credibility of the four Gospels – and their contents is this: All four Gospel writers claim to be eyewitnesses of the events they describe.

If Matthew, Mark, Luke or John were written after their deaths, then why were they named for them? If this were the case, they certainly couldn't be their eyewitness accounts. At best they would be second-hand accounts based on hearsay. So the issue of when Matthew and the other Gospels were written is of more than passing importance to Christianity.

It should be noted that the favorite tactic of unbelieving "liberal theologians" is to seek to "late date" the writing of every biblical book they attack.

An amazing story in the Kansas City Star detailed a find from a most unlikely source. It was a source the "scholarly" Jesus Seminar evidently overlooked in their "exhaustive research." And mind you, they are so confident of their "research," that they have no compunction in using it to declare the faith of a billion people to be built upon a fraud.

Interestingly, although the piece details considerable new information that tends to support the authenticity of the Bible and cast doubt on decades of the liberal's "New Thinking," the Star ran the story in its "Entertainment" section.

In an essay written for the book, "Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times," Israel J. Yuval of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, reports the Star, writes about a leading rabbinical scholar of the first century named Gamaliel, who is mentioned in Acts 5:34 and 22:3. Yuval declares that Gamaliel is "considered to have authored a sophisticated parody of the Gospel according to Matthew."

Because the date of Gamaliel's death is known, it places the publication of the Book of Matthew some time before AD 73. The fact that it was a parody demands that the Book of Matthew had extensive circulation and was well known. Otherwise, no one would have gotten the joke.

The fact the parody exists, and the date it was written is known, "badly undercuts (the critics') claims of a late date of A.D. 85-90 or later," said Bob Newman, professor of New Testament at Biblical Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, according to the article.

www.worldnetdaily.com/Article on Matthew

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The point is that we should stop and think about what this means in terms of the Cannon of the NT. These First Century Christians already knew, already knew which books were to be included.