Reply to Jonathan Morrow's defense of Matthew's authorship

This is my reply to an article by Jonathan Morrow entitled

How Do We Know Matthew Was the Author of the Gospel of Matthew?

3 Reasons Why Matthew Was Not A Forgery of the Early Church

We live in a culture that has questions about the Bible. And that’s OK–because questions, if the goal is truth, will lead to a stronger faith.

But it could also be 'bad', as questions, where the goal is truth, can also lead to apostasy, such as becoming an atheist...or at least giving up on bible inerrancy and adopting a less extreme form of biblical inspiration.  And since questions logically impede one's decision for Christ, the failure to repent immediately upon hearing the gospel, was believed by the gospel authors to automatically signal the hearer's assured condemnation: 

 18 "He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. (Jn. 3:18 NAU)

 Apparently then, those who hold off accepting Jesus, because they have "questions" are defined in the bible as being under the present condemnation of God, thus implying their basis for questioning arises from their rebellious spirit and not an honest desire for knowledge.  As a fundamentealist yourself, you need to rework the part of your article that renders questions "ok" or "permissible".  Or become a liberal and deny the fantatical position espoused in John 3, supra.

I have seen this time and again. (But how we question the Bible is critically important)

But as Christians we also are called to respond to challenges which threaten to undercut our faith (Jude 3; 1 Peter 3:15).

 Those bible passages legitimately raise the objection as to why we should assume there is any Holy Spirit conviction going on when a Christian makes argument to defend the faith.  Crediting the convicting to the Holy Spirit here is about as gratuitous as the attorney who tells the jury "There's lots of evidence in favor of my client's innocence, but the only way you can appreciate its force is if the Holy Spirit opens your eyes to it."

And in case you haven’t noticed, the Bible is a BIG target so there are lots of challenges!

    Our goal is to say (and defend) what the Bible says—no more and no less.

Then this article is going beyond your stated goal, as you admit that the proposition that Matthew authored the gospel now bearing his name, is not technically made IN the bible.  So perhaps you could have spent God's precious time more efficiently by scrapping the defense of something that isn't even "biblical" and defending something that is biblical, but which skeptics viciously attack, such as Paul's credibility.

The Skeptical Challenge of the Authorship of the Gospels

Skeptics like to raise doubts and new “hidden” or “lost” information about the Gospels. Why? Because that is where all the information about Jesus is. And if you can undermine confidence in biblical authority there, then that weakens the overall authority of Christianity. Why? Because Christianity rises or falls with Jesus.

 On the contrary, like Mormonism and other obviously false cults, Christianity rises or falls based on how successfully the local upstarts can convince the laity that their claims about ancient historical events are true.  Given that most people's eyes turn into question marks when asked to spell "historiography", I'm not surprised that false claims about what happened in history are still capable of deceiving masses of people.  I suppose that if everybody had the level of knowledge about historical methodology as professional historians possess, the number of people who go around pushing the resurrection of Jesus as a true historical event would be similar to the number of professional historians who go around pushing the resurrection of Jesus as a true historical event.

Here’s the basic argument of the Bible skeptic meant to raise doubt:
    “Did you know that we don’t know who wrote the Gospel of Matthew? In fact, this Gospel is anonymous–(i.e., there is no formal claim to authorship within the document itself). The early church for political reasons wanted to exclude certain writings it didn’t like and so used an Apostle’s name (i.e., Matthew) to generate authority so this version of Christianity could win.”

 Then you are very close to misleading your readers, as you are merely refuting a very superficial type of gospel authorship skepticism.  It would be akin to me "refuting Christianity" by showing how stupid it is to allow people to play with live rattlesnakes in church.  That might refute those particular Christians, but would hardly operate to successfully broad-brush Christianity proper as false.  So when you refute the retarded skeptic whom you are quoting, you aren't refuting the serious scholarly skeptics, whose arguments you don't even get near touching in this article.

One of the new challenges in this generation is that arguments like this used to stay locked up in stuffy ivory towers. The effect was that everyday Christians never encountered them. Enter social media and youtube. Now these “sophisticated” arguments are available for the masses. And in our culture with a general distrust of authorities, conspiracy theories are then off and running.

How do we respond?

3 Reasons Why the Apostle Matthew Wrote the Gospel of Mathew

New Testament Scholars like Darrell Bock, D.A. Carson, and Michael Wilkins (among plenty of others) have done a lot of excellent work.

 So have other conservatives like Craig Blomberg, who specifies he is setting forth his case for Matthew's authorship "tentatively":

When all the evidence is amassed, there appears no conclusive proof for the apostle Matthew as author but no particularly cogent reason to deny this uniform early church tradition…Without any ancient traditions to the contrary, Matthew remains the most plausible choice for author…But again we present these conclusions tentatively. Little depends on them.

New American Commentary
Blomberg, C. (2001, c1992). Vol. 22: Matthew, p. 43

 Given Blomberg's status as a world-authority on the gospels, and his status as a fundamentalist or conservative who accepts biblical inerrancy, and his prior books about the historical reliability of the gospels, his admitting to presenting his case for Matthean authorship "tentatively" would be alone sufficient to reasonably justify the skeptic to strike this gospel from the list of alleged resurrection "eyewitnesses".  If you were on trial for murder and the prosecutor's only evidence against you was an affidavit whose authorship had generated just as much scholarly disagreement as exists in the case of Matthew (i.e., there's no reliable way to tell which parts are from the eyewitness and which parts were added or changed around by later and anonymous redactors), and if the prosecutor admitted to the jury he was only "tentatively" arguing that the alleged eyewitness was the real author of the affidavit, wouldn't you ask the court to drop charges on the grounds that there is simply no way a reasonable jury could find an affidavit of such questionable "authorship" sufficient to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?

Yeah, you would.

Here is just a short summary of the evidence for why we can be confident that Matthew, wrote the Gospel of Matthew, even though this Gospel is technically anonymous.

(1) First, regarding Matthew, “there is no patristic evidence that anyone else was ever proposed as the author.”

That's called the argument from the uniformity of tradition.  But many scholars insist that the only reason the tradition is uniform is because the later fathers were doing little more than repeating what 2nd century Papias said, which, if true, robs your argument of force, since in that case its not 10 ancient guys testifying to the same thing independently, it's one guy's opinion being cut and pasted by 9 other guys.  Guthrie:

 This evidence points to an unbroken tradition that Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew, and advocates of any hypothesis which disagrees with this must suggest an adequate explanation of so consistent a tradition. The usual explanation is that later Church Fathers were merely reiterating Papias’ original mistake, or at least confusion, over what Matthew originally wrote in Aramaic.

Guthrie, D. (1996, c1990). New Testament introduction.
Series taken from jacket. (4th rev. ed.). [The master reference collection].
Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press.

 

And indeed, if Papias is everything you think he is, you will never disconnect his influence from the later fathers who mention Matthew's authorship.  Would we not expect the later fathers to gain much of their knowledge about such issues from the fathers who preceded them?  

 Morrow continues:

 (2) Second, Papias, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, and Origen all affirm Matthean authorship.

But the fathers who mention the language Matthew wrote in, never say it was Greek, they always say it was Hebrew.  If it is historically true that Matthew authored a second original in Greek before he died, you would expect the later church fathers, who desire to tell the reader the language Matthew wrote in, would have no less desire to mention the Greek than the Hebrew, especially in their own day when the Hebrew was archaic and the Greek version of the gospel was mandatory for preaching.

(3) Third, the literary evidence reveals that Matthew was the most popular Gospel in the earliest period of the church and it was circulated widely.

 Lots of early Christian works enjoyed popularity despite authorship you'd say was non-apostolic authorship.  Shepherd of Hermas, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel to the Hebrews, etc.  

2 Objections to Matthew as Author

There are two common objections to his authorship.

Then you need to up your game.  I have more than 300 separate objections to Matthew's authorship.  I'm surprised that you completely avoid dealing with the obvious objection:  Papias' unreliability and the fact that his famous statement can just as easily be translated and understood in a way that significantly distances Matthew from the Greek gospel now bearing his name.

First, it is argued that Matthew, an apostle himself, would not have relied so heavily upon Mark, who was not an apostle, when composing his Gospel.

 And since you cannot find any 1st century examples of a true eyewitness author depending as heavily upon hearsay accounts as Matthew depended on Mark, this skeptical objection's force is not abated by anything you argue below.  Unless you can defeat Markan Priority and the Two-Source Hypothesis, your apostle's extensive quoting hearsay accounts to tell the world what he himself experienced, remains authentically unexpected.  If you saw a car accident along with your grandma, what would you tell the police when they asked you to make a staement?  Would you refer them to somebody else's edited version of your grandma's version?  Obviously not.  The fact that you saw it yourself means you either give your own version, or the cops become reasonable to be suspicious of your claim to be an eyewitness.  It really is that simple.

But since we have very good evidence that Peter stands behind Mark’s Gospel, Matthew would have had no issue utilizing the recorded testimony of Peter.

You are assuming Peter is "the" source behind Mark's gospel, when in fact even conservative Christian scholars think Mark's sources included far more than just the notes he allegedly took during Peter's sermons:

 Furthermore, the traditional units betray little evidence of being simply mental or written notes based on Peter’s preaching from his first–hand witness, a conclusion that impugns part of Papias’s testimony but does not necessarily disparage the veracity or the value of the traditional units.... Consequently, for the most part, one can only speak generally and tentatively when seeking to delineate between tradition and redaction. This conclusion does not dispute Mark’s use of traditional materials or the availability of multiple sources, but it does mean that one cannot precisely reconstruct or always identify the exact content of his source or sources.

Guelich, R. A. (2002). Vol. 34A: Word Biblical Commentary : Mark 1-8:26.
Word Biblical Commentary (Page xxxiv-xxxv). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

 Furthermore, you haven't solved the problem:  there's not much difference between the problem of an alleged eyewitness author extensively using hearsay, and an alleged eyewitness author making extensive use of the hearsay version (Mark) of another's (Peter's) alleged eyewitness account.  Once again, if the author of Matthew was an eyewitness apostle, we would no more expect him to hide behind the hearsay version of another eyewitness's version, than we'd expect him to hide behind a purely hearsay version.  Matthew's extreme reliance on Mark remains inconsistent with what we'd reasonably expect of a real "eyewitness", especially if his memory recall was magically put into turbo-mode by "divine inspiration", another assumption about Matthean authorship that fundies insist on, and which they likewise cannot reasonably demonstrate.

The other common objection is that the Greek is too good to have been written by Matthew. However, Matthew was likely trilingual (Aramaic, Greek, and Latin) by growing up as a Jew in the region of Galilee, and as a tax collector he would have been required to know Greek well.

 None of my objections to Matthean authorship argue from the goodness of the Greek.  Dismissed.

Does it Matter if Matthew is the Author?

Yes.  The only resurrection testimonies that come down to us today from the NT in first-hand form would be (generously assuming traditional authorship) Matthew, John and Paul.  So the more reasonable skepticism of Matthew's apostolic authorship is, the more reasonable skeptics are to strike Matthew from this list of witnesses.  Reducing thecase for Jesus' resurrection from 3 witnesses to 2 witnesses is profoundly injurious, given that you need every last bit of evidence you can possibly get your hands on anyway.

I'm gonna change my life and start focusing on invisible issues of sophistry and theology, leading me into possibly psychologically harmful relations with "fundies", because the case for that religion draws from TWO "eyewitnesses" supplemented by a smattering of equally problematic hearsay? 

I don't think so.

Let me make one last point: Our goal is to say (and defend) what the Bible says—no more and no less. In the case of Paul writing a letter that bears his name, we are compelled to defend his authorship as a matter of biblical integrity. However, when it comes to the four Gospels, there is no one specifically to defend (i.e., because it is technically anonymous).

 Which is another argument against apostolic authorship of Matthew.  The example from Paul and most other NT authors is that the author is willing to say IN the document what his name is.  So the Matthew author's unwillingness to do so is not subject to only one reasonable interpretation (i.e., maybe his audience already knew who he was, he didn't need to repeat the obvious.  Well gee, Paul's churches knew who he was, but by divine inspiration still felt compelled to "state the obvious" anyway).  It is just as reasonable to conjecture that the apostolic signature doesn't appear in Matthew because the author wasn't an apostle.  Or Matthew wrote it, but like lukewarm Christians today, might have wished to help the church in some way, but was reticent to just dive headfirst into the role...reasonably suggesting he was something less than "amazingly transformed", thus impeaching to some degree his statements about Jesus rising from the dead.

You also fail to mention that among the late and contradictory accounts of Matthew's death, several give no hint that it was anything more than an uneventful natural death, no implication he was "martyred"...also suggesting he became disenchanted with the whole business, and, while remaining a part of the movement, stopped being the Jesus-freak he once was, also hurting the credibility of his resurrection testimony.

Finally, the Matthew-author quotes no more speech from the risen Jesus than what would take about 20 seconds to recite orally.  If Acts 1:3 is true and this risen Jesus taught Matthew and the other 10 disciples things concerning the kingdom of God over a period of 40 days, that sounds like the risen Christ had far more to say than 20 seconds worth of speech...even if the actual speeches happened less often than 8 hours per day for each of the 40 days.  So the shockingly short quote of the risen Jesus in Matthew either suggests the author's knowledge of the risen Christ's sayings was far less than what we'd expect for "Matthew", or, the risen Christ didn't say much more than what Matthew records, and Acts 1:3 is exaggerating historical reality.

I say that the Matthew-author's obviously intense desire to quote the pre-crucifixion Jesus' sayings at length is reasonably expected to manifest itself also in the case of the post-crucifixion Jesus' sayings.  The author's belabored obsession with the pre-crucifixion Christ contrasts sharply with "his" far shorter account of the post-crucifixion Jesus, reasonably justifying skepticism, either in that the resurrection narrative wasn't authored by the same obsessed person who wrote the bulk of the gospel, or it was the same apostolic author, but he lost much of the zeal for his faith before authoring the resurrection chapter, and that's why he appears to care far more to document the pre-crucifixion than the post-crucifixion Jesus.

The reasonableness of those skeptical theories cannot be overthrown merely because you can always dream up some sort of logically possible theory that favors bible inerrancy or tradition.  You either show your theory to be more reasonable than mine, or you lose in your attempt to "defeat" the skeptical view.  

If you think my skeptical views can be reasonable, I wouldn't really hit you this hard.  But since you appear to be a fundamentalist, which thus implies you think any and all skeptical theories of gospel authorship are devilish attacks upon the wordagawd, you cannot afford to allow for theories opposite to yours to be the least bit reasonable...all that would do is involve you in helping the devil mock the Christian faith!.  

So you either demonstrate my theories to be unreasonable, or you fail to demonstrate that my theories are unreasonable.  You don't demonstrate a skeptical theory to be unreasonable by merely pointing out that your own opposite theory is reasonable.  Reasonableness can often be equally present in two conflicting theories, such as when reasonable educated mature respectable members of the jury hear the exact same evidence and are unable to agree on the verdict.  Only a fool would pretend that this is always because there is some mentally defective or dishonest person in the jury that is being unreasonable.  Evidence is not usually so perfect in quality and quantity as that.

If I cannot demonstrate your theory to be unreasonable merely because my own contrary theory is reasonable, then fairness dictates that YOU aren't showing my theory to be unreasonable merely because your own contrary theory is reasonable.  I'm keenly aware of the epistemological "shortcuts" fundies typically employ in their clever efforts to make it seem the only reasonable theory is the theory favoring biblical inerrancy/reliability. 

As a thought experiment, let’s say it was somehow discovered that Andrew wrote what we now know as the Gospel of Matthew in the 1st century? Would that mean that there is an error in the Bible? Actually, no, because no claim of authorship was technically made in this document (the same logic would hold for the book of Hebrews)

 Then you are admitting there are more important issues that you could have devoted God's precious time to defending, than who authored the gospel now bearing Matthew's name.

So the bottom line? We have good reason to believe that Matthew is the author of this Gospel.

And you've now been given several justifications for saying skepticism of Matthew's authorship is reasonable.