Demolishing Triablogue: The Weakness Of The Evidence For Matthew's Authorship

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer at Triablogue entitled

The Strength Of The Evidence For Matthew's Authorship

Friday, December 20, 2019

If the gospel attributed to Matthew was written by him, then that's a good line of evidence for the historicity of what he reports about Jesus' childhood.

Which is like saying an eyewitness report is good evidence for the historicity of some alleged event.     That's not "good", that's merely "slightly better than hearsay".

But since objections to the arguments for Jesus' resurrection are weighty and powerful, it hardly matters whether Jesus was the son of God.  Failure is failure, no matter how bright your clothes are.  And failure justifies others to draw certain conclusions.

Matthew's gospel and other early sources (e.g., Acts 1:13-14) put the apostle in contact with people who knew a lot about Jesus' background, such as Jesus himself, his mother, his brothers, and the people of Nazareth.

And Jesus' own immediate family members did not find his miracles the least bit compelling. Mark 3:21, 6:4 and John 7:5.  I've seen how you Triablogue types jump around like fleas on a dog trying to "account for" these verses while trifling that Jesus' miracles were still real.  Keep dreaming.

You think the author of Mark got his material from Peter, who was associated with Mary and other apostles, yet Mark attributes no miracles to Jesus' birth.  Whatever people were wondering about in Mark 6:3, that verse doesn't equal "Jesus was magically conceived."  But Jason Engwer specializes in squeezing blood out of turnips.  So Mark's disinterest in a birth of Jesus that you think was legitimately miraculous and which also testified in favor of Mark's own theme of Jesus as Son of God, is YOUR problem.

What you aren't going to do is prove the unreasonableness of the skeptic who cites Mark's silence on the virgin birth as a justification to accuse Matthew and Luke of lying.

But even conservative scholars don't say much about the evidence for Matthean authorship of the gospel,

Probably because they recognize a trap when they see it.  After all, being conservatives, they would more than likely make a big deal out of Matthew's authorship if they thought doing so could come across as serious argument.

and the few arguments they bring forward don't get developed much.

Probably because they recognize that the evidence in their favor is not very strong and easily falsifiable.  Papias this, logia that, and let's move on.

Here's a collection of articles on the evidence for Matthew's authorship.

I'll start a new blog piece to answer those.