A Rant About The Person Who Wrote Matthew’s Gospel

So I’m listening to a sermon, or reading a blog post, or reading a book, and the speaker or writer or author says something like, “…the person who wrote Matthew’s Gospel,” instead of simply saying “Matthew”. Why? Or someone will say, “Of course, it’s essential to understand what was going on in Matthew’s community while the Gospel was being assembled.” Again, why?

This is a pet peeve of mine: the attitude that the manner in which the sacred scriptures came to be written is the most important thing about them, and that they cannot be well understood given any other foundation. This simply cannot be true. If it were, then essentially every Catholic exegete from the third century on to the birth of the Historical-Critical Method got it wrong. Augustine got the scriptures wrong. Thomas Aquinas got the Scriptures wrong. Only we, by the benefit of modern scholarship, can possibly get them right.

Well, but the problem with modern scholarship is that this year’s modern scholarship is last year’s old news.

In fact, as Catholics we believe that the canon of Scripture as it has been assembled, and by whatever process it was assembled, is inspired of God, and essential for our lives as Christians. The thing we are to grapple with, to read, mark, and inwardly digest, are the words of Scripture themselves, not the latest scholarly conjectures about biblical origins: because the words lead us to the Word.

(Another pet peeve: the tendency of scholars to speak of their latest conjectures as absolute fact. But I digress.)

If Scriptures are so inspired, then as Catholics we can turn to them, learn from them, study them as they are, with no concern for the politics of Matthew’s community, or whether the person who wrote Matthew was Matthew or one of his followers. We do not need to become critical scholars to find Christ in Scripture.

Please note, I’m not arguing that source criticism has no value; nor am I arguing that less knowledge is better than more knowledge. What I’m arguing is that all source criticism is conjectural, and that while knowledge of it is be a good thing (if taken with a grain of salt) it is hardly essential to the Christian life.

And that leads me to a third peeve: the insistence on dragging critical theories into discussions where they have no proper place. If you are speaking about how Matthew’s Gospel came to be, then by all means bring out all of your scholarly knowledge on that topic (while maintaining proper humility as to the strength of your conclusions).

If, on the other hand, you are preaching on the Parable of the Sower (or some such passage) why say things like, “the author of Matthew’s Gospel included this because”? Matthew, or his stand-in, might have had any number of reasons for including it, and for placing it where he did. None of them matter all that much. Just tell us, “Matthew says thus and so” or “The Gospel says this and that,” and we’ll follow you all the better for your not having dragged a red herring across the path the Sower cast his seeds upon.

Here endeth the rant.

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