Book of Matthew

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Charlotte408

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Hi everyone, so I’m reading Matthew for RCIA, and … at the begginning, there’s these footnotes that say-

‘The unknown author, we’ll call Matthew, for the sake of convenience’ and then something about a ‘source Q’…

I don’t really understand this. Are they saying that they don’t really know who wrote Matthew, and that most of it seems to come from Mark, mixed with an outside source?

BTW - I am LOVING this Catholic bible. I’ve read most of the bible before, but, I’m seeing things or reading them in a way that I can tell I’ve haven’t really gotten most of what it’s trying to say. The structure, footnotes, all kinds of awesome. 😃
 
Charlotte408 said:
Hi everyone, so I’m reading Matthew for RCIA, and … at the begginning, there’s these footnotes that say-

‘The unknown author, we’ll call Matthew, for the sake of convenience’ and then something about a ‘source Q’…

I don’t really understand this. Are they saying that they don’t really know who wrote Matthew, and that most of it seems to come from Mark, mixed with an outside source?

BTW - I am LOVING this Catholic bible. I’ve read most of the bible before, but, I’m seeing things or reading them in a way that I can tell I’ve haven’t really gotten most of what it’s trying to say. The structure, footnotes, all kinds of awesome. 😃
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St.Ireneus (A.D 180), Origen (A.D 250), St. John Chrysostom (A.D 390), St. Jerome (A.D 398), and St. Augustine (A.D 400) all affirm the apostolic authorship of the Gospel of Matthew. Following tradition we have every reason to believe it was the apostle Matthew who wrote it. Scholarly there is a lot of debate, but I find it hard to error by siding with all those great Saints 😉
 
Nate13 said:
St.Ireneus (A.D 180), Origen (A.D 250), St. John Chrysostom (A.D 390), St. Jerome (A.D 398), and St. Augustine (A.D 400) all affirm the apostolic authorship of the Gospel of Matthew. Following tradition we have every reason to believe it was the apostle Matthew who wrote it. Scholarly there is a lot of debate, but I find it hard to error by siding with all those great Saints 😉
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So what is the source Q bit? What’s that mean?
 
Lisa44 said:
I googled it for you. 🙂
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source
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LOL, thanks Lisa - I could have done that cept I tend to stay away from wikipedia as it is completely untrustworthy. To prove this to a friend I actually created an account, made some stuff up and posted it there. I suppose I could just wait till my next class and ask…but…I really treasure the wisdom of my fellow posters here…and more importantly trust them.

I’ll go read the wiki article anyways, I’m sure the meat of it is just about right.
 
Charlotte408 said:
Hi everyone, so I’m reading Matthew for RCIA, and … at the begginning, there’s these footnotes that say-

‘The unknown author, we’ll call Matthew, for the sake of convenience’ and then something about a ‘source Q’…

I don’t really understand this. Are they saying that they don’t really know who wrote Matthew, and that most of it seems to come from Mark, mixed with an outside source?

BTW - I am LOVING this Catholic bible. I’ve read most of the bible before, but, I’m seeing things or reading them in a way that I can tell I’ve haven’t really gotten most of what it’s trying to say. The structure, footnotes, all kinds of awesome. 😃
Click to expand...

  1. *] It has always been common knowledge among us that the (technically anonymous) gospel that the starts with Jesus’ genealogy was written by the apostle Matthew Levi, although it is also said that the Greek-language version that we canonized is either a translation made by him or by someone else of an earlier Aramaic edition that he wrote first. (We don’t know what happened to the earlier Aramaic version, but in any case, if a copy of it were to turn up somewhere, it would not be automatically canonized, for a number of reasons.)
    *]“Q”, which is short for quelle, German for “source”, is a hypothetical reconstruction of a gospel-like book containing the bare bones of Jesus’ teachings, written by who knows whom. We have always known that there is a four-way overlap among the gospels, some things are mentioned in all four, or in only three, and so on. In fact, in most old Gospel Books there is an index at the front that lists all of these parallels (cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebian_Canons … yeah, wikipedia 👍). Well, back in the 1800s, Biblical scholars (Protestants, especially Germans), taking into account that the parallels among Matthew, Mark, and Luke were parallel sometimes down to the exact words, and the fact that Matthew and Luke had nearly identical passasges that are missing from Mark, surmised that Matthew and Luke were aggregating material from Mark and from another lost gospel in the process of making their own gospels. This lost gospel, the “source”, they labelled “Q”. Now, at the same time, there was a trend among other Biblical scholars that the same sort of aggregation process was how the first five books of the Old Testament were written too, but with successive editors incorporating more material from other sources as the centuries went by, and those written sources were labelled J, E, D, and P. So this “Q” theory was all part of a piece with what was going on in academia at the time - and by the way, it was also part of a general attitude that none of the supernatural stuff like miracles and the resurrection were real either, so it was fashionable to assume the authors of the Pentateuch and the Gospels were just making it all up from other myths. But I digress. Anyway, this “Q” has never been found by archaeologists, so it’s just a hypothetical construct, consisting of the overlap between Matthew and Luke that is not in Mark.
    *] What Bible are you using? Some Catholic study-bible?
 
Yes there is a debate scholarly on the so-called Q Source, which derives from a viewpoint of Markan Priority which was pushed during the Prussian Kulturkampf in the mid to late 19th Century. It stems from the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), and as Mark is the least detailed it proposes that it is something of an “outline” for the more detailed Matthew and Luke. The similarities between these Gospels has been the subject of debate since the Early Church, yet there simply is no precedent for the actual existence of the so-called Q soure except inference. The Kulturkampf was an anti-Catholic movement which sought to secularize Prussia and deter people from the Catholic faith, and therefore many prominent atheist/“agnostic” scholars subscribe to this belief.

The early tradition of the Church has been that of Matthean Priority which St. Augustine wrote on, entirely eliminating the need for a Q source. The testament of the earliest Church Fathers has always been that Matthew the Apostle wrote his Gospel, and he wrote it first. Despite revisionist history, there is no reason to doubt the Tradition of the Church. However, it is prudent to mention these alternate “theories” so that we are not suspected of suppressing or denying scholarly work. In some cases, the Church has been overly accomadating to these counter-Traditional theories.

In any event, enjoy RCIA, welcome home, and continue to seek the answers to your questions!

God bless,
Paul
 
I would like to add a few things here.

1.) In the minds of many people, Markan priority and the Two-Source Hypothesis are often (mistakenly) viewed as being related to each other, so that people sometimes construe attacks against the existence of Q as an attack against the priority of Mark as well. In reality, however, the two are not as intertwined as one might think: one could believe in Markan priority but not in Q (which is what the so-called Farrer hypothesis, the idea I accept, proposes).

2.) Historically the two theories were separate and was only joined together by the German scholar Herman Christian Weisse in 1838: Herbert Marsh in 1801 was the first to think about the existence a hypothetical document upon which the Evangelists would have drawn upon. Gottlob Christian Storr meanwhile was the first to propose Markan priority in 1776, albeit his ideas were not widely accepted at the time, because scholars at the time either accepted Matthean priority as represented by the Augustinian or Griesbach hypotheses, or the so-called fragmentary theory (i.e. that various events and teachings from the life of Jesus were originally recorded in the form of smaller disjointed documents, which the Evangelists pieced together to form their accounts).

Karl Lachmann in 1835, working within this fragmentary theory, arrived at the conclusion which we now call ‘Mark as the middle term’. Simply put, the material that is shared by all three Synoptics are called ‘triple tradition’: within triple tradition there are usually substantial agreements between Matthew, Mark and Luke, between Matthew and Mark against Luke, and between Mark and Luke against Matthew; by contrast, there are only minor agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark. Lachmann inferred from this phenomenon that Mark best preserved a relatively fixed order of episodes in Jesus’s ministry. Three years later, Christian Herman Weisse and Christian Gottlob Wilke managed to wed Markan priority with Q by having Mark not just as representative of Matthew’s and Luke’s source, but (one of) their sources itself. Their ideas were not immediately accepted, but Heinrich Julius Holtzmann’s endorsement in 1863 of a qualified form of the idea won general favor.

3.) Much has been made of the Kulturkampf’s (1871-8) propagandistic use of the Markan priority-Q theory against the Church, one of the reasons being because it ostensibly helped negate one of the well-known Catholic proof-texts: Matthew 16:18. However both theories have as we have seen, existed even before the Kulturkampf and are originally neutral; IMHO we shouldn’t throw the baby with the bathwater.

4.) The Q theory is dependent on the idea that Matthew and Luke did not know each other’s gospels and so must have drawn from another hypothetical source aside from Mark; if, however, one allows for the possibility that they knew and drew from each other, Q can be eliminated from the equation.

5.) Patristic testimony is the one strong challenge against Markan priority, methinks. That being said, however, I did notice that the earliest testimonies we have are silent about the exact order the Gospels were written to draw sufficient conclusions (Papias, or at least the way Eusebius quotes him, seems to speak of Mark first before Matthew but that’s hardly indicative of anything) and when they speak of Matthew writing, it is usually almost always in reference to a ‘Hebrew’ Gospel (the Logia as Papias calls it), with no mention about the Greek.

As an aside, is it not also possible that the reason why Matthew was always named first is because as an Apostle he has pride of place? (This is something much more evident in the so-called ‘Western order’ of the Gospels, where the two Apostle-Evangelists are placed first and second respectively: Matthew-John-Luke-Mark.)
 
For the record, I’ve said this once and I’ll say it again: I think that the main problem with most studies and analyses of the Synoptic Problem today is instead of teaching you the problem, they refract all the data through a preferred solution (which is almost always invariably the Two-source hypothesis, aka Q theory), so you would get taught the answer first even before you know what the problem actually is. That’s a bad teaching method if you ask me.
 
Charlotte408 said:
Hi everyone, so I’m reading Matthew for RCIA, and … at the begginning, there’s these footnotes that say-

‘The unknown author, we’ll call Matthew, for the sake of convenience’ and then something about a ‘source Q’…

I don’t really understand this. Are they saying that they don’t really know who wrote Matthew, and that most of it seems to come from Mark, mixed with an outside source?

BTW - I am LOVING this Catholic bible. I’ve read most of the bible before, but, I’m seeing things or reading them in a way that I can tell I’ve haven’t really gotten most of what it’s trying to say. The structure, footnotes, all kinds of awesome. 😃
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Ignore “Q”. There is no Q and there is no evidence to support Q. It is a baseless speculation plucked out of the air.
 
VicTorDominican said:
*] What Bible are you using? Some Catholic study-bible?
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Thank you 🙂 That was a very satisfying answer.

I suppose it is. It’s the New American Bible ((for Catholics)) from American Bible Society. Father Kevin blessed and gave it to me in RCIA, along with a new version of the Catechism for the west…

On a side note I’m not too thrilled with that book. I’m saving up money to get a meaty, traditional cathectism.
 
PJD1987 said:
The early tradition of the Church has been that of Matthean Priority which St. Augustine wrote on, entirely eliminating the need for a Q source.
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I’ll have to add that to my now, very extensive ‘must read’ list :D:D This week on women of grace they’ve been talking about the book on the Church Fathers…I’ve been itching to get my hands on that one, too…or maybe just taking it one Saint at a time…studying them. There’s just SO much! 😃 It’s a lot to take in 🙂
 
When you guys say ‘Matthean Priority’ or ‘Markan Priority’ - do you mean which one was written first, and the other’s drawn from?

Like, Markan Priority would be the notion that Mark was written first…and that Matthew drew from Mark?
 
Charlotte408 said:
When you guys say ‘Matthean Priority’ or ‘Markan Priority’ - do you mean which one was written first, and the other’s drawn from?

Like, Markan Priority would be the notion that Mark was written first…and that Matthew drew from Mark?
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Yep. To be more exact, Markan priority means that Mark wrote first and that both Matthew and Luke drew upon Mark, while Matthean priority ascribes this to Matthew. As for ‘Lukan priority’, I don’t doubt that someone has already come up with that idea at some point, but that’s still in the minority. 😛

Some would also use the jargon ‘Markan posteriority’ for the notion that Mark wrote last (cf. the Griesbach hypothesis).
 
Try this link The Authors Of The Gospels:

churchinhistory.org/pages/booklets/authors-gospels-1.htm

Extract:

The Q Source

There are verses in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke which are identical. The Markans claim the authors copied from Marks Gospel. They further assert that Matthew and Luke had no knowledge of each other. So where did they obtain their many identical verses that were not present in Marks Gospel? Markans say they copied from a lost document, which they call Q from the German word Quelle (Source).

There is not the slightest historical evidence, or even a hint, that Q or its author ever existed. If Q had existed, it would have been the most precious scroll of Christianity during the first 50-70 years of the new religion. According to the Markans we owe the preservation of The Our Father and The Beatitudes to Q. Mark did not bother to record them. If Q had been the key document containing the sayings of Christ, it would have been treasured, copied and passed from hand to hand and read at Services.

Markan priorists want us to believe that the community that produced Q later lost it, although it was so important that Matthew and Luke, unknown to each other, made much use of it. Then the communities of Matthew and Luke also lost it. It is hard to believe that only two copies were made of Q and these just happened to be in the possession of the isolated communities in which Matthew and Luke lived and these communities lost them. If more copies were made for many communities, Markans have to explain how all these copies of this key Christian document were lost. Also, how did ‘Q’ disappear without leaving even a vague reference or echo in any piece of Christian or heretical literature?

Those who hold the Markan theory demand the most stringent proof for the historicity of the Gospels, for which we have much historical evidence. Yet they accept conjectures and theories about Q, based on further conjectures and theories for which there is no evidence at all. In reality Q was created in the 19th century, out of nothing, to fill a hole in the Markan priority theory.

Markans describe the period between the time of Christ and the writing of the Gospels as A long dark tunnel. Groups of dedicated Markans have spent years, at the expense of Universities, looking for Q and its author in this darkness. According to the historians and those who accept the Jerome or Clementine traditions, the period was short. The long is not a fact, but a further creation by Markans to bolster their theory. It is true that the Markans are working in a long dark tunnel. This is because they refuse to turn on the lights provided by the historians.

The Markans call the anonymous authors they have invented, by the names of actual people (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). This makes them sound familiar, real and comforting but, if the Markans are correct, more appropriate names would be Saints Tom, Dick, Harry and Janette, while not forgetting the venerable Q. I have no wish to be facetious, but it is necessary to be blunt in order to bring home an important point. The use of familiar names to describe unknown alleged authors, emotionally clouds a clear understanding of what Markan priorists wish us to believe. I am not surprised when non-Christians are unconvinced by the Markan way of explaining the truth of Christianity.

Irenaeus, Eusebius, Tertullian and others had travelled throughout the Roman Empire, and were well educated, so why did they have no knowledge of the alleged anonymous authors or Q? Why were all the ancient historians and theologians completely ignorant of the great saints who had, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, produced the greatest writings of mankind? Also, why did they all come to believe that they were written by the same four other authors?

When the Deists first put forward the assertion that we could not know of the life of Jesus from the Gospels, they were asserting that the Gospels had been written 2-300 years after the life of Christ. Few today try to uphold this assertion, so place Matthew and Luke at about 85 AD and John about 95-100. But these were periods when many eyewitnesses and the children of eyewitnesses were alive and active in the Church. Although many of the old Deist arguments have now been discredited they still influence modern Markan thinking.
 
Charlotte408 said:
Hi everyone, so I’m reading Matthew for RCIA, and … at the begginning, there’s these footnotes that say-

‘The unknown author, we’ll call Matthew, for the sake of convenience’ and then something about a ‘source Q’…

I don’t really understand this. Are they saying that they don’t really know who wrote Matthew, and that most of it seems to come from Mark, mixed with an outside source?

BTW - I am LOVING this Catholic bible. I’ve read most of the bible before, but, I’m seeing things or reading them in a way that I can tell I’ve haven’t really gotten most of what it’s trying to say. The structure, footnotes, all kinds of awesome. 😃
Click to expand...
You are reading the New American Bible. Some of the footnotes are problematic. The fact is none of the Gospels specifically state who the author is, so the tradition of the Church has held to the four evangelists. The editors of the NAB are not all that friendly toward tradition. The “Q” source is one tradition they love, but can not produce.
 
I’d also recommend Mark Goodacre’s The Case against Q website.

But to be sympathetic to those who hold the Two-source theory, one of the reasons why Q is so attractive probably is because, should it turn out to be true, then we have actually made a breakthrough: we have discovered a heretofore-unknown document, a phantom (proto-) gospel which never left any physical or literary evidence whatsoever just by looking at and scrutinizing the texts. Literary archaeology, one could call it.
 
Charlotte408 said:
Hi everyone, so I’m reading Matthew for RCIA, and … at the begginning, there’s these footnotes that say-

‘The unknown author, we’ll call Matthew, for the sake of convenience’ and then something about a ‘source Q’…

I don’t really understand this. Are they saying that they don’t really know who wrote Matthew, and that most of it seems to come from Mark, mixed with an outside source?

BTW - I am LOVING this Catholic bible. I’ve read most of the bible before, but, I’m seeing things or reading them in a way that I can tell I’ve haven’t really gotten most of what it’s trying to say. The structure, footnotes, all kinds of awesome. 😃
Click to expand...
There is a large and very vigorous community of scholars working in the field of Biblical Studies. Many of the most distinguished of these are Catholics, more particularly, Jesuits. Among my favourites are Father Daniel J. Harrington and the late Father Raymond Brown.
The main impetus for their ( frequently brilliant) activities is, from what I can gather, the Papal Encyclical DIVINO AFFLANTE SPIRITU, issued by His Holiness Pius XII in 1943.

Harrington wrote the volume in the Sacra Pagina commentary series on Matthew. Therein, on p. 8, he acknowledges that the author of Matthew is anonymous. This view he holds in common with the vast majority of modern Biblical scholars, Catholic or otherwise.

There is a very useful breakdown of Matthew at :

catholic-resources.org/Bible/Matthew-Themes.htm

a site hosted by Fr Felix Just, another of those brainy Jesuits.😃 In fact, I find this site to contain the clearest layout available of Matthew.

There are a number of sources involved in the making of Matthew. Read the scholarship, get involved with it! You will learn much and be enlightened.

Start with the Just website, and move on to the Introduction in Harrington. If you’re wanting to make a quick start, go to:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_problem

which will give you a good rundown of the current state of the knowledge in the field. Search thereafter through Google for scholarly sites on the Synoptic Problem (Dr Mark Goodacre runs a very highly regarded site).

Personally, I don’t have any problem with the theories regarding the formulation of the NT. I’m a historian by training, and have a good idea of how sources a created. The fact that each of the Gospels was shaped from a variety of sources is far more credible to me than the notion that one person sat down and simply wrote each of them from end to end, without any external (name removed by moderator)ut. Indeed, the fact that the later Gospels contain additional information not found in Mark suggests to me that their authors were provided with more information as it trickled in from other communities on whom Our Lord made an impact.

Anyway, look at the sources I have mentioned and bear in mind that Wikipedia is not 100% reliable as a scholarly resource! Go to websites run by scholars in Bible Studies and read Bible Commentaries, starting with Harrington.

Well, good luck! You are embarking on an exciting and challenging journey.😃

Peace be with you.
 
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