On Matthew writing first, a German scientist, Carsten Peter Thiede, director of the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research in Paderborn, with Matthew D’Ancona, is about to dash to pieces the Bultmann-built edifice of modernist exegesis.
Their book, *Eyewitness To Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin of the Gospel *(Doubleday, 1996), is about a small piece of papyrus held at Magdalen College, Oxford, which is the oldest fragment of St. Matthew’s Gospel in existence today.
The fragment contains disjointed segments of Matt. 26, but even more important than the writing style, which Thiede p(name removed by moderator)ointed to the time of Jesus’ life, is the use of KS, an abbreviated form of Kyrios, to refer to Jesus as Lord God — meaning that the ancient author believed that Jesus is divine.
Thiede, a papyrologist, furthermore concludes that St. Matthew’s Gospel must have been the first Gospel written. The implications of this are enormous. As Thiede and D’Ancona write in their book:
“Bultmann was wrong: The authors of the Gospel could hear far more than the faintest whisper of Jesus’ voice. Indeed, the first readers of St. Matthew may have heard the very words which the Nazarene preacher spoke during his ministry, may have listened to the parables when they were first delivered to the peasant crowd; may even have asked the wise man questions and waited respectfully for answers. The voice they heard was not a whisper but the passionate oratory of a real man of humble origins whose teaching would change the world.”
In 1982, Dom Bernard Orchard, O.S.B., alerted Catholics to the dangers of false Catholic scholarship, as English scholar John Beaumont has recalled in an article (“Kulturkampf and the Gospel”) in “Culture Wars”, Dec 1996:
"Since 1946, the majority of Catholic professors of the New Testament have given their support to the hypothesis of the priority of the Gospel of St. Mark, on grounds . . . of internal evidence alone.
“In practice, this has meant that they deny that the Apostle St. Matthew could have published his own Gospel; and this, in turn, amounts to saying that all the Church Fathers and early Councils erred on a matter of fact in saying St. Matthew wrote his own Gospel. In other words, the modern biblical ‘authorities’ are committed to denying that the Church has accurately transmitted the true tradition regarding the authorship of the Gospels.”
It is generally accepted by scholars that Luke and Matthew used the works of Mark and Q as sources for their gospels. Likewise, it is generally accepted that all three gospels were written originally in Greek, with the possibility of Aramaic as well. The authors of the book
Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus, in their research, show that those positions may not be right.
Bivin and Blizzard relate research by Dr. Robert L. Lindsey as to the history of the synoptic gospels. Within five years after the death of Jesus, a biographer (believed to be Matthew) recorded the story of Jesus in Hebrew. At once, there was a demand in the Greek-speaking churches for a translation of the biography into Greek. A very literal translation was made. A few years later, stories and parts of stories were removed and arranged topically. Shortly after, a Greek author tried to reconstruct the story. Luke used the latter two of these records as his sources. Mark used Luke’s work and the topically-arranged Greek as his sources. Matthew used Mark’s work and the topically-arranged Greek as his sources. The current gospel may have been written by someone other than the Matthew who is believed to have written the original biography.
Thus, if this is correct, the original writing was composed in Hebrew, not Greek, or even Aramaic. The authors, throughout their book, present evidence to support their position. Statistics are quoted to show that over 90% of the Bible, including Old Testament quotes in the New Testament, was written in Hebrew, with about 1% in Aramaic, and the rest in Greek. If Bivin and Blizzard are right, there needs to be a change in thinking about the origin of the synoptic gospels and the resultant translations. They quote from Eusebius in
Ecclesiastical History, giving evidence that it was known in his day that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew. Eusebius himself had quoted other writers, Papias (Book III, Chapter 39, page 127), Irenæus (Book V, Chapter 8, page 187), Origen (Book VI, Chapter 25, page 245), and Eusebius himself (Book III, Chapter 24, page 108).
tyndale.cam.ac.uk/scriptures/www.innvista.com/scriptures/compare/gospels.htm
and don’t really know the fullness of Our Lord, so simple things keep me busy…how does one truly meet the divine on the divine’s terms?