Saint Matthew, apostle, evangelist and martyr

Summary:

The Gospels were composed around the time the birth of the Church, after Pentecost, in the Jewish world of the 1st century. At that time, the Mesopotamian culture, the oldest in the world, dominated the region: it was in this culture that writing, trade and the first scientific knowledge were born. The language spoken in Israel at the time of Christ was the Aramaic of the Parthian Empire, the great trading language used throughout the East, from the shores of the Mediterranean to India, and on all the trade routes of Antiquity.Hebrew was only a liturgical language (a bit like Latin for us), and Greek was an international language, but mainly in the Mediterranean, as were Latin and Phoenician, although Alexander's conquests also made it known in the East.

Life in Israel at the time of Christ was structured around three levels of the Torah: daily domestic practice, including readings and prayers; practice in the synagogue, where people gathered especially on the Sabbath for prayer, reading and commentary on the Scriptures (the Torah, divided into 52 parts, allows continuous reading throughout the Sabbaths, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, incorporating all the Jewish liturgical festivals) and visits to the Temple, with the six feasts (holiday) celebrated there during the winter cycle, from October to June, with Rosh Hoshana, Yom Kippur, the Feast of Tents, the Dedication of the Temple, Passover (Pesach) and Pentecost (Shavuot), all of which are also linked to specific texts. The summer cycle, with no festivals, is more or less the equivalent of our "ordinary time". Each week, and for each festival, a section of the Torah and a text from the prophets are proclaimed. There is no other canonical Scripture than the Torah, the prophets and the psalms.

Christ's preaching is based on the liturgical life of Israel as it goes through the Torah.  Jesus positioned himself in relation to these texts of the Torah and the prophets read in the synagogues (Lk 4:15) and in the Temple. He commented on them and gave them a messianic development, which took place in connection with specific dates, places and significant events. For example, on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles (Jn 7:2), when Christ spoke in the Temple of "rivers of living water" that would flow from "within him" (Jn 7:37-38), it was a direct commentary on the texts of Zechariah (Zech 14:8) and Ezekiel (Ezek 47:1-12) that were read on that day. Or again, at the Synagogue of Nazareth, "according to his custom" Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah, and commented with a messianic development: "Today is fulfilled that passage of Scripture which you have just heard" (Lk 4:16-21).

After Jesus, the apostles preached the New Covenant in a Jewish context.All the protagonists were Israelites: the apostles, the disciples, the converts, the opponents, and they all went to the synagogue during the week and to the Temple for the festivals, taking part in the same services. The apostles were questioned in the supreme court, the Sanhedrin, where Peter and John gave legally valid testimony, and they also preached under Solomon's colonnade, in the Temple, or in private, orally, from master to disciple, following the example of Christ. They concentrated on this preaching, as "witnesses" (Acts 1:8) of everything they had seen and heard "from John's baptism to the day Jesus was taken up" (Acts 1:22). Depending on the liturgical season, they were naturally led to recall the corresponding teachings of Christ, and this is how an organic, oral catechesis was very quickly established, based on the readings from the Holy Scriptures of Israel, which remained the only "written" texts".

The apostles' teaching therefore naturally followed the pacing of the synagogue calendar, recalling every Sunday after the Sabbath the deeds and actions that Christ had performed in accordance with the Sabbatical readings. Recently, researchers have shown that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke correspond to the synagogue texts of the eight months of the winter cycle - the Gospel of Mark can, it seems, be matched to the texts of the four months of the summer cycle. This would suggest that the Synoptic Gospels were built up from the lectionaries of the early Church - John's Gospel, based on the Temple festivals, being a supplementary teaching, intended for listeners who were already initiated. Thus, just as Jesus taught the crowds in parables and explained everything in detail to his disciples (Mt 4:34), and Paul distinguishes between beginners who should be given "milk" and those who are more advanced, who can take "solid food" (1 Cor 3:1-2), the apostles did the same: a general public teaching, and a more in-depth teaching related to it (many have noted that there is clearly a division of accounts: the Synoptic Gospels do not, for example, speak of the resurrection of Lazarus, which was a major event, and the Gospel of John says nothing about the institution of the Eucharist, which is yet at the heart of the events of the Last Supper, reported by John in great detail. This shows that the two teachings are related).

Thus, according to the testimony of Saint Irenaeus , around 180, "Matthew published among the Hebrews, in their own language, a written form of the Gospel at the time when Peter and Paul were evangelising Rome and founding the Church" (Against Heresies III 1,1). Eusebius of Caesarea (265 - 340) confirms this in his Ecclesiastical History, adding that, of the apostles, "Matthew and John alone left records of the Lord's teachings. And tradition records that they came to write out of necessity" (EH 3,24,5), i.e. the apostles prioritised oral teaching, which was the norm, but the written word could be used in case of need (dispersion, departure on a mission, persecution, etc.). "Tradition records that they came to write out of necessity. Matthew preached first to the Hebrews. Since he also had to go to other nations, he wrote his Gospel in his mother tongue, making up for his absence by writing for those he had to leave. Whereas after this Luke and Mark published a Gospel in writing for the reasons we have already mentioned (they were moving away from their community), John, it is said, continued his preaching all the time without writing it down. Finally, he also wrote, for the following reason. Although the three Gospels written earlier had already been passed on to all (the faithful) and to him as well, he received them, it is said, bearing witness to their truth. But their writings lacked the only account of the things done by Christ in the early days and at the beginning of his preaching" (EH 3,24,8). Eusebius of Caesarea also reports that a certain Panthenes, "who went as far as India [...] found his coming anticipated by the Gospel of Matthew among certain natives of the country who knew Christ.  Bartholomew, one of the apostles, is said to have preached to these people and to have left them Matthew's book written in Hebrew letters, which they kept until the time we are speaking of" (EH 10,2) and there are several other comparable accounts.

Matthew's Gospel, which is addressed to the Jews, is therefore certainly the first Gospel to have been composed and distributed, as the Vatican's Biblical Commission taught as early as 1911, when pronouncing on questions related to this subject: "Is the opinion that Matthew preceded the other evangelists in his writing and that he composed the first Gospel in the mother tongue then used by the Jews of Palestine, to be considered sufficiently well-founded by tradition? The answer is 'yes' to both" (Denzinger n. 3562); and "with regard to the chronological order of the Gospels, is it permissible to depart from the opinion corroborated by the very ancient and constant testimony of Tradition, which attests that after Matthew, who was the first to compose his Gospel in his mother tongue, Mark wrote the second, and Luke the third. And should, on the other hand, the opinion that the second and third Gospels were composed before the Greek translation of the first Gospel be regarded as contrary to this view? The answer is no to both." The Commission also points out that the Gospel of Matthew "does not always follow chronological order" (Denzinger n. 3566), which is logical becauseit is based on a single liturgical year. As several Fathers of the Church have also noted, there is only one mention of Jesus "going up to Jerusalem for Easter", even though he went there every year during the three years of his public life. Matthew's is also, of course, the Gospel that is most addressed to a Jewish audience because, in the first years of his preaching, all the protagonists - apostles, disciples, opponents, teachers and listeners - were Jews. The apostles followed the command of Christ, who had asked them first of all to be his witnesses "in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria" before being his witnesses to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8).

The better understanding we have today of the process of composing, writing and publishing Matthew's Gospel gives us new arguments about the reliability and speed of the genesis of these texts. It is clear that every time a miracle or significant event occurred, the disciples and witnesses recounted it dozens of times: "Then he took five loaves and two fish etc." Anyone who has experienced this kind of transmission knows that, under these conditions, the stories become clearer and more fixed very quickly. This is even truer in an oral culture, such as that of the Jewish world after the Exile, which benefited from Mesopotamian techniques for composing and memorising texts. And Christ himself used all the attention, organisational skills and method of the Jewish people (cf. the whole of the Old Testament) to ensure that preaching was precise. Subsequently, the apostles repeated a hundred times all the deeds and actions of Jesus that they had witnessed, "from the beginning, when John baptized him, to the day he was taken up " (Acts 1:21-22), and all these teachings were therefore naturally and definitively fixed very early on, from the first years of preaching, in Jerusalem and Israel, in the 30s. At the beginning, it was a matter of commenting on the Scriptures throughout the liturgical year, and these accounts were only written and distributed in Gospel form later, according to needs and necessities, when persecutions and missions led the apostles to disperse and move away.

Matthew, for his part, was probably from the tribe of Levi and, according to tradition, went to preach on the incense route to Arabia and Ethiopia. At the time of Christ, the Jewish people numbered, according to estimates, between 4 and 8 million, roughly half of whom lived in Israel and half in a huge diaspora that was unique in the world, present in every region of the ancient world, from China to England, with particularly large communities in Rome, Egypt and Mesopotamia. It is estimated that the Jews represented between 5 and 10% of the Roman Empire, making them a large and influential community. Major trade routes crossed the ancient worldaround Israel, which occupied a central position on the "Silk Roads" in particular, from the Mediterranean to China, but also on the "Incense trade routes" to the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, and on the "tin route" to Spain, Western Europe and England. The Jews were the main organisers of this trade: they ran the trade from China to Spain with the help of their diaspora. Their ancient trade routes were highly organised and enabled the exchange and trade of spices, textiles, precious stones, precious metals, technology and the sharing of religious and philosophical ideas, and the apostles used these connections to spread the Gospel.

Finally, Matthew gave the ultimate testimony to Christ by his martyrdom, in 61, at Naddarer, in southern Egypt. According to the venerable tradition recorded in the Roman Martyrology, the Virtutes Apostolorum (6th century) and the Golden Legend (13th century), he was assisted in Ethiopia by the eunuch of Candace, the Queen of Ethiopia, who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:26-39). Two sorcerers, Zaroes and Arfaxar, told the king that they could not save his dying son Euphranor, but the eunuch brought Matthew to the court and the apostle managed to save the young prince. The king and his family converted, encouraging the Christianisation of the country. The next king, Hyrtaque, wanted to marry Iphigenia, a virgin consecrated to Christ, but Matthew refused. After 23 years on mission in Ethiopia, he died a martyr in Naddarer in 61, after the king had sent one of his soldiers to put the apostle to the sword. His body was transferred to Salerno, Italy, where a basilica bearing his name was built around his relics: today it is an important place of pilgrimage, and many miracles and healings have been recorded there. In 2014, Pope Francis ordered a scientific study of the relics to confirm their authenticity. The results of the study have not been made public, but Pope Francis has confirmed that the relics are indeed authentic.

Matthew was celebrated by Caravaggio, who, in his famous painting (see our illustration), makes it clear how surprising it is that Christ chose Matthew, the publican, to be one of his closest friends - one of the Twelve - and that is why the theme of mercy is so strong and present throughout Matthew's Gospel: "Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous but sinners" (cf. Mt 9:9-1).

Beyond reasons to believe:

Like all the Gospels, the Gospel of Matthew deserves to be read and meditated on, because the word of God speaks for itself. As Christ says, his sheep "recognise his voice" (Jn 10:26-27).

Going further:

The film Jesus of Nazareth by Franco Zeffirelli (1977), a magnificent retelling of the life of Christ based on the Gospel of Matthew.

More information:

• The full reading of the Gospel of Matthew (Audio)
• Biographical note on Saint Matthew according to the visionary Maria Valtorta, on François-Michel Debroise's extremely well-documented website.