So this is the first lesson in the Matthew course. Today, we're going to be looking at some of the introductory material, an introduction to the Gospel of Matthew itself. And we'll be using somewhat of a question-and-answer format. And the questions are ones that different persons have sent in to me or people have asked me during Sunday school classes or youth Bible study classes on this material. And we'll just use that as the format today in going.
And one of the questions I've been asked a lot, and in some ways, it's a little bit embarrassing. And that is, I've said a lot of negative things about commentaries in the past. And so people ask me, he's like, " David, I thought you were against commentaries. So why did you compile one? " So this is the first lesson in the Matthew series. We're going to be going through the material that is in the historic faith commentary series on Matthew, volume one.
Today, what we're going to be doing is looking at the introductory material, an introduction to the commentary itself, and also to the book of Matthew. And the format we're going to be using is I'm going to be going through different questions that my readers have asked me about Matthew and about this commentary series. So we'll just be going down some of these questions. The first one, which is a very fair question. And I knew I'd get asked this when I decided to do the commentary. And that's this.
Okay, David, for years, you've been negative about commentaries, and now you turn around and you compile a commentary yourself. So isn't that being a bit inconsistent? And that's a very fair question. I'm glad people have asked me that and that I have a chance to explain on that. My negativity would probably go back at least 40 years if not before. I remember doing a Sunday school class. This was back when Deborah and I were attending an evangelical church.
And we did, or I'm sorry, I did this course on what the New Testament teaches on salvation. And what we decided to do or how I presented it was every week we were going to go through a different book of the New Testament. And the homework was for the people to read that book during the week and list every single verse that pertains to salvation or at least arguably might pertain to salvation. And then let's look at all those verses and let's see if we can see if there's a consensus of what these verses are saying.
And we're going to do that beginning with Matthew. We're going to go all the way through to the Book of Revelation. And at the end, hopefully as a class, we can come to some conclusions. In other words, it's just going to be an open session of what does the Bible itself say? Well, this is what happened as we got into it. There were all of these verses that were pretty clear that our obedience plays a role in our salvation, that we do have to obey Jesus ' commandments.
Not that we earn our salvation somehow, but that this is a requirement of the gift of salvation that God is giving us. It's a conditional gift, in other words. But I kept running into this during the session. We would have this verse. You know Someone would say, " Okay. Well, I noticed in Romans it says this or in Matthew or whatever. " And it would be something that would clearly show obedience is necessary. And then someone would say they were sitting there with the Ryrie Study Bible.
Remember, this was an evangelical church. And they'd say, " Well, okay, the note here at the bottom of my study Bible, now it says Paul didn't mean blah, blah, blah, blah. What he actually meant was such and such. " In other words, let's not pay attention to what the Scripture is actually saying. The Study Bible overrules the words of Scripture.
And during that session, which I think was about six months long that we had that series on what the New Testament teaches on salvation, that I definitely became very much an enemy of study Bibles. I saw that instead of God's Word being able to speak to people, people put more reliance on the notes at the bottom of the Study Bible. Well, then I noticed the same thing with commentaries. Up to that point, I was a person who read commentaries all the time.
In fact, most of my reading outside of the Bible, most of my Christian reading, was of Christian reference works, commentaries and scholarly works, things like that. And I had assumed that the information in commentaries were all based on primary sources. In other words, they would say, " Well, now how things were in Jesus ' time when Jesus said such and such, " Okay, what the Jews did, their practice was this and that. " Or, " Well, in the Corinthian congregation, now this is how things were.
This is what church was like, and this was the background of what he was saying. " And I was assuming we had all of these writings from the first century that gave all of these insights that were in the commentaries. So when I decided I was going to read all of these primary sources for myself, I wanted to see all of this firsthand. Well, right away, I discovered, " Wait a minute. We don't have any of this. " What we have as far as Christian writings starts with the Ante-Nicene fathers we have.
The earliest work, the Didache, maybe was written during the first century. If so, it's the only one we have outside of the New Testament, the only Christian writing that may go back as early as the late first century. And then we have Josephus and Philo and a few things like that. But that's it. I mean, I soon realized that all of this stuff in commentaries was made up. The editor would pretend that he had all of this background information when, in fact, it was imaginary. It's not there.
And I soon notice that in most commentaries, there's no footnotes. Or if there are, there are very few. And if there is a footnote, it's usually to a secondary source. So yeah, they don't have anything to back up what they were saying. So yeah, I developed a very negative view of commentaries for that reason is because they were saying things that they had no historic background behind it. They were inventing things. And then I saw how this was influencing sermons. I would sit there in church and listen to sermons.
And now this would be in an Anabaptist church, and they would be spewing forth all of this explanation of Scripture that was just straight from Martin Luther, straight from evangelical seminaries. And it would be presented in a sermon. And this would be in an Anabaptist church, in a church that had rejected Reformation theology. And I realized it's because the speaker got his information from a commentary. And so he was just spewing that out.
He had no personal knowledge of whether this information was accurate or not. He was just relying on what he read in a commentary. So for years, I said, " Look, let's just quit reading commentaries. Just take the Bible and look at it. What does it say on its face value? " And I would have probably stuck with that position, but I realized the average Christian doesn't feel comfortable just getting up and taking the Bible by itself. Yeah, they want to see what insights do other people have.
So they're going to go to commentaries. And unfortunately, there are no commentaries that present the early Christian view of things, the historic faith. It's all mainly commentaries from evangelical writers. Now, recently, I don't know how many years this goes back. We do have the I think it's called the ancient Christian commentary series. And that has quotations from the patristic period, but it's nearly all fourth century and beyond.
Very few quotations from the pre-Nicene church, but it's definitely a big step ahead. But I don't think it's very popular because it's just quotations. And people like to have a lot of explanation, particularly explanations that resonate to a 21st-century mind, not what resonated to a fourth-century mind, let alone what resonated to a first or second-century mind. So seeing the reality, I am a practical person, and I saw there's no point in trying to argue, look, quit using study Bibles, quit using commentaries.
People are going to do it. So, okay, if you can't lick them, join them. I thought, I'd like to put a commentary out there. That's not David Bercot's ideas, but that would actually present what the early Christians understood Scripture to be saying, what the historic faith truly was. So that was the basis for beginning the commentary series. I was going to actually start off with just a study Bible with just notes at the bottom. But I spent like four years of research.
I totally reread the Ante-Nicene Fathers again, plus a lot of works that have been translated from the pre-Nicene Church that are not included in the Ante-Nicene Father set. So I read those, and I made tons of notes. I had about 10,000 pages of notes, and I couldn't figure out how to reduce those into a study Bible. So I thought, I think a commentary series is going to make more sense. So that's the story behind it. Yeah, it's not that I'm inconsistent.
It's that I'm realizing people do sense a need to find some authority, to find some explanations. They're going to go to commentaries. So since people are going to do that, then, yeah, it's important. Let's get the historic faith out there. And people can look up something and be able to say, truly, this is the historic faith. The next question I've been asked a lot, and this one surprised me. I thought, " Okay, if I'm going to do a commentary series, I guess there's two logical places to start.
I could start with Genesis and go from there. But I'm age 70, okay? I turned 70 this past April. So obviously, if I start in Genesis, I'm not going to get very far. I'm going to be just covering a lot of Old Testament books, which have a lot of value, but that's as far as I'm going to get in my lifetime. So it seemed to be a lot more sensible to start with the New Testament. And so to me, the logical place to start was with the Book of Matthew.
So it really surprised me that people said, " David, why did you start with Matthew? " A lot of them were wondering why I didn't start with Romans since that's the book that Luther has made so famous and so much of Reformation theology turns on the book of Romans. And if we're going to maintain a kingdom theology, well, people were wanting a response to what Luther says. How did the early Christians understand Romans? And so I'm actually going to go there next.
I've decided not to go in the strict order of the New Testament. And next, I am going to be going to Romans. But even knowing now how much interest there is in Romans, it's important to begin with Matthew, not just because it's the first book of the New Testament, it's because it is the book that contains more of Jesus ' teaching than any other book in the Bible. So if you want to know what Jesus taught, and as a Christian, that is what you want to know.
Before you get to Paul, you've got to have Jesus down cold what he taught. Forget about Paul for the moment. Start with Jesus. What did Jesus say about salvation? What did he say about any subject? Because he is our Lord. This is coming from the Son of God Himself. He also is the judge. He says all judgment had been delivered to him by his father. So the Father won't be doing any of the judging. It's going to be Jesus Christ Himself. So we will stand before Him on Judgment Day.
So it would seem like, logically, we want to know what does he say about salvation? What does he say about how he's going to judge us on Judgment Day? Let's make sure we understand that. And then when we go to Paul, we're going to read Paul through Jesus ' eyes. But see, what the evangelical church is, they turn it upside down. They start with Paul. Actually, they're starting with Martin Luther, but in their minds, they think they're starting with Paul. And then they read Jesus through Paul's eyes.
In other words, Paul is the chief theologian. And then it's a matter of, well, what did Jesus have to say in light of what Paul has already explained? And of course, we need to do it the other way around. What did Paul say in light of Jesus? And if Paul seems to be contradicting Jesus, then we're misreading Paul because Paul is not going to contradict his Lord.
And Jesus said, although there are many teachers, many masters, you have you know one Lord, and that's Jesus Himself, and you have one teacher, and that is Jesus. In other words, all teaching has to originate with Jesus, any teaching on the matter of salvation, anything dealing with God. Jesus is our teacher. We don't have a second teacher on that same level. So what did Jesus say?
Once we have that down, he is the master, then all of his apostles, everything they say is in light of what Jesus has already explained, not the other way around. So that's why we start with Matthew, because that's where we get the bulk of Jesus ' teaching. And as important, it is the only book in the New Testament that contains the Sermon on the Mount, which is the central piece of Jesus ' teachings. And the early Christians recognize this.
The Book of Matthew is their normative book to go to to explain anything about how a Christian should live, on salvation, on what happens in the end times, all of that. Matthew is their number one book. They quote it far, far more than they quote from the book of Romans. So one of my readers asked me, " Okay, David, you say that commentaries make a lot of things up. " Give us an example of what you're talking about. Okay.
I'll give one from the Matthew commentary that was a total surprise to me, actually, because I had heard this all of my life, and probably most of you have, that when you compare the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, they aren't the same. I mean, a lot of the names are the same, but quite a lot of them, particularly after Solomon, it's a different line of people. And so when we get down to the bottom of Luke's genealogy, he says that Joseph is the son of Eli, which is different from what Matthew says.
So anyone reading that, obviously, they're going to see a problem. Luke says something different than what Matthew says. Please explain that. Well, the explanation I heard since I was just a little boy was Luke is giving Mary's genealogy, and Matthew is giving Joseph's genealogy. Oh, okay. Well, that made total sense. Now, I never thought about the fact that Luke says that Joseph is the son of Eli. He doesn't say Mary is the son of Eli, but it was always explained, " Well, he really means Mary. " " Okay.
Well, you know I just accepted things as a boy, and then as an adult, you find that every commentary is saying this. " So you think, " Okay, I guess these people know something that I don't know. " And so I just accept that. It certainly made things easier. So I was very surprised to find that none of the early Christians say that. They don't even remotely suggest that. And of course, they're reading it, and it says that Joseph is the son of Eli. It doesn't say Mary.
If Luke is giving Mary's genealogy, why would he say that Joseph is Eli's son rather than saying Mary is his daughter? Well, one of the commentaries I'd looked at said, " Well, it was the Jewish custom in giving a woman's genealogy to put it in the name of her husband. " Oh, really? Okay. Well, show me an example of that. Well, there is no example. That's just totally bogus, totally made up because someone was trying to explain things.
And this is what I've seen over and over that commentators will literally just make something up at a scratch. And I know that's hard to believe. I mean, it took me a long time to realize that this is what they're doing and to believe it because I wouldn't have expected that of Christian scholars. I mean, I would have thought, " Well, no one would do that, just make up something, but oh, yes. That is precisely what they do.
" And you know if you've got a doctorate behind your name, no one is going to question you, particularly if you teach at a seminary somewhere, " Oh, well, you know Dr. So-and-so, " he says, " Oh, oh, okay. Well, if he says it, that must be the case. " So that's why in the historic faith commentary, what's particularly different about it is everything is based on primary sources.
And I think most of you know you've heard this enough in my books and in my messages, or you learned this in school, that a primary source is an original source that goes back close to the time in question. So if you want a primary source on early Christianity, on what life was like during New Testament times, well, then you go back to writings from the first century. And as I said, we don't have very many outside of the New Testament. And then you go to the second century and in that time period.
I mean, life didn't change very much during those centuries. Today, life has changed more in the last 30 years than it did in the 300 years after the time of Jesus. In fact, it's probably changed even more in the last 30 years than it did back then. I mean, life pretty well went on year after year, century after century. There were political changes and all of that. But the customs of people, marriage customs, customs of how you farmed, how you carried on commerce, that didn't change very much, which makes it nice.
If you're reading something from the second century, they lived the same way that people did in the first century. Nothing had changed other than you had different emperors and you had the Roman Empire persecuting Christians, which you had a little bit of that in the first century, not a lot. Other than that, there's not a lot of changes. So none of them read that and thought, " Well, this is a genealogy of Mary.
" They weren't sure exactly why there was a difference, but one of them gave the explanation and everyone agreed, " Yeah, that makes the most sense, " that because of the practice among the Jews of levirate marriage, that one person would have two different fathers he could be traced to. In other words, when a man died without leaving a male heir, then his brother was to take his wife as his own wife and have offspring through her.
And the offspring, particularly the sons, would be considered the son of the man who had died. So let's say somebody named John dies without an heir. He's got a brother named Thomas. Okay. His wife then becomes Thomas's wife. And then if she has a son from Thomas, well, that man has two fathers. Legally, he's the heir of John, but genealogically, physically, he's the heir of Thomas. So you could list either one.
And that's why in these lists of names, you have conflicting names because that person could go under either one. And so that's why Luke, he's tracing it through these levirate marriages this way, and Matthew is tracing it another way. So whether or not that's the correct explanation, that made the most sense to them. But none of them imagined that Luke would give a genealogy tracing it to Joseph, but, " Oh, he really meant Mary. " Well, if he really meant Mary, why wouldn't he say Mary?
Well, they said, " Well, because it was prejudice against following a woman's genealogy. " Well, then either don't follow it, or if you're going to break precedent, then say you're breaking precedent. But how does it help things to trace hers but then say this is Joseph and no one knows that it's really Mary. You haven't helped anything at all. So it's not a very logical explanation. It makes sense to a 21st century mind.
And that's what I'm trying to do in this commentary is to get us away from explanations that make sense to a 21st century person to explanations that made sense to someone living in the first, second, and third centuries. They looked at things very differently. Today, like when someone is tracing their genealogy, well, they trace it through their mother and they trace it through their father. I mean, it's normal to us. You trace it through both your mother and your father. That's not how it was done in Bible times.
You don't have any example in the Old Testament of someone's genealogy being traced through their mother. Now, women are often listed in genealogies. Don't misunderstand me. It'll give the name of the Father, and it'll say through whichever wife that was. So there was no prejudice that, " Oh, we can't list a woman's name in the genealogy. " You'll see that all through Chronicles and Genesis and that sort of thing. But it was traced through the fathers. So yeah, there's no change in that.
It's just that, yeah, Joseph could be considered the son of Eli, or he could be considered the son of his natural father. You know One was the father through levirate marriage. One was the natural father. That was the explanation they give. That's the explanation that made sense to an ancient mind.
So that's an example of commentators just making something up, number one, and also giving an explanation that, " Oh, that makes sense to us living in the 21st century, but made no sense to people living back then in ancient times. " Another one that I've given, it doesn't, of course, appear in the book of Matthew, but it's one I've given before of how commentators just totally make things up, again, to fit what somebody in the 20th or 21st century wants to hear.
And that is in 1 Corinthians 11 where it talks about the head covering, which in the 19th century, women started getting away from. When you look at portraits of women in the 1700s, normally, they're wearing a head covering, particularly if it's a painting and you have just a regular person, a peasant person in it, the woman always has her head covered. Now, sometimes when it's a picture of royalty, it's a portrait, they will not have the covering on. But quite often, they do. It varies in that regard.
In the 19th century, you just see more and more paintings of women without their heads being covered. So back in the 19th century, commentators started making things up about Corinth. Of course, Paul's instructions were not something dealing with Corinth. He brings it up because the Corinthians were not following what all of the other churches were following, that some of their women were not covering their heads. And so Paul rebukes them because of that.
He's not making up a rule for the women in Corinth versus the women in Rome. He's talking about, " Hey, you in Corinth, you're departing from the traditions. You're not following what the rest of the church is doing. " So the teaching on the head covering has nothing to do with Corinth. But anyway, commentators started making this up that, " Oh, this is only instruction to the women in Corinth. " Well, why those women?
Well, they said, " Oh, because there were so many prostitutes in Corinth that if you went out in the streets and you did not have a head covering on, people assumed you were a prostitute. " Well, where did they get that? I mean, there is no ancient writing that says anything about that. Totally made up. Now, at one point in my life, I would have believed it because I assumed no one would put something in a commentary if it was just an invention. But yeah, I learned no, they will totally invent things.
So they made that up that, okay, that was just for those women in Corinth. It was just for that time period that, " Oh, if a woman didn't have her head covering, she was mistaken for a prostitute. " Well, wow, if you read the ancient Roman pagan writers and if you just look at pictures, there are a lot of pictures of Roman women in various kinds of scenarios. Normally, they don't have their heads covered.
Occasionally, they will, but not like a Christian covering, but they'll have some kind of fancy veil or something like that. But there was nothing in Roman society that women covered their heads unless they wanted to be viewed as a prostitute. That's totally made up. And again, that's one example. I could spend hours going through commentaries, things that they say that, no, there's no basis for it.
In fact, most of the time, when they're giving you " background information, " it is made up because they don't quote any primary source. They have no primary source. They either totally made it up themselves, or they read it in somebody else's commentary, and they're just quoting what that person said. I mentioned earlier that one of the reasons I'm starting with Matthew is because it's the first book of the New Testament. Now, there's a reason why it's the first book of the New Testament.
It's because the early Christians state that Matthew was the first gospel written. And because they recognized that Jesus ' teaching was the predominant teaching of the Christian faith, they logically put the four gospels, and they called them the gospels. That was their term. The books that contain the life and teaching of Jesus, they put them at the beginning.
Once they formed the New Testament into a book form, they made the decision that those four books need to go first, and they put the gospels in the order in which they were written, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and then John. I'm going to just read to you a quote. This is from Irenaeus. It would have been written about the year 170. So we're talking about 70 years after John died.
He said, " Matthew issued a written gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, " which could have been the Hebrew dialect or it could have been Aramaic, which is what most Jews would have spoken, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and laying the foundations of the church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also handed down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke, also the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the gospel preached by him.
Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, published a gospel himself during his residence at Ephesus in Asia. Now, we have the witness of Irenaeus. We also have Tertullian, we have Clement of Alexandria, we have Eusebius, we have Origen, a number of independent early Christian witnesses who all testify that Matthew was the first gospel written. And that of Irenaeus is particularly important because he was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a personal disciple of the apostle John.
That doesn't mean that everything Irenaeus says necessarily came straight from John or even straight from Polycarp. But there's a good likelihood, like on that subject, he obviously got that information somewhere. It wasn't from his personal knowledge. So more than likely, that would have come from Polycarp. And of course, Polycarp would have received it from John. Or at the end of the first century, when Polycarp lived, that may have been common knowledge among all of the Christians of the first century.
So today, I've been asked, " Well, why do you say that Matthew was the first gospel written? Almost every reference book you go to says that Mark was the first gospel written. " Well, the reason, of course, as I said, is because that's the early Christian witness. It's the uniform witness. In fact, it is so much definitely a part of the historic faith that every Bible we have, that is the Bibles that were made into book form, which go back very, very early.
Everyone we have, it doesn't matter if it's the Byzantine text, if it's the Alexandrian, if it's Caesarean, it doesn't matter. Western text, they always have the same order of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Now, the rest of the Bible sometimes is not in the same order that we have in our present-day Bibles, but those four are always the same. So that means it was the understanding of the whole church that that was the order of those four books. And it's the historic faith handed down.
And no one questioned it until the late 1700s. And you know when I was working on the Matthew commentary, I thought, " Well, I need to research that out. " Obviously, I'm going to stick with what the early Christians had to say, but I'm curious, what is there evidence that Mark was written first? I assume that, okay, there must be something pretty big that raises a question about the priority of Matthew.
Well, when I started digging into it, I found, first of all, the ones who first questioned it were people who didn't even believe in the inspiration of the Scripture. So these weren't people studying the Bible because they were looking for truth. They're trying to undermine the Scriptures. And so one of their first things is they didn't believe the apostles wrote the gospels. Of course, only Matthew and John were apostles, but Mark and Luke were associates of apostles.
But yeah, they're just trying to make it that who knows who made it up. But they didn't believe the apostle Matthew wrote the book of Matthew. So it was important to undermine all of that because you're trying to take away the authority of Scripture. And these were all liberal Lutheran German theologians. This was all in Germany for about a century that they were attacking all of this. And again, these were people who did not believe in the inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture.
Well, then, finally, in the early 1900s, this started getting adopted by English-speaking theologians. And surprisingly, even you'll see fairly conservative evangelicals backing this up. Well, I say surprising. In some ways, it's not surprising because what I see among scholars, it's a herd mentality. It's follow the leader. Once it becomes accepted, this is the scholarly view, then everyone is afraid to say something different. It doesn't matter how weak the grounds are on believing something.
If that's, quote, " the scholarly view, " well, then everyone wants to follow in line because they don't want to be viewed as being ignorant or dumb or something like that. So I looked at, " Okay. This man's name was B.H. Streeter who first brought this German theology about Mark being the first gospel written into the English churches. " And he gives these proofs. And I'm waiting, " Okay, this is going to be something really, really deep. " And I'm not going to go into all of this.
It's in the appendix in the commentary. I really encourage you to read it. If it's a question on your mind, if it's not a question or you don't ever deal with it, then you can ignore it is why I put it in the back in the appendix. I'm going to just read you his first proof. He says, " Matthew reproduces 90% of the subject matter of Mark in nearly identical language with that of Mark, Luke does the same for rather more than half of Mark.
" Well, if you know anything about fallacies, the logical fallacies and how to spot them in argumentation, it's like, well, this is a textbook example. It's known as begging the question. In other words, his premise is Mark was the first one written. Okay. So what's your evidence for that? Well, Matthew, he says, reproduces 90% of what's in Mark. But of course, that's your premise, is that Matthew copied Mark. But what's your evidence? You haven't given any evidence.
All you've said is that 90% of the material in Mark is also in Matthew. Well, that might suggest that one of them copied from the other, but it in no way suggests that Matthew copied from Mark. I mean, let's just say you have two school students, one named Matthew and one named Mark. These are just two teenagers. And the teacher gets their exams, and he notices it's an essay exam that 90% of what the student Mark has on his paper is what's in Matthew's paper.
Well, that might suggest there's been some copying, but it doesn't suggest, well, who copied who? I mean, it'd be pretty silly for a teacher to say, " Well, all right. That proves Matthew copied from Mark. " Particularly, if the teacher then looked at Matthew's paper in more detail and he realized, " Well, wait a minute. Half of what's on Matthew's paper isn't on Mark's, but nearly everything, 90% of what's on Mark's comes from Matthew or is in Matthew. Not necessarily comes from, but it's in Matthew.
" Well, I think almost any reasonable person would say, " Well, obviously then, or evidently, Mark copied from Matthew. " Because Matthew has a lot of stuff on his paper that's not on Mark's paper, but almost everything on Mark's paper is in Matthew's. So it takes an inverted sense of logic that, okay, 90% of the Gospel of Mark is in the Gospel of Matthew, but then Matthew has a whole bunch of stuff that's not in Mark. And to suggest then, well, then Matthew copied Mark?
I mean, logically, you would think the other way around. Of course, the early Christians said neither one copied from the other. It's two independent sources, but both sources were apostles of Jesus, so they got it firsthand. So you would expect that they would be saying pretty much the same thing because they were there together.
So because of inventing this thing, well, Mark was first, and yet you have all of this material in Matthew that's not in Mark, well, then these German theologians had to come up with this myth of Q. And you maybe have heard about Q if you do any reading and different reference works. And Q then is supposed to be a source of where Matthew got the rest of his stuff. It makes me think of the old adage that once we start weaving lies, how complicated they eventually become.
In other words, once you leave the historic faith and you try to invert it and say, " Well, Matthew got his material from Mark, and yet Matthew has all of this other material that's not in Mark, then you have to invent this Q. " " Oh, well, then there was another source. Well, what was that? " " Well, we don't know yet, but we know there's a Q out there and maybe someday we will find it. " Well, isn't it just a lot easier to believe what the early Christians have to say?
And instead of having to invent all of these tall tales and again, all of his evidences are along that line. You haven't proven anything. You've started off with the conclusion that Matthew copied Mark, and then you just keep repeating the same thing in other forms. Or you come up with absurd things like, " Well, Mark is more primitive, and so it must have come first. " And then Matthew is a little bit more polished, okay? So give an example.
Well, an example of being more primitive is Mark has more Aramaic words than Matthew does. And supposedly, Aramaic would mean you're closer to the time of Jesus, although, of course, Greek was spoken in that time as well, so it doesn't really prove anything. Well, I looked at this and I thought, " Okay, that's interesting. I'm curious how much more. " Well, what I found was there's a total of eight words in Mark that are Aramaic words. And there's a total of five in Matthew that are Aramaic.
It's like, " Oh, come on. You can't be serious. " That proves that Mark was written first because he has eight words and Matthew only has five. I mean, this is really, really silly things. So don't be wowed because somebody's got this you know big doctorate after name and all of that. It may mean something if his arguments are sound.
But too often, people who have the credentials, the academic credentials, they get very lazy, and they rely on those to wow people that people aren't going to really look at their reasoning in great detail. So that's why I have no hesitation to say Matthew was written first. This is clearly the faith that was once for all handed down. And the people challenging it, their motivation is to challenge the authenticity of Scripture.
And of course, not only throughout Scripture, but also throughout the testimony of the early Christians. Someone once asked me, " Well, how do we even know that Matthew wrote the gospel of Matthew? " Because, of course, the liberal theologians would say he didn't, that that's just you know fiction.
And this is something that's really important to Bible-believing Christians, evangelicals, Church of Christ, people like that, conservative Christians who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, they often will tell me, " Well, David, we don't need the early Christians. We just have the Scripture. " Well, yeah. Obviously, the Scripture is our source of information. The early Christians are only our best commentary to give us background information and all of that.
Obviously, we can follow Jesus Christ, and we would do better if we just read the Bible without any commentaries, period. But we've already discussed that, that people are going to rely on commentaries. And so, yeah, the early Christians can give us the best background information and also the best information on the Greek language that was spoken, how they understood it, because it was their natural language. It's what they grew up with, what they spoke day-to-day.
They didn't go to school and study it nearly 2,000 years later when it was no longer the spoken language. I'm talking about Koine Greek or New Testament Greek. But something people don't realize is when you say, " Well, I don't want anything other than just the Bible. " Well, then we would have to say we have four anonymous gospels because well, our Bibles, you'll see at the top, it'll say you know the gospel according to Matthew. Well, that's something that copyists wrote on the manuscript.
It's not in the text of Matthew. Matthew never identifies himself as the author, nor does Mark, nor does Luke. And actually, John doesn't either. That we are totally dependent on the early Christians to know who wrote those gospels. We accept their testimony on who wrote them. We accept it without question as Bible-believing Christians. But then we don't want to accept anything else that they have to say. Well, I'll take that back. We accept the books of the canon.
I mean, we look at the 27 books we have in the New Testament canon. That was compiled by the early Christians. The apostles didn't hand down 27 books, " Okay, this is the New Testament. " There were all kinds of books floating around and certainly all kinds of gospels, a lot of spurious gospels floating around, more fake ones than there were genuine ones. And it was the early Christians who had to sort through and decide, " This is authentic, this one isn't, " that sort of thing.
So we are totally dependent on them for our canon and for so many things like that. So yeah, that's how we know because we have the uniform testimony of the early Christians. And so, like I say, the liberals want to throw out not just the scriptures, but also the testimony of the Christians in the first centuries after the New Testament, because their testimony does so much to guide us into what is the historic faith. All right.
We're going to look at one last question, and that is, do we know anything about the apostle Matthew, who wrote the book of Matthew? Well, all we know about him is from the Gospels, and particularly the Gospel of Matthew tells us a bit how he lived in Capernaum. He had a tax collecting business there. And he was one of the early converts of Jesus. He was in his tax office when Jesus went by and invited him to become his follower.
And he immediately dropped everything, his business and everything, and followed Jesus, and never turned back. We know he's a very humble man because when he lists the 12 apostles, he puts after his name, Matthew the tax collector. And the name or term tax collector in those days was oh, it was a black mark. It would be like saying a prostitute or a thug, whatever, that normally people would want to hide that.
But Matthew advertises it to show the power of Jesus Christ to transform people that he once had been this despicable person, a tax collector, and now he was an upright, godly man following Jesus Christ. So we know about the change in him, we know his background, and we can see his humility that instead of trying to hide this, he actually advertises it.
Whereas the other apostles, out of respect for him, when they list the apostles, they don't put tax collector after Matthew because they have brotherly concern for him and they don't want to advertise it. But like I say, Matthew felt free to advertise it about himself. Now, there's a lot of myth. And we were talking earlier about the myths that we see in commentaries.
And one of the common ones again, I heard this when I was a little boy, and I've heard it all my life ever since, that the reason the Jews didn't like the tax collectors, the reason why that was considered such a bad thing is because they were viewed as collaborators with the Romans. And so they were viewed as traitors to the Jewish cause. And I accepted that. That made logical sense. But then when I was reading the early Christians, I noticed none of them say that.
Even more importantly, when I was reading Josephus and Philo, who were first-century Jewish writers, they talk about tax collectors, but neither of them say anything about them being traitors. And the reason why is because the tax collectors normally did not work directly for the Roman government or even necessarily indirectly. The Roman government, the tax system normally worked out that the emperor would farm out the right to collect taxes to different people. Now, sometimes it was given as a gift.
Like Herod was given the right to collect taxes there in Judea. There was a poll tax, a head tax that went directly to Rome, but that was a different thing. But the general taxes like on your property and all that, that came from Herod and that sort of thing. But that would have been in, say, Judea. In other regions, it would be someone else who had the power to collect taxes. And often, people had to bid for it. In other words, the emperor would say, " Okay, I'm opening up Syria.
Whoever wants to collect taxes in Syria, how much will you give me for the right to do that? " And people would bid. And I believe it's Josephus. He gives a long description of an example of that, of how the different ones bid. And then someone came forward and said, " Okay, there's a collusion there. They're holding this down too low. I'll bid twice as much as what they're bidding. " And he bid that much. And so then he would pay the emperor or the king wherever it happened to be.
He would pay that person for the right to collect taxes. So the emperor got his money up front. And whatever that person collected was his own money. He had already paid for the right. So he wasn't working for the Roman government. He was working for himself. Well, then he would farm that out to other people.
So he would have a bunch of little tax collectors, and they would either work on a salary basis or a salary plus commission, or maybe they paid for the right to collect in this particular city or something like that. So no, they were not seen as Roman collaborators because they weren't working for the Roman government, and the money paid to them didn't go to the Roman government either. The reason they were viewed so poorly is because they were mean, vicious people.
I mean, just think of somebody that would come to your mind as just a thug or a mafia type person or something like that. If there's an image that comes up in your mind, well, think of that person when you think of Matthew. Okay? In my mind, I know most of my life, I thought of this maybe educated person who was like an accountant type or something like that. I mean, I'm sure he was very careful with his figures and things. But yeah, get that image out of your mind.
Think of, like I say, a pretty mean, despicable, sly, vicious kind of person. And you'll have an idea of what Matthew would have been like before his conversion. I'm going to read to you a description from Philo. If you're not familiar with Philo, he was a Jewish writer. He lived in Alexandria, was a contemporary of Jesus Christ, but their lives never crossed. From his writings, it doesn't appear that he ever even heard of Christianity.
He was a very devout Jew, and he was a very respected Jew in the community in Alexandria. And he says this about tax collectors. He said, " Tax collectors are the most pitiless of men. Persons full of every kind of inhumanity. " And then he went on to explain how they were given such a free license. You know Once they got the right to collect taxes, then, wow, they were given free license to do whatever it took to get their money. And yeah, they could kind of decide how much they wanted to extract from you.
He continues. He says, " They practice the harshest measures they can imagine, having no notion of gentleness or even humanity, not even in their dreams. Therefore, they throw everything into disorder and confusion for they exact their extortions not only on the possessions of the citizens, but also on their very persons. They do this with insults, violence, and the invention of new and unprecedented tortures.
So I mean, they had the right not like just the IRS who can seize your assets, but yeah, they could go up, insult you, call you everything they wanted to. They could beat you up. They could drag you off into some private dungeon and torture you like, " Okay, you must have some money hidden somewhere. You tell us where it is, " you know and that sort of thing.
Philo even goes on to describe if you died before the tax collector got everything he wanted, then often he'd come in right there where you know they were having a wake for the person and grab the body and then hold it hostage and maybe do things you know to defile it, beat it with sticks, hang it up upside down, just you know whatever would desecrate it until the relatives handed over money and then the tax collector would release the body.
So this is a kind of vile person you're talking about why Jesus talks about prostitutes and tax collectors because tax collectors were just base, mean people, motivated by money, hated by everybody.