SAINT MATTHEW, EVANGELIST; FEAST DAY 21 SEPTEMBER

SAINT MATTHEW, EVANGELIST

FEAST DAY 21 SEPTEMBER
Who is Saint Matthew?
He was a Jew from Galilee. He was a tax-collector, a profession despised by his fellow-Jews who saw it as collaboration with the occupying Roman force.
He was called by Our Lord to leave his life as a tax collector behind, (Matthew 9:9):
“And when Jesus passed on from thence, he saw a man sitting in the custom house, named Matthew and he saith to him: Follow me. And he arose and followed him.”
He was then chosen by Our Lord to be one of his inner circle of the twelve Apostles, (Matthew 10:1-4):
“And having called his twelve disciples together, he gave them power over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of diseases, and all manner of infirmities.
And the names of the twelve Apostles are these: The first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother.
James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the publican, and James, the son of Alpheus and Thaddeus.
Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.”
He was one of the witnesses to the Ascension of Our Lord and early Church fathers such as Irenaus (Against Heresies 3.1.1.) and Clement of Alexandria claim that after the Ascension, Matthew preached the Gospel in Judea, before going to other countries. He is venerated as a martyr and is the patron saint of bankers.
His is the earliest Gospel. Estimates as to the date of writing vary between 40 to 50 AD. The Greek manuscripts of Matthew’s Gospel, Papyrus 4 and 62, with attribution as to authorship, date from the 2nd century AD. Later copies, the Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, all of which bear attribution to Matthew, are dated from the 4th century;
• Brandt Pitre, “The Case for Jesus, the Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ” (2016), Image, at pp. 16-17, 84.
Recent historical revisionism has perpetrated an idea that authorship of the Gospels was anonymous and the attribution of authorship was of later date. The Wikipedia entry on St Matthew provides as follows:
“The Gospel of Matthew is anonymous: the author is not named within the text, and the superscription "according to Matthew" was added some time in the second century…. The tradition that the author was the disciple Matthew begins with the early Christian bishop Papias of Hierapolis (c. AD 60–163).… who is cited by the Church historian Eusebius (AD 260–340), as follows: "Matthew collected the oracles (logia: sayings of or about Jesus) in the Hebrew language … and each one interpreted … them as best he could."”
The Catholic faith has been the beneficiary of her tradition – in which the scripture, the Gospels as the Word of Christ, is firmly placed within a context of received knowledge, handed down through the generations of Popes and bishops, in which they are not viewed in isolation, to be interpreted in a vacuum, away from the history that informs it or the historical understanding of the times. Rather, in accordance with the tradition handed down through Jewish religious practice, the disciples of Christ memorized and repeated the words that pertained to the faith with great care, adding nothing to that which was divinely inspired and scrupulous in its accuracy. The information which was conveyed by them was sacred, by men whose faith was so profound that they all, with the exception of St John, died for their faith rather than renounce it. All of them could have, at any time, renounced faith in the risen Christ, and lived.
Thus, St Linus, the first Pope after St Peter, received, together with his bishops, the knowledge of St Peter himself.
The significance of the attestation of the authorship of St Matthew by the Christian Bishop Papias of Hieropolis cited above, is that he was a disciple of St John.*
St Irenaeus of Lyons also directly attested to the authorship of Matthew’s Gospel, as follows:
“Now Matthew published among the Hebrews a written gospel also in their own tongue while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and founding the Church.”
The significance of such testimony by St Irenaeus is that he said these words around 180 AD, and his authority as to the veracity of what he says is derived from the fact that he was a disciple of St Polycarp, who was the disciple of St John; Brandt Pitre, ibid., at pp. 40-41.
That is, the Church fathers were the receivers of wisdom and teaching from the mouths of the Apostles themselves. That is tradition.
Image: St Matthew and the Angel, Rembrandt,



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