II.

Authorship

Early Christian writers believed this book to be the earliest of the synoptic Gospels (hence its position at the beginning of the New Testament) and attributed it to Saint Matthew, one of the 12 apostles. They believed that he wrote the Gospel in Palestine, just prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70. Although this opinion is still held by some, most scholars consider the Gospel According to Mark the earliest Gospel. They believe, on the basis of both external and internal evidence, that the author of Matthew used Mark as one of his two major sources and a hypothetical collection of Jesus' sayings called Q (from Quelle, German for “source”) as the second. They doubt, moreover, that the apostle Matthew wrote the book. Whoever the actual author was, he is identified as a Jew partly because his Gospel contains numerous references to Jewish Scripture, law, and ways of life that presuppose the reader's familiarity with them, and partly because other evidence suggests that he wrote chiefly for Christians of Jewish origin. The place where the Gospel was written is not definitely known. Some authorities think it was Palestine; others favor another early Christian center, possibly the city of Antioch in Syria. The commonly accepted time of composition is sometime after 70, perhaps about 80.