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Matthew’s Gospel and The Early Fathers

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An Orthodox icon of Saints Irenaeus of Lyons, Ambrose of Milan, Athanasius the Great, Martin the Merciful, Germanus, Gaudentius and Randoald.
An Orthodox icon of Saints Irenaeus of Lyons, Ambrose of Milan, Athanasius the Great, Martin the Merciful, Germanus, Gaudentius and Randoald.
By Daniel Agafonov
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Matthew’s Gospel and The Early Fathers

Early Church Father on Who Wrote Matthew

Papias of Hierapolis

Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew dialect and each person interpreted them as best he could.1

Justin Martyr

For in the Memoirs [=Gospels] of the apostles and their successors it is written…2

Irenaeus of Lyons

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.3

Early Church Father on When Matthew Was Written

The Fathers do not give us exact dates. They claim that the Gospel was written while the apostle Matthew was still alive and “preaching”: so it would have been sometime after the resurrection of Jesus (ca. AD 33) and before the apostle Matthew’s death. Irenaeus gives us some extra information, claiming that the Gospel of Matthew was written “while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies , 3.1).

Footnotes

  1. Cited in Eusebius, Church History , 3.39.16. Author’s translation. ↩︎

  2. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho , 103.8. For the translation used here, see Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho , trans. Thomas B. Falls (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 157. ↩︎

  3. Cited in Eusebius, Church History , 5.8.2. Unless otherwise noted, translations of Eusebius are from Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History , 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926, 1932) (hereafter cited as LCL). ↩︎

Textual Criticism
Early Church Fathers Church History Gospel Origins
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