Year A, Focus on the Gospel According to Matthew

On December 2nd, we began Year A of our three-year lectionary cycle.  During Year A, our Gospel readings are primarily from the Gospel According to Matthew.  Following is some information about this Gospel, based on material from the New Interpreters Bible, the New Oxford Annotated Bible and the Oxford Study Bible:

As Christianity developed and spread around the Mediterranean in the first century, collections of stories and other material about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus developed and began to be used for teaching and liturgy.  Most biblical scholars agree that Mark was the first Gospel recorded, and that Mark was then used by the authors of Matthew and Luke as source material.  There seems to have been a second source, probably a record of Jesus' "sayings," also used by both Matthew and Luke.  All four Gospels are similar, and the first three are definitely related from a literary standpoint, meaning that they share sources.  But each also expresses a unique point of view, emphasizing particular aspects of the Jesus story.

Matthew is known as the "most Jewish" of the gospels, emphasizing Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy and heir to the Kingdom of David.  It begins with a genealogy that connects Jesus directly back to Abraham, through David, and uses a large number of quotes from Hebrew scripture.  the majority of scholars believe Matthew was written in Antioch (present day Syria), where the community was obviously in some tension with its surrounding dominant Jewish community.  It generally follows biographical order and contains five long speeches by Jesus, including "the Sermon on the Mount," which contains the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer.  Matthew is the only Gospel that uses the word "church" to describe its community and is clearly concerned about the ordering of church life.  

Although the Gospel bears the name of one of the apostles, it was probably written around 90 CE, long after Matthew himself would have died.  We do not have any original Greek manuscripts for any of the New Testament books.  The oldest preserved fragment of Matthew is from about 200 CE, and the oldest complete Greek text is from the fourth century.  One copy is in the British Museum in London and the other is in the Vatican Museum in Rome.