Matthew's Time of Writing
Matthew's works were wrote between 90-100CE in Syria, probably written in the same time range as Luke, as they were unaware of each other's existence. The original works of Matthew were completely anonymous and it was not until about 150CE that the author "Matthew" was assigned to the writings. In traditional pseudepigraphic fashion the author was based on a historic character, in this case on "Mattai", who was a disciple of Yeishu ben Pandeira, who lived in Hashmonean times, predating the Jesus concept, but containing many similarities. (See this text by Hayyim ben Yehoshua for more on this.)
The first two chapters of Matthew, the virgin birth and the genealogy, were not contained in the first versions of Matthew's gospel.
Matthew's Sources
Matthew's gospel contains 92% of the text that appears in Mark! This is a very high percentage - almost a copy - but Matthew corrected many of Mark's blunders about the Jewish ways of life and proceeded, a few versions later, to add the chapters about the virgin birth. (See the text on Mark: Mark was not a Jew - he did not understand Jewish ways.)
Matthew also uses a source that historians call "Q" - a completely unidentified source who was supposedly an original disciple of Christ (or a friend of Paul), none of whose work has survived.
Matthew's fallacies.
Matthew staked his writing career on the fact that Jesus was a great man, divine and the Messiah. He set out in his writings to prove that Jesus was all of these things.
Matthew went through the Old Testament searching for any passage that he could apply as a prophecy of Jesus' divine nature. In many cases he found a text, and because he did not know Jesus, felt free to invent details in order to make the Old Testament text he was reading appear as a prophecy.
Here are some of the famous cases that can be used as proof of his untrustworthy tactics and furtive imagination:
The Prophecy of the Virgin Birth appears in Matthew 1:22-23. Matthew wrote this seventy years after Jesus Christ was born (35-40 years after he died). Up until that point no other text mentions Jesus' virgin birth. He quotes Isaiah 7:14 which was written 700 years before Jesus was born - thus claiming it was a sign, a prediction of the Messiah's virgin birth.
But there is a serious problem. Matthew states that, due to prophecy, it is true that Jesus was a male line descendant of King David, and presents a geneology at the beginning of his gospel tracing Jesus' lineage through Joseph. Matthew, apparently, like Luke and Paul and the rest of the early Christians, did not believe in a virgin birth. There are two theories that I see explain how this contradictory state of affairs occurred. (1) The first is that a Septuagint mistranslation of the word "virgin" instead of "young woman" caused the discrepancy. This means that the prophecy is not that someone called Immanuel will be born of a virgin, but merely that someone called Immanuel will be born. In the original context of the story, this makes a lot of sense. (2) The second theory is that Matthew, writing for a Roman gentile audience in Greek, included popular myths surrounding sons of gods, who in Roman mythology were frequently said to be born of virgins. In either case, it is clear that Matthew's prophecy of a virgin birth was a mistake, and modern Bible's actually include a footnote in Matthew pointing out that the virgin birth is probably a mistranslation. The two above theories are expanded upon henceforth:
The text in Matthew reads: "All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet: "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel" --which means, 'God with us.'".
"As it happens, the ancient Greek translators of the Septuagint and similar translations made an ancient error. They translated the Hebrew word "almah" into the Greek "parthenos", which usually means a "virgin." "Almah" appears 9 other times in the Hebrew Scriptures; in each case it means "young woman" - a female who might have been a virgin or might have been sexually active. When the Hebrew scriptures referred to a virgin (and they do over 50 times) they always used the Hebrew word "betulah." So, Isaiah was referring to a young woman becoming pregnant (a rather ordinary event) and not to a woman having conceived while still remaining a virgin (a miracle). During the Christian era, the passage has become so famous that many modern translators find it difficult to conform to the Hebrew original. Many duplicate the error of those ancient Greek translations.The story in Isaiah 7:14 is unrelated to the birth of Jesus. 6 It describes a siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians about 715 BCE. The child that was born to the young woman at the time was a sign from God that the siege would be lifted and that Jerusalem would continue as before"
"If the quote is examined in context, it is easy to see that the young woman of the prophecy was Isaiah's own wife or concubine, and it was the birth of her son, or the promise of it, that was being offered to King Ahaz as a sign that God would protect his kingdom from its enemies."Text from No Holy Night by M. R. Gates 1997
This means that the original text only prophecizes that "A young woman will be with child and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel". As pointed out above the Biblical text makes perfect sense in the context of the story, it was never meant to be taken out of context, nor mistranslated in part to read "of a virgin". This would explain why Matthew states that Joseph, of the line of David, was Jesus' father and that this fulfils the Old Testament requirement that the saviour would be born of the lineage of King David. It is only as a result of the early 6th century CE Septuagint mistranslation that we think Matthew believed simultaneously that Jesus was born of a virgin, and that Joseph was his father.
OCRT list several modern bibles that correctly translate the term as "young woman", and some that mistranslate it as "virgin", and some who cleverly avoid the problem by saying a "virgin will conceive", therefore leaving it unclear.
Other Christians and previous Christians did not believe in the virgin birth
Bullet points from Virgin Birth Summary - comprehensive breakdown from religioustolerance.org
"The apostle Paul makes no reference to the virginal conception by the mother of Jesus when speaking of Jesus' origins and divinity. His epistles were written during the 50's A.D. and predate all of the four gospels. Although Paul never met Jesus (who died about 30 A.D.), he personally did know James, the brother of Jesus. Yet despite this eye-witness link to Jesus, Paul apparently knows nothing of the virgin birth, for he states only that Jesus was "born of a woman" (Galatians 4:4) and was "descended from David, according to the flesh" (Romans 1:3), thereby implying a normal birth."
Thus it can be seen that nowhere in the Old Testament is a prophecy that the messiah will be born of a virgin. In fact, virgins nowhere give birth in the Old Testament. The following text explains why Matthew would have included and supported text on a virgin birth even if the original prophecy did not read as such.
Matthew would have been aware of all the Roman myths, being a Syrian. In Roman (pagan) myths there are many virgin births of great heroes and mythical characters, eg Herakles, Romulus and many others. For Matthew it would be unthinkable that the Messiah would not be born of a virgin along with these other great heroes. Matthew was writing for a gentile, Roman audience, in Greek, and he would have also known that his readers also would assume that Jesus, if at all divine, was born of a virgin.
In a fashion typical of Matthew worked, and of the way Roman mythology as a whole worked, Matthew included a virgin birth in Jesus' historical life in order to add credence to his story. He then looked through the Old Testament, and either in haste or dishonesty, appropriated some relevant-sounding text from Isaiah.
We think it is only a later Greek mistranslation that makes Matthew say "called Immanuel, born of a virgin", rather than "of a young woman". This saves Matthew from an accusation of deception, but no matter which of these two theories we accept, we see that there was never a virgin birth.
Many other myths, including more ancient Roman ones, had an event where all the male children were killed, and the famous Romulus and Remus story is (once again) a good, famous example. The story of Moses also contains a period of time when all Jewish male children are being killed by the King of the time, when Moses escapes in a basket pushed down a river by his mother. The princess who picked him out of the water called him Moses, which means "picked out".
Mark wrote that Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey. Luke and John both stuck to this. Matthew was in the habit of "correcting" Mark's errors and on this point of Jesus' riding into Jerusalem, Matthew felt he should have been riding on TWO donkeys at the same time.
On all three times Matthew mentions this part (Matthew 21:1-7) he says the same thing, so it was not a transcription error. Why does Matthew alter the text in such a bizarre way? It seems he misread Zechariah 9:9: "mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey". We have already seen from Matthew's misinterpretation of the difference between the Hebrew word "Almah" and "Betulah" that he has a poor understanding of Hebrew. This passage also was misunderstood by Matthew.
"In Hebrew an emphasis is expressed by the doubling of a word or a phrase, like "and David's enemies were dead, and yes, very dead," so the original phrase does not mean two animals at all (as is also clearly shown by Jewish comments on the passage)."From Jesus didn't exist (Site is now down).
Once again Matthew changed the meaning of the text to reflect what he thought it should say in order to make a prophecy come true, a conscious act of fraud in order to make the text fit his own personal opinion of the facts.
Matthew contributed some very unlikely events to the Biblical account of the crucifixion and resurrection. For example, the Guards on the Tomb, the empty Tomb, the Angel, the Earthquake and the 3 hours darkness at Jesus' death are all very likely to be wrong. These side-stories, although not essential to the idea of the resurrection, reinforce the feeling that Matthew was writing anything he could to make Jesus out to have existed, whether such things were true or not.
I quote at length from "2g. Was the Tomb Guarded?" by Richard Carrier. At this point in his essay on the Resurrection, Richard Carrier is casting doubt on Matthew's text on the crucifixion.
"Doesn't the fact that the tomb was guarded make escape unlikely, even if Jesus survived? Although one gospel accuses the Jews of making up the theft story, it is only that same gospel, after all, which mentions a guard on the tomb, and the authors have the same motive to make that up as the Jews would have had to make up the theft story: by inventing guards on the tomb the authors create a rhetorical means of putting the theft story into question, especially for the majority of converts who did not live in Palestine. And it is most suspicious that the other gospel accounts omit any mention of a guard, even when Mary visits the tomb (compare Matthew 28:1-15 with Mark 16:1-8, Luke 24:1-12, and John 20:1-9), and also do not mention the theft story--this claim is not even reported in Acts, where a lot of hostile Jewish attacks on the church are recorded, yet somehow this one fails to be mentioned. Neither Peter nor Paul mention either fact, either, even though their letters predate the gospels by decades. Worse, Matthew's account involves reporting privileged conversations between priests and Pilate, and then secret ones between priests and guards that no Christian could have known about (27.62-65, 28.11-15). This is always a very suspicious sign of fiction. Such a story could very easily be a Christian invention. They had the motive to make it up, to answer the objections of later skeptics (just like the Thomas story in John), and the story looks like an invention, because it narrates events that could not be known by the author.Matthew appears to have included, as part of Jesus' history, the same story that accompanies many other myths in history. That of the darkening of the sun when an important person dies. I now quote Kersey Graves' essay "The Aphanasia":How would this story develop? If a doubter had claimed that the Christians "could have" stolen the body, and someone overheard this charge and, in the manner of all rumours which get altered in transmission, thought that they heard the body was stolen and then accused the Christians of theft, the Christians could have responded that "the Jews said that, to thwart us" (as Matthew says, "this story is spread around among Jews to the present day," 28.15). This would be quite plausible, since the story does portray the Jews as having a motive to torpedo the cause. One can easily imagine the skeptics answering back that if the Jews really feared theft, they would have guarded the tomb. This skeptical charge would then inspire the addition of guards, which would also require a story of bribery to explain why there are no guards around who could vouch for the resurrection, as well as the invention of an earthquake and angelic intervention to explain why the guards would not interfere with Mary, since, now that he has placed guards on the scene, Matthew has to invent some bizarre reason for their cowering before a woman, a strange story appearing in no other accounts of Mary's visit to the tomb.
It seems, then, that a lie is getting larger and more implausible, in a desperate attempt to make it more plausible, a fate that has befallen many a tall story
[...]
An additional reason to reject Matthew's story is that it contradicts all other accounts and is illogical: if the tomb was sealed until the angel came and moved the stone before the women and the guards, how did Jesus leave the tomb undetected? Did he teleport? For he wasn't in the tomb: it was already empty. Even if he want to imagine that he did teleport, all the other Gospels record that the stone had already been moved when the women arrived (Mark 16:4, Luke 24:2, John 20:1). Thus, Matthew's account is contradicted three times, even by an earlier source (Mark), and does not make a lot of sense. That is further ground for rejecting it: for Matthew alone must have the angel open the tomb when the women are present in order to silence the guards that he alone has put there."
"2g. Was the Tomb Guarded?" by Richard Carrier
"MATTHEW tells us (xxvii. 31) that when Christ was crucified, there was darkness all over the land for three hours, and "the earth did quake, and the rocks were rent, and many of the saints came out of their graves."Here we have a series of events spoken of so strange, so unusual and so extraordinary that, had they occurred, they must have attracted the attention of the whole world -- especially the amazing scene of the sun's withdrawing his light and ceasing to shine, and thereby causing an almost total darkness near the middle of the day. And yet no writer of that age or country, or any other age or country, mentions the circumstance but Matthew. A phenomenon so terrible and so serious in its effects as literally to unhinge the planets and partially disorganize the universe must have excited the alarm and amazement of the whole world, and caused a serious disturbance in the affairs of nations. And yet strange, superlatively strange, not one of the numerous historians of that age makes the slightest allusion to such an astounding event.
"The Aphanasia, or Darkness at the Crucifixion" by Kersey Graves
I believe that Matthew included this story (just like he included many others) because he assumed that because Jesus was Christ that all the stories surrounding other Christs would be true of Jesus also. This would be a natural assumption, just like today we assume a PC is running Windows, Matthew assumed that Jesus' death, like Romulus and others, caused a darkening of the sun. The assumption is natural to someone who is relying on myth as the basis of their beliefs.
Graves continues to partially list major myths of the time that included such a darkening of the sun: The ancient pagan demigod Senerus, the Indian God Chrishna, the Egyptian Osiris, Prometheus, Romulus, even Caesar and Alexander the Great.
Links:
"The Aphanasia, or Darkness at the Crucifixion" by Kersey Graves [Offsite]
"The Crucifixion Facade" by Vexen Crabtree 2002 Sep 19
Notes:
By Vexen Crabtree 1999 Dec 22