THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW, WITH NOTES CRITICAL AND PRACTICAL. BY THE REV. M. F. SADLER, RECTOR OF HONITON; PREBENDARY OF WELLS; AUTHOR OF "CHURCH DOCTRINE THE INTRODUCTION. 1. THE ORIGIN AND SOURCES OF THE FOUR GOSPELS. HE account of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which has come down to us in the Four Gospels, was not at the first given to the Church in a written form, but was taught orally by the preaching of the Apostles. Thus in the notice of the first Church-that which was founded in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost-it is said of those who belonged to it, that they "continued stedfastly in the Apostles' teaching," or "doctrine," though no Gospel was written till many years afterwards. Throughout the history of the planting of the Christian Church in various cities and countries, which we have in the Acts of the Holy Apostles-an account covering at least thirty years-we have no mention of any book from which the first Christians were taught respecting the Son of God. That book of the New Testament which almost all agree in considering the first part put into writing is the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, and throughout that Epistle it is taken for granted that the members of the local Church, for whose sake it was written, had been instructed in all needful truth, and only required to be reminded of what they had learnt. Throughout his Epistles, St. Paul never alludes to any book of the New Testament, except in one or two cases to some Epistle which he has previously written to some particular Church. So that the Church was not only in existence, but spread over a large part of the world, and taught in all the truth of Christ, before the first Gospel was composed, and had existed for seventy years before the writing of the last Gospel. But a still more remarkable fact, universally acknowledged, requires here to be stated: which is this, that the several books of b the New Testament were written, simply as occasion, sometimes a seemingly passing occasion, required. For instance, humanly speaking, the two Epistles to the Corinthians would not have been written if there had not been disorders and divisions in the Church at Corinth, and unless they had sent to the Apostle questions for his solution respecting matters upon which they were divided. Similarly the Epistle to the Galatians was written to guard the Church against Judaizing; and in that to the Romans even so all-important a matter as Justification is treated, to a great extent, with a view to a passing controversy respecting the standing of the Gentiles before God, as uncircumcised, and not under the Jewish law. So with the Epistle to the Colossians, the pastoral Epistles, and that to the Hebrews. Now these two considerations, (1) that the Church was instructed in all truth before the New Testament, or, indeed, any book of it, was written, and that the several books were written to remind them of what they knew; and (2) that particular local or temporary circumstances gave occasion to the writing of the books, applies to the Gospels equally with the Epistles, and is the only possible way of accounting for the form in which the record of the Life and Death of Jesus Christ appears in each one. Not one of them could possibly have been composed by the writer with the view of giving the Church, in after ages, as full an account of the Life of Christ as he was able to give from his own memory or from the sources of information available to him. To mention but one proof of this: the three Synoptics give no account whatever of any ministry, of either teaching or miracles, in the city of Jerusalem previous to our Lord's last visit, i.e., they give no account of the important miracles and discourses arising out of them, which we have in the first eleven chapters of St. John. One of the Evangelists gives us the reason for writing his Gospel. It was to give a certain Theophilus an orderly account of what had been delivered to the writer and his associates by those who "from the beginning had been eye-witnesses and ministers of the word: " so that Theophilus "might know the certainty of the things in which he had been catechized," of course orally. An universal consensus of the most ancient writers gives us a similar account of the circumstances by which St. Mark was led to write his Gospel. It was that the hearers of St. Peter, "not contented from his lips to receive the unwritten doctrine of the Gospel of God, persevered in every variety of entreaties to solicit Mark, as the companion of Peter, and whose Gospel we have, that he should leave them a monument in writing of the doctrine thus orally communicated . . . and thus become the means [of the production of] that history which is called the Gospel according to Mark." (Eusebius," Eccles. Hist." B. ii. ch. 15.) So universal is the consent of the earliest writers upon this, that if the account be not substantially true, no one single fact of ecclesiastical history is to be relied on. The Gospel of St. John would also, humanly speaking, never have been committed to writing, if the three first Synoptics had not been brought formally under his notice. "The three Gospels previously written having been distributed among all, and also handed to him, they say that he admitted them, giving his testimony to their truth; but that there was only wanting in the narrative the account of the things done by Christ, among the first of His deeds, and at the commencement of the Gospel. . . . For these reasons the Apostle John, it is said, being entreated to undertake it, wrote the account of the time not recorded by the former Evangelists, and the deeds done by our Saviour which they had passed by," &c. (Eusebius, Book iii. c. 24.) If we are to gather the style and substance of the preaching of St. John from his general Epistle, then it was founded wholly on his Gospel, being almost entirely built upon the words of Christ in the fourth Gospel. Again, we are told by Irenæus, who wrote within little more than a century of the publication of St. Luke's Gospel, that that Gospel bears the same relation to St. Paul's preaching as St. Mark's does to St. Peter's. His words respecting the Evangelists are: "Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke, also the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him." (Irenæus, "Against Heresies," B. iii. ch. 1.) Again, Tertullian, very little later, writes: "Whilst that which Mark published may be affirmed to be Peter's, whose interpreter Mark was. For even Luke's form of the Gospel was usually ascribed to Paul." (Tertullian, "Against Marcion," B. iv. ch. v.) With respect to the particular occasion which prompted St. Matthew to write his Gospel, only one short notice has come down to us, but that shows that his procedure in the matter of his preaching and writing was the same as that of his brother Apostles. For a long time he delivered his Gospel orally |