Star Wars nerds have an argument about Han Solo, and whether he fired his gun first in the bar scene of “A New Hope.” There are t-shirts that say, “Han shot first.” I am here to tell you of a similar argument, one that has far greater importance and consequence for anyone that believes Jesus is God incarnate, also known as the Creator of the Universe. This one matters immensely because your spiritual life may depend on how you answer it, and the truth about this matters much in the founding of Christ’s Church. This question is about which Gospel was written first, and I am here to tell you:

Matthew shot first.

Matthew wrote the first Gospel.

He wrote it in Hebrew first before it was translated into Greek.

He wrote it before the year 70 A.D.

And it was Matthew the Apostle that wrote it, not some random Matthew from Accounting.

Why does any of this matter? Because for two centuries, people have been spending incredible amounts of ink to disprove this Tradition, because it undermines the Church.

According to Sacred Tradition, from Papias and Irenaeus, to Ignatius of Antioch, all the way to St. Jerome and St. Augustine, Matthew was known to be the first Gospel. This is documented in various writings from the Church fathers. The whole tradition of the Church said so for nearly two millennia. For a terrific read on this, check out Brant Pitre’s book The Case for Jesus which cuts through two hundred years of fog spewed from anti-Catholic scholarship and atheists. For anyone who attended college in the 1990s, brace yourself and be seated when reading this book. Much of what I learned in my freshman year of college turned out to be false, it’s just unfortunate that I can’t get a refund from Viterbo University for it. (Note: there’s a video series on formed.org of Pitre’s The Case for Jesus).

Matthew happens to be the Gospel with the most pro-Catholic references. But that is not the reason I believe it is important to believe that Matthew shot first. Not at all. Rather, it is the overwhelming evidence of history and testimony of the early church that indicates that Matthew, the apostle, wrote a Hebrew or Aramaic gospel first, and no one batted an eye about this claim until 19th century scholars decided that Matthew a.) didn’t write it all, and b.) wrote it much later, and c.) maybe didn’t even exist.

All of Christianity, for 1800 years, knew that the gospel of Matthew was written first, hence the ordering that we all learn as children: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Until the 19th century, in Germany’s “culture war” (Kulturkampf) against the Catholic Church, Matthew shot first. Then, magically, by textual criticism, in mostly Lutheran academic circles, suddenly Mark became the first Gospel.

You have to marvel at this sudden change, when you consider how much Catholics and other faithful talk about Jesus, and things related to Jesus, and anything that could possibly even relate to Jesus. People talk about Jesus and the Gospels like breathing air. But we are to assume that for 1800 years, no one had really thought about which Gospel was written first? And, stranger still, only when the Protestant era and Enlightenment humanism arrived did the topic finally come up?

I find it difficult to imagine that the early Church members, from bishops downward to the lowliest lay person, didn’t constantly discuss these things. Moreover, you have copies of Matthew scattered about the known world with “According to Matthew” written at the very top of the scrolls, indicating very clearly that the authorship was not in question. But suddenly in modern times, the question erupts: “Did Matthew really write Matthew?”

There is literally no copy of Matthew that does not have his name written at the top. Zero. The only question of authorship comes from those who do not want it to be written by an apostle and an eyewitness of Jesus’ life.

Further, there is not a single argument in the writings of the early Church that dispute that Matthew was written first. When scripture first started being read in liturgy, the Church would still have been almost entirely oral tradition. In other words, spreading the word of Jesus was not done by handing someone a Gideon’s Bible or leaving a pamphlet on the bathroom sink at the airport. No, the word, was all passed on by the spoken word, and through relationships. Anyone still remember relationships? This is hard to remember for us now, but relationships and human contact was a pre-Internet phenomenon when people got together and talked about things that really mattered to them instead of watching cat videos, sports, and porn by themselves.

In the early church, there was no printing press, and most people were illiterate. So if you wanted to learn about Christ, you had to talk about Christ with others, listen, repeat, retell, and revisit. No podcasts were available, no wordy blogs like this one. Yet clearly the copyists and the Church fathers knew that Matthew existed, wrote the first Gospel, and wrote it first. This is what is called Tradition in the Catholic Church.

It is beyond my ceiling of credibility to imagine that no one during the Apostolic era stopped to ask, or thought to discuss, or bent anyone’s ear about which evangelist wrote first, or who wrote it. We are to believe that we had to wait some 1800 years for English and German Protestant scholars to come up with these questions.

Now, I can watch just about any fantasy or science fiction movie and let my ceiling be raised to accommodate the director’s or author’s imagination, but I cannot imagine that no one said, “Hey guys, which Gospel was written first?”

In addition, the one Apostle who most certainly knew how to write was the tax collector, Matthew, who worked in Jerusalem and would have obviously needed to know multiple languages to merely do his job. Yet, we plant this stamp of doubt upon it and ask, “Did Matthew really write Matthew?” as if no one ever asked that question.

But there is good reason for enemies of the Church to argue that Mark shot first. There are extremely compelling reasons to take up this banner and fight against “Matthew shot first.”

The motive to remove eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life is strong on the atheist side of the fence, because it increases doubt and alleviates their conscience for not believing. If you push Matthew out to 90 A.D., then a sixty year gap from Crucifixion to writing the Gospel makes it more of a legend than a biography.

On the flip side, for Protestants, moving Matthew to a much later date elevates the argument against Peter as the first Pope. Matthew is full of references to Peter as the founder of Christ’s Church, as well as the Sacraments of confession and marriage being defined exactly as the Church still teaches them in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In both cases, the Church is attacked. This is nothing new, and every heresy and battle the Catholic Church ever faced comes from the same places, going as far back as Marcion, Pelagius, Arius, Celsus, and every other would-be Pope-slayer.

But here’s one of the funny things about all of those historical heresies: not one of them, not a single one, ever challenged the idea that Matthew shot first. This only came up relatively recently, starting in countries with kings and politicians that hated the Church, who were either Protestant or unbelievers.

But most interesting is that in both writing the author as Matthew and declaring the order with Matthew first, the early church had no motive or reason to lie about any of this, because neither the specter of atheism nor the idea of future Protestantism in the 16th century would have occurred to them.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how every scribe in the world wrote “The Gospel according to Matthew” on top of the scroll, when as this thing was spread out it was like feathers flying out of a pillow from a rooftop. Yet, we are to believe that every scribe who caught a feather was somehow in on a conspiracy to mask the authorship of some random writer by tricking everyone into believing that the apostle Matthew wrote it. Perhaps more amazing is the minor, miniscule errors in copying that the scribes made as this document flew around the world.

To follow this a bit more, we are to believe that those first Christians who were willing to preach in the streets and be martyred for proclaiming the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, had some kind of massive, Orwellian, bureaucratic memory-hole operation in place to bury any copy that could have unwound the conspiracy. This is beyond comprehension, because it assumes that rather than just trying to spread the word of Jesus, the apostles were master manipulators, like Machiavelli, or Iago from Othello, and somehow these fishermen cooked up a story so profound and so life-changing, that not only were they willing to tell it to everyone, but they were willing to be boiled, clubbed, beaten, stabbed, flayed, and crucified for it.

The “synoptic problem” was not a problem until it was a problem for unbelievers and Protestants, especially kings who wanted to have their own form of religion and morality, like every mythological cult that ever got started. The problem with allowing kings and power into your religion is that in that very moment, that instant, you’ve lost your religion. This is, essentially, what paganism is. It’s the hammering of God’s law and natural law to fit the goals of the king or the State. And re-writing history to remove Matthew is one of those methods of “winning” that modern kings and governments and academics have attempted to use.

But the motive of the Apostles motives was evangelism, as they were on fire with the Holy Spirit, literally, from Pentecost onward. Things were moving at a pace far too fast for creeping conspiracies, and the Word of God was spreading even without them, because as soon as they told someone, that person told the next, and the next, and the next.

It’s worth pointing out that the Apostles and early Church Fathers didn’t have TV or YouTube, so they had immense amounts of time to ponder these things, and they knew the scriptures, not to mention Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, far better than anyone alive today. They lived far closer to the oral tradition and the texts themselves, and St. Jerome even wrote that he saw and read from the Hebrew version of Matthew in Alexandria.

What scholars do with lines like that is find an error in the writing, unrelated to the claim, and then cast out the author as “unreliable.” Or they look to the motives and say, “This Church father was a propagandist for the Catholic Church.” This is classic hitman work, but if that is the case, then this cancel culture should be applied equally to modern scholarship, where if any error is ever made, the Ph.D. should be rescinded. As for who I would rather trust, I would take saints Jerome, Augustine, Papias, Irenaeus, Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, and Matthew himself over the 19th century anti-Catholics and 20th century atheists. After all, a lot of the Church Fathers and the Apostles died for their proclamations, and none of them, not one, cracked and cried out in the fires or at their beheadings, “You’re right, I lied. We all lied! In the seven weeks between the Crucifixion and Pentecost, we came up with a grand conspiracy, and we would say that Matthew wrote in Hebrew first, and that he wrote it after the Temple was destroyed so that we could make it look prophetic, and actually Matthew didn’t write it all, it was Matthew from Accounting - he wrote it! We hired a ghost writer, just please, please don’t kill me!”

No, they go to their deaths. They go boldly, without apostatizing or recanting. They die saying things much different than what I just imagined.

"Eighty-six years have I have served him," Polycarp said on his way to the fire, "and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my king and my savior?"

Ignatius of Antioch, dragging his chains, spoke defiantly to the Roman emperor Trajan. He said, “You are in error, emperor, when you call the demons of your nation gods. For there is but one God who made heaven, earth, the sea and all that are in them. And one Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God.” Church tradition even holds that Ignatius was the actual kid that Jesus held in the Gospel stories. (Mt 18:1-5)

In other words, guys like Ignatius of Antioch were alive when Christ was alive. He met Jesus. So here’s the dilemma, the choice: am I to believe a 19th or 20th century scholar who spent all of his time in a library reviewing fragments of paper and letting his imagination soar, or am I to believe the testimony of Matthew, Ignatius, Papias, Irenaeus, Jerome, Eusebius, Augustine, and all the others, who lived and died in the era when the Church was forming and when many were being slaughtered by kings and governors in professing that Jesus is the son of God?

I choose the latter. Sorry, C.H. Weisse. Sorry, Bart Ehrman. It requires more faith to believe anything that Ehrman claims than it does to believe in the Resurrection of Christ. Here’s the thing: these scholars have sacrificed nothing and only sown doubt, and led millions to the death of their faith. It is not difficult to destroy faith. It is difficult to be in the counter-culture and live a life of faith. Ehrman and the others may be searching for truth, but they are doing so in the darkness, willfully choosing to reject God, which is what God allows us to do. Each of us has the choice to turn toward or away from God, and the effort of scholars to spurn God requires that they reject hard historical written evidence in order to produce and uphold their faith in nothing. But then of course they must do this - when all you have is this world, and no spiritual life, it’s imperative that you recruit others to your worldview, because we all need our cheerleaders, and standing alone in the abyss without God is a lonely place to be. We get to choose our own hell, but some of us like Ehrman want others to choose it as well.

St. Thomas, the doubting apostle, was told, “Blessed are those who have not seen and believe.” (Jn. 20:29)

This is, of course, the great test, the final test, the one we get to answer on our deathbed. It’s the one that Ehrman and Dawkins have already answered, but could still change their mind. It’s the kind of final exam you really don’t need to study for, but you do need to prepare for it, because how you decide will crystallize your eternal state.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for me to believe is that we have several different writings from Church Fathers which mention that Matthew first wrote a document in Hebrew, but because we cannot find that document today, we assume it doesn’t exist. Here’s a news flash for modern people: paper crumbles. Time decays paper. If you don’t believe me, go find your grandmother’s photo album and inspect it. There’s this odd sense that if we don’t dig up the original draft that it didn’t exist, when we know full well that paper falls apart, and copyists had to copy and yes, even translate the texts. There is a reason scribes were called scribes, and that was to copy texts so they didn’t disintegrate. Yet many deny a Hebrew writing by Matthew exists because we haven’t found it.

But this leads us to the best part, the most fantastic and ludicrous thing of all about 19th century German scholarship and 20th century atheist scholarship, which has even bled over into Catholic teaching at universities like the one I attended. You cannot make up the next part, except that they did make it up…

Of all things that confound me, replacing this Hebrew version of Matthew, we have scholars who have invented a fictional document called “Q” for which there is no evidence, no scrap, not a letter of, but which is assumed to exist. So we have writings that mention Matthew’s earlier writing in Hebrew, which is discarded for a hypothetical document that is not mentioned anywhere, has never existed, and will never exist, that takes its place. We even have St. Jerome saying that he saw a Hebrew version of Matthew in Alexandria. We have testimony of eyes on the Hebrew version of Matthew. However, this fairy Q document has nothing, but is treated as if it were the first Gospel.

So the next time someone tells you that Matthew was written after 80 A.D., you should assume that they are referring to the Greek translation of Matthew, because there is clearly a Hebrew version of Matthew, of some kind, of some format, written long before that. Because if the scholars can “prove” that a Greek translation of Matthew was written after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, and that someone other than Matthew translated it, that’s not a terribly big deal. The point of massive significance is that Matthew wrote first, that Matthew wrote a Gospel, and he wrote it first in Hebrew. He was the only apostle that certainly had to be literate because of his occupation as a tax collector, and even if he dictated it to a scribe, that’s no different than any other author speaking to a secretary that types a memo.

It should come as no surprise that copies and translations had to be made, and my New Testament college professor acted as if the Gospels had to a.) either fall from the sky, b.) or had to have the finger of God directing the hand motion on the paper, or c.) if neither of the above happened, then it was just a game of telephone that only academics and the Jesus Seminar unbelievers could decipher. To this day, I am stunned, really beyond stunned, that a Catholic University was teaching and guiding students to read the output of the Jesus Seminar from the 1990s.

The same attack on Matthew has been done to the point of insanity on the books of Moses, with the same batch of motives, which is to reduce the sacred texts to “nation-building” lies, or worse, to deny the existence of Moses altogether.

When things come up like this you have to look at the motives of the scholars. To quote the Dude in The Big Lebowski, who quotes Vladimir Lenin, before his stoner mind drifts off: “You look to the person who will benefit…and ah…”

Walter Sobchak:

The Dude: It's all a fake, man. It's like Lenin said: you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh, you know...

Donny: I am the walrus.

Who benefits from this scholarship that removes Matthew as author, as the first author, and pushes his writing back to 90 A.D.? It’s quite simple. Protestants and atheists benefit, and they benefit in different ways. The Church’s authority is undermined, which is what Protestants wanted, but funny thing about that, in their zeal for undermining Catholic authority, they undermined scripture altogether, because as soon as they finished their sprint around the track, atheists took the baton and ran so that today people don’t even believe that Jesus existed.

Now, I can go on for days about this railroading of Matthew, and I probably will, because one of the greatest attacks on the Church, sustained now for two hundred years, is this effort to force Matthew down from it’s chronological position as the first Gospel. The goal is multi-faceted. The attack has various prongs, but first of all, his writing clearly elevates the Catholic Church, and most of the scholars on this topic truly hated the Catholic Church. They still do.

Second, removing Matthew as an eyewitness account of Christ makes the miracles seem fishy. Hence, you get unbelievers like Ehrman calling it all a “telephone game” rather than eyewitness accounts of God in the flesh. What’s funny is that there is a telephone game happening, but it’s among academics starting in the 1500s right up until today in 2023.

Third, pushing Matthew’s writing to beyond the year 70 A.D. after the temple was destroyed in Jerusalem, makes the prophecy of Christ about the temple destruction seem more like a statement from Captain Obvious than the Son of God. Moving the goal posts on the chronology of the Gospel writers has a clear motive, which is to remove the eyewitness nature of the accounts and play up the “telephone game” nonsense. There’s just one major problem with this,

Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church. After their departure, 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. Afterwards John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3:1:1)

Peter and Paul were martyred before 70 A.D. So was this a vast conspiracy by Irenaeus and Papias and the various other writers to befuddle us all until we were blessed with Protestant German scholars and atheist academics? I think the QAnon people have a more plausible conspiracy theory than this one.

So who are we to believe? Some random professor today? Or Irenaeus, who was taught by Polycarp, who knew the Apostle John, who stood at the Cross during the Crucifixion? Which of these two people are more likely to have known when and by whom the Gospels were written? Here’s the pedigree of Irenaeus, who today’s random professor has written off as unreliable:

Polycarp was a bishop of the early church, a disciple of the apostle John, a contemporary of Ignatius, and the teacher of Irenaeus. According to Irenaeus, Polycarp “was instructed by the apostles, and was brought into contact with many who had seen Christ.” He lived from the latter half of the first century to the mid-second century. Polycarp was martyred by the Romans, and his death was influential, even among the pagans. (from gotquestions.org)

I choose Irenaeus.

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