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So, now we're moving to Matthew. Okay, Matthew's next. And we talked about how rough and problematic Mark is in places. And Matthew and Luke both, they respected Mark and it was their scripture for a while, but they thought they could do a better job.

And so it's pretty clear that both Matthew and Luke used Mark to write a better gospel.

Interesting. Yeah. So Matthew took over, he incorporated like 80 plus percent of Mark's gospel. And it worked. Historically, Matthew has been the favorite gospel of the church. It's the most quoted.

It's the best preserved. We have the most manuscripts of Matthew. So Matthew is good stuff. Very popular. Right. And so Matthew, he knew Mark. We could tell that he had a copy of Mark in front of him.

And when you say he knew Mark, you're meaning he knew the writings, not necessarily that he knew the guy named Mark. Right. Okay, to clarify. So first to to finish up, Mark, just a reminder, Mark is anonymous.

But you could make an interesting argument that some guy named Mark wrote the gospel because if there was, if the name Mark was not attached to the gospel, why on earth would someone pick that?

Yeah, good point. In fact, Justin Martyr, like the 150s calls at the gospel of Peter. Not the gospel of Mark. He calls Mark the gospel of Peter. So anyway, Matthew is also anonymous.

And we'll talk very briefly about who wrote who wrote Matthew. Yes, when I say Matthew knew Mark, that's a shorthand of saying the author of Matthew knew the gospel of Mark. He had the gospel mark in front of him as a literary work.

That makes more sense. In fact, my dissertation is reconstructing and analyzing the form of Mark used by Matthew.

Oh, yeah, that's right. So interesting, detailed stuff. So Matthew, as best we can tell, was probably a Jewish Christian, which means, and possibly a Jewish scribe, who was converted to the message of Jesus.

And we know this from a variety of ways, just his presuppositions. So once again, the scholar is trying to put himself or herself in the shoes or hand right, you know, pen of Matthew and saying, you know, what do I know? What do I expect? What are my assumptions?

And one interesting way that we can get at Matthew's goals and agendas and what he felt was important is looking at how he changed Mark.

This is called reduction criticism. So obviously, if Matthew changes Mark, he's going out of his way to change it. And so that lets us know what he's concerned about.

Yeah, okay, I see what you're saying. And so one of these is our key to knowing that Matthew is a Jewish Christian. So when Mark is talking about how, you know, the end of the world coming, and he says, you know, this is Jesus speaking, you know, Mark is Jesus or Mark is transmitting the words of Jesus in whatever degree of fidelity.

Jesus says, pray that your flight in these times of tribulation be not in winter. Or, you know, you better hope you're not nursing or pregnant because it's harder to run away when it's winter.

And Matthew changes it from pray your flight, not be in winter, he adds or on the Sabbath.

Oh, yeah. And so here's an important thing. And again, it would only be if Matthew was observing the Jewish Sabbath, which said you could only walk a certain distance on a Sabbath that he would have any reason to add that.

Yeah, it's interesting how you find small little tidbits of information from little scraps of words like that. Yeah, and I don't, I don't think it's over emphasizing the significance of these tiny little things.

Little scraps because they really do tell us a lot about history. You know, it's kind of like our earliest manuscript of the New Testament is this little tiny credit card size fragment of the gospel of John.

But even though it's tiny, it tells us when John was written. So before this was found, some people said the gospel of John was written in the second century.

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