And Let me just rephrase it. I'm going to

let's talk about who wrote the book of Matthew. In fact no let me just rephrase it. I'm going to throw that to you as a question.

Who do you think wrote the book of Matthew? It feels like I'm doing the who that to you as a question. Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb routine here?

But the difference is that I think Grant's Tomb

probably says Ulysses S Grant on it,

whereas Matthew doesn't actually say Matthew's name on it.

It seems like it does because in our Bibles his name is all over it and really the

Gospels all work the same way. They say Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but none of those authors

actually acknowledge themselves within the text as being the authors of those books, which

I suppose could be tricky.

Now, John of the four, I think most tips his hand that he's the guy who wrote it.

There's a bunch of hints that we're not going to get into in this conversation about that.

Luke, if you extrapolate that out and look at the whole body of his work, Luke and Acts, I think there's

some pronoun usage in Acts that indicate that Luke was with the traveling party at times and you can kind of piece that together to do the math to figure out that there's some internal evidence of Luke as being the author of Luke in acts. Mark, it's thin. Some people point to his phrasing on the

account of the rich young ruler being different than Matthew's phrasing of

that account in Matthew 19 and they suggest that

maybe Mark was tipping his hand that he was the rich young ruler but you can see

with all of this it's thin we're obviously relying on some other external evidence for who we credit these books to.

And Matthew is no different.

In fact, I would say Matthew has the fewest hints as to its own authorship, at least in terms of a smoking gun.

Matthew talks about himself, as we discussed in our last conversation,

to Matthew Chapter 9, with that very brief account of his conversion, and that's kind of all you get.

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