And Hey, my name's Matt Whitman, and this is the 10 minute Bible hour

podcast. We do this every day. We're working our way through the Book of

Matthew, or I guess I should say, we're working our way through the book of Matthew or I guess I should say we're

about to work our way through the book of Matthew but right now we're laying the groundwork

so that we're operating from a common set of assumptions or at least a common set of questions as we go and get into the text here coming up really soon.

So in the last conversation we talked about the internal evidence for dating Matthew before 70 a.D. and we talked about why that matters

because you interpret things very differently based on when they were written.

You can picture the original audience on the receiving end of a book or an

article or whatever it might be and you can assume a lot of things about the conversation based on who that audience is and when that

audience existed.

So we do want to take some time to nail this down and in this episode I want to talk about

the external evidence for when Matthew was written and what the early church

said and thought about this.

We're going to do the quick version here, but I think it's really fascinating.

So a lot of people assume that Matthew is second or third gospel to have been written.

There are three gospels that come at it the same way.

We call these synoptics.

There's a fourth gospel that looks really very

different even though it's telling the same story and driving it the same stuff and

that one is John it's the not synoptic. I guess there's no category for John, it's weird. So the common thinking for a hundred years plus has been that Mark came first. Fancy people will say Markin priority. And the idea here is that Mark operated in close proximity to Peter. He got a whole bunch of details. And then Mark maybe even drawing on some other written sources that were floating around put together his very streamlined gospel and then Matthew and Luke came along after the fact depended on Mark used the same sources Mark used and they wrote their more

elaborate Gospels. And to that I would say maybe there's a reasonable case that can be made,

but there's some pretty smart people who make a case for

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