For whom, and with what special purpose, was St. Matthew's Gospel written? The thesis of this paper is, that it was written after the Fall of Jerusalem by a Jewish Christian for the Great Church, which by then was predominantly Gentile, with the special purpose of bringing to Gentile Christians the moral and spiritual teaching which Jerusalem had preserved and which they sorely needed.

One problem of Matthew is this: that the Evangelist, while reproducing with great care the testimony of the sources which he accepts as authoritative (namely, Mark, Q,, and M which contained the tradition of the Church of Jerusalem over which St. James had presided), does not attempt to reconcile them. As we shall see, it is hard to think that if our Lord said that ‘till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished’ (5.18), He could also have said ‘It is not that which enters the mouth that makes a man unclean, but that which comes out of his mouth is what makes him unclean’ (15.11, cf. Mark 7.15), since this saying repeals the whole of Leviticus 11, on unclean foods. Again, if He commanded His disciples to do and observe all that was laid down by the Scribes who sat on Moses' seat (23.1–3), how could He have so trenchantly criticised the Tradition of the elders as leading in actual cases to breach of the Fifth Commandment (15.1–9, cf. Mark 7.5–13)?

In 1932, Professor Dodd published in the Expository Times an article on ‘The Order of Events in St. Mark's Gospel' which broke fresh ground in the Study of that Gospel. Dr Dodd then stated that in planning the first ten chapters St. Mark had a skeleton outline of our Lord's earthly career which he broke up into what now stand as editorial summaries. This outline he suggested was in the nature of a summary of the kerygma and approximated to the Petrine speech of Acts 10.37–41 or the Pauline speech in Acts 13.23–31. Into this outline were inserted the pericopae Mark collected sometimes on a historical, and at other times on a topical basis. This hypothesis held the field for a considerable time but it has recently been questioned by Professor Nineham in an examination of Dr Dodd's hypothesis in his contribution to Studies in the Gospels published in 1955. Indeed Professor Nineham takes the line that the presupposition of such a skeleton outline of our Lord's ministry which Mark used in the way Dr Dodd suggests is ‘highly improbable’.1 He questions the probability of such an outline having been preserved by the early Church. Referring to the changes in the Marcan pattern which both Matthew and Luke felt free to introduce when using St. Mark's Gospel as a basis, and to the difference in outlook between St. John's Gospel and the Synoptics, he concludes: ‘It does not appear that the precise order in which the saving events occurred seemed to the early Christian mind a very vital element in the saving proclamation or kerygma.'2 Professor Nineham is of course prepared to admit that the Passion narrative is in a class by itself and does not appear to question the accepted opinions of scholars that it was an early compilation of the primitive Church. But he rightly contends that there is no cogent evidence that the Church quite early agreed on ‘a formal outline account of the progress of the Lord's earthly ministry’.3