Tuesday 16 November 2021

the gospel according to matthew

Venerated in the Eastern Church on this day according to the Julian calendar (21 September in Western Christianity), the tax collector (among his patronage—including also accountants, bankers and broadly civil servants) turned evangelist would have been universally despised as a collaborator with the Roman occupation and garnered criticism for Jesus for associating with such a person. Although the Biblical accounts are anonymous and only attributed to the titular superscription, Saint Matthew is attested to collecting oracles—that is, sayings—of Christ, with some crediting the Apostle with the authorship of the Q Source—from the German Quell or Source Source, a hypothetical canonical rubric of quotations, ghost-written by an angel, that would account for similarities among the first books of the New Testament.