I was excited today to find several older Catholic Bibles which also list an early date for Matthew’s Gospel.1 The date was integrated into a chronological index for the New Testament. Of course, finding dates in old Bibles doesn’t prove when the Gospels were published. However, what I am trying to accomplish with this post is to further demonstrate that the modern academic consensus that Matthew was published in the 60s or later is indeed a recent invention.
This particular family Bible was a Doway-Rheims English translation of the Vulgate, published in Philadelphia in 1821. It included a fair amount of reference information and pictures, akin to what was being published for the Protestant community.
I have images of similar charts from Catholic Bibles printed in 1749, 1833, and 1858, with the charts variously titled as “A Chronological Table,” “A Historical and Chronological Table of the New Testament,” etc. Some Bibles have similar charts, but without the Gospel publication dates. Some of the charts include this interesting event in AD 42: “St. Peter goeth to Rome, and foundeth the church there,” which accords with a tradition recorded by Eusebius, and is attributed to Justin Martyr.2
