Here are some of the scholars who argued that Matthew was published within roughly a decade of the resurrection and ascension. I do not affirm everything which they assert below, particularly when it comes to their approach to the traditions concerning Matthew being written in Hebrew, but these quotations do suffice to demonstrate that there were many who affirmed an early Matthew over the last several centuries. Laurentius Codomannus (trans. 1590) Henoch Clapham (1608) Richard Ward (1646) Francis Roberts (1648) William Cave (1676) Thomas Allen (1688) Nicolas Fontaine (trans. 1691) John S. Gent (1692) Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1694) John Edwards (1695) Thomas Ellwood (1709) Laurence Echard (1729) Samuel Humphreys (1746) Robert Cockburne (1755) Henry Owen (1764) Thomas Townson (1778) Edward Kimpton (1785) John Eveleigh (1792) Jeremiah Jones (1798; originally 1727) George Tomline (1822) Thomas Horne (1825) Edward Greswell (1837) William Goodhugh (1843) Richard Watson (1844) Thomas R. Birks (1852) William Webster and William F. Wilkinson (1855) Alexander Roberts (1862) Joseph Angus (1866) Francis Upham (1881) Arthur Carr (1898) John MacEvilly (1898) The following publications are more recent. John Chapman (1937, 1944) Note: Chapman has been included here because he defends Matthean priority, followed by Mark, and then Luke. He doesn’t defend an early date, but contends that Matthew could have been written five years or thirty-five after the resurrection. Basil Butler (1951) Note: In the book listed below, Butler defends Matthean priority, and proposes that Matthew was written before the apostles dispersed beyond Palestine; although, he does not assign a particular date to Matthew’s Gospel (at least not in this publication). However, in his The Church and the Bible (1960), he has apparently abandoned this early Matthew view, as he merely echoes the popular view of Markan priority, with Mark being published around AD 67 (p. 35). And in his subsequent autobiography, A Time to Speak (1972), he reflects on his support of Chapman; yet at the same time, he posits that the Gospels were published 37 to 70 years after the crucifixion, with Mark first and Matthew third, perhaps 65 years after Christ. He also suspects that Mark and Luke may have been based on an earlier revision of Matthew (p. 78–79). Bernard Orchard (1979) John Wenham (1992) David Alan Black (2001, 2010) Peter Leithart (2010) Edward Stevens (2014) Phil Fernandes (2016) Daniel Moore (2024) With the modern popularity of the theory that Mark was the first Gospel, written around the AD 60s, and that Matthew was not written until the 80s, give or take a couple decades, modern students of the Bible may not be aware that there have been many advocates of an early Matthew over the centuries. These advocates offered a variety of arguments to support their perspectives, which went beyond the modern emphasis on the use of comparative analysis between the Synoptic Gospels, for speculating on the publication order. The above quotations offer a sampling of their arguments.