In 1961, S. Vernon McCasland published an article entitled “Matthew Twists the Scriptures,” in which he charges the author of Matthew with distorting not only his Old Testament sources, but also his contemporary sources.1 Brazenly, McCasland begins his accusation by redirecting the expressed concern of 2 Peter 3:16 at the author of Matthew’s Gospel, as one who twisted “the other Scriptures”:
There are some things in them [Paul’s writings] that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. (ESV)
McCasland raises issues with Matthew’s genealogy, with Matthew’s treatment of Isaiah 7:14 (born of a virgin, rather than a young woman), with Matthew’s claim that there is an OT passage which refers to the Messiah as a Nazarene, etc.2 Correspondingly, with regard to “liberties which Matthew took … with his more contemporary sources,” McCasland highlights “Matthew’s readiness to distort Mark,” as “Matthew has freely picked up sayings of Jesus from various places and put them together in convenient collections, showing no concern for preserving the integrity of any original sources from which he drew.”3 Several purported examples are offered. Of course, McCasland is working from the popular premise of Markan priority—that Mark was published before Matthew, decades after the resurrection. In summary, McCasland charges Matthew with blatant “disregard of original contexts, transference, relocation, and rewriting of sayings on the basis of a superficial similarity, literary whim, or theological idea.”4
Norman Walker, of West Ewell, could not let these claims stand unchallenged.5 In “The Alleged Matthaean Errata,” he responds to nine passages which had been called into question.6 His rebuttals will sound familiar to modern readers, as other Christian apologists have similarly addressed the issues raised against these passages. However, what is significant about Walker is that he also challenges McCasland’s underlying assumption of Markan priority, this theory of Gospel origins which frequently leads to challenges against the integrity of Matthew’s Gospel.
I was pleased to discover that his views regarding Gospel origins largely align with my own—Walker argues that Matthew was published at an early date and before Mark:
In the cases mentioned above it is not a question of Matthew ‘twisting’ Mark, but of Mark reducing Matthew. … There is much to be said for the priority of Matthew, its identity with the ‘Logia’ of Papias,7 and with the Q of modern scholarship, as has been so well argued by B. C. Butler.8
Taking all the evidence into consideration, the present writer [Walker] has come to regard Matthew’s diary in Aramaic as supplying the first Gospel Text-Book [i.e., Papias’ logia], which was later “Greeked,” and augmented by the Genealogy and the Infancy Stories, and published soon after the Ascension [as Matthew’s Gospel]. But Mark, Peter’s ‘interpreter’ wrote down, after the Apostle had died, all that he remembered of his preaching, thus composing what might be termed Peter’s version of the Gospel, and doing this in the light of the already existing Matthaean Gospel. In fact, Mark’s task amounted to a reduction of Matthew’s Gospel to the limits of Peter’s preaching, that is to say, from the mission of the Baptist to the Ascension.9 The result was a Note-Book for Preachers. Items in Peter’s preaching which were not found in Matthew were thus preserved. In the main, however, Mark’s Gospel was an abridgement of Matthew’s, as St Augustine held.10
Well said, except that per my understanding of the church fathers, Mark was published shortly after Peter and Paul left to preach within the Roman empire, rather than after they left this life.11 Nonetheless, Walker is to be applauded for not only recognizing the importance of defending specific passages, but also of pushing back against theories of Gospel origins which foster these kinds of challenges, with their claims of evolving oral traditions and careless distortions.
- S. Vernon McCasland, “Matthew Twists the Scriptures,” Journal of Biblical Literature 80, no. 2 (1961): 143–48. ↩︎
- McCasland, 143–44. ↩︎
- McCasland, 146–47. ↩︎
- McCasland, 148. ↩︎
- A history of All Saints Church in West Ewell, where Norman Walker (1887–1972) served from 1939 to 1972, is available here: https://www.allsaintswestewell.org.uk/historyofallsaints.htm. His wife, Minnie, died in 1952. Walker published a variety of articles in the 1950s and 60s. Examples include Norman Walker, “The Date of Deuteronomy,” Vetus Testamentum 3, no. 4 (1953): 413–14; Norman Walker, “Israel,” Vetus Testamentum 4, no. 4 (1954): 434; Norman Walker, “Do Plural Nouns of Majesty Exist in Hebrew?,” Vetus Testamentum 7, no. 2 (1957): 208–208; Norman Walker, “The Reckoning of Hours in the Fourth Gospel,” Novum Testamentum 4, no. 1 (1960): 69–73; Norman Walker, “After Three Days,” Novum Testamentum 4, no. 4 (1960): 261–62; Norman Walker, “Concerning Exod 34:6,” Journal of Biblical Literature 79, no. 3 (1960): 277–277; Norman Walker, “What Is a Nabhî?,” Zeitschrift Für Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 32, no. 1 (1961): 99; Norman Walker, “The Rendering of RĀṢÔN,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81, no. 2 (1962): 182–84. ↩︎
- Norman Walker, “The Alleged Matthaean Errata,” New Testament Studies 9, no. 4 (1963): 391–94. ↩︎
- Papias in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39. ↩︎
- B. C. Butler, The Originality of St Matthew: A Critique of the Two-Document Hypothesis (Cambridge: University Press, 1951), 12. ↩︎
- Arthur Carr, The Gospel According to St Matthew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), xvii. ↩︎
- Augustine, Cons. 2. ↩︎
- Daniel B. Moore, A Trustworthy Gospel: Arguments for an Early Date for Matthew’s Gospel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2024), 32–34. ↩︎
