I do not think that the author of the Gospel of Matthew was a Stoic, but I do think that the writer freely adapted elements of Stoic thought in creating his picture of Jesus the moral teacher. I arrived at my conclusions by asking what is distinctive about Matthew's depiction of Jesus as a teacher of ethics. This holds especially for the so-called Sermon on the Mount, but recent scholarship has shown that Stoicism was also a component of the gospel's thought more generally.

Recognizing the importance of Stoic thought for Matthew should entail a revolution in our scholarly thinking. We have all been captured by the narrative world created by the writer that both informed and coincided with our romantic and theological stereotypes of what was genuinely Jewish, an imagined “Palestinian Judaism.” But Matthew was not written in archaizing Hebrew or in Aramaic and discovered in some Judean cave. It was written in Greek and directed toward that cosmopolitan world eager for exotic foreign wisdom. We should have long ago guessed the imaginative construction at play from the fact that Matthew makes its Markan source more Jewish in its exoticizing and ethnicizing way. Now current scholarship has rightly shifted the cultural locations of the gospels from the ghetto of our imaginations to the known vigorous cultural landscapes of the early Roman empire.

It will be helpful to review what are taken as basic facts in gospel studies and studies of the earliest traditions about Jesus. In the earliest sources, the only sources that precede and are not definitively shaped by the Roman destruction of the Judean temple in Jerusalem, one cannot even determine that Jesus was a teacher of ethics. If Paul knew that Jesus was such a teacher, he does not appeal to the teachings or the idea that Jesus was a teacher, even though the teachings from the later Matthew and Luke would be very relevant and overlap with his own teachings. In the Gospel of John, Jesus teaches, but those teachings are about himself (such as “I am the light of the world” in 8:12) and there are no teachings that might be considered broadly moral teachings beyond the saying that his disciples should love one another (John 15:12).