For whom, and with what special purpose, was St. Matthew's Gospel written? The thesis of this paper is, that it was written after the Fall of Jerusalem by a Jewish Christian for the Great Church, which by then was predominantly Gentile, with the special purpose of bringing to Gentile Christians the moral and spiritual teaching which Jerusalem had preserved and which they sorely needed.

One problem of Matthew is this: that the Evangelist, while reproducing with great care the testimony of the sources which he accepts as authoritative (namely, Mark, Q,, and M which contained the tradition of the Church of Jerusalem over which St. James had presided), does not attempt to reconcile them. As we shall see, it is hard to think that if our Lord said that ‘till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished’ (5.18), He could also have said ‘It is not that which enters the mouth that makes a man unclean, but that which comes out of his mouth is what makes him unclean’ (15.11, cf. Mark 7.15), since this saying repeals the whole of Leviticus 11, on unclean foods. Again, if He commanded His disciples to do and observe all that was laid down by the Scribes who sat on Moses' seat (23.1–3), how could He have so trenchantly criticised the Tradition of the elders as leading in actual cases to breach of the Fifth Commandment (15.1–9, cf. Mark 7.5–13)?