St. Matthew, one of the twelve Apostles, is the author of the first
Gospel. This has been the constant tradition of the Church and is
confirmed by the Gospel itself. He was the son of Alpheus and was
called to be an Apostle while sitting in the tax-collector’s place at
Capharnaum. Before his conversion he was a publican, i.e., a taxcollector by profession. He is to be identified with the “Levi” of Mark
and Luke. His apostolic activity was at first restricted to the
communities of Palestine. Nothing definite is known about his later
life. There is a tradition that points to Ethiopia as his field of labor;
other traditions make mention of Parthia and Persia. It is likewise
uncertain whether he died a natural death or received the crown of
martyrdom.
His Gospel was written to fill a sorely felt want for his fellowcountrymen, both believers and unbelievers. For the former it served as
a token of his regard and as an encouragement in the trial to come,
especially the danger of falling back to Judaism; for the latter it was
designed to convince them that the Messias had come in the Person of
Jesus, our Lord, in whom all the promises of the messianic kingdom
embracing all people had been fulfilled in a spiritual rather than in a
carnal way: “My kingdom is not of this world.” His Gospel, then,
answered the question put by the disciples of St. John the Baptist, “Art
thou he who is to come, or shall we look for another?”
Writing for his countrymen of Palestine, St. Matthew composed his
Gospel in his native Aramaic, the “Hebrew tongue” mentioned in the
Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles. Soon afterwards, about the
time of the persecution of Herod Agrippa I in 42 A.D., he took his
departure for other lands. Another tradition places the composition of
his Gospel either between the time of this departure and the Council of
Jerusalem, i.e., between 42 A.D. and 50 A.D., or even later. Definitely,
however, the Gospel itself, depicting the Holy City with its altar and
temple as still existing, and without any reference to the fulfillment of
our Lord’s prophecy, shows that it was written before the destruction
of the city by the Romans (70 A.D.), and this internal evidence
confirms the early traditions. Lives of the Saints, pages 371-372