The ninth verse of the ninth chapter of the
Gospel of Matthew reads as follows: “And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he
saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto
him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him.” (Matt: 9-9) Now, please pay
close attention to this point: if Matthew himself wrote these statements, why
did he use the name Matthew in the third person instead of speaking as Matthew
himself? [If the author of this Gospel had been Matthew himself, he would have
said, “As I was sitting at the customs place, Îsâ ‘alaihis-salâm’ passed by.
When he saw me he told me to follow him, to walk behind him. So I stood up and
followed him, walked behind him.”]
In the Gospel of Matthew, every speech quoted
from Îsâ ‘alaihis-salâm’ is so long that it is impossible to say any one of
them at one sitting, at one time. In fact, the advice and the directions that
he gave to the apostles in the tenth chapter, his continuous words in the
fifth, sixth and seventh chapters, his scolding of the Persians in the
twenty-third chapter, his continuous exemplifications in the eighth chapter are
absolutely not short enough to occur within one sitting. A proof of this is
that these same speeches and exemplifications of his are divided into various
sittings in the other Gospels. This means to say that the author of this Gospel
is not Matthew, the customs officer, the faithful companion of Îsâ
‘alaihis-salâm’.
In the Gospel of Matthew, miracles (mu’jiza)
of Îsâ ‘alaihis-salâm’ such as his curing the poor people who were blind,
leprous or paralyzed, his feeding large numbers of poor people, are mentioned
at two different places each. The Gospels of Mark and Luke, on the other hand,
mention each of these events at one place. Hence, the author of the Gospel
attributed to Matthew probably consulted two sources when writing the book and
saw the same event in both sources. Then, perhaps, thinking the two events were
different, he wrote them as such in his book.
It is written in the fifth verse of the tenth
chapter of the Gospel of Matthew that hadrat Îsâ commanded his messengers,
i.e. the Apostles, not to go to [call] the Gentiles [to their
religion] and not to enter the city of Samaria. Further ahead it is said that
he cured a pagan captain’s servant and Canaanite woman’s daughter.
On the one hand, the sixth verse of the
seventh chapter says, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast
ye your pearls before swine, ...” (Matt: 7-6) The nineteenth verse of the
twenty-eighth chapter, on the other hand, enjoins, “Go ye therefore, and teach
all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
the Holy Ghost;” (ibid: 28-19)
While the fifth verse of the tenth chapter
prohibits, “..., Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the
Sa-mar’i-tans enter ye not:” (ibid: 10-5), the fourteenth verse of the
twenty-fourth chapter commands, “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be
preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the
end come.” (ibid: 24-14) [This and the preceeding verses are completely
contradictory of each other.]
Countless contradictions and oppositions of
this sort are repeated in this Gospel. These additions leave no doubt as to the
fact that the Gospel of Matthew was interpolated. Some important episodes
contained by the other Gospels do not exist in the Gospel of Matthew. For
example, the episodes such as the selection of seventy pupils by Îsâ
‘alaihis-salâm’, his ascension in the Mala-i-hawâriyyûn, his coming to
Jerusalem twice for celebrating the Bayram (Holy Day), and Luazer’s
resurrection from his grave do not exist in this Gospel. Therefore, it is
doubtful that the Gospel of Matthew was written by Matthew the Apostle.