Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Evanghelia după Matei" in Romanian language version.
Papias tells us that Matthew’s book comprised only “sayings” of Jesus (our Matthew contains a lot more than that) and it was written in Hebrew (not Greek, as our version came down to us). Papias does not appear, therefore, to be referring to this book.
I have often wondered what would have happened if Paul and Matthew had been locked up in a room together and told they could not come out until they had hammered out a consensus statement on how followers of Jesus were to deal with the Jewish law. Would they ever have emerged, or would they still be there, two skeletons locked in a death grip?
The historical narratives, the Gospels and Acts, are anonymous, the attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John being first reported in the mid-second century by Irenaeus
We do not know who wrote the gospels. They presently have headings: ‘according to Matthew’, ‘according to Mark’, ‘according to Luke’ and ‘according to John’. The Matthew and John who are meant were two of the original disciples of Jesus. Mark was a follower of Paul, and possibly also of Peter; Luke was one of Paul's converts.5 These men – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – really lived, but we do not know that they wrote gospels. Present evidence indicates that the gospels remained untitled until the second half of the second century.
Finally it is important to realize that none of the four gospels originally included an attribution to an author. All were anonymous, and it is only from the fragmentary and enigmatic and—according to Eusebius, from whom we derive the quotation—unreliable evidence of Papias in 120/130 CE that we can begin to piece together any external evidence about the names of their authors and their compilers. This evidence is so difficult to interpret that most modern scholars form their opinions from the content of the gospels themselves, and only then appeal selectively to the external evidence for confirmation of their findings.
But are these traditional ascriptions correct? The first thing to observe is that the titles of the Gospels were not put there by their authors—as should be clear after just a moment's reflection. Suppose a disciple named Matthew actually did write a book about Jesus' words and deeds. Would he have called it "The Gospel According to Matthew"? Of course not. He might have called it "The Gospel of Jesus Christ" or "The Life and Death of Our Savior" or something similar. But if someone calls it the Gospel according to Matthew, then it's obviously someone else trying to explain, at the outset, whose version of the story this one is. And in fact we know that the original manuscripts of the Gospels did not have their authors' names attached to them.1 1. Because our surviving Greek manuscripts provide such a wide variety of (different) titles for the Gospels, textual scholars have long realized that their familiar names (e.g., "The Gospel according to Matthew") do not go back to a single "original" title, but were later added by scribes.
Almost all scholars agree that our Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Greek and is not a translated document. Matthew's Greek reveals none of the telltale marks of a translation. Furthermore, Matthew's OT quotations are derived from the LXX rather than the Hebrew text (see below), although of course they could be derived from a different Hebrew text or could later have been made to conform to the LXX text.[nefuncțională]
the New Testament was, apart from a few individual words (e.g. Mark 5:41, 7: 34, 15: 34//Matt. 27: 46), written virtually entirely in a form of ancient Greek. This much has long been recognized by scholars and others alike.
The concept of the Council of Jamnia is an hypothesis to explain the canonization of the Writings (the third division of the Hebrew Bible) resulting in the closing of the Hebrew canon. ... These ongoing debates suggest the paucity of evidence on which the hypothesis of the Council of Jamnia rests and raise the question whether it has not served its usefulness and should be relegated to the limbo of unestablished hypotheses. It should not be allowed to be considered a consensus established by mere repetition of assertion.