Regarding ancient attributions of the gospel to Matthew, Culpepper writes, "Later attributions of the Gospel to Matthew all seem to depend on Papias." (14) You can go here and here for further treatments of this subject, but I'll summarize some of the relevant points. None of our fragments of Papias suggest he viewed himself as having much influence. Instead, he refers to how highly he views other sources and how dependent he was on multiple sources for the information he had, including his information on the origins of the gospels. Irenaeus is the only source in the first three centuries to mention Papias by name, and even Irenaeus doesn't say much about him and doesn't mention him in the context of the gospels' authorship. The ante-Nicene traditions about the origins of the gospels differ to some extent, which makes less sense if all of them were dependent on Papias. As I'll discuss further below, Culpepper acknowledges that gospel titles that included the names of the authors were part of gospel manuscripts as early as the beginning of the second century, so the post-Papian sources would have been influenced by gospel manuscripts when making authorship judgments. And it would be absurd to deny that authorship issues were discussed orally in many contexts (e.g., the oral comments of Polycarp heard by Irenaeus). What about the Jewish, pagan, and heretical sources who corroborate the authorship of Matthew and the other gospels? Why should we think all of their views on the subject can be traced back to Papias? To the contrary, that's a highly unlikely scenario. Furthermore, even if all of the relevant sources had been dependent on Papias, he tells us that he got his information from earlier sources, such as an individual he refers to as "the elder" (probably John the son of Zebedee), so we can't stop with Papias. The gospel authorship attributions go further back.
I mentioned Culpepper's acknowledgement that gospel titles that included the names of the authors were part of gospel manuscripts as early as the beginning of the second century. He claims that Matthew's title "probably originated at this time [early second century] in order to differentiate the Gospels" (17). For some discussions of the many problems with that dating of the gospel titles, see here and here. The opening of the gospel of Luke makes it evident that there was already a large need to distinguish one gospel from another in the first century (1:1-3). Culpepper dates Matthew to the first century and has the alleged Matthean community that produced the document using Mark as a source. That's another example of a context in which there was a need to distinguish among multiple gospels prior to the second century. Culpepper's explanation for how the gospel titles originated calls for dating the titles to the first century, not the second century, and his second-century dating makes less sense of the uniformity of the gospel titles and gospel authorship attributions that we see in the historical record.
While discussing the infancy narratives, Culpepper writes:
The only points of correspondence between the birth accounts in Matthew and Luke can be reduced to the confession "Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem."…
Aside from the need to explain how Jesus was related both to Bethlehem and Nazareth, the only points common to Matthew and Luke can be reduced to a confession that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary in Bethlehem. (38, 49)
Go here for a discussion of a few dozen agreements between Matthew and Luke concerning Jesus' childhood. And more could be cited. It's astonishing that Culpepper and so many other people don't even mention agreements as well evidenced as the premarital timing of the pregnancy and the family's presence in Nazareth earlier rather than later in Jesus' childhood. Elsewhere in his commentary, Culpepper repeats common allegations of contradictions between the accounts of Jesus' childhood and repeats other common objections. See here for responses to those claims. My primary concern here, though, is Culpepper's radically erroneous underestimation of how much Matthew and Luke agree about the events surrounding Jesus' birth. This isn't some kind of highly subjective disagreement I have with Culpepper. He's demonstrably wrong, and he's wrong to a large degree.
These are just a few of the examples I noticed while reading about 50 pages of the commentary. Something all three of these examples have in common is that they don't get addressed much even by conservative scholars. There's seldom much effort to argue for the traditional authorship attribution of the gospel of Matthew. Issues like how early we should date the gospel's title and how dependent the authorship attributions are on Papias seldom get addressed much. I haven't seen many commentaries by conservative New Testament scholars that make much of an effort to discuss how widely Matthew and Luke agree about Jesus' childhood. Even the scholars I've seen who put the most effort into it bring up less than half the agreements that could be mentioned. But as bad as conservative scholarship has been on issues like these, the situation is even worse among Christian laymen. (For discussions of some of the problems and the reasons for them, see here and here, among other relevant posts in our archives.) We should fault people like Culpepper for reasoning poorly and advancing wrong conclusions on such important issues, but there are significant problems with how conservative scholars and Christian laymen have been handling these issues as well.
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