THE EEADERS FOR WHOM MATTHEW WROTE HIS GOSPEL. 185 



graves were opened, and how the dead arose when the sufferer with 

 a great cry gave up tiie gliost. Even in deatli Be was victor over 

 death. 



Had Jesus been merely man, His claim to Messiahship had 

 ended in disaster with His death. Matthew shows how, what to 

 onlookers seemed to be His final and absolute defeat, was turned 

 into glorious triumph by His Eesurrection. He alone relates 

 how the fact of the Eesurrection was only the more emphasized 

 by the efforts of the High Priests to prevent any false resurrection 

 being pretended by the Apostles. The sealing of the stone and 

 the placing of the watch only the more demonstrated the great 

 fact. The Evangelist is careful to forestal the fable by which 

 the Jewish priesthood strove to hide it. Those who were to carry 

 the Gospel to Mesopotamia would most likely have heard the 

 story. Some one of the elders, or perhaps one the soldiers, let 

 the truth slip out. Matthew's account of the forty days of the 

 Lord's risen life seems scanty. As do the other Evangelists, he 

 relates the presence of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary at the 

 sepulchre before daybreak, and the vision of Angels, but he alone 

 tells of the earthquake and its effect on the Eoman sentinels. 

 Other inhabitants of Jerusalem may have been awakened by the 

 shaking of the earth, but as these earth tremors are frequent in 

 Palestine they are not noticed unless specially severe. The very 

 scrappiness and scant am.ount of the records of our Lord's risen 

 life as recorded by Matthew, as compared with the fulness and 

 orderliness of what has gone before, suggests that this part of the 

 Gospel was written on the very morrow of the events. The excite- 

 ment, the spiritual exaltation of the six weeks between our Lord's 

 Eesurrection and His Ascension were but little conducive to calm 

 narrative. 



That Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, not for the 

 Palestinian believers, but for the Eastern Diaspora is, to recapitu- 

 late, rendered probable by the fact that while the former knew 

 Greek, and were familiar with our Lord's history, the latter knew 

 little or no Greek, and had no means of being acquainted with the 

 career of the crucified Messiah. Further, the events of Pentecost 

 were specially fitted to impress the Apostles with the importance 

 of Israel east of the Euphrates. 



Have we any evidence that this Hebrew Gospel reached the 

 readers for whom it was intended? It may be objected that 

 the Book of Acts contains no record that multitudes were added to 

 the Church through the perusal of an account of the Words and 

 Works of Jesus. The silence of Acts is not to be pressed. To 

 conclude, as some have done, from this that at first Christianity 

 was confined to the Eoman Empire, is to forget the very limited 

 scope of the Book. It is in no true sense the " Acts of the 

 Apostles." It really only narrates the Acts of Paul. What is 



