Ancient Truth: Intro to Matthew

I completely rewrote the introduction to Matthew’s Gospel:
By tradition, Matthew was a cousin of Jesus – their fathers were brothers. Also known by the name Levi, this fellow was employed in collecting King Herod’s taxes. There is a lot of popular mythology about this profession. During this time, the Sanhedrin controlled direct tax collections in Judea, while Galilee was under a tax-farming system. Matthew collected taxes for the nominally Jewish king in Jerusalem, but it meant handling money with pagan images and social mixing with Gentiles, violating many of the legalistic traditions of common religious orthodoxy. Not quite the traitor, as those who collected taxes directly for Rome were commonly viewed, he was still a social outcast because the whole business was considered immoral. Even if Matthew were utterly scrupulous and fair, as John the Baptist had preached, Matthew was despised by society. Jesus included him partly for this very reason, showing His rejection of common views on social morality.
An even better reason was Matthew’s training and education. He would have been at the least literate in Greek, and likely Latin. He would be familiar with the various dialects of Syrian and Persian travelers. He was a superb record keeper, with a highly organized mind, using the common shorthand writing of those in his profession. He would have understood completely the nit-picking legalism of the Jewish government, and could easily keep track of Jesus’ teachings as contrary to that legalism. Permitted no stake in the prevailing system of his day, Matthew’s mind would have been quite receptive to his cousin’s alternative approach to seeking God’s favor. In the end, he was a very Hebraic writer, and his Gospel shows it. A primary focus of his writing was Jesus’ declarations about His kingdom.
The primary target of this Gospel was Jewish Christians who needed to see Jesus was most certainly a fulfillment of the Messianic prophecies, if not a fulfillment of the common political aspirations many Jews had for the promised Messiah. Matthew took pains to collect the teachings of his Lord into themes. Since he seems to have copied so much of Mark’s Gospel, finding no fault with the narrative of events, we sense Matthew wrote his much longer version afterward; we date Mark around 50 AD. It seems painfully obvious Matthew thought in Hebrew, not merely the language but in the entire structure of thought itself. Hebrew was a supremely verbal language, and writing it down was a sort of translation in itself, never mind recording it in yet another language such as Greek. Apparently Matthew was quite up to the task.
I’m working my way through each chapter lesson and enjoying myself immensely. I found a few factual errors and corrected those, and changed my view somewhat at a few points, but mostly it’s passing through with only grammar and spelling corrections. But it’s slow going, and I got as far as chapter 10 today.