Hello Diogenes,
Trying to get these up before I’m no longer able to post. Your take on Micah 5:2, please? I see that there are additional references in I Chronicles and elsewhere in the NT. I’m not entirely convinced that, based on these other references, that Micah 5:2 refers to a person. Give me all you got and thanks!
widdley
It’s a Messianic prophesy but it’s not about Jesus. Bethlehem is given as the birtplace of the Messiah because that was the birthplace of David. This is a case where the Jesus’ birth was placed in Bethlem in the literary tradition deliberately to match Messianic expectations
Moreover, there are a number of prophesies in Micah which were not fulfilled by Jesus, such as rebuilding the Temple, bringing world peace and causing the world to worship God. Micah is talking about the Messiah, and that’s why Matthew and Luke chose to set Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, but this is an instance of a story being deliberately created to follow expectations, not a real historical event predicted by Micah.
Jesus was not really born in Bethlehem.
Interesting reply. I’m interested in your thoughts. You’d be doing me a favor to isolate my questions in separate quote boxes. Feel free to snip the un-undelined parts for clarity/brevity.
Were Matthew and Luke lying? Good intentions or not, it sounds like you’re saying they made this up. They spent 3½ years with Christ, and wrote even about his childhood. They knew his mother for sure, and likely his father. It’s highly unlikely that they would have been mistaken, or guessed.
What biblical cites do you have to support that they, a) made this up, and; b) let us know his actual birth place. Where was he born?
If your cites are non-biblical, what are they?
Why evidence is there that those cites are more compelling than the bible writers? My point here is that the writers knew Jesus directly and his family. They are first hand writers, and while not present at his birth, certainly would have known this from their dealings with him. Even if your cites are first century historians et al, they are at least once (or removed) from the source. If they’re 20th century writers, why would they be more credible than the writers? Are not writers 2000 years later speculating?
Was Jesus the Messiah? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but referencing the temple, world peace etc I’m left with the impression that you don’t believe he was the Messiah, and that Matthew & Luke for example gussied up the account to support what they wanted to believe.
Without either of us going off on an off OP jaunt, are there many other instances where bible writers, good intentioned or not, intentionally mislead the readers to support something they wanted to believe?
If Matthew and Luke lied, shouldn’t that cause at least some believers to lose some faith, perhaps not so much because of Christ’s actual birthplace, but that the writers’s integrity should be called into question?
Luke spent 3 1/2 years with Christ? I thought it said right off the bat in Luke that the author wasn’t an eyewitness, but got his information from those who were. No?
Even if we accept the Biblical attribution of authorship of the first Gospel to Matthew, Apostle of Jesus, I’m puzzled why the raindog says Luke spent 3½ years with Jesus. Luke was a companion of Paul; AFAIK, neither of them (even accepting the Bible as true in all respects) claims to have known Jesus in life.
And Luke and Matthew have no credibility on the subject of Jesus’ birthplace, or on anything else about his childhood, because they hardly agree on anything they say about those subjects, and frequently flatly disagree. The “Christmas story” is a composite of Luke and Matthew, and (apart from having Jesus born in Bethlehem, because the Messiah pretty much had to be born in Bethlehem), there’s just about zero overlap. The Magi, the Three Wise Men, and the star in the east are found in Matthew, but not Luke. Luke gives the story of the census as explaining why a family otherwise identified as being from Galilee were in Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus; Matthew doesn’t mention this. Herod and the slaughter of the innocents are in Matthew, but not Luke. The manger is in Luke, but not Matthew. Granted, different biographers might mention different incidents without necessarily contradicting each other. But in many places Matthew and Luke do contradict each other. They give totally different genealogies for Joseph, at Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38. In the third chapter of Matthew, after Jesus’ birth we have the flight into Egypt to escape Herod. In the second chapter of Luke, after Jesus’ birth the family travels to Jerusalem to present him at the Temple.
John and Mark, of course, don’t have anything to say at all about Jesus’ childhood. I don’t believe the other gospels even mention the virgin birth (one thing Matthew and Luke do agree on).
You are correct. Luke (unlike Matthew) was not present, and not likely a believer until after Jesus’s death. He would not have been an eyewitness.
Yes…or rather, they were creating fiction.
Neither of the authors of Matthew or Luke ever knew Jesus. Both authors are annoymous and the traditional ascriptions of authorship grew up in the 2nd century. Luke is not alleged to have known Jesus even by tradition, but to have been a travelling companion of Paul (who also never met Jesus). Even that tradition is suspect and is not supported by the text. Not one of the gospels names its own author or purports to be an eyewitness account of Jesus’ life.
Both Matthew and Luke are written far too late and in the wrong language to be eyewitness accounts. Moreover, and more importantly, they are both dependent on prior literary traditions (Mark and Q). An eyewitness would not have had to rely on verbatim accounts from secondary sources for events which they had witnessed themselves.
Matthew was written in the 80’s CE, was based on Mark and Q and the author wrote his own Nativity narrative based on extropolations from the Tanakh. There is no tradition prior to Matthew that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
Luke also used Mark and Q but apparently did not know Matthew because his own fictionalized nativity contradicts Matthew at every turn.
The evidence that the Nativity narratives are fiction is based on some of the facts I’ve already noted:
1.) The authors were not, and did not claim to be, eyewitnesses of Jesus or his apostles.
2.) Matthew was written c. 80 CE or later, Luke was written in at least the mid 90’s. This is far too late for them to have been written by eyewitnesses.
3.) They were written in Koine Greek. That’s not a problem for Luke who was a gentile, but is impossible that Matthew, a Palestinian Jew, would have been able to write in literary Greek.
4.) They are both dependent on prior secondary sources also written in Greek.
5.) They both use the Greek septuagint rather than the Hebrew Tanakh. This is an indication that they did not know Hebrew, especially since Matthew preserves mistranslations from Hebrew to Greek and even extropolates from them.
All of the earliest traditions say that Jesus was from Galilee. John even apologizes for it. Whether he was specifically from Nazareth (or whether Nazareth even existed at the time) is a matter of debate, but he was almost certainly born in Galilee.
See above.
Once again, the authors did not know Jesus. Your entire premise is false.
I’m saying that Jesus did not fulfill the OT expectations of the Messiah. Matthew and Luke placed Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem to fit expectations, but they couldn’t very well have him fulfill prophecies which had manifestly not come true yet (and a lot of the so-called fulfillments of prophecy that they do cite are actually not Messianicprophecies when read in context).
“Mislead” is the wrong word. These were not deliberate lies, but honestly intended extropolations from Hebrew Scripture. The authors had veru little historical information to go on and so they sought clues in the Bible. Anything that seemed like a prophecy was read as such. They sincerely thought they were gleaning bits of factual info, though. They said Jesus was born in Bethlehem because, in their minds, it must have been so, not because they were ntentionally trying to deceive.
I still think “lie” is the wrong word. They were mythmakers. The spiritual truths were more important than the literal words. Was jesus “lying” when he created his parables?
I think that getting hung up on the literal truth would definitely be a problem for many but I also know that many others manage to reconcile their faith with a more alegorical reading of scripture. I’m not in any position to say what Christians “should” do, but I know that they can understand these stories as myth and still be Christians.
Jesus was reportedly of the lineage of David, which was identified with Bethlehem, the town where David’s father Jesse had lived. The stories suggest that Joseph and Mary went from Galilee, where they lived, to Bethlehem, and that, for the first time since David himself, a heir to David was born there. There’s something extremely symbolic in that – whether or not you accept it as literal truth. And we know that Matthew at least was intent on finding “the fulfillment of prophecies” in Jesus’s life and death – to the extent that he stretches quotations out of any reasonable reading in order to “show that they prophesied Jesus.” Whatever the historical truth of the Nativity narratives, they are intended to show Jesus as David’s heir, the promised Messiah of the line of David, fulfilling the Messianic prophecies.
I think I’d wrap Diogenes’s last post to this thread, and the post he made that the questioning of provoked that post too, in a caveat – “Modern scholars are convinced, for good reasons too long to go into, that…” We modern people miss the importance of symbolic language – “George Washington and the cherry tree” said something important to our ancestors, regardless of the truth value of the story as historical narrative.
I have to admit that any Davidic descendant would fulfill the Micah prophesy, whether or not they were actually born in Bethlehem. And I do believe the factuality of the Gospel accounts.
Diogenes,
Show me “Q”.
widdley
Diogenes,
Looks like I can’t edit a post here. What I’m asking is for you to prove “Q”. Your assertions are based on an unproveable.
widdley
Well, I ain’t Diogenes, not by a long shot, but what exactly are you asking him to prove? There’s no evidence that the authors of Matthew and Luke had access to the other’s writings, and yet they share several passages, sometimes with word-for-word agreement, that are not found in Mark. So, doesn’t it seem likely that these shared passages came from somewhere else? That’s all Q is- the something else from which the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, etc. were gleaned.
Isn’t the fact that Matthew and Luke both added the same stuff to Mark- even though they didn’t appear to know about each other- enough evidence in favor of another shared source?
Is it really so unprovable?
OK, the evidence for the Q theory is based on the fact that there are wide swaths of material in Luke and Matthew that is word for word the same in Greek (although not necessarily in the same chronological order) and did not come from Matthew. Now how did this come to be? Here are the options to choose from.
1.) It’s a coincidence. Both authors just happened to translate Aramaic sayings into precisely the same Greek words. Not only that but they also chose precisely the same framing narratives (meaning the narrative pericopes around the sayings…they didn’t just translate the sayings the same but told the stories around them in the identical words).
2.) Luke copied Matthew.
3.) Luke and Matthew both used a common written source.
4.) Miraculous “Divine” intervention.
Now, empirical methodology requires us to rule out option 4 absent some kind of orrefutable evidence.
Option 1 is ruled out by Ockham as being the least plausible of the remaing possibilities.
That leaves options 2 or 3. Either Luke copied Matthew or both copied something else. But if Luke copied Matthew, why is his Nativity so completely different? Why does Luke contradict Matthew in so many details? If Luke trusted Matthew enough as a source to duplicate so many passages verbatim, then why does he completely ignore Matthew’s Nativity. Also, why did he change the order?
Another thing to consider is that Matthew’s “Q” passages are written in a different style (a different “voice,” different vocabulary and phrasing) from Matthew’s other original material. Why would Matthew keep lapsing by fits into a completely different writing style and how is it that these lapses are precisely non-Markan passages copied by Luke?
Can I prove absolutely that Q existed? No, but it is now almost unanimously accepted by scholars that Matthew and Luke used a common written source.
If you have an alternate theory for the common material in Matthew and Luke then please tell us what it is. Remember that your theory will require evidence (especially if you wish to assert the supernatural) and it will also have to explain the contradictory Nativities.
Should be did not come from Mark.
Please notice that “the Q hypothesis” as actually formulated does not require nor necessarily suggest the existence of a Q document, merely a traditional collection of Jesus’s sayings on which both Matthew (as it presently exists) and Luke drew. Far too often the idea is rejected because there is no evidence of such a document existing – but the Q theorists don’t claim that it did, necessarily. Remember that there was an expectation among the early Christians that Christ’s return was not far off – so they depended on oral tradition to preserve the content of what later became the Gospels.
I’ve done the detailed outline several times before, but there’s nothing standing in the way of, and quite a bit to suggest that, what St. Matthew himself produced was not the existing First Gospel but rather what we’d call Q in modern parlance – and that an editor later incorporated this sayings collection into a copy of Mark, mildly modified for Jewish sensibilities, to produce “the Gospel according to Matthew.”
Diogenes the Cynic said:
Luke certainly did not know Jesus, and likely didn’t become a believer until after Christ’s death. Matthew was one of Jesus 12 disciples and if he is the author of the book of Matthew, he certainly did. More on that later…
As to the authorship of Luke, the Muratorian Fragment (around 175 C.E.) and 2nd century writers Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria accept Luke as the author of Luke. There is no evidence before that time (that I’m aware of) that would dispute their belief that Luke authored the book of Luke. There is no other credible cite from that period (from 33 CE through the 4th century and later) that would indentify any author other than Luke. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Many scholars ascribe both the book of Luke and Acts to Luke. Luke begins with “3 I resolved also, because I have traced all things from the start with accuracy, to write them in logical order to you, most excellent The·oph´i·lus, …”** (Luke 1:3)** Acts begins with , “The first account, O The·oph´i·lus, I composed about all the things Jesus started both to do and to teach…” (Acts 1:1) (italics mine) This is an apparent reference (to The·oph´i·lus by name in both accounts) about the previous writing about Christ; the book of Luke. So the author of Acts had earlier authored "the first account ", specifically about the Christ. (Acts 1:1)
So far, as it relates to Luke’s Gospel, we have 2nd century authors ascribing Luke as author. The beginning verses of both Luke and Acts are in agreement in that Acts refers back to “a first account”, both to The·oph´i·lus, that is logically the account of Jesus in Luke’s gospel.
As to the quality of the texts, it would appear that Luke was a doctor. (Col 4:14) Does the text of Luke’s Gospel support that? Throughout the account medical terms are used that are either not used in the other gospels, or not mentioned in the same level of detail. (see** Luke 5:12, 16:20, 4:38** and many others)
As to Matthew, scholars are not in universal agreement as to the date of authorship. (as is the case with the other gospels!) Some manuscripts show the date as 41 CE. (All later that 1000 CE) Here too, the second century is where authorship is ascribed to Matthew. McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopedia states: “Passages from Matthew are quoted by Justin Martyr, by the author of the letter to Diognetus (see in Otto’s Justin Martyr, vol. ii), by Hegesippus, Irenæus, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Clement, Tertullian, and Origen. It is not merely from the matter, but the manner of the quotations, from the calm appeal as to a settled authority, from the absence of all hints of doubt, that we regard it as proved that the book we possess had not been the subject of any sudden change.” Jerome said (375 CE?) “Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an apostle, first of all composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed…” He goes on to say that the Hebrew text was preserved in Pamphilus’s library in Caesarea. (4th century) (De viris inlustribus (Concerning Illustrious Men)) In the 3rd century Origen quotes Eusebius and says (in part) “…first was written . . . according to Matthew, . . . who published it for those who from Judaism came to believe, composed as it was in the Hebrew language…”
Luke’s knowledge would have come from early Christians, and from Matthew’s Gospel primarily. (As his Gospel likely preceded Mark) It’s fair to say that Paul had an influence on him (compare Luke 22:19,20 & 1 Cor 11:23-25) It would appear that Luke was a traveling companion of Paul.** (2 Tim 4:11, Philem 24, Col 4:14)**
Not sure what you mean. As Luke was not an eyewitness, he would have relied on oral accounts and the Gospel of Matthew among other sources. How that’s not supported by the text I don’t understand. Cites & comparisons?
True. However, the weight and context support the authors as identified. Further the nature of the writings are consistent with the professions/backgrounds of the authors. There is no sources that I’m aware of that would indentify another author, or even speculate one in that period, or the the 300 years that followed. Matthew and John are considered part of Jesus’s 12 disciples, whereas Matthew and Mark are not. Nonetheless, if in fact Matthew is the author (and the compelling evidence is that he is) he would be an eyewitness.
The exact date of authorship among all the gospels in not in universal agreement. Some manuscripts show the date of Matthew as early as 41 CE. Luke is considered by some to be about 15-20 years after Matthew’s account. John is generally considered to be the last of the 4 Gospels. In any event Diogenes, even if the date is 80 CE, there is no reason to believe that Matthew could not have been an eyewitness, given that it would only be 50 years after Jesus’s death. There is no cite that I’m aware of that specifically identifies the date of Matthew’s death. Further, John’s gospel has been estimated as late as 98 CE, more than 60 years after Christ’s death. It’s been estimated that John died a couple years after writing his account. No matter, there is nothing in those accounts that suggest that the passage of time, and time alone, make these accounts invalid. Even accepting your dates, there is no reason to believe that Matthew couldn’t have written the accounts as an eyewitness.
As to language, both Jerome and Eusebius identify Matthew as the author and Hebrew as the language. Nonetheless, there is nothing to suggest that either Matthew, or another translator at his direction, could not have translated this account.
Diogenes, we don’t know:
Cite?
Cite?
Even in the 80’s there is no reason to discredit Matthew as an eyewitness unless you want to speculate as to the date of his death.
Before Matthew there is no tradition about Jesus of any kind! It’s the first book of the Greek Scrpitures/NT, and the first account written after Jesus’s birth!
Cite, with comparisons?
Of course, that fact alone doesn’t mean that Matthew wasn’t an eyewitness, right? And, the author didn’t claim that he wasn’t an eyewitness, right?
Why? Unless you are willing to speculate as to their deaths, 50 years after the death of Christ is not an unreasonable time frame to be an eyewitness.
Why would Matthew been unable? It would seem that the original account was written in Hebrew. Unless you are willing to speculate, how do we know that he wasn’t able to speak Greek, or employ the use of a translator? Did Paul write Greek? Was he a Jew?
I would like to see proof of this.
Cite?
A biblical cite that shows that Jesus wasn’t from Galilee, but born in Galilee? If not biblical, are the cites earlier than when Matthew’s Gospel was said to be written? (80CE) In any event, what are the traditions, and sources?
I appreciate your thoughts, while I disagree, I appreciate the respect you show towards those who would call themselves Christians.
Every passage of the Old Testament quoted in Matthew or Luke is a direct copy of the Septuagint. Had either of them been translating the Hebrew Tanakh into Greek, one would expect to find variants in the passages as different words were selected for translation.
The most famous of these occurs in Matthew where he quotes Isaiah 7:14 “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son” using the word parthenon (virgin) regarding his view of the prophecy of the birth of Jesus. This word is used in the Septuagint, but the original Hebrew simply says almah, (young woman), with no reference to “virgin.”
I know of no serious scholar who continues to hold this position. The Papias comment that Matthew compiled a list of sayings in Aramaic is attested by no other contemporary of his and even he was writing from a perspective 40 to 70 years after the works he claims to be reporting (and, of course, we only know Papias through Eusebius about 160 years later than that). I disagree with DtC that a Palestinian Jew could not have written in Koine, but the Gospel of Matthew that we possess is a complete literary work with a coherent structure that shows no signs of having been a reworking of an earlier Aramaic text.
(Whether the Aramaic sayings of Matthew were translated to Greek to become the Q of Matthew and Luke is an entirely separate topic, but one that would be purely specualtive in any event.)
Diogenes,
Bum’s rush on this one I’m afraid. I’ll get back to you on the remainder of your comments tomorrow so long as I’m still able to post.
or…
5) They are both simply recording oral tradition.
I’ll try to get back here, another related issue I want to run by you.
widdley
Ockham is not on your side, here.
For them to be both quoting oral tradition of nothing more than a collection of sayings we need to be able to explain why the sayings were extremely close to identical on a line by line basis.
Beyond that, there is the issue of Why insist on an oral tradition that has an identical effect as a written tradition?
The sayings are inserted into two quite different narrative texts in ways that demonstrate a coherent original source (nearly identical phrasing throughout, same basic order of insertion, despite the differences in the texts into which they were inserted, etc.). So what is the practical difference between assuming that the two authors were both looking at a written document that would tend to make the passages consistent and proposing that the two authors were recalling an oral work from memory? It really does not change the dating of the gospels. It does not alter the idea that each author borrowed from an earlier source. It simply makes the (presumed) written document into a harder-to-recall spoken collection. (As a personal objection, I would suggest that a truly oral tradition should have been couched in poetry for the purposes of memorization, but I will not defend that point to the death.)
There is no evidence that would identify any specific person as the author of Luke/Acts. The traditional character of the author as a physician and travelling companion of Paul is not based on anything in the text of Luke or Acts themselves. Irenaeus made that identification based on inference from the “we” passages in Acts and from a few passing references to a physician companion named Luke in the Epistles. There is NOTHING in any Biblical text which states that this companion was the author of Luke/Acts, and the dating of those texts in the mid 90’s makes such an identification even more unlikely.
Beyond that, even if the author had been a travelling companion of Paul’s, he still did not know Jesus and never claimed to. The books were not even written until 70 years after the crucifixion and the author was a Greek gentile, not a Palestinian Jew.
Nobody disputes that Luke-Acts had the same author. What I dispute is a.) that the author was an eyewitness of Jesus or b.) that he was a travelling companion of Paul’s or that there is any evidence that the author was named Luke.
I’m not sure why you keep spelling Theophilus phonetically but since the word means “Lover of God” in Greek it is arguably just an address to a generic audience rather than a specific person.
Colossians is no longer regarded as an authentic Pauline letter and there is nothing in it anyway which would connect “Luke” to author of Luke-SActs.
No.
Cadbury debunked the “medical language” in Acts long ago. I suggets you seek oot a book called The Style and Literary Method of Luke. The author of Luke-Acts does not show the requsite knowledge of ailments and remedies that a doctor would show and there is nothing in the vocabulary which would be unique to a physician.
There is simply nothing in any Biblical text which identifies the author of Luke-Acts or any of the other canonical gospels.
Yep, 2nd century tradition just like I said. Too bad none of thjat 2nd century tradition can explain why Matthew was dependent on Mark and Q, or why it was written in Koine instead of the Hebrew claimed by Papias.
Matthew absolutely could not have been written before sometime in the 70’s at the very earliest. It copies from Mark and Mark knows about the Jewish-Roman war and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
The only books in the New Testament which were written before 70 CE were the seven authentic letters of Paul.
You have it backwards. Mark came first and Matthew copied Mark. This is now universally acceoted by scholars. Only the most rock-ribbed fundamentalists still try to argue for Matthean priority.
If Luke used Matthew you have to explain why he wrote such a contradictory Nativity.
I meant that the tradition of Luke as a travelling companion of Paul is not supported by any Biblical text.
Luke did not know the Gospel of Matthew, btw. He knew Mark and Q.
This paragraph doesn’t parse very well but I’ll try to address it anyway.
All four gospels are anonymous. None of them name their own authors and none of them claim to be eyewitness accounts.
Matthew could not have been an eyewitness because it is written too late, it is dependent on secondary sources and the author uses the Septuagint exclusively (which means that he was a not a Palestinian Jew or he would have used the Hebrew Tanakh rather than the Greek LXX).
What “manuscripts” would those be?
It is impossible for Matthew to have been written before the 70s CE.
That’s true if you date Matthew at 80 CE which is the current consensus.
That is true.
This is true as far as it goes. The dating in itself would not be sufficient to rule out apostolic authorship but the date in conjunction with the other factors I’ve listed are more than sufficient.
You should also remember that sonce the text itself does not name an author, it is incumbent upon those who would hypothesize one to a prove it. I do not have to prove who did not write an anonymous work, you have to prove who did. I have showed you that there are massive problems with asserting apostolic authorship for Matthew and franky, there is no good reason to do so except to cling to tradition.
I’m afraid that the gospel of John was not the work of an apostle either, in fact, not a single canonical book of the NT was written by an eyewitness of Jesus, but I have already stated that the problems with apostolic authorship for Matthew are by no means limited to its date of authorship.
Papias claims that Matthew compiles a Logia (sayings gospel) in Hebrew. Canonical Matthew is not a sayings gospel and is not a translation from either Hebrew or Aramaic. It is a Koine composition using prior Koine sources.
Earlier in this thread Polycarp mentioned a hypothesis that Matthew’s Logia may have been an early version of Q (probably in Aramaic, Papias may not have realized the distinction between Hebrew and Aramaic). At some point Q could have been translated and redacted into the Greek form used by Matthew and Luke. If any kind of tradition recognized that an apostolic sayings tradition was embedded in canonical Matthew then that apostolic authorship tradition could have been transeferred to canonical Matt as a whole. This is a theory that I am not averse to, but I would also point out that Q has no miracle stories, no Virgin birth and no resurrection.
You want a cite that Matthew copied Mark and Q? Read the damn thing.
Do you deny that there are passages that are word for word the same as Mark?
Do you deny that Matthew and Luke contain certain passages which are identical in Greek and which did not come from Mark? How do you explain it?
I’ve already explained the reasoning for all this, I’m not sure what more you’re asking for
Cite that an eywitness would no use a secondary account- an account from a non eyewitness- as a source for events he witnessed himself?
Why would he?
I’ve been over this already.
Are you kidding? You are really misinformed about this subject.
There is plenty of literary tradition before Mark. I’m amazed you don’t know this but the earliest NT writings are the Epistles of Paul. That’s not even disputed by the most conservative scholars. Besides Paul. Matthew is predated by Mark, Q and Thomas. (I know that Thomas is not canonical but it still predates Matthew).
This post is turning into War and Peace already, but MEBuckner has already saved me the work in this very thread. If you’ll just scroll up you’ll see that he has already made a list of some of the Matthew/Luke Nativity contradictions, complete with chapter and verse.
You know this is a classic argumentum ad ignorantium, are you not? The author also did not claim he was not a wolverine. Is that a reason to assume that he was?
Canonical Matthew shows no artfacts of translation and it uses prior Greek sources word for word.
Yes, Paul wrote Greek and yes he was a Jew. He was also not a Palestinian Jew and the vast majority of Palestinian Jews were not literate even in Aramaic or Hebrew much less literary Greek.
Moreover, any Jew who knew Hebrew would not have preferred the Greek LXX to the Hebrew. He also would have been aware of the translational errors in the former.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking for. You want proof that Matthew is dependent on Mark? Read them side by side.
The most notorious example of Matthew preserving a mistranslation of the Hebrew word almah (meaning "young woman) into the Greek pathenos (meaning “virgin”). The fact that Matthew did not know this was a mistranslation indicates that he did not know Hebrew and hence was not a Palestinian Jew.
The case for Galilean birth is made simply by the fact all the earliest traditions say he was from Galilee, they do not say he was born in Bethlehem and that John clearly sees his Galilean origin as a problem.