Matthew
c. 4 BCE–c. 74 CE · Ancient Israel
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Influence99th pct
Popularity54th pct
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
Influence
The lineage through Matthew
Inspired(13)
who Matthew shaped
Fyodor DostoevskyRussian 19th Century
via Devils
- Luke's Gadarene swine — the demons cast out of a man into a herd that drowns itself — gave Dostoevsky his title, his epigraph, and his governing image
- In a letter to Maykov he says it plainly: "the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine"
- Devils reads the whole nihilist convulsion of 1860s Russia through that single Gospel scene
- The book Nietzsche knew best, and built Thus Spoke Zarathustra to invert
- A pastor's son and former divinity student, he mimicked the Gospel arc on purpose — the solitary teacher who leaves at thirty, returns with a mission, gathers disciples, is misunderstood
- He kept the cadence and the shape and reversed the message: a mock-gospel preaching anti-Christian morality in the very voice it set out to overthrow
John BunyanEnlightenment
- Bunyan's allegory runs on Gospel text — Christian's whole journey begins at a Wicket Gate lifted straight from the Sermon on the Mount
- The 'strait gate' and 'narrow way' of Matthew 7:13-14 become the literal geography of salvation; Bunyan cites the verse in his own margins
- Spurgeon said Bunyan's prose was 'Bibline' — prick it and it bleeds scripture, and this is where most of it comes from
- Christ's denunciation of the Pharisees in Matthew 23 becomes Douglass's weapon against the slaveholders
- In his Appendix he quotes it at length — "woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" / "They bind heavy burdens... grievous to be borne" — to expose the men who whipped slaves on Sunday
- Douglass turns the Gospel's own words back on a Christian nation, splitting "the Christianity of Christ" from "the slaveholding... Christianity of this land"
- Stowe's novel is, at bottom, the Gospel preached as fiction — Christian love set against slavery
- Uncle Tom owns and reads only the New Testament, patterning his whole life on the Jesus of these pages
- Read these first and Uncle Tom's Cabin reveals itself as a deliberate Christ-figure built straight from Matthew and John
William ShakespeareShakespeare
via Richard II
- The Passion narrative becomes the script for a king's fall — Shakespeare stages Richard's deposition as a crucifixion
- Richard names his betrayers "Pilates" who deliver him to his "sour cross," and likens his courtiers' false homage to "So Judas did to Christ" (echoing the mockery of Matthew 27)
- Watch how Richard II turns a political surrender into a sacred betrayal — and where it gets the imagery
Augustine of HippoAncient Rome
via Confessions
- The book Augustine could not stop quoting — the Confessions is a mosaic of scripture, and the Gospels supply its load-bearing stones
- John's prologue, the Word made flesh, is Augustine's measuring stick: it's what he finds the Platonists lacking, the one thing their philosophy could never reach
- Matthew's knock and it shall be opened runs through the whole book and gives Augustine his closing words — the Gospel doesn't just influence the Confessions, it ends it
UnknownBible
- The Passion narrative becomes the moral architecture of the first great chanson
- Roland dies a Christ-figure, his death scene shadowing the Passion; his twelve paladins echo the Twelve Apostles, and the emir's offer replays Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4)
- Above all, the traitor Ganelon is a new Judas — betraying his lord, doomed to a traitor's end
Thomas PaineEnlightenment
via Common Sense
- Paine seized on the Gospel line every royalist loved — "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's" (Matthew 22:21) — and turned it against the crown
- His argument: the Jews of that moment had no king and answered to Rome, so the verse can't be read as a blessing on monarchy
- A scriptural commonplace, repurposed into revolutionary ammunition
Charlotte BrontëVictorian
via Jane Eyre
- Of all scripture, it is The Gospels — Matthew above all — that Brontë reaches for most in Jane Eyre
- The Sermon on the Mount runs as the deepest current beneath Jane's moral struggles, an Anglican clergyman's daughter writing with the Gospel in her bones
- Brontë doesn't just allude; she quotes and reworks Gospel passages directly into the narrative
Nathaniel HawthorneTranscendentalists
- Hawthorne reaches into The Gospels for the bones of his novel: the adulterous-woman scene — "let him cast the first stone" — sits behind Hester's public shaming
- Pearl is named verbatim from Matthew's parable of the "pearl of great price" (Matthew 13)
- And Dimmesdale's scaffold becomes a Golgotha, the minister staged as a Christ-figure under judgment
Victor HugoFrench 19th Century
via Les Misérables
- The moral engine of Les Misérables runs on gospel grace — Bishop Myriel gives away his silver to redeem a convict, the way Christ gives himself to redeem the world
- Hugo frames Jean Valjean's conversion in explicitly Gospel terms: mercy that buys a soul, set against the institutional religion that only condemns
- Read the parable of unconditional forgiveness here, then watch Hugo build a 1,400-page novel on it
Leo TolstoyRussian 19th Century
via Anna Karenina
- Beneath the love story, Anna Karenina turns on a single Gospel doctrine — forgiveness — and Tolstoy wrestles centrally with the Sermon on the Mount
- Karenin's bedside forgiveness of Anna and Vronsky is the Gospel ethic tested against wounded pride; Levin's closing conversion is its resolution
- Tolstoy began his own Gospel-harmony project in these same years — the religious reading drives the whole book
In their words
Famous Quotes
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”
“Jesus wept.”
“All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”
Biography
About Matthew
Tax collector turned apostle, traditionally credited with the first Gospel. His account emphasizes Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy and includes the Sermon on the Mount, the most influential ethical teaching in Western civilization.
1 work