More decisive upon this matter is the general character of the birth and infancy sections, which is sharply distinguished from that of the body of the Gospel. This is not due to the presence of the marvelous in these early chapters, since that is found to some degree throughout, but to the presence of what may be more distinctly called the legendary element. In this characteristic it is like some of the material at the end of Matthew's Gospel. Let one compare the general character of the stories of the star and the magi, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt with the story of the opening of the graves and the awakening of the departed dead, and the angel rolling away the stone from the grave, and the question will suggest itself, whether Matthew may not have obtained all these stories from one source.
This suggestion might appear to be seconded by the fact that this material, which has such a striking family resemblance, is not scattered thru the body of Matthew's work, but occurs, part of it before he has reached his junction with Mark and Luke, and the rest of it after he has parted from them. He not only begins and ends alone, but he begins and ends with material of a remarkably similar character. This is not enough, of course, to prove the unity of Matthew's source for the first and last parts of his single tradition; but it is enough to suggest it.
As to the source of the rest of Matthew's peculiar material, we cannot get beyond guesswork. Some of it has an extremely genuine sound; for example, the sayings appended to the Sabbath discussion, "The priests break the sabbath in the temple and are blameless," etc. (xii, 5-6); the saying about the angels of the little ones (xviii, 10); the parable of the Fish-Net, preserving so well the eschatological features of the preaching of Jesus (xiii, 47-50); the parable of the Two Sons (xxi, 28-31). The incident of the temple tax (xvii, 24-27) seems to go back for its origin to a time when the temple was still in existence, and, when it is relieved of the item of the coin in the fish's mouth (which may easily be a later addition to the story), seems to bear traces of undoubted genuineness.
The parable of the Laborers who received every man a penny (Mt xx, 1-16) seems likewise to indicate a time considerably later than that of Jesus; a time, namely, when those who had long waited for the parousia were asking whether those who had come in at the eleventh hour were to receive the rewards of the coming kingdom exactly as those who had "borne the burden and the heat of the day." That it was in such a time as this that Matthew wrote his Gospel may suggest the hypothesis that he has here worked over some genuine saying of Jesus, or received such a saying as it had been worked over by the waiting community, to suit the need of the times.