And if we consider the passage more broadly, in the light of the special tendency of St. Matthew’s Gospel, its authenticity becomes manifest. It is the plain purpose of his Gospel to set forth Jesus as the Messiah foretold by the Old Testament, and in particular as the divine Law-giver and Teacher who reveals the deepest meaning of the Old Testament and brings it to fulfillment. His new and perfect doctrine corrects and amends the false doctrine of the Scribes and Pharisees, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel (Mt. xxiii, 24). Therefore the special tendency of St. Matthew, though not anti-Jewish, is certainly antipharisaic. The true Teacher of the Kingdom of Heaven is Jesus alone. And in so far as His chosen disciples have to propagate His teaching of a justice superior to the justice of the Pharisees, they become a new teaching body and supplant the blind Scribes and Pharisees. And so we see that the wider purpose of St. Matthew’s Gospel is the institution of a new religious authority, a new teaching body, and consequently the establishment of a new Church which should replace the Synagogue. And that disciple who grasped the mystery of the Kingdom of God beyond all the rest, and confessed it at Caesarea Philippi, is appointed to be the foundation stone of the new Church, to be its steward and instructor in the Kingdom, and is given the power of binding and loosing, that is of forbidding and permitting, not according to the manner of the Pharisees, but according to the mind of Jesus. Thus the anti- pharisaic tendency of the Gospel of St. Matthew culminates precisely at this point, in the foundation of a new Church and in the new authority granted to St. Peter. Our Lord’s promise to St. Peter is undiluted anti-pharisaism. And for that reason the passage may not be expunged from the Gospel; it belongs to the evangelist’s original plan.