MATTHEW LINCOLN

English form of the name of the Christian evangelist, author of the first gospel in the New Testament. His name is a form of the Hebrew name Mattathia, meaning ‘gift of God’, which is fairly common in the Old Testament, being rendered in the Authorized Version in a number of different forms: Mattan(i)ah, Mattatha(h), Mattithiah, Mattathias, and so on. In the Authorized Version, the evangelist is regularly referred to as Matthew, while the apostle chosen to replace Judas Iscariot is distinguished as Matthias. A related name from the same Hebrew roots, but reversed, is Jonathan. Throughout the English-speaking world Matthew has been particularly popular since the 1970s.

English: habitational name from the city of Lincoln, so named from an original British name Lindo- ‘lake’ + Latin colonia ‘settlement’, ‘colony’. The place was an important administrative center during the Roman occupation of Britain and in the Middle Ages it was a center for the manufacture of cloth, including the famous ‘Lincoln green’.