Hebrew Gospel hypothesis

Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. [This is what is related by Papias regarding Mark; but with regard to Matthew he has made the following statements]: Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could. [The same person uses proofs from the First Epistle of John, and from the Epistle of Peter in like manner. And he also gives another story of a woman who was accused of many sins before the Lord, which is to be fount in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.]

— Papias circa 120 AD, quoted by Eusebius, Church History

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. Who translated it after that in Greek is not sufficiently ascertained. Moreover, the Hebrew itself is preserved to this day in the library at Caesarea, which the martyr Pamphilus so diligently collected. I also was allowed by the Nazarenes who use this volume in the Syrian city of Beroea to copy it.

— Jerome: De viris inlustribus (On Illustrious Men), chapter III.[7]

He (Shaul) being a Hebrew wrote in Hebrew, that is, his own tongue and most fluently; while things which were eloquently written in Hebrew were more eloquently turned into Greek.

— Jerome, 382 AD, On Illustrious Men, Book V

Matthew also issued a written gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect.

— Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3:1 [c.175-185 A.D.]

First to be written was by Matthew, who was once a tax collector but later an apostle of Jesus Christ, who published it in Hebrew for Jewish believers.

— Origen circa 210 AD, quoted by Eusebius, Church History, Book 6, Chapter 25, Section 4[8][9]

The Gospel of Matthew is anonymous: the author is not named within the text and nowhere does he claim to have been an eyewitness to events.[10] It probably originated in a Jewish-Christian community in Roman Syria towards the end of the first century AD,[11] and there is little doubt among modern scholars that it was composed in Koine Greek, the daily language of the time.[12] The majority of scholars posits, in accordance with the Two-source hypothesis that the author drew from three main sources: the Gospel of Mark; the hypothetical sayings collection known as the Q source; and material unique to his own community, called M.[13] Mark and Q were both written sources composed in Greek, but some of the parts of Q may have been translated from Aramaic into Greek more than once.[14] M is comparatively small, only 170 verses, and made up almost exclusively of teachings; it probably was not a single source, and while some of it may have been written, most seems to have been oral.[15]

An early modern advocate of the proto-gospel hypothesis was Eichhorn who suggested the existence of an Ur-Gospel in 1794–1804, but this theory won little support in the following years.[16] General sources such as John Kitto's Cyclopedia describe the hypothesis[17] but note that it had been rejected by almost all succeeding critics.[18]

Johann Gottfried von Herder in turn argued for an oral Gospel tradition as an unwritten proto-gospel, leading to Friedrich Schleiermacher's idea of the gospel Papias referred to as being a separate work from canonical Matthew composed only of sayings of Jesus and no narrative, later known as the Q source. This logia would have been the a source for the canonical gospels.[19][20]

In 1838, Christian Hermann Weisse took Schleiermacher's suggestion of a sayings source (Q) and combined it with the idea of Marcan priority to formulate what is now called the Two-source hypothesis. As the shared passages in Matthew and Luke presumably from Q matched exactly, it was presumed that Q too must have been in Greek, rather than a translation from Hebrew or Aramaic which would likely have resulted in subtly different phrasings.

Acceptance of a proto-Gospel hypothesis in any form was in the 20th century minimal. Critical scholars had long moved on from the hypotheses of Eichhorn, Schleiermacher (1832) and K. Lachmann (1835).[21] Traditional Lutheran commentator Richard Lenski (1943) wrote regarding the "hypothesis of an original Hebrew Matthew" that "whatever Matthew wrote in Hebrew was so ephemeral that it disappeared completely at a date so early that even the earliest fathers never obtained sight of the writing".[22]

Regarding the related question of the reliability of Jerome's testimony also saw few scholars taking his evidence at face value. Helmut Köster (2000) casts doubt upon the value of Jerome's evidence for linguistic reasons; "Jerome's claim that he himself saw a gospel in Aramaic that contained all the fragments that he assigned to it is not credible, nor is it believable that he translated the respective passages from Aramaic into Greek (and Latin), as he claims several times."[23]

One advocate for the existence of a Hebrew gospel was Wilhelm Schneemelcher who cited several early fathers, apart from Jerome, as witnesses to the existence of a Hebrew gospel similar to Matthew - including Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius and Hegesippus.[24]

In the 20th century, three French scholars have suggested that Matthew as well as Mark was originally written in Hebrew, although they are an extreme minority. Jean Carmignac studied the Dead Sea Scrolls and found that translating Mark from Greek to Hebrew was surprisingly easy. He wrote the 1987 book The Birth of the Synoptics defending the idea of a Hebrew Mark/Matthew.[25] Likewise, Claude Tresmontant hypothesized a Hebrew originals for all four Gospels in his book The Hebrew Christ (1989). Jean-Marie Van Cangh has supported Carmignac's hypothesis since and authored in 2005 a Hebrew retroversion of the Gospel according to Mark under the title L'Evangile de Marc : un original hébreu ?[26]

Richard Simon of Normandy in 1689[27] asserted that an Aramaic or Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, lay behind the Nazarene Gospel, and was the Proto-Gospel.[28] J. J. Griesbach[29] treated this as the first of three source theories as solutions to the synoptic problem, following (1) the traditional Augustinian utilization hypothesis, as (2) the original gospel hypothesis or proto-gospel hypothesis, (3) the fragment hypothesis (Koppe);[30] and (4) the oral gospel hypothesis or tradition hypothesis (Herder 1797).[31][32]

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing whose New hypothesis on the Evangelists, 1778 suggested a lost Hebrew Gospel as a free source for the Synoptic Gospels

In 1778, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing posited several lost Aramaic Gospels as Ur-Gospel or proto-Gospel as a common sources used freely for the three Greek Synoptic Gospels.[33][34] He was followed by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn,[35] who in 1804 provided a comprehensive basis for the proto-gospel hypothesis and argued for an Aramaic original gospel that each of the Synoptic evangelists had in a different intermediate form.[36]

Hermann Olshausen (1832)[37] suggested a lost Hebrew Matthew was the common source of Greek Matthew and the Jewish-Christian Gospels mentioned by Epiphanius, Jerome and others.[38][39][40][41][42]

Edward Nicholson (1879) proposed that Matthew wrote two Gospels, the first in Greek, the second in Hebrew. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915) in its article Gospel of the Hebrews noted that Nicholson cannot be said ...[to] have carried conviction to the minds of New Testament scholars."[43]

Rudolf Handmann (1888) proposed an Aramaic Gospel of the Hebrews[44] but reasoned that this was not the Hebrew Matthew and there never was a Hebrew Ur-Matthew.[45]

During the 20th century Léon Vaganay (1940),[46] Lucien Cerfaux, Xavier Léon-Dufour and Antonio Gaboury (1952) attempted to revive Lessing's proto-gospel hypothesis.[47][48][49][50][51]

Related is the "Aramaic Matthew hypothesis" of Theodor Zahn,[52] which propounded the existence of an early lost Aramaic version of Matthew. In Zahn's opinion, Matthew wrote a complete Gospel in Aramaic; Mark was familiar with this document, which he used while abridging it. Matthew's Greek translator utilized Mark, but only for form, whereas Luke depended upon Mark and secondary sources, but was not acquainted with "Aramaic Matthew".[53][54] Setting him apart from some earlier scholars, Zahn did not believe Hebrew Matthew was identical to the surviving fragments of the Jewish-Christian gospels instead he understood them as derivative works.[55]

J. E. Belser held a similar view to Zahn and suggested that Matthew first wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, a Greek translation of it being made in 59–60, and Mark depended on Matthew's Aramaic document and Peter's preaching in Rome. Luke made use of Mark, of Matthew (both in Aramaic and Greek), and also of oral tradition.[56]

James R. Edwards, in The Hebrew Gospel and the development of the synoptic tradition (2009), suggested that a lost Hebrew Ur-Matthew is the common source of both the Jewish-Christian Gospels and the unique L source material (material not sourced from Mark or Q) in the Gospel of Luke. Edwards suggestion is in effect that a proto-Luke (rather than a proto-Matthew) is the lost hebrew proto-gospel. His thesis has not been accepted by other scholars.[57][58][59]

Maurice Casey argues in Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? (2014) that Matthew did compose a sayings collection in Aramaic (a proto-Matthew) that is the source for both the Greek canonical Matthew and Luke. Casey suggests that this is what Papias meant when he said that "each (person) translated/interpreted them as he was able" and that later Church fathers confused proto-Matthew with the Greek Gospel of Matthew. Casey also argues that the Greek Gospel of Matthew is a composite work (that also made use of Mark) that was, in accordance with common custom at the time, attributed "to the fountainheads of tradition" i.e. Matthew.