Why There Was Probably Never a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew

[00:00:00]If, as I argued before, the case for Markan priority is not airtight, then the possibility of a much earlier date for Matthew's gospel presents itself.

[00:00:12]As we saw, the patristics are unanimous in affirming that Matthew was authored prior to the other gospels. However, the patristics also appear to tell us something else about Matthew, namely that it was written in Hebrew. But the difficulty is that the Gospel of Matthew that we know today is written in Greek, not Hebrew. So, if the patristics are telling us that the Gospel of Matthew that preceded the Gospels of Mark and Luke was written in Hebrew, then perhaps this indicates that our canonical Gospel of Matthew should not automatically be assumed to have been written prior to Mark and Luke. Perhaps it was actually this Hebrew Matthew that was written before Mark and Luke.

[00:00:59]This whole concern is motivated entirely by the assumption that the patristics do in fact claim that Matthew's gospel was written in Hebrew in the first place.

[00:01:10]I do not question the fact that later church fathers, like Origen, Jerome, and St. Augustine thought that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew. However, these church fathers are much farther removed from the writing of the gospels and may be misunderstanding the statements of earlier church fathers.

[00:01:32]The only two early sources that might be thought to be asserting that Matthew was originally authored in Hebrew are Papias and Irenaeus. Strikingly, they are also the most vague in their wording.

[00:01:45]The word translated as language in Papias and Irenaeus is the Greek word dialecto, and it can also be legitimately translated as style or dialect. On this interpretation, Papias and Irenaeus would be saying that Matthew wrote for a Hellenistic Jewish audience. As Larry Chouinard points out, while much critical opinion has assumed that Papias' errant view of an original Semitic Matthew discounts his testimony about Matthew being the author, in recent times, the evidence afforded by the testimony of Papias has been reassessed. On the one hand, some scholars have argued that the terms Hebraidi dialecto do not refer to the Hebrew or Aramaic language, but rather to a Jewish style or literary form. In this view, Papias would be referring to Matthew's pension for Semitic themes and devices, not an original Semitic gospel.

[00:02:51]And Bernard Orchard adds, "In the 1st century, dialecto commonly meant both language and style, so that our phrase could mean either in a Jewish language or in a Jewish style, depending on the context.

[00:03:09]It must be said that this suggestion looks extremely plausible when one reads the canonical Gospel of Matthew. After all, despite being written in Greek, it reflects the most distinctively Jewish outlook and concerns of any of the four Gospels. As R.T. France points out, Matthew is a gospel which devotes more space than the others to quotation of and meditation on the Old Testament, which is saturated with Old Testament language, which presents fuller accounts of Jesus' debates with the scribal and other Jewish authorities, and focuses more on questions of Jewish legal observance and rabbinic discussion. And William Varner adds, "Matthew's account presents to us a Jewish Jesus who lived and worked in a thoroughly Jewish world.

[00:04:03]Matthew's gospel thus bears witness to a very Jewish Jesus whose life and ministry were formed and nurtured by his own people's history and heritage.

[00:04:15]So this interpretation of Papias and Irenaeus matches what we find in the canonical of Matthew extremely well.

[00:04:24]Given that the word dialecto can mean either Hebrew language or Hebrew style, we must look to the context of Papias and Irenaeus to determine which translation is more appropriate.

[00:04:37]Speaking of context, it is rather plausible that the context of Papias at least favors this alternative translation. For Papias' elder surely seems to be fussing over the style of the gospels by saying that Mark was not written in an orderly fashion, whereas Matthew gave the proper order.

[00:04:59]As Robert Gundry argues, "In his statement quoted by Papias, the elder shows concern over Mark's style, particularly over the disorderly way the single points concerning Jesus' ministry appear in the Gospel of Mark.

[00:05:16]This concern favors a similar frame of reference in the statement about Matthew whose writing by contrast exhibits orderliness.

[00:05:26]This contrast comes out clearly in the elder's parallelistic use of the verb arranged to describe what Matthew did do with the Lord's oracles, and of the cognate noun arrangement to describe what Mark, following Peter, did not do with the Lord's oracles. Furthermore, the elder says nothing at all about the linguistic form of Mark, which he ought to mention if it is his intention to introduce, by way of contrast, a different linguistic form in Matthew.

[00:06:01]Apparently, Matthew does not have a linguistic form different from Mark's Greek. A Hebrew dialect then does not imply that Matthew wrote in the Aramaic language.

[00:06:13]Furthermore, it should be noted that Papias does not include a definite article prior to his reference to a Hebrew dialecto, which he ought to include if it is his intent to say that Matthew was written in the Hebrew tongue.

[00:06:30]While most English translations of Papias supply the definite article, this is an interpretative translation. The Greek itself provides no support for this translation, and the considerations that we have been exploring point in the opposite direction.

[00:06:49]Now, some scholars have argued that the context of Papias better fits the translation of dialecto as language due to Papias's subsequent remarks saying that everyone translated Matthew's Gospel as best they could. For example, Jedidiah Tridal remarks, "It is thus plausible that Papias believed that Matthew wrote in the Hebrew language given that others had to translate it as they were able."

[00:07:20]But this argument is predicated upon translated being the best interpretation of Papias's use of the Greek word hermeneusen. But much like the word dialecto itself, hermeneusen is a vague term that could just as easily be translated as saying interpreted. On this reading, Papias would be saying that everyone interpreted Matthew as best they could, rather than saying that everyone translated it as best they could.

[00:07:52]In fact, in the other instance where we know that Papias used a cognate of this term, namely in his reference to Mark as Peter's interpreter, it almost certainly is intended to be understood as an interpretation rather than as a translation.

[00:08:10]David Sim makes a similar argument against Gundry's preferred translation of Papias, saying, "While Gundry's understanding of Papias's language here falls within the category of possibility, it is not very plausible.

[00:08:26]His discussion of dialecto and hermeneusin in isolation from one another tends to obscure their more natural meaning when they are found together.

[00:08:37]Thus, the association suggests translation of a Semitic original into Greek.

[00:08:43]This remains true despite Papias giving the nominal cognate slightly differently nuanced elsewhere in the passage. Such a rendering also makes best sense of the statement that different Christians handled this text as each was able.

[00:09:00]Papias was making the point that those who translated this Semitic document into Greek did so to the best of their bilingual abilities.

[00:09:10]Gundry's alternative interpretation, that these people exposited or interpreted the gospel as best they could, is far less satisfactory.

[00:09:20]Why would the evangelist's Jewish portrayal of Jesus present such difficulties that its later expositors could only explain it as each was able?"

[00:09:31]Sim's objection is more clever than Tritle's, for whereas Tritle had to assume a dubious reading of hermeneusin as translated, even though the term is known to refer to interpretation rather than translation elsewhere in Papias, Sim argues that the conjunction of dialecto and hermeneusin together supports translating these terms as language and translated respectively.

[00:10:00]While Sim is right to remind us of how these terms are typically used together in literature of the time, and while this is undoubtedly the strongest point that he makes against Gundry, he neglects a very basic principle of interpretation, namely that context determines meaning.

[00:10:18]While it is valuable to consider how terms are commonly used together in other literature, fundamentally, the author's own uses of terms and the immediate context carry the most weight.

[00:10:32]And as I've already shown, both the context of Papias, as well as his usage of these terms elsewhere, support Gundry's reading over Sim's. Sim, frankly, never deals with the fact that the context much more strongly supports Gundry's translation than his own. As Gundry concludes, in other connections, we should expect the conjunction of Hebrew and dialect to form a linguistic reference, but the stylistic contrast between Mark and Matthew cancel such an expectation here, and the lack of a definite article in Hebreidi dialecto facilitates, though it does not prove, a different reference, since dialecto always has the definite article in its six occurrences for language in Acts, including three for the Hebrew or Aramaic language. As for Sim's other argument, that his preferred translation makes better sense of Papias' subsequent remarks saying that everyone interpreted Matthew's writing as best they could, I must confess that the opposite conclusion strikes me as more plausible.

[00:11:47]Indeed, Sim's interpretation begins to look rather silly if we take seriously Papias' statement that everyone did this.

[00:11:58]While I don't think that Papias literally means everyone, he presumably is referring to quite a lot of people within the Christian community. But are we seriously to believe that a substantial number of Christians were personally translating Matthew?

[00:12:15]Why not just have one person do it for the whole community? It makes far better sense to think that Matthew was originally written in Greek but for Hellenistic Jews, which created certain interpretive difficulties for resulting in a substantial number of Christians interpreting his gospel as best they could.

[00:12:39]And clearly, this accords better with Gundry's preferred translation of Papias as saying that Matthew wrote in a Hebrew style or dialect rather than in the Hebrew language.

[00:12:52]Sim sort of anticipates this move, but he has this to say in response.

[00:12:57]The Gospel of Matthew was the most favored gospel in the ancient church, and nobody considered it to be an especially difficult text.

[00:13:06]Sim is quite right that the Gospel of Matthew was indeed the favorite gospel of the early church. However, his remarks about no one considering it a particularly difficult text to understand are misplaced.

[00:13:21]In the first place, Papias is describing the initial composition and reception of Matthew's gospel. So, even if Christians in the later 1st and 2nd century didn't struggle to interpret Matthew, Papias may simply be referring to the difficulties faced by the earliest non-Jewish recipients of Matthew's gospel. But secondly, Sims' indication that no early Christians struggled to understand Matthew is simply not true.

[00:13:51]For example, in Against Heresies 3:11:8, Irenaeus notes significant controversy over how to make sense of Matthew's genealogy of Jesus. Similarly, Origen, in his commentary on Matthew, especially 10:1-2 and 10:22, frequently notes that Christians have a variety of interpretations of various passages within Matthew. So, contrary to Sims' suggestion, we do in fact have some concrete data indicating that early Christians struggled to interpret Matthew.

[00:14:28]So much for a Hebrew Matthew in Papias.

[00:14:31]What about our next earliest source, Irenaeus?

[00:14:35]Well, as with Papias, Irenaeus also uses the Greek term dialecto, and so has the same vagueness inherent to his statement as was present in Papias' statement. So, Irenaeus could also be read as saying that Matthew wrote in a Hebrew style or dialect just as easily as Papias.

[00:14:57]Unfortunately, however, Irenaeus does not offer the same contextual grounds as Papias does for concluding that he is referring to a Hebrew style rather than the Hebrew language. And whereas Papias does not include any definite article, which argues strongly against his referring to the Hebrew language, Irenaeus does include a definite article.

[00:15:21]Thus, while I still regard it as likely that Irenaeus is merely saying that Matthew was written in a Hebrew style, for those who are skeptical, allow me to offer another way to read Irenaeus without thereby concluding that he is saying that Matthew was written in the Hebrew language. It is possible to understand Irenaeus as saying that Matthew was written with reference to the Hebrews' own language rather than in their own language. If Irenaeus is understood to be using the dative of reference rather than the dative of sphere.

[00:15:58]Daniel Moore proposes such a translation saying, "BDF characterizes the dative of respect as being appropriate when contrast is involved either in the text or in the mind." Indeed, this appears to be the problem which has plagued translators and scholars throughout the centuries in handling Irenaeus. The reference respect approach to the dative fits well in this passage if we understand the passage to be asserting that Matthew published among the Hebrews that which was in reference to their own language but not their own language.

[00:16:40]Accordingly, since Irenaeus is communicating the backstory of the Gospels, my preferred translation is Matthew also issued a written gospel among the Hebrews in a language contrasting with their own.

[00:16:56]Thus, Matthew published in Greek, a language which was not the native language of the Hebrews.

[00:17:03]Lastly, it is also worth pointing out that we have no manuscripts of this Hebrew Gospel of Matthew that is supposed to have existed. Of course, it is quite fair to point out here that the vast majority of ancient literature has not survived until the present day.

[00:17:22]But we know that the early Christians were extraordinarily good at preserving written Gospels. Our canonical Gospels, along with the rest of the New Testament, represent the best preserved works from antiquity.

[00:17:37]Are we really to believe that the early Christians, who took such pains to preserve the other Gospels for us, somehow completely lost this work authored by the Apostle Matthew himself, such that no textual trace of it has survived?

[00:17:53]That surely seems a stretch. As Carson Moo and Morris say, "It is not at all clear how an apostolic source as important as this could have fallen so completely out of use as to be lost to posterity."

[00:18:09]And William Varner adds, "While it is possible that Papias was referring to a Gospel of Matthew written in the Hebrew language, it is hard to understand why no ancient copy of Matthew in Hebrew survives. A better approach to Papias is to recognize that the word dialect can also refer to the Hebrew style in which Matthew recorded and presented the words of Jesus.

[00:18:36]This Jewish style is evident in his Gospel.

[00:18:41]But what then are we to do with later statements from church fathers like Origen and Saint Augustine claiming that there was a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew?

[00:18:51]Why does Jerome think that it existed in his own day in the library of Caesarea?

[00:18:56]And why does Pantaenus think that he saw a copy among the Ebionites of India?

[00:19:02]Statements about the existence of this document abound. As James Edwards remarks, "The widespread and enduring testimony in early Christianity to a Hebrew gospel is the single most important conclusion of the first two chapters. The evidence is more considerable than even specialists in the field often imagine. The tradition of an original gospel written in Hebrew is attested by 20 church fathers.

[00:19:33]As my earlier discussion has indicated, I am in the habit of taking the testimony of the patristic seriously.

[00:19:40]However, I put the count a bit lower than Edwards since I think the two earliest sources he includes, Papias and Irenaeus, are not saying that Matthew was written in Hebrew at all. And I think that perhaps this gives us some indication of how a legend may have developed.

[00:20:00]My suspicion is that these later church fathers badly misread Papias and or Irenaeus and assumed, as many today still do, that they were saying that Matthew was written in the Hebrew language. Regarding Jerome, I suspect that what he saw and copied was the now lost gospel to the Hebrews, which, based on his misunderstanding of Papias and Irenaeus, he assumed was Hebrew Matthew. As Donald Hagner suggests, that there was at least one, perhaps more than one, gospel in Aramaic or Hebrew known to the early church may have added to the confusion caused by Papias' statement, wrongly tempting the early church fathers to think of the Gospel of Matthew.

[00:20:50]Notably, the translations that Jerome claims come from this Hebrew Matthew bear no resemblance to the canonical Gospel of Matthew and his own Latin Vulgate is clearly translating from the Greek Matthew that we possess today rather than whatever Hebrew gospel Jerome possessed. As R.T. France summarizes, "Jerome frequently refers to a Gospel According to the Hebrews, which he claims to have translated himself into both Greek and Latin. He associates it with the Nazarenes, and it was the Nazarenes who he claims gave him permission to copy the Hebrew original of the Gospel of Matthew.

[00:21:32]Yet the passages he quotes from the Gospel According to the Hebrews are clearly not from the canonical Matthew.

[00:21:40]Here then, there is good reason to suspect a confusion between the assumed original Hebrew Matthew and a separate but related Gospel According to the Hebrews, which was in fact preserved in Hebrew or Aramaic. The situation is unclear in several ways, but there is enough common ground among the various patristic references to indicate the existence of at least one Semitic Gospel in use among Jewish Christian groups, Ebionites and Nazarenes, which they associated with the name of Matthew, but which was in fact different from the canonical Gospel of Matthew.

[00:22:21]In that case, it is at least possible that the tradition that the canonical Matthew was written in a Semitic language arose from a confusion such as we see in the case of Jerome. Whatever the reason, it seems that the widespread tradition of the original language of Matthew was wrong.

[00:22:41]Pantaenus' reference to a Hebrew Matthew among the Ebionites of India might similarly be explained by him confusing the Gospel to the Hebrews for a Hebrew Matthew that he mistakenly believed to exist based on his own misreading of Papias and Irenaeus.

[00:23:02]Pantaenus himself was Sicilian and it is doubtful that he was even able to read Hebrew or Aramaic. This is perhaps why he describes this gospel as being written in Hebrew letters, potentially betraying the fact that he himself could not read the document, but could only recognize the type of lettering.

[00:23:25]Pantaenus' account is further hampered by the fact that he reports the Ebionites as claiming that Bartholomew left them this Hebrew gospel, even though Thomas is the apostle who is more strongly associated with India.

[00:23:41]The likelihood of a language barrier between Pantaenus and the Ebionites renders plausible Orpa Slack's suggestion in The Jews of India that Pantaenus misunderstood the Ebionites and thought that they had claimed that Bartholomew gave them this gospel, when in reality it was the apostle Thomas.

[00:24:05]This is somewhat plausible when one considers that church tradition generally places Thomas, rather than Bartholomew, in India and that the Aramaic term for Saint Thomas, Mar Thoma, sounds somewhat similar to the Hebrew name for Bartholomew, Bar Tolmai.

[00:24:25]If Pantaenus could not even understand the language of the Ebionites, then it is virtually certain that he could not read whatever gospel they had.

[00:24:36]This means that he could not verify that it was a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. It might have been any Hebrew document. In short, there is just too much margin for error regarding Pantaenus' claim to have seen a Hebrew Matthew for us to have any confidence in his testimony.

[00:24:55]Furthermore, what other church fathers tell us about this Hebrew Ebionite Gospel tends to confirm that it was nothing like canonical Matthew.

[00:25:05]Epiphanius tells us that it does not contain a genealogy of Jesus and contains other heretical material. This is corroborated by Irenaeus, who tells us that the Ebionites used only the Gospel of Matthew but altered that they denied the virgin birth. Presumably, this indicates that whatever Gospel they had did not include the nativity story, further distinguishing it from the Gospel of Matthew that we know today. Carson Moo and Morris rightly conclude, "All this suggests that there was ample opportunity for confusion to arise between some Gospel according to the Hebrews and Matthew, engendering the theory that the latter was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic."

[00:25:54]So, to conclude, I do not think that we need to assume the existence of a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. Our two earliest sources are best interpreted as saying that Matthew wrote in Greek for Hellenistic Jews. The later sources attesting to the existence of this work can easily be seen as misreading the earlier sources and confusing what they describe with the Gospel to the Hebrews.

[00:26:22]And this accounts for the total absence of this Hebrew Gospel of Matthew from the manuscript tradition. Consequently, I will be proceeding on the assumption that there never was a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew and therefore that when our early sources claim that Matthew was the first Gospel to have been written, they are indeed placing the canonical Gospel of Matthew first in the timeline.

[00:26:51]There is a further concern about Papias' testimony and whether it refers to the canonical Gospel of Matthew, which is distinct from the issue of the language in which Matthew is supposed to have been written.

[00:27:05]This arises from Papias' use of the term logia or sayings in reference to Matthew, which some have thought indicates that the text to which Papias refers is a sayings gospel much like the Gospel of Thomas.

[00:27:21]This would mean that the Gospel of Matthew that Papias knew contained no narrative and this would distinguish it from canonical Matthew.

[00:27:31]Now, I have dealt with this objection to identifying Papias' Gospel of Matthew with our canonical Gospel of Matthew in detail in my video on Gospel Authorship, so I won't belabor the point here.

[00:27:45]But allow me to briefly summarize the problems with this objection.

[00:27:49]The major problem is that the idea that logia can only refer to sayings is certainly wrong for Papias likewise uses the term in reference to Mark's Gospel in the very same passage. There he is very careful to specify that logia includes both the sayings and the actions of Jesus, meaning that Papias does not use this term to exclusively refer to sayings.

[00:28:17]The other problem for this objection is that other early Christians like Irenaeus and Origen also use this term to refer to the Gospels suggesting that the term logia was simply an early Christian synonym for gospel.

[00:28:35]There is also a long laundry list of more general objections to the historical reliability of Papias ranging from Eusebius calling him a man of low intelligence to his supposedly getting the details of Judas' death wrong.

[00:28:51]This is not the place to get sidetracked by offering a full-scale defense of the reliability of Papias, though I have done that in my video on gospel authorship. Much more can be said here, but for the remainder of this video, I will be taking it to be established that Papias was indeed referring to our canonical Gospel of Matthew.

[00:29:14]To summarize this section, we have seen that the earliest sources, typically taken to attest to the existence of a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, are better interpreted as saying that Matthew wrote in Greek, but for a Jewish audience. The later sources testifying to the existence of a Hebrew Matthew appear to be greatly confused. And it is noteworthy that there is no manuscript evidence for a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.

[00:29:44]The conclusion is that there is no good reason to think that the earliest church fathers are not talking about our canonical Gospel of Matthew when they place it first in the timeline.