The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the well-known words of Papias, a writer who in early life might have seen St. John. The works of Papias are lost--a misfortune the more to be regretted because Eusebius speaks of him as a man of very limited understanding, [Greek: panu smikros ton noun]. Understanding and folly are words of undetermined meaning; and when language like that of Irenaeus could seem profound it is quite possible that Papias might have possessed commonplace faculties which would have been supremely useful to us. A surviving fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one interpreted them as he could. Pantaenus, said by Eusebius to have been another contemporary of the apostles, was reported to have gone to India, to have found there a congregation of Christians which had been established by St. Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this Hebrew Gospel. Origen repeats the story, which in his time had become the universal Catholic tradition, that St. Matthew's was the first Gospel, that it was written in Hebrew, and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish converts. Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the Church had to say; and what had become of that Hebrew original no one could tell. That there existed _a_ Hebrew Gospel in very early times is well authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In one instance, indeed, it gave the right reading of a text which has perplexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to suspect that that Gospel in its present form could not have existed before the destruction of Jerusalem. The Zachariah the son of Barachiah said by St. Matthew to have been slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown to Old Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly in the manner described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the same words are found with this slight but important difference, that the Zachariah in question is there called the son of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chronicles. The later translator of St. Matthew had probably confused the names.