"He who wonders shall reign, and he who reigns shall rest."
"Then the rich man began to smite his head, and it pleased him not."
"The Holy Ghost, my mother, lately took me by one of my hairs, and
bore me to the great mountain Tabor."
"I am a mason, who get my livelihood by my hands; I beseech thee,
Jesus, that thou wouldst restore to me my strength, that I may no
longer thus scandalously beg my bread."
If these passages are from the original Gospel of Matthew, then the
accepted Gospel of Matthew is spurious.
This Hebrew Gospel was the Gospel of the Ebionites and
Nazarenes. Eusebius says: "They [the Ebionites] made use only of that
which is called the Gospel According to the Hebrews." Epiphanius says:
"They [the Nazarenes] have the Gospel of Matthew most entire in the
Hebrew language." St. Jerome refers to it as "the Gospel which the
Nazarenes and Ebionites use."
Referring to these sects, Dr. Hug, the eminent Catholic critic, says:
"The Ebionites denied the miraculous conception of Christ, and,
with the Nazarenes, looked upon him only as an ordinary man." The
Gospel which these sects accepted as their authority could not have
been our Gospel of Matthew, because the most important part of this
Gospel is the story of the miraculous conception.
While the claim that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew is vigorously
maintained, the claim that he afterwards translated it into Greek
himself is so manifestly untenable that many have conceded its
improbability. Jerome says: "Who afterwards translated it [Matthew]
into Greek is not sufficiently certain."
The consequences of this admission are thus reluctantly expressed
by Michaelis: "If the original text of Matthew is lost, and we have
nothing but a Greek translation: then, frankly, we cannot ascribe
any divine inspiration to the words."
Two texts may be cited from Matthew which prove a later date for the
Gospel than that claimed. Jesus, in upbraiding the Jews, is reported
to have used the following language:
"Upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth,
from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, son of
Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar" (xxiii, 35).
Zacharias, the son of Baruch (Barouchos), who is undoubtedly meant,
was slain in the temple about 69 A.D. Thus Matthew makes Jesus refer
to an event that occurred forty years after his death and twenty or
thirty years after the Gospel of Matthew is said to have been written.
Dr. Hug admits that this is the Zacharias referred to. He says:
"There cannot be a doubt, if we attend to the name, the fact and its
circumstances, and the object of Jesus in citing it, that it was the
same Zacharias Barouchos, who, according to Josephus, a short time
before the destruction of Jerusalem, was unjustly slain in the temple."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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