The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments RemainBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
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The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Apocryphal Gospels
It relates, what is found in St. Mark and St. Luke, but not in St.
Matthew, that Barabbas was cast into prison for sedition and murder;(196)
and it gives the interpretation of the name, “Son of a Rabbi.”(197) These
particulars may be correct; there is no reason to doubt them. The
interpretation of the name may be only a gloss which found its way into
the text.
Eusebius says that Papias “gives a history of a woman who had been accused
of many sins before the Lord, which is also contained in the Gospel
according to the Hebrews.”(198) Of this we know nothing further, for the
text is not quoted by any ancient writers; but probably it was the same
story as that of the woman taken in adultery related in St. John’s
Gospel.(199) But then, why did not Eusebius say that Papias gave “the
history of the woman accused of adultery, which is also related in the
Gospel of St. John”? Why does he speak of that story as being found in a
Gospel written in the Syro‐Chaldaean tongue, with which he himself was
unacquainted,(200) when the same story was in the well‐known Canonical
Greek Gospel of St. John? The conclusion one must arrive at is, either
that the stories were sufficiently differently related for him not to
recognize them as the same, or that the incident in St. John’s Gospel is
an excerpt from the Gospel of the Hebrews, or rather from a translation of
it, grafted into the text of the Canonical Gospel. The latter opinion is
favoured by some critics, who think that the story of the woman taken in
adultery did not belong to the original text, but was inserted in it in
the fourth or fifth century.
Those passages of the Gospel of the Nazarenes which most resemble passages
in the Gospel of St. Matthew are not, however, identical with them; some
differ only in the wording, but others by the form in which they are
given.
And the remarkable peculiarity about them is, that the lessons in the
Gospel of the Hebrews seem preferable to those in the Canonical Gospel.
This was apparently the opinion of St. Jerome.
In chap. vi. ver. 11 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, we have the article of the
Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.” The words used in the
Greek of St. Matthew are, τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον. The word ἐπιούσιος
is one met with nowhere else, and is peculiar. The word οὐσία means
originally that which is essential, and belongs to the true nature or
property of things. In Stoic philosophy it had the same significance as
ὕλη, matter; ἐπιούσιον ἄρτον would therefore seem most justly to be
rendered by _supersubstantial_, the word employed by St. Jerome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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