There are many difficulties and confusions in Jerome’s statements on this subject, but the fol- lowing facts clearly appear from them :—l. The Christians of Syria used in the 4th cent. a Gospel in Aramaic, written in the square Hebrew char- acter, and not identical with any of those in the Canon. 2. There was great uncertainty as to the origin of this work. Many held it to be the origi- nal work of the Apostle Matthew. Some identified it with the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles, the surviving fragments of which, not preserved by Jerome but by others, show it to have been a different work (see Harnack, Chronologie, ii. 627). Those who knew little about it could say that it was used by the heretical Ebionites as well as by the ordinary Oriental Christians. 3. It was un- known at this period in the West; Jerome knew of no Greek or Latin version of it ; his designation of it ‘ according to the Hebrews’ indicates its circle of readers ; it was used by Hebrew-speaking Chris- tians, not by others. 4. The identification with the Apostle Matthew shows that it resembled our First Gospel more than the others; yet Jerome knew that it was in many respects different from the canonical Matthew, else he need not have translated it.
2. From Lpiphanius, Jerome’s contemporary, who also spent part of his life in the East, we have various statements as to the Gospel used in Pales- tine, and on the whole a confirmation of the facts obtained from Jerome. It is from Epiphanius that we derive our fragments of the Gospel according to the Ebionites. He tells us that that Gospel began with John the Baptist, without any genealogy or story of the Infancy, and that the early Docetics,
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Cerinthus and Carpocrates, had used it. The frag- ments show an ascetic tendency, and in one of them there is an account of the baptism of the Lord quite different from that in the Gospel ‘sec. Hebr.’ Nicholson, however, prints them as part of the same book ; for which he can allege the passage of Jerome given above, and also a statement of Epiphanius, who says that the Ebionites called this Gospel ‘according to the Hebrews,’ and that it was the Hebrew Matthew. The latter statement the ex- tracts plainly disprove ; and if we add to it the statement made by the same Father, that Tatian’s Diatessaron was called by many ‘according to Matthew,’ we have some measure of the confusion which, in this Father’s mind at least, rested on the whole subject. As to the Nazarenes, whom he treats as another set of heretics, but in his descrip- tion of whom we may recognize the features of the ordinary Jewish Christian of the East who cherished the Law as well as the Gospel, Epiphanius says they have a ‘very full Matthew in Hebrew.’ This book, however, he has never seen ; he cannot even tell whether or not it opened with a gene- alogy.
3. The work with which Jerome made such close acquaintance was known to Fathers of the two centuries before him; some of the extant frag- ments are found in their writings, and we find them considering how much authority is to be allowed to a Gospel which, though not recognized by the Church, was not suppressed, but in some quarters warmly cherished. Husebiws, who lived half a century before Jerome, and was much in- terested in the question of the books to be adopted by the Church, quotes several times ‘the Gospel which has reached us in Hebrew characters,’ or ‘the Gospel which is with the Jews in the Hebrew language.’ He does not speak of any translation of it into Greek, and we do not know how he got the Greek versions he gives us. In his famous list of the New Testament Scriptures (HZ iii. 25) he gives ‘sec. Hebr.’ a place, not among the acknow- ledged books of the Church, but among the Anti- legomena, the books which are accepted in some quarters of the Church but not generally, such as the Shepherd of Hermas, the Teaching of the Apostles, and, in the view of some, the Johannine Apocalypse. ‘In this class,’ he says, ‘some count the Gospel according to the Hebrews, which is most used by those of the Hebrews who have ac- cepted Christ’ (6 pddira ‘“EBpatwy ot tov Xpiorov mapadeeduevor xalpovow). Harnack sees in these words an implied statement that there were Greek-speaking as well as Hebrew-speaking Chris- tians who used this Gospel, and holds them to prove the existence in Eusebius’ day of a Greek translation, which had disappeared when Jerome wrote. But the uddioramay be taken with 6 rather than with ‘Efpatwv, and may indicate that the Christians of Syria clung to this Gospel more than to the Diatessaron or any other Syriac translation. Similarly, Eusebius says (iii. 27) that ‘sec. Hebr.’ was used by the better set of Ebionites, i.c. by the Christians of Syria who kept up their attachment to the Law, as their only Gospel: ‘by the others they set small store.’ Eusebius, then, respects the practice of the Jewish Christians in using a Gospel which had come down to them in their own tongue ; but a work of such limited circulation could not be taken to belong to the accepted collection of the Church. He nowhere identifies it with the Hebrew of Matthew, though he does speak of that work, in which early tradition firmly believed, when he says (v.!°) that Panteenus found in India the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew, which had been carried there by the Apostle Bartholomew. What he knew of *sec. Hebr.’ is all in the direction of the difference of that work from Matthew, not of their similarity.