■When he finds M • .1 - , r
Gospels Mark's
Oospel, as he read it, there seemed any inaccunu;y, this must he imputed to the translators ; the Gospel as Matthew himself wrote it was free from fault ' (Salmon, Introd. to XT, p. 93).
The conclusion, then, to which we are <lriven is that if the existence of an original Hebrew (iospel depended im the testiiiioiiy of the presbyter John, we could not safely iii.akc any j)Ositive affirma- tion on the subject. The only other witness to
Matthews Hebrew Gospel who seems to be in- dependent, i.e. Irenseus, may not really be so. It has been generally believed that he adds to what Eusebius quotes from Papias a note of time, ' while Peter and Paul were preaching and founding the Church at Rome' ; but the Rev. J. Chapman has proved {JThSt vi. 563) that this clause is neither derived from Papias nor is it a note of time.
12. However, whether St. Matthew wrote a Gospel in Hebrew or not, there can be no doubt, Ixith from a priori considerations and also from the internal evidence of tlie extant Greek Gospels, that there was current in the infancy of the Church a Gospel in the Hebrew language as then com- monly spoken in Judjea. The last command of our Lord, as recorded by St. Luke (24^'), that tlie gospel should be preached, ' beginning at Jeru- salem,' is in itself a sufficient proof that one of the first Gospels, in the sense in which we have used that word, must have been in the Aramaic tongue. Even if our Lord sometimes, and in some places, taught in Greek, yet Aramaic was His mother tongue, and that of His Apostles, and of the vast majority of His hearers. In the early Jerusalem Church it is plain that the Hebrews outnumbered the Hellenists (Ac 6^). These considerations make it certain that one of tlie forms which the Evan- gelic narrative assumed from the very first was in Aramaic. The facts that such a Gospel is not now extant, and that the external evidence for its ex- istence at any time is so scanty, are fully aecoimted for by the destruction of Jenisaleni in the year A.D. 70. That world-shaking event, among its other immediate consequences, was followed by the disappearance of the Hebrew-speaking Church of Jerusalem. Then, after not many years, the Hebrew-speaking Christian community in Palestine lost touch with the main current of Christian thought, and, in consequence, sank to the position of an obsciue sect with an out-of-date theology.
It has been stated above that the inteiTial evi- dence of the extant Greek Gospels suggests an Aramaic original. It must be confessed that the presence in a Greek document of Aramaic turns of
fihrase does not necessarily prove that it is a trans- ation from the Aramaic. Dean Armitage Robinson has given good reasons for his theory that the Aramaisms in the first two chapters of St. Luke's Gospel are due to a deliberate imitation of the LXX of 1 Samuel. But there does not seem any likelihood that the author, or authors, of the common Synoptic narrative were, like St. Luke, conscious literary artists ; and even if we cannot follow AVeiss in eveiy application of his condu- it e
ions, there remains proof enough to render the theoi-j- of an original Aramaic Gospel, as under- lying" the Sj-noptics, probable to a high degree. This supposition is even more plausible in the case of the portions of St. Matthew's Gospel which are peculiar to that i;\ an-i li>i. Bishop Westcott long ago pointeil out. witli iiL:ard to the quotations from the OT fouml in the Synoptic Gospels, that, while the cyclic quotations, as he calls them, agree with the LXX, those that are peculiar to St. Matthew seem to be independent translations from tlip Hebrew.
13. This is not a discussion of the Synoptic I olilem ; but it may not be out of jilace to con- . iuilc this article 'ivith a suggestion as to the rela- I ions of the three Synoptic Gospels to each other. It is generally held now that the First and Third Gospels are altogether indepemlent of each other, but that Mt. and Lk. derived tlie matter which they have in common with Mk. either from St. Mark's Gosjiel, or from an earlier source from which St. Mark selected the incidents and dis- courses which he rebates. Un the hypothesis that Mt. .and Lk. cojjied our St. Mark, we have to
GOSPELS (APOCRYPHAL)
GOSPELS (APOCRYPHAL) 671
assume t-lii; oxisteni-e of another early Gospel, from which they derived the noii-Markan matter which they have" in common. In this case we conclude that the details peculiar to St. Mark were an original feature of that Gospel, and that Mt. and Lk. for various rea-sons omitted them. On the other hand, if the common Synoptic matter and the matter common to Mt. and Lk. l)e both assigned to one original, it will then be natural to think of St. Mark's peculiar details as additions made by him, probably on the authority of St. Peter.
The problem has been rendered unnecessarily ' complicated by an assumption that it is impossible that an Evangelist should have omitted anything from his work which he had reason to believe was true. The fallacy of this assumption will be evident, whichever hypothesis we adopt. The simplest method to account for all the facts is to suppose a Greek translation of an Aramaic original as the source of all the common Synoptic matter, and also of the matter common to Mt. and Lk. In this document the OT quotations would have been given in a LXX form. At least two other sources must be postulated for the matter found only in Mt. and Lk. respectively. We have already found reason to hold that the matter peculiar to Mt. was a translation from an Aramaic original.