{)liesthat Jerome had an extremely superficial know- edge of NG, and this is on other grounds unlikely. It is true that Jerome required an expert to trans- late the Chaldee or Aramaic text of Tobit into Hebrew, that he might render it into Latin ; and his acquaintance with the original of NG must have been equally second-hand. But this does not prove that he could not have known its contents with sufficient accuracy. There is no obvious reason to doubt his veracity, or to hold that he did not know, e.g., that this or that quotation occurred in NG, even supposing that he translated the latter as rapidly as he did Tobit.
references in his Commentary on Isaiah. But we do not see why it follows (pp. 125-126) necessarily that their Gospel could not have included the unhistorical legend about the appearance of the risen Jesus to his brother James. This was surely in line with St. Paul's own tradition (1 Co 157). The latter no doubt puts the appearance to James fourth instead of first in chronological order, hut, in view of the very different accounts in the Gospels (particularly Matthew and John), we can hardly lay stress upon the prominence assigned to James as if this were incompatible with the catholic position of the 'Nazaraei.' After all, as Schmidtke himself admits, they were keen upon circumcision and the Law as national traditions. As Matthew's Gospel had no record of any appearances to individual disciples, the way lay opeu for a harmless legend of this kind in honour of James the Just. If St. Paul put the appearance to him before his own vision, why should not the ' Nazarjei ' ?
Schmidtke's reconstruction is in outline as follows. At an early period the Church at Syrian Serosa broke up — or, at any rate, the local Jewish Christians soon formed a community of their own, apart from the Gentile Christian Church. It was these Jewish Christians who were the real ' Nazarenes' of the earlj' Church. Outside Beroea there were none. When Epi- phanius calls the Nazarenes a sect of the primitive Church, he is simply confusing them with the Kazarenes of Ac 24i'*-i5, where St. Paul protests, on being- charged with being a ring-leader of rris TMi/ No^upoiwe aipeVecos, ' I cherish the same hope in God as they (aiirol oSrot) accept.' Here avroi ourot means St. Paul's Jewish accusers, but Epiphanius mistook the words for a refer- ence to the Nazarenes. In reality, these Nazarene Christians of BercEa preserved their consciousness of belonging to the Church ; they accepted the virgin-birth of Jesus and honoured St. Paul as an apostle (see above, p. 490 n.), though they retained, like some of the Jewish Christians afterwards known to Justin, a number of Jewish peculiarities of custom and belief. Their Gospel was an Aramaic version (135-150 a.d.) of Matthew's Gospel, which was a sort of targum ; it also included some touches from the other canonical Gospels. Now it was this document, according to Schmidtke, which caused all the subse- quent misunderstandings of the Church about the Hebrew Gospel which formed the basis of the canonical Matthew. This version of Matthew was supposed to have been the original of Matthew. Papias was the first to go wrong, and he misled Eusebius and Apollinaris, as well as Irenaeus and Origen. Even those who knew Hebrew and Syriac were misled into calling NG a Hebrew document, since they assumed it was the basis of the canonical Matthew with its Jewish Christian char- acteristics. The only writer who had a first-hand knowledge of it was Hegesippus (c. a.d. ISO). Eusebius secured a copy only when he wrote the Theophania ; he did not know it when he composed his Church History. And even when he did read it he imagined, thanks to Papias and others, that it was the Semitic original of Matthew.
The copy of Eusebius in the library of Caesarea fell into the hands of Jerome. But Jerome, like Epiphanius, for the most part depended not on this Gospel directly but on the information supplied by the distinguished scholar, Apollinaris of Laodicea, who had edited an exposition of Matthew, in which his Hebrew scholarship enabled him to quote fragments of this Nazarsean Gospel. "That dishonest and unreliable writer, Jerome, had no first-hand acquaintance with the Nazarenes, of whom he says so much. He was the Defoe of his age.
Hegesippus, as Eusebius points out, used both NG and HG. The latter * was an independent Greek work, equivalent to TG whereas NG was neither an independent work nor a Greek composition, but a Syriac document reproducing Matthew's Gospel in the main. The mistaken identification of HG and NG was Jerome's fault. He imagined that this Gospel of the Nazarenes which he saw in the episcopal library of Caesarea was the Gospel according to the Hebrews, and Schmidtke bluntly declares that his story about translating it (c. A.D. 390) is a fabrication.t
It is not necessary here to discuss the details of Schmidtke's brilliant and searching investigation. His strictures on Jerome (pp. 66-69) are too sweep- ing ; his conjecture about the relation between Apollinaris and the extracts from the Nazarene Gospel is hardly more than ingenious ; and his tendency to attribute misunderstanding to early Christian writers, although it is in the main justi- fiable, carries him into some extreme positions. But his analysis of the extant data has suc- ceeded in showing afresh J the strong case for regarding HG and NG as difierent works. So much at any rate may be granted. On the other hand, the identification of HG and EG breaks down ; Waitz is probably right in regarding EG as an in- dependent work. The difi'erentiation of HG, NG, and EG is a precarious task, however, and in the present state of our knowledge no reconstruction can claim to be more than conjectural. The proba- bility is that there were several Jewish Christian Gospels approximating more or less closely to the type of Matthew. Jewish Christians who claimed