2. Internal Evidence. — What, then, is the origin of our present Gospel? To whom are we to ascribe its existing form and language? What is its authority? These are the questions which now meet us, and to which it must be confessed it is not easy to give a sat- isfactory answer. We may at the outset lay down as indisputable, in opposition to Cureton (who asserts, ut sup., that " a careful critical examination of the Greek text will afford very strong confirmation of the Hebrew original), that the phenomena of the Gospel as we have it — its language, its coincidences with and divergences from the other synoptists, the quotations from the Old Test, it contains, and the citations made from it by an- cient writers, all oppose the notion of the present Greek text being a translation, and support its canonical au- thority, (1.) An important argument may be tlrawn from the use made of the existing Gospel by all ancient writers. As Olshausen remarks (Clark's ed., i, xxviii), while all the fathers of the Church assert the Hebrew origin of the Gospel, they without exception make us? of the existing Greek text as canonical Scripture, and that without doubt or question, or anything that would lead to the belief that thej' regarded it as of less author- ity than the original Hebrew, or possessed it in any other form than that in Avhich we now have it, (2,) Another argument in favor of the authoritative charac- ter of our present Gospel arises from its miiversal diffu- sion and general acceptance, both in the Clmrch and among her adversaries. Had the Hebrew Gospel been really clothed with the authority of the sole apostolic archetype, and our Greek Gospel been a mere transla- tion, executed, as .Jerome asserts, by some miknown in- dividual (" quis postca in Gra;cum transtulerit non satis certum est," De Vir. III. 3), would not, as Olshausen re- marks, xit sup., objections to it have been urged in some quarter or other, particularly in the country \vhere Matthew himself labored, and for whose inhabitants the Hebrew was written ? Woidd its statements have been accepted without a cavU bj' the opponents of the Church ? No trace of such opposition is, however, to be met with. Not a doubt is ever breathed of its ca- nonical authority. (3.) Again, the text itself bears no marks \)f a translation. This is especially evident in the mode of dealing with the citations from the Old Test. These are of two kinds: {a) those standing in the discourses of our Lord himself, and the interlocu- tors; and (i) those introduced by the evangelist as proofs of our Lord's Messiahship. Now if we assume, as is certainly most ]irobable (though the contrary has been maintained by Hug, the late duke of Manchester, and more recently, by the IJcv, Alexander lioberts, whose learned and able " Discussions on the Gos]iels" demand attentive consideration from every Biblical student), that Aramaic, not Greek, was tlie language ordinarily used by our Lord and his Jewish contemporaries, we should certainly expect that any citations from the Old
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Test., made by them in ordinary discourse, would be from the original Hebrew or its Aramaic counterpart, not from the Septuagint version, and would stand as such in the Aramaic record; while it would argue more than the ordinary license of a mere translator to substi- tute the Sept. renderings, even when at variance with the Hebrew before him. Yet what is the case ? While in the class (b), due to the evangelist himself, which may be supposed to have had no representative in the current Greek oral tradition which we assume as the basis of the synoptical Gospels, we find original render- ings of the Hebrew text; in the class («), on the other hand, where ^\•e might, a priori, have looked for an even closer correspondence, the citations ai'e usually from the Sept., even where it deviates from the Hebrew. In («) we may reckon iii, 3 ; iv, 4, G, 7, 10 ; xv, 4, 8, 9 ; xix, 5, 18; xxi, 13,42; xxii, 39, 44; xxiii, 39 ; xxiv, 15; xxvi, 31 ; xxvii, 46. In (i), called by Westcott {Introd. p. 208, note 1) " Cyclic quotations," i, 23; ii, G, 15, 18; iv, 15, IG; viii, 17; xii, 18 sq. ; xiii, 35; xxi, 5; xxvii, 9, 10). In two cases Matthew's citations agree with the synoptic parallels in a deviation from the Sept., all being drawn from the same oral groundwork. Matthew's (\\xo- tations have been examined by Credner, one of the soundest of modern scholars, who pronounces decidedly for their derivation from the Greek {Elnleit. p. 94 ; comp. De Wette, Einl. p. 198). We may therefore not unwar- rantably find here additional evidence that in the exist- ing Greek text we have the work, not of a mere trans- lator, but of an independent and authoritative writer. (4.) The verbal correspondences between jMatthew and the other synoptists in their narratives, and especially in the report of the speeches of our Lord and others, are difficult to account for if we regard it as a translation. As Alford remarks {Gr. Test. Froleg. i, 28), " The trans- lator must have been either acquainted with the other two Gospels, in which case it is inconceivable that, in the midst of the present coincidences in many passages, such divergences should have occurred, or unacquainted with them, in which case the identity itself woiUd be altogether inexplicable." Indeed, in the words of Cred- ner {Einlelt. p. 94, 95), " the Greek original of this Gos- pel is affirmed by its continual correspondence with those of ^Mark and Luke, and that not only in generals and important facts, but in particulars and minute de- tails, in the general plan, in entire clauses, and in sepa- rate words — a phenomenon which admits of no expla- nation under the hypothesis of a translation from the Hebrew." (5.) This inference in favor of an original Greek Gospel is strongly confirmed by the fact that all versions, even the Peshito Syriac, the language in M'hich the Gospel is said to have been originally written, are taken from the present Greek text. It is true that canon Cureton (S/jriac Recens. p. Ixxv sq.) argues with much ability against this, and expends much learning and skill in proof of his hypothesis that the Syriac ver- sion of ilatthew published by liim is more ancient than tlie Peshito, and may be regarded as, in the main, iden- tical with the Aramaic Gospel of Matthew ; which he also considers to have been identical with the Gospel ac- cordinfi to the Hebreics, used by the Nazarenes and Ebionites, " modified by some additions, interpolations, and perhaps some omissions." His statement (p. xlii) that " there is a marked difference between the recen- sion of Matthew and that of the other Gospels, proving that they are by different hands — the former showing no signs, as the others do, of translation from the Greek" — demands the respect due to so careful a scholar; but he fails entirely to explain the extraordinary fact that, in the very country where JIatthew published his Gos- pel, and within a comparatively short period, a version from the (ireek was substituted for the authentic orig- inal; nor have his views met with general acceptance among scholars.