no indication whatever that he stood in a.ny oloee relation to the Lord, muoh lees that he wa.s one of the apostolic band who travelled with him, sharing his privations, seeing his miracles, and hearing his private teaching. Internal evidence does not absolutely contra.diet the supposition that the author is St. Matthew, but is oerta.inly rather against it. § 11. &ternol evidence. But when wo turn to the external evidence, matters stand very differently. There never appears to have been any doubt in the earlyChuroh (of.§ 14) that the First Gospel was composed by St. Matthew, and it is hard to understand why so comparatively unknown and unimportant a member of the twelve should have been named if he were not, in fa.ot, the author. It is with him as it is with St. Mark, and as it would have been with St. Luke if the Book of the Acts had not been written. For if St. Luke had not written the second volume of his work, no one of the synoptic narratives could ha.ve been compared with a writing attributed to the same author as itself, and the authorship of all three would have rested on a tradition whioh finds the chief reason for its acceptance in the difficulty of explaining how it could have arisen if it were not true. It seems hard to believe that the early Church could be wrong in its assertion that the author of the First Gospel was St. Matthew, but the belief depends on a tradition, the cause of which cannot be demonstrated, and which is only just not contradicted by the phenomena of the Gospel itself.
IV. WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF THE GOSPEL? § 12. It has, however, been thought that the original language of the Gospel was not Greek, but" Hebrew," i.e. some kind of Aramaic. It will be in accordance with the lines of our previous inquiries to consider, first, the evidence of the Gospel itself as to its original language, without refer- ence to any considerations derived from other quarters; seoondly, to notice reasons that may be adduced for thinking that an Aramaio Gospel, either oral or written, was in existence during tho first century; thirdly, to examine tl:e direct external testimony that connects St. Matthew with such a Gospel. (1) As regards the Gospel itself there is but little doubt. It is, indeed, saturated with Semitic, and particularly Jewish, thought and idioms, and the genealogy and also, perhaps, the remainder of the first two chapter6 may be directly or almost directly a. translation from the Aramaic. But ell the other phenomena of the Gospel contradict the supposition that it is a translation as we generally use the word. The Framework must have already existed in Greek 1 (whatever its original language may have been) if any satisfactory theory of it being used by all three evangelists is to be formed. The frequent minute verbal agreement necessitates this, and notwithstanding the fa.et that Professor Marshall shows that e. few of the 1 Not nece888rily in a written Col'ID (cf. § 9). THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BT. MATTHEW. xiii
differenoe,s in the synoptiste are aooounted for by a common Aramaio original ( of. § 18), the evangelists themselves can hardly have llSed it when they wrote their Gospels. Similarly, the Discourses, or at least large portions of them, must have been known in Greek to the two authors of the First and Third Gospels. The principal sources, that is to say,1 must assuredly have existed in Greek before they we:re used by the evangelists. But should it be said that St. Matthew originally used these two sources in Aramaic, and that the corresponding Greek phrases and words and parts of words were only inserted by the translator (whoever he was) from his acquaintance with the other Gospels, then it must be answered that such a work would not only be altogether opposed to the spirit of ancient translations, but would be quite impossible from the minute and microscopic character of the process which it presupposes. Besides, the distribution of the quotations is against the present Gospel being a translation. For how can we suppose a translator to have scrupulously observed the distinction between the quotations which are common to the eynoptiete, or which belong to the same kind of teaching (vide supra, § 6), and those which are peculiar to the evangelist, so that he nearly always took the former from the LXX. and the latter from the Hebrew? 9 Further, the paronomasia O are unlikely in a translation. Again, the explanations of Hebrew words' and customs 5 indicate that the Gospel in its present form was intended not for Jews alone,8 since Jews of the Dispersion would surely understand the meaning of the very ordinary Hebrew words thus explained. Such explanations might, indeed, in themselves be interpolated by a translator. When, however, they are taken with the other evidence they are not unimportant. § 13. (2) Yet although our First Gospel shows so few traces of being a translation from an Aramaic original, it is very probable that some Aramaic Goepel existed.7 Hence attempts have often been made to dis- ' Observe the.t this will include those quotations of the Old Testament which are taken from the LXX. 1 Upon this eubject, of. T. K. Abbott(' Essays,' p. 157: 1891), e.nd Roberts' 'Greek lhe