whose evidence repeats, or is in harmony with, these four. Papias speaks of "the oracles" or "utterances " (Tà λóyia) which Matthew composed; the other three speak of his "Gospel" (evayyéλov). Assuming that the two expressions are equivalent, the testimony is uniform that the First Gospel was written in Hebrew by Matthew, the tax-collector and Apostle. In that case the Greek Gospel which has come down to us must be a translation from this " Hebrew" original.1

But the First Gospel is evidently not a translation, and it is difficult to believe that it is the work of the Apostle. Whoever wrote it took the Second Gospel as a frame, and worked into it much material from other sources. And he took, not only the substance of the Second Gospel, but the Greek phraseology of it, showing clearly that he worked in Greek. It is incredible that he translated the Greek of Mark into Hebrew, and that then some one translated Matthew's Hebrew back into Greek that is almost the same as Mark's. The retranslation would have resulted in very different Greek. And it is not likely that the Apostle Matthew, with first-hand knowledge of his own, would take the Gospel of another, and that other not an Apostle, as the framework of his own Gospel. There would seem, therefore, to be some error in the early tradition about the First Gospel.

Very possibly the Aóyia of Papias should not be interpreted as meaning the whole of the First Gospel, but only one of its elements, viz. a collection of facts respecting Jesus Christ, chiefly consisting of His utterances, and the circumstances in which they were spoken. The expression, rà λóyia, would fitly describe at document largely made up of discourses and parables. That such a document is one main element in both the First and the Third Gospels, may be regarded as certain, and it may have been written originally in Hebrew by S. Matthew.*

1 The subscriptions of certain cursives state that the Hebrew Matthew was translated into Greek "by John," or "by James," or "by James the brother of the Lord," or "by Bartholomew." Zahn, Einleitung in das NT. ii. p. 267.

"Mk.

"The main common source of the Synoptic Gospels was a single written document" (Burkitt, The Gosp. Hist. and its Transmission, p. 34). contains the whole of a document which Mt. and Lk. independently used” (ibid. p. 37).

3 The reader will find a good illustration of this in Duggan's translation of Jacquier's History of the Books of the New Testament, pp. 35, 127. Jacquier translated passages from English into French. Duggan translates them back into English, and his English is surprisingly unlike the originals.

4"Hebrew" in this connexion must mean the Aramaic which Christ Himself spoke. It is scarcely credible that any one would translate the words of Christ into the Hebrew of the O.T., which was intelligible to none but the learned.

The collection of Utterances often spoken of as "the Logia" is now frequently denoted by the symbol "Q."

When the unknown constructor of the First Gospel took the Second Gospel and fitted on to it the contents of this collection of Utterances, together with other material of his own gathering, he produced a work which was at once welcomed by the first Christians as much more complete than the Second Gospel, and yet not the same as the Third, if that was already in existence. What was this Gospel to be called? It was based on Mark; but to have called it "according to Mark" would have caused confusion, for that title was already appropriated. It would be better to name it after the other main element used in its construction, a translation of S. Matthew's collection of Utterances. In this way we get an explanation of the statement of Papias, that "Matthew composed the Utterances in Hebrew, and each man interpreted them as he was able," a statement which seems to be quite accurate. We also get an explanation of the later and less accurate statements of Irenæus, Origen, and Eusebius, which seem to refer to our First Gospel as a whole; viz. that Matthew wrote it in Hebrew. It was known that Matthew had written a Gospel of some kind in Hebrew: the First Gospel, as known to Irenæus, was called "according to Matthew"; and hence the natural inference that it had been written in Hebrew. There was a Gospel according to the Hebrews, which Jerome had translated into Greek and Latin, and from which he makes quotations. A Jewish Christian sect called Nazarenes used this Gospel, and said that it was by S. Matthew. It was Aramaic, written in Hebrew characters. We do not know enough of it to be certain; but it also may have contained a good many of the Utterances collected by Matthew, and for this reason may have been attributed as a whole to him. It seems to have been very inferior to our First Gospel, and this would lead to its being allowed to perish. See Hastings' DB. extra vol. pp. 338 f.

Dr. C. R. Gregory (Canon and Text of the New Testament, pp. 245 ff.) writes thus of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. "One book that now seems to stand very near to the Gospels, and again moves further away from them, demands particular attention. But we shall scarcely reach any very definite conclusion about it. It is like an ignis fatuus in the literature of the Church of the first three centuries. We cannot even tell from the statements about it precisely who, of the writers who refer to it, really saw it. Yes, we are even not sure that it is not kaleidoscopic or plural. It may be that several, or at least two, different books are referred to, and that even by people who fancy that there is but one book, and that they know it. Nothing would be easier for any one or every one who saw, read, or heard of that book to call it the Gospel to the Hebrews, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, or the Hebrews' Gospel. We shall doubtless some day receive a copy of it in the original, or in a translation. It may have contained much of what Matthew, Mark, and Luke contain, without that fact having been brought to our notice in the quotations made from it. For those who quoted it did so precisely in order to give that which varied from the contents of our four Gospels, or especially of the three synoptic ones." The origin of this

...

perplexing document must be placed early. After Matthew and Luke became well known a Gospel covering much the same ground would hardly have been written. E. B. Nicholson has collected and annotated the quotations from it, R. Handmann, in Texte und Untersuchungen, 1888, has done the same. also Mgr. A. S. Barnes, Jour. of Th. St., April 1905.

See

The collection of Utterances made by Matthew and used by the compiler of the First Gospel, and the similar collection used by Luke, were not such as we might have expected. The selection was determined by the needs and hopes of the first Christians, who wanted moral guidance for the present and revelation as to the future. Hence the sayings of Christ preserved in the Synoptic Gospels are largely of either a moral or an apocalyptic character.1 Utterances which seemed to teach principles of conduct, and prophecies or parables respecting the Coming and the Kingdom were specially treasured. Some of them were misunderstood at the time, and some appear to have been misreported, either from the first or in repeated transmission; but the result is a body of doctrine, of marvellous unity and adaptability, the great bulk of which must be faithfully reported, because it is inconceivable that the Evangelists or their informants can have invented such things. It is evident that these informants, in the last resort, are the memories of the first body of disciples, who, happily for us, were sometimes stronger in memory than in understanding. They remembered what perplexed them, because it perplexed them; and they reported it faithfully. That a collection of sayings and narratives was made during our Lord's lifetime, as Salmon (The Human Element in the Gospels, p. 275) and Ramsay (Expositor, 1907, p. 424) suppose, is scarcely probable (Sanday, The Life of Christ in Recent Research, p. 172).

The answer, therefore, to the question, Who was the author of the First Gospel? is a negative one. It was not S. Matthew. The writer was an early Jewish Christian, not sufficiently important to give his name to a Gospel, and in no way desiring to do So. But he used a great deal of material which was probably collected by S. Matthew, whose name thus became connected with the First Gospel as we have it. That it is in no sense the work of S. Matthew is not probable. Some more conspicuous Apostle than the toll-collector would have been chosen, if the title had no better basis than the desire to give a distinguished name to a nameless document. Andrew, or James the son of

1 J. R. Ropes, The Apostolic Age, p. 222. There is good reason for believing that there existed a written collection of sayings which had the definite title Abyoɩ тoû kupiov 'Inooù, to which reference is made Acts xx. 35; also in Clem. Rom. Cor. xiii., xlvi.; and in Polycarp, ii. See Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus, pp. 187-189.

See Briggs, The Ethical Teaching of Jesus, pp. 2, 3, 20.

Zebedee, or Philip would have been preferred. And the writer has given us "a Catholic Gospel," written in "a truly Catholic temper." "Wherever his own hand shows itself, one sees that his thought is as universalistic as it is free from the bondage of the Law. . . . The individuality of the author makes itself so strongly felt both in style and tendency, that it is impossible to think of the Gospel as a mere compilation" (Jülicher).

On the contrary, as Renan says, "the Gospel of Matthew, all things considered, is the most important book of Christianitythe most important book that has ever been written." Not without reason it received the first place in the N.T. "The compilation of the Gospels is, next to the personal action of Jesus, the leading fact in the history of the origins of Christianity;-I will even add in the history of mankind" (Les Évangiles, p. 212; Eng. trans. p. 112).

The writer of this Gospel rises far above the limitations of his own Jewish Christianity. To see in it anything directed against the teaching of S. Paul is strangely to misunderstand it. So far as there is anything polemical in Mt., it is directed, not against the Apostle of the Gentiles, but against Pharisaic Judaism. This wide outlook as to the meaning and scope of Christianity is clear evidence that what he gives us as the Messiah's teaching is not the writer's own, but the teaching of Him in whom both Jew and Gentile were to find salvation. Its Catholic Christianity, which is the spirit of Christ Himself, has made this Gospel, from the first century to the twentieth, a favourite with Christians.

THE SOURCES.

To some extent these have been already stated. The writer of our First Gospel used Mk. in nearly the same form as that in which it has come down to us, and also a collection of Utterances which was probably made either wholly or in part by S. Matthew. This second document, which quickly went out of use owing to the superiority of the Canonical Gospels, is commonly spoken of as "the Logia," or (more scientifically) as "Q" a symbol which commits us to nothing. Besides these two main sources, there were at least two others. These are (1) the O.T., the quotations from which, however, may have come from a collection of passages believed to be Messianic, rather than from the writer's knowledge of the O.T. as a whole; and (2) traditions current among the first Christians. It is also

1 If there were differences, it is not impossible that the text of Mk. which Mt. used was inferior to that which has come down to us: corruption had already begun. See Stanton, Synoptic Gospels, pp. 34 f.

possible that some of the many attempts at Gospels, mentioned by S. Luke in his Preface, may have been known to our Evangelist and used by him. But the only one of his sources which we can compare with his completed work is the Second Gospel, and it is most instructive to see the way in which he treats it. This has been worked out in great detail by the Rev. W. C. Allen in his admirable work on St. Matthew in the International Critical Commentary, which ought to be consulted by all who wish to do justice to the Synoptic problem. Here it will suffice to make a selection of instances, paying attention chiefly to those which illustrate the freedom which the compiler of the First Gospel allowed himself in dealing with the Second.

1. He appropriates nearly the whole of it.1 The chief omissions are: Healing of a demoniac (Mk. i. 23-28); Prayer before preaching in Galilee (i. 35-39); Seed growing secretly (iv. 26-29); Healing of a deaf stammerer (vii. 32-36); Healing of a blind man (viii. 22-26); The uncommissioned exorcist (ix. 38-40); Widow's mites (xii. 4144). And there are other smaller omissions.

2. He makes considerable changes in order, chiefly so as to group similar incidents and sayings together, and thus make the sequence more telling. Thus we have three triplets of miracles: leprosy, paralysis, fever (viii. 1-15); victory over natural powers, demonic powers, power of sin (viii. 23-ix. 8); restoration of life, sight, speech (ix. 18-34). And he omits sayings where Mark has them, and inserts them in a different connexion, generally earlier. Thus Mk. iv. 21 is inserted Mt. v. 15 instead of xiii. 23, 24; Mk. iv. 22 is inserted Mt. x. 26 instead of xiii. 23, 24; Mk. ix. 41 is inserted Mt. x. 42 instead of xviii. 53 Mk. ix. 50 is inserted Mt v. 13 instead of xviii. 9; Mk. xi. 25 is inserted Mt. vi. 14 instead of xxi. 22.

3. Although he adds a great deal to Mark, yet he frequently abbreviates, perhaps to gain space for additions. He often omits what is redundant. In the following instances, the words in brackets are found in Mark but not in the First Gospel. '[The time is fulfilled, and] the Kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye [and believe in the gospel]' (Mk. i. 15). And at even, [when the sun did set]' (i. 32). And straightway the leprosy [departed from him, and he] was cleansed' (i. 42). [And the wind ceased] and there was a great calm' (iv. 39). 'Save in his own country, [and among his own kin,] and in his own house' (vi. 4). Such things are very frequent. He also omits un

1 Why did both he and S. Luke have so high an estimate of Mk. as to incorporate it in their own Gospels? Because Mk. was believed to be the mouthpiece of S. Peter, and because his Gospel emanated (as is highly probable) from the great centre of all kinds of interests-Rome.