Secret Alias wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2020 11:50 am
If you acknowledge that Irenaeus's blanket statement about 'the Ebionites' using 'the Gospel according to Matthew and repudiating Paul' is inaccurate. I think you only do that because you 'like' Epiphanius's material better. Epiphanius is problematic but his report on the Ebionites proves that their gospel (whatever they are or were) is not Matthew. It can be inferred that Hegesippus rejected Paul (Photius, Bibliotheca 232). He could read Hebrew, was the spokesman for the alleged Jerusalem Church. Whether or not he explicitly mentions 'the Ebionites' - his Church is what the Ebionites were taken to have been. In the same way as Paul seems to have been defined negatively by Hegesippus, the term 'Ebionite' seems to have been a negative term applied to whatever community opposed Paul. Were the 'beggars' Jews? Did the Jews have 'beggardly' understanding? All of this is not clear. But the testimony of Irenaeus seems built upon gossip and second hand inference.
The Ebionite Matthew cited by Epiphanius is not the
NT Matthew, no, but as I said, it doesn't have to be. I suspect the NT Matthew was the only version that was combined with Mark, and Epiphanius says that the Ebionite Matthew was "mutilated and forged," for examples. And whatever Irenaeus says about the Ebionites and Matthew is undercut by Papias (who I date c. 100 CE, or in any event before Irenaeus), who says that there was a Hebrew Matthew with multiple translations (which I think Edwards makes a strong case for in his discussion of Papias on pages 2-10 in
The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition).
https://books.google.com/books?id=Vs9YX ... rs&f=false
And I think all of the translations that were made of the Hebrew Matthew "mutilated" and added things to it in the same way the NT Matthew and Luke "mutilated" and added things to Mark, thus they were all different to some extent, yet they were all based on the Hebrew Matthew. And Edwards shows how the Ebionite Matthew and a Matthew-type text used by Luke were similar (with each, in my view, "mutilating" and adding things to it). One example of Luke using a Matthew-type text is Papias' reference to the woman accused of "many sins" in the gospel of Hebrews (aka Matthew):
Eusebius records a second though less celebrated testimony of Papias to a "Hebrew Gospel" at the end of [EH] book 3 … "The same writer [Papias] … has also set forth another account about a woman who was accused before the Lord of many sins, which is found in the Gospel according to the Hebrews" …
[This] is often taken as a reference to the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 7:53-8:12 … It cannot be concluded for certain, however, that Papias and John 8 refer to the same event. The woman in John 8 is referred to as a "woman caught in the act of adultery," whereas Papias refers to a woman "accused of many sins." On a formal lexical level, Papias' description is closer to the description of the woman in Luke 7:36-50, who was forgiven by Jesus of "many sins" ... That Papias's woman of "many sins" is not the same woman as the adulteress in John 8 is further suggested by the fact that Eusebius does not attribute the story to the Gospel of John but rather to "the Gospel according to the Hebrews" [aka Matthew].
https://books.google.com/books?id=Vs9YX ... ns&f=false
In other words, only Luke and the gospel of the Hebrews (aka Matthew) have/had an account of a woman "who was accused before the Lord of many sins," thus Luke arguably used (a translated version of) the gospel of the Hebrews (aka Matthew) as a source. And since there are examples where Luke and the Ebionite Matthew are similar (as Edwards notes), they both arguably used a similar source, i.e., a translation of the Hebrew Matthew (aka gospel of the Hebrews) that Papias mentions.
And I don't think Hegesippus rejected Paul. I think Hegesippus was rather using Mt. 13:16 ("blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear") to refute Gnostics who used 1 Cor. 2:9 ("What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard") to argue that Jesus was a phantom. I think Paul only
appears to have been "defined negatively by Hegesippus" in Photius' citation of Gobar, but as I wrote on another thread the last time I looked into this, Gobar was:
... just being the dumb ass Photius says he is ("The work seems to have involved a lot of work without procuring a profit proportional to the great pain expended; it exhibits in fact more futile vanity than utility … And these opinions are not advanced either by logic or from the holy scriptures but uniquely, according to the author, from the citation of various Fathers of whom some advance the point of view of the church and others who reject it").
All Gobar saw (or understood) is that Paul (or whoever) said one thing and Hegesippus said the "opposite," all the while, as he himself says, "Hegesippus … in I do not know what context, says …" The context, then, is refuting Gnostics who were using the no eye/no ear passage to argue that Jesus was a phantom.