The gospel of the Hebrews.

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Bernard Muller
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Re: The gospel of the Hebrews.

Post by Bernard Muller »

I used to feel the same way, and basically embraced the Farrer theory (though with a lot of reserve). However, I have come to suspect that, even if Luke did know Matthew, there is other material in between the two gospels that Luke is drawing on directly instead of on Matthew. This conclusion certainly does not come from an overview of the situation; rather, it comes from close textual examination of individual pericopes and such. I do feel the need, so to speak, for some kind of intermediate document(s), though I remain skeptical about any specific reconstruction of it (or them), and that includes MacDonald's.
It's beyond my comprehension why a) "Luke" & "Matthew" knowing Q (& gMark), b) "Luke" not knowing gMatthew, c) most of the Q material written with full knowledge of gMark, are not thoroughly accepted: http://historical-jesus.info/q.html
There are so many pieces of evidence supporting the aforementioned: why looking for some ill-evidenced other hypotheses as alternative?

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rakovsky
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Re: The gospel of the Hebrews.

Post by rakovsky »

Bernard Muller wrote: It's beyond my comprehension why a) "Luke" & "Matthew" knowing Q (& gMark), b) "Luke" not knowing gMatthew, c) most of the Q material written with full knowledge of gMark, are not thoroughly accepted: http://historical-jesus.info/q.html
There are so many pieces of evidence supporting the aforementioned: why looking for some ill-evidenced other hypotheses as alternative?
Occam's Razor.

It's simpler to post that Luke went to the "official" Christian community and got and used the materials known to be already written containing the Q passages, (ie Matthew), like Luke claimed in his prologue, than to posit an unknown never-mentioned document, "Q".

Scholars posit that Matthew was written before Luke.
Luke says he investigated the Christian claims.
Matthew contains Q.
Simplest explanation: Luke got a copy of Matthew, which contains Q, and used the Q passages.

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Bernard Muller
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Re: The gospel of the Hebrews.

Post by Bernard Muller »

Occam's Razor.

It's simpler to post that Luke went to the "official" Christian community and got and used the materials known to be already written containing the Q passages, (ie Matthew), like Luke claimed in his prologue, than to posit an unknown never-mentioned document, "Q".

Scholars posit that Matthew was written before Luke.
Luke says he investigated the Christian claims.
Matthew contains Q.
Simplest explanation: Luke got a copy of Matthew, which contains Q, and used the Q passages.
The simplest solution is not always the right one. For example, the sun seems to travel from East to West, with the earth being immobile: that's what the ancients believed because it was the simplest solution, but they were wrong.
Furthermore, that simpler solution becomes more complicated when you take in account the many differences, even conflicts between gLuke & gMatthew. And also the fact "Luke" did not take from gMatthew stuff which would fit nicely in her gospel (but at the same time incorporated Q sayings going against her views).
And that's only the start of the complications.

Some scholars also posit "Matthew" knew about gLuke:
"Q" coming from gLuke to gMatthew: Christian Gottlieb Wilke (1838), Bruno Bauer (1841), Ronald V. Huggins (1992) & Evan Powell (2006)

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Ben C. Smith
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Re: The gospel of the Hebrews.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Bernard Muller wrote:Some scholars also posit "Matthew" knew about gLuke:
"Q" coming from gLuke to gMatthew: Christian Gottlieb Wilke (1838), Bruno Bauer (1841), Ronald V. Huggins (1992) & Evan Powell (2006)
Alan Garrow has a version of this, too: http://www.alangarrow.com/synoptic-problem.html.
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Bernard Muller
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Re: The gospel of the Hebrews.

Post by Bernard Muller »

to Ben,
Alan Garrow has a version of this, too: http://www.alangarrow.com/synoptic-problem.html.
That's a complicated solution. But Garrow can be added to the list of scholars who think "Matthew" knew about gLuke.

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Re: The gospel of the Hebrews.

Post by rakovsky »

I heard some claims that the Gospel of the Hebrews lacks the Virgin birth, which the Ebionites didn't believe in.
I don't know how they know this, since GHebrews isn't extant and in the OP of this thread we have the stories about Mary being the power Michael that came into the world as Mary, and we have Nativity stories like the pilgrims coming to the inn, along with the claim that g Hebrews has 7 miracle stories from the time of the Nativity.

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Re: The gospel of the Hebrews.

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Good list of potential verses from G. Hebrews in the Textexcavation website:
http://www.textexcavation.com/jewishgospels.html

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Re: The gospel of the Hebrews.

Post by rakovsky »

One of my main questions about the text is what status it had among the Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem in c. 135 AD.

First, I should note that scholars have a 70 year period for its date of composition, c. 50-150, so while it looks like it was written before the 135 destruction, this is not clear. The Early Writings entry says:
Unlike other Jewish-Christian gospels, the Gospel of the Hebrews shows no dependence upon the Gospel of Matthew. The story of the first resurrection appearance to James the Just suggests that the Jewish-Christian community that produced this document claimed James as their founder... Cameron makes these observations on dating and provenance: "The earliest possible date of the composition of the Gospel of the Hebrews would be in the middle of the first century,
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/g ... brews.html
I am pretty skeptical about the claim that it was written in Egypt. Just because it has a quote with the verse "From Egypt did I call My son" and that Clement of Alexandria and Origen had a copy doesn't mean that it was originally written there, since Hegessippus earlier seems to have had a copy. I think that it's remarkable that we can't show that it was written based on Matthew, although we don't have enough quotes and it probably would have been a similar document.

Eusebius says that Papias (c. 125 AD) quotes a story about an accused woman that shows up in the Gospel according to the Hebrews, but this doesn't mean which writer or writing took the story from the other. Papias did though claim that Matthew wrote a Gospel text in Hebrew first, since Eusebius notes "These things therefore are recorded by Papias about Mark. But about Matthew he says these: 'Matthew therefore in the Hebrew dialect ordered together the oracles, and each one interpreted them as he was able.'" But I suppose that even Papias could have been wrong about the authorship of the Gospel According to the Hebrews.

The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia's entry for the Gospel According to the Hebrews notes:
Eusebius, speaking of Ignatius and his epp., takes notice of a saying of Jesus which he quotes (Ep. ad Smyrn, iii; compare Luke 24:39), "Take, handle me, and see that I am not an incorporeal spirit." The saying differs materially from the saying in Luke's Gospel, and Eusebius says he has no knowledge whence it had been taken by Ignatius. Jerome, however, twice over attributes the saying to the "Gospel according to the Hebrews," and Origen quotes it from the "Teaching of Peter." Ignatius may have got the saying from oral tradition, and we cannot, therefore, be sure that he knew this Gospel.
Justin Martyr (c. 150) has the story about the fire at Jesus' baptism that resembles Epiphanius' quote from the Hebraic Gospel, "And again: 'Today I have begotten you.' And immediately a great light illuminated the place." (http://www.textexcavation.com/jewishgospels.html)

Eusebius wrote about Hegesippus, a writer of c.165:
"[Hegesippus] sets out something from the gospel according to the Hebrews and from the Syriac, and likewise from the Hebrew dialect, making apparent that he himself had come to faith out of the Hebrews."
It sounds like Hegessipus comes from the official mid-2nd century Jewish-Christian community, is quoting from the Gospel according to the Hebrews and that Hegessipus respects this text.

Irenaeus in c. 180, maybe 30 - 130 years after the text's composition, says:
"Indeed Matthew, among the Hebrews in their own dialect, also bore forth a writing of the gospel, Peter and Paul evangelizing in Rome and founding the church." Now, do we really know that the "Gospel according to the Hebrews" was really an earlier version of Matthew's Gospel? Maybe this was just Irenaeus' theory about a document 30-100 years before his time? If it was written in 150 AD, Irenaeus should have had a good idea about its authorship. And maybe Irenaeus was just talking about Matthew's earlier writing in Aramaic, not about the document called "The Gospel According to the Hebrews".

Clement of Alexandria (c. 190, writing 40-140 years after the composition) refers to the "Gospel according to the Hebrews", giving a quote from it that doesn't show up in our canonical Matthew.

Eusebius claimed that the Ebionites "used only the so-called Gospel according to the Hebrews and made small account of the rest."

Jerome in the 4th century wrote that the Gospel According to the Hebrews was used by the Nazarenes in Syria and that it was in the library of Caesarea (Palestine). So you can conclude that it had significant currency among the Jewish Christian community in the time of Hegessippus and Jerome.

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Re: The gospel of the Hebrews.

Post by John2 »

rakovsky,


Glad you are still around, by the way.


The last time I thought about the gospel of the Hebrews I concluded that the "logia" mentioned by Papias are the key to the various Matthews (NT, Ebionite and Nazarene), and that all of them more or less pre-date Papias (c. 110 CE by my reckoning), and that while each version (whether in Hebrew or Greek) was called "Matthew" or "the gospel of the Hebrews" and more or less had the same logia, they weren't (and needn't have been) otherwise in total harmony with each other. (I suspect the NT Matthew was the only version that was combined with Mark, for example.)

I'm thinking there were "logia" floating around (and I have no issue with the idea that they could be genuine sayings and doings of Jesus) that wound up in Mark and these various Matthews prior to the time of Papias (along with whatever else their authors cared to say as literary artists and to support their particular doctrines). In that sense, Mark would be a kind of "Matthew" too, perhaps even the first one, only (in my view) one that was written by a Gentile who may have actually been called Mark (as per Papias).
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