Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

Post by Peter Kirby »

John2 wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:30 pm Church writers cite things from the Hebrew Matthew that stood out to them in contrast to the NT Matthew so I assume it was otherwise more or less in line with the NT Matthew.

It was also said to have been shorter than the NT Matthew (I always forget the source for that, but they counted all the lines), and since I am unaware of anything Markan in Church writer citations of the Hebrew Matthew (though I need to investigate this further and could be wrong, and if so, then that would be fine and I'll let it go), and since it was written in Hebrew and I am unaware of anyone writing or translating Mark in Hebrew, I imagine that the Hebrew Matthew was "sans Mark." And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but that's how it looks to me right now.

I also assume it promoted Nazarene beliefs because it was used by Nazarenes and it's what the NT Matthew does (and Mark and Luke and Acts, for that matter). And Jerome says he translated it and that it was available in the library in Caesarea.
Dialogue against Pelagius, iii.2. In the Gospel according to the Hebrews which is indeed in the Chaldaean and Syrian speech but is written in Hebrew letters, which the Nazarenes use to this day, called 'according to the apostles', or, as most term it, according to Matthew', which also is to be seen in the library of Caesarea,
The gospel in Hebrew is a very boring NT Gospel of Matthew. Sorry.

http://earlychristianwritings.com/text/ ... s-ogg.html
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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

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Peter Kirby wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 12:50 pm
John2 wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 11:16 am he may have misunderstood what Peter said about John's food
This is quite forced. Greek word substitution like this is a textual phenomenon, not the reminiscences of Peter.


If the options are a) someone was working from notes he made of Peter's teachings "as he remembered them" and something somehow got lost in translation or transmission), or b) someone who is not said to have known Mark changed part of something from Mark to support vegetarianism but kept another part that doesn't (John's wool and leather clothing), or c) Mark knew the Ebionite Matthew and changed "cake in oil" to "locusts" because he's anti-vegetarian, my first choice would be option a.

I can't explain exactly how something could have gotten "lost in translation" (or transmission), but I know that the Ebionites are said to have only used Matthew (or their version of Matthew) and are never said to have known Mark. So I can either imagine that something got lost in transmission somehow, or I can imagine that the Ebionites knew Mark (based solely on this verse?) against the evidence to the contrary.

Plus some early Christians were vegetarians (according to Paul), including Peter's co-pillar James (according to Hegesippus) and Peter himself in what are commonly thought to be Ebionite sources in the Clementine writings, so it would be natural enough if John was one too (and I would call him a Christian since he is presented as saying "After me will come One more powerful than I" and is likened to Elijah).
Last edited by John2 on Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:18 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

Post by John2 »

Peter Kirby wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:46 pm
The gospel in Hebrew is a very boring NT Gospel of Matthew. Sorry.

http://earlychristianwritings.com/text/ ... s-ogg.html


That goes against what Church writers say and discounts the internal evidence that the NT Matthew is a translation from Hebrew, as Nehemia Gordon persuasively argues.

He also presents linguistic support for Hebrew as the original language for the Gospel of Matthew, then picks apart minor differences between the Hebrew and Greek in several key verses. These slight differences could lead to major new interpretations of Jesus’s directives, namely that he was upholding Old Testament law and speaking against the "reforms” of the Pharisees, not attempting to replace the laws of Moses.


https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-revi ... eek-jesus/
Last edited by John2 on Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

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John2 wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:16 pm
Peter Kirby wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:46 pm
The gospel in Hebrew is a very boring NT Gospel of Matthew. Sorry.

http://earlychristianwritings.com/text/ ... s-ogg.html
That goes against what Church writers say and discounts the internal evidence that the NT Matthew is a translation from Hebrew, as Nehemia Gordon persuasively argues.
It's based on what they do say. They say they found the Gospel in Hebrew, and that it was almost exactly like NT Matthew. Different language, same book.
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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

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Peter Kirby wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:21 pm
John2 wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:16 pm
Peter Kirby wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:46 pm
The gospel in Hebrew is a very boring NT Gospel of Matthew. Sorry.

http://earlychristianwritings.com/text/ ... s-ogg.html
That goes against what Church writers say and discounts the internal evidence that the NT Matthew is a translation from Hebrew, as Nehemia Gordon persuasively argues.
It's based on what they do say. They say they found the Gospel in Hebrew, and that it was almost exactly like NT Matthew. Different language, same book.


I must not be understanding you then, because I'm trying to say the same thing, only that it was also "sans Mark" (since Mark is never said to have been written or translated into Hebrew and the Hebrew Matthew was considerably shorter than the NT Matthew).

Do you think someone wrote or translated Mark in Hebrew and that it was combined with the Hebrew Matthew in the way that the NT Matthew is combined with Mark? And did they make more or less the same edits? Otherwise it makes more sense to me to imagine the Hebrew Matthew "sans Mark."
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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

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John2 wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:35 pm
Peter Kirby wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:21 pm
John2 wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:16 pm
Peter Kirby wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:46 pm
The gospel in Hebrew is a very boring NT Gospel of Matthew. Sorry.

http://earlychristianwritings.com/text/ ... s-ogg.html
That goes against what Church writers say and discounts the internal evidence that the NT Matthew is a translation from Hebrew, as Nehemia Gordon persuasively argues.
It's based on what they do say. They say they found the Gospel in Hebrew, and that it was almost exactly like NT Matthew. Different language, same book.
I must not be understanding you then, because I'm trying to say the same thing, only that it was also "sans Mark" (since Mark is never said to have been written or translated into Hebrew and the Hebrew Matthew was considerably shorter than the NT Matthew).

Do you think someone wrote or translated Mark in Hebrew and that it was combined with the Hebrew Matthew in the way that the NT Matthew is combined with Mark? And did they make more or less the same edits? Otherwise it makes more sense to me to imagine the Hebrew Matthew "sans Mark."
I don't find any evidence that Hebrew Matthew was shorter than Greek Matthew. It seems a few words longer here and a few words shorter there but only a few, based on Jerome. What are you referring to, and is it reliable evidence?
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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

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Peter Kirby wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:38 pm
I don't find any evidence that Hebrew Matthew was shorter than Greek Matthew. It seems a few words longer but only a few, based on Jerome. What are you referring to, and is it reliable evidence?

... according to a list of canonical and apocryphal works drawn up in the 9th century, known as the Stichometry of Nicephorus, the gospel was 2,200 lines, just 300 lines shorter than Matthew.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_the_Hebrews
The Stichometry of Nicephorus is a stichometry by Patriarch Nicephorus I of Constantinople (c. 758-828). It is significant in that it counts the number of lines of various Christian texts, many of which have been lost over the course of time. This has enabled modern scholars to determine how much of various fragmentary texts from the New Testament apocrypha and Old Testament apocrypha remain missing.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichometry_of_Nicephorus

Nikephoros I or Nicephorus I (Greek: Νικηφόρος Α'; c. 758 – 5 April 828) was a Byzantine writer and patriarch of Constantinople from 12 April 806 to 13 March 815 ...

Nikephoros follows in the path of John of Damascus. His merit is the thoroughness with which he traced the literary and traditional proofs, and his detailed refutations are serviceable for the knowledge they afford of important texts adduced by his opponents and in part drawn from the older church literature.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikephoro ... tantinople

I gather this was based on a translation of the Hebrew Matthew and it is 300 lines shorter in Greek than the NT Matthew, and I account for this gap by removing Mark and adding the citations of Church writers.
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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

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John2 wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:57 pm I gather this was based on a translation of the Hebrew Matthew and it is 300 lines shorter in Greek than the NT Matthew, and I account for this gap by removing Mark and adding the citations of Church writers.
Epiphanius shows that there were multiple texts under the name "Gospel of the Hebrews." The one actually in Hebrew, both Epiphanius and Jerome agree, was almost exactly Matthew. The one actually in Greek looked to Epiphanius like a modification of Matthew. The one that was actually in Greek, only called the Gospel of the Hebrews, would be the shorter one, especially if this stichometry is of Greek texts. The usual designation for this text (to avoid confusion) is the Gospel of the Ebionites.
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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

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Peter Kirby wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 4:30 pm
John2 wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:57 pm I gather this was based on a translation of the Hebrew Matthew and it is 300 lines shorter in Greek than the NT Matthew, and I account for this gap by removing Mark and adding the citations of Church writers.
Epiphanius shows that there were multiple texts under the name "Gospel of the Hebrews." The one actually in Hebrew, both Epiphanius and Jerome agree, was almost exactly Matthew. The one actually in Greek looked to Epiphanius like a modification of Matthew. The one that was actually in Greek, only called the Gospel of the Hebrews, would be the shorter one, especially if this stichometry is of Greek texts. The usual designation for this text (to avoid confusion) is the Gospel of the Ebionites.


That's a fairly standard view but I think there was only one text, the Hebrew Matthew, with multiple translations (as per my reading of Papias), and one translation of it was combined with Mark and became the NT Matthew, and another was not combined with Mark and became the Ebionite Matthew.

And since Luke and Marcion's gospel arguably used the same source and resemble the Ebionite Matthew, and since Marcionism espouses the same doctrines as the Ebionites, I think both of these gospels were "mutilations" of the Ebionite Matthew (which itself was a "mutilation" of the Hebrew Matthew).

Jerome notes a number of major and minor differences between the Hebrew and NT Matthews (including a resurrection appearance to James), and Epiphanius doesn't appear to have known Hebrew and never cites any of the Hebrew vMatthew and says, "I do not know if whether they have also excised the genealogies from Abraham to Christ."

So there were a number of "Jewish Christian gospels" called Matthew, and to me it makes the most sense to see them as being translations/redactions of the Hebrew Matthew: 1) the NT version that was combined with Mark; 2) the "mutilated" Ebionite version; 3) that in turn became "mutilated" by Marcion and Luke. That makes two Greek versions of gospels that were called "Matthew" and two spin offs, but they were all based on one gospel, the Hebrew Matthew, and it would all be in keeping with what the first person to mention Matthew says, "each translated [the Hebrew Matthew] as he was able."

The NT and Ebionite Matthews would simply be two examples of this translation process (perhaps they were even the only ones made), and Marcion then used an edited version of the latter (since it was a non-orthodox version of Matthew and supported his doctrines) and Luke used and edited the latter as well (either to counter Marcion and/or the Ebionites or or as part of his having "carefully investigated everything" or for all these reasons) and maybe even also used and edited the NT Matthew.
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Re: Bathtime Stories: Ebion and Cerinthus

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John2 wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 5:33 pm "each translated [the Hebrew Matthew] as he was able."
Nobody's that bad at translating.

"Honey? Where's my Hebrew dictionary? Whatever, I'll just write a new Gospel."
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