Greetings,

Of those biblical scholars who are aware of HMt at this time, majority are
of the opinion that it was a medieval translation from Latin. They do not
agree with Howard and some other commentators that this Hebrew text may go
back to ancient times.

The purpose of this post is to clarify the assumptions behind various
scholarly positions on HMt. While it is true that accepting HMt as a
witness to early Christianity is not entirely problem-free, the opponents
of such a view also have some problems of their own as well that need to be
acknowledged and dealt with.

If HMt is indeed a medieval translation, the most logical assumption will
be that it was translated from some previous copy of Mt, probably in Latin.
Unfortunately, no such text survived to our time, so it must remain
hypothetical for now. We can call it "the Lost Gospel X", or LGX. (Of
course Synoptic-L members have often enough heard the opinion that
hypothetical sources should not be posited without a very good
justification.)

What we do have at this time are some interesting textual parallels between
HMt and some vernacular medieval gospel harmonies, the Liege harmony being
the most representative among them, that were most probably translated from
Latin, and that seem to preserve some interesting pre-canonical readings.
WL Petersen succeeded in identifying quite a few of these parallels.

To what extent do these parallels help us to track down the textual history
of HMt? For them to be useful, the assumption needs to be made that the
Liege should be seen as witnessing to the existence in medieval Europe of
LGX, rather than being a straight translation of the Diatessaron, as most
people think. So there seems to be a bit of a problem justifying this
particular assumption.

The alternative assumption seems to be that the creators of HMt assembled
it from a wide variety of sources, including Diatessaronic. In this case,
no need to suppose the existence of LGX, of course. But now the redactional
behavior of the creators of HMt becomes somewhat problematic. Why did they
launch into their extremely time-consuming text-critical hustle and bustle
by bothering to try combining so many different sources, when the ready
made Mt was already sitting on their bookshelf? To the best of my knowledge
Petersen never answers this simple question.

And here's yet another assumption for your interest. It is now widely
accepted that theologically HMt shows substantial Jewish-Christian
influence. Those who think that HMt is ancient point to this influence as
helping to establish the antiquity of HMt. Whereas the critics of HMt are
in an unenviable position of postulating the following line of
transmission:

some sort of a Jewish-Christian Mt, probably in a semitic tongue -->
hypothetical Latin LGX --> HMt

Occam's Razor may do some work on this particular theory, perhaps.

Now, for those who do accept HMt as a witness to early Christianity, a big
problem may be Why on earth did nobody ever point attention of the biblical
scholarly world to this text before? Why did every NT scholar before
Howard, many generations of scholars in fact, overlook this Hebrew text in
such a mysterious fashion, if it is so valuable? Well, perhaps it's not so
much a problem as a mystery. And the answer most likely has to do with the
fact that both Du Tillet and Munster published so early and so widely their
quite un-interesting versions of Mt in Hebrew. So everybody just _assumed_
that all existing texts of Mt in Hebrew are like this.

It always takes someone to challenge "what everybody already knows", I
suppose.

Best regards,

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky | Toronto | http://www.trends.ca/~yuku/bbl/bbl.htm

Biblical history list http://www.egroups.com/group/loisy - unmoderated

"No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no superstition too
degrading for acceptance when it has become imbedded in common belief" --
Henry George