Note 429 — Chapter VI
Neil Buchanan translation
Footnote 429:
(return)
This Gospel no doubt greatly interested the scholars of the Catholic Church from Clement of Alexandria onwards. But they have almost all contrived to evade the hard problem which it presented. It may be noted, incidentally, that the Gospel of the Hebrews, to judge from the remains preserved to us, can neither have been the model nor the translation of our Matthew, but a work independent of this, though drawing from the same sources, representing perhaps to some extent an earlier stage of the tradition. Jerome also knew very well that the Gospel of the Hebrews was not the original of the canonical Matthew, but he took care not to correct the old prejudice. Ebionitic conceptions, such as that of the female nature of the Holy Spirit, were of course least likely to convince the Church Fathers. Moreover, the common Jewish Christians hardly possessed a Church theology, because for them Christianity was something entirely different from the doctrine of a school. On the Gospel of the Hebrews, see Handmann (Texte u. Unters V. 3), Resch, Agrapha (I. c. V. 4), and Zahn, 1. c. p. 642 ff.