As I have been working through the synoptic Gospels, I have been using the Hebrew manuscripts of Matthew as a tool to restore the lost Hebrew of the synoptic parallels in Mark and Luke. (64% of Hebrew Luke can be restored from Hebrew Matthew, and 55% of Hebrew Mark can be restored from Hebrew Matthew).
This brings up the question of Gospel Origins. As anyone who studies the first three Gospels quickly notices, much of the same material, in the same, or almost the same words, appears in each of these Gospels. Some material is common to all three, and some appears in two of the three. This has resulted in several theories of Gospel origins, designed to explain the common origin of the shared material.
Many scholars through the years have seen within the Gospel according to the Hebrews, possible answers to questions about synoptic origins.
In 1778 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) known as a founder of the Scientific Method, proposed the idea that the Gospel according to the Hebrews was the primary source for our Synoptic Gospels. [1]
In 1866 Hilgenfeld concluded:
At length the Gospel according to the Hebrews offers those of us who are investigating the origin of the gospels the punctum Archimedis [point of origin] which so many learned men have vainly sought in the Gospel according to Mark.[2]
In 1905 A. S. Barnes proposed an identification between the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Logia document which many scholars closely associate with the hypothetical “Q” document Barnes writes:
Is it possible seriously to maintain that there were two separate documents, each of them written at Jerusalem during the Apostolic age and in the Hebrew tongue, each of them assigned to the Apostle Matthew, and each of them dealing in some way with the Gospel story? Or are we not rather forced to the conclusion that these two documents, whose descriptions are so strangely similar, must really be identical,… (A. S. Barnes; The Gospel according to the Hebrews; Journal of Theological Studies 6 (1905) p. 361)
In 1940 Pierson Parker concluded that a close connection existed between the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the hypothetical “Proto-Luke” and the hypothetical “L-Source” document:
…the presence in this gospel of Lukan qualities and parallels, the absence from it of definitive… Markan elements… all point to one conclusion, viz., that the source of the Gospel according to the Hebrews… was most closely related to sources underlying the non-Markan parts of Luke, that is, Proto-Luke. (Pierson Parker; A Proto-Lukan Basis for the Gospel according to the Hebrews; Journal of Biblical Literature 59 (1940) p. 478)
And Hugh Schonfield concluded of the Gospel according to the Hebrews:
…it may be argued that there has been dependence not of ‘Hebrews’ on the Synoptics but vice versa– that ‘Hebrews’ was one of the sources on which one or more of them drew. (Hugh Schonfield; According to the Hebrews; 1937;pp. 13-18)
This is why this restoration of the Scriptures must include restoration of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Because the Gospel according to the Hebrews was the original Jewish Gospel which was the source for Matthew, Mark and Luke (and even to some degree, John).
The Gospel according to the Hebrews is the source for the common material appearing in Matthew, Mark and Luke. And therefore we will be able to use these three Gospels, along with the fifty or so quotations from this lost Jewish Gospel, which appear in the Church Fathers, along with other sources and clues (which I will discuss in future blogs), to restore the original Hebrew of this original lost Jewish Gospel.
[1] The Hilbert Journal 3 (1904); The Gospel according to the Hebrews; Walter F. Adeney, M.A., D.D.,; p. 139
[2] Ibid; Novum Testamentum extra Canonem Receptum, fasciculus iv. P. 13. Apad. Nicholson, The Gospel according to the Hebrews, p. ix.