. His later allusions to
the Gospel say that "it is called by most the original Matthew," [5]
and that it is "the Gospel according to the Apostles or, _as most
suppose_, according to Matthew." [6] In fact, this Hebrew Gospel,
which bore sometimes the title of "the Hebrews," sometimes "the
Apostles," sometimes "St. Matthew," was not the Hebrew original of our
present Matthew, nor could it have been written by an Apostle. The
fragments of it which now remain come from two versions. Both versions
show traces of a mixed Jewish and Gnostic heresy, and are plainly
apocryphal. The Holy Spirit is called the "mother" of Jesus, and
represented as transporting Him by a hair of His head to Mount Tabor,
and our Lord is represented as handing His grave-clothes to the servant
of the high-priest as soon as He was risen from the dead. The Gospel
certainly seems not only to be a forgery, but to betray a knowledge
both of our Greek Gospel according to St. Matthew and that according
to St. John.[7] We are obliged to conclude that it throws no light on
the origin of our Matt., and that the original Hebrew Matt. was lost at
an early date.

On the other hand, it is certain that our Greek Matt. was {36} regarded
as authentic in the 2nd century, and it is plain that it records the
sayings of Christ with peculiar fulness.

We must now return to what was stated in our previous chapter when
dealing with the Synoptic problem. We there saw that there is a great
mass of common material in all three Synoptic Gospels, and saw that
Mark was probably used as a groundwork for Matt. and Luke. We
therefore are led to the conclusion that the Gospel according to St.
Matthew is a combination of a Greek version of St. Matthew's original
Hebrew Logia--St. Matthew possibly wrote a Greek version of it as well
as the Hebrew--with the Gospel written by St. Mark. The combination
was apparently made either by the apostle himself, or by a disciple of
the apostle as the result of his directions. The Catholic Jewish
Christians, knowing that the Gospel contained St. Matthew's own Logia,
and that the rest of the Gospel was in accordance with his teaching as
delivered to them, called it "the Gospel according to Matthew." The
less orthodox Jewish Christians, as we have seen, invented a Gospel of
their own.

A little help is given us by the internal evidence afforded by Matt.
The author appears to be writing for Greek-speaking converts from
Judaism, who need