h Jerome: "Who was the
person that afterwards translated it into Greek is not known with
certainty." The universal and unhesitating reception of this gospel by
the early Christians in its present Greek form can be explained only
upon the supposition that it came to them with apostolic authority; that
it received this form at the hand, if not of Matthew himself, yet of an
apostle or an apostolic man, that is, a man standing to the apostles in
the same relation as Mark and Luke.

This supposition will explain the freedom of Matthew's gospel
and its coincidences in language with the gospels of Mark and
Luke. An apostle or apostolic man would give a faithful, but not
a servile version of the original. The oral tradition of our
Lord's life and teachings from which the first three evangelists
drew, as from a common fountain (see above, No. 7), must have
existed in Palestine in a twofold form, Aramaean and Greek. The
translator would naturally avail himself of the Greek
phraseology, so far as the oral tradition coincided with that
embodied in Matthew's gospel. Those who have carefully examined
the subject affirm that the citations from the Old Testament
adduced by Matthew himself in proof of our Lord's Messiahship
are original renderings, with more or less literalness, from the
Hebrew. The citations, on the contrary, embodied in the
discourses of our Lord himself follow, as a rule, the Greek
version of the Seventy; probably because the translator took
these citations as they stood in the oral tradition of these
discourses.

Meanwhile the original Hebrew form of the gospel, being superseded by
the Greek in all the congregations of believers except those that used
exclusively the vernacular language of Palestine, gradually fell into
disuse. The "gospel according to the Hebrews," noticed above, may have
been a corrupted form of this gospel or an imitation of it. As Marcion
chose the Greek gospel of Luke for the basis of his revision, so the
Ebionites and Nazarenes would naturally use the Hebrew gospel of Matthew
for their purposes.

15. The gospel of Matthew opens with the words: "The book of the
generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." In
accordance with this announcement, it traces back our Lord's lineage
through David to Abraham, giving, after the manner of the Jews, an
artificial arrangement of the generations from Abraham to