12.  The question respecting the original language of Matthew’s gospel has been, since the time of Erasmus, a matter of controversy, in which eminent biblical scholars have been found on different sides.  The problem is to find a solution which shall bring into harmony the following well-established facts:  (1) that, according to the united testimony of the early church fathers, Matthew originally wrote his gospel in Hebrew; (2) that our present Greek gospel has all the freedom of an original work, that it has remarkable coincidences in language with the second and third gospels, and especially that the citations from the Old Testament which stand in our Lord’s discourses follow as a rule the Greek version of the Seventy; (3) that all the early writers, those who testify to the Hebrew original of this gospel included, receive and use our present Greek gospel as the genuine and authoritative gospel of Matthew; (4) that the original Hebrew gospel, to the existence of which there is such abundant testimony, was allowed utterly to perish, while the Greek form of it alone was preserved and placed at the head of the canonical books of the New Testament.

13.  The testimony from Papias, in the beginning of the second century, and onward to the fourth century, has often been quoted and discussed.  It is not necessary to adduce it here at length.  It may be found in Kirchhofer, in the critical commentaries and introductions, and also in the modern Bible dictionaries.  The words of Papias, as preserved to us by Eusebius (Hist.  Eccl., 3. 39) are as follows:  “Matthew therefore wrote the oracles in the Hebrew dialect, and every one interpreted them as he was able.”  If there were any ground for doubting what Papias meant by “the oracles,” it would be removed by the testimony of the later writers, as Pantaenus and Origen (in Eusebius’ Hist.  Eccl., 5. 10; 6. 25), Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 3. 1), Eusebius himself (Hist.  Eccl., 3. 24), Epiphanius (Heresies, 29. 9; 30. 3), and others.  They who maintain that Matthew wrote originally in Greek suppose that the early fathers confounded an apocryphal gospel, the so-called “gospel according to the Hebrews,” with the true gospel of Matthew.  Others think, perhaps with more reason, that the gospel according to the Hebrews was a corrupted form, or, what amounts to nearly the same thing, a close imitation of the true Hebrew gospel of Matthew.

The Ebionites and Nazarenes used each apparently a different form of a Hebrew gospel which is sometimes called the gospel according to Matthew, but more properly “the gospel according to the Hebrews” (once by Jerome “the gospel according to the apostles").  According to Epiphanius that in use among the Ebionites was “not entire and full, but corrupted and abridged.”  Heresies, 30. 13.  Jerome says:  “Matthew, who is called Levi, having become from a publican an apostle, first composed in Judea, for the sake of those who had believed from among the circumcision,