a gospel of Christ in Hebrew letters and words.  Who was the person that afterwards translated it into Greek is not certainly known.  Moreover, the Hebrew copy itself is at this day preserved in the library of Caesarea which Pampilus the Martyr collected with much diligence.  The Nazarenes, who live in Beroca, a city of Syria, and use this volume, gave me the opportunity of writing it out.”  De Vir.  Illustr., 3.  Here he certainly identifies this gospel, which, as he repeatedly informs us, he translated, with the true Hebrew gospel of Matthew.  But he afterwards speaks of it more doubtfully, as “the gospel according to the Hebrews,” and more fully as “the gospel according to the Hebrews, which is written indeed in the Chaldee and Syriac language, but in Hebrew letters, which the Nazarenes use to the present day, [being the gospel] according to the apostles, or, as most think, according to Matthew” (Against the Pelagians, 3); “the gospel which the Nazarenes and Ebionites use, which we have lately translated from the Hebrew language into the Greek, and which is called by most the authentic gospel of Matthew.”  Comment. in Matt. 12:13.  The most probable supposition is that Jerome, knowing that Matthew originally wrote his gospel in Hebrew, hastily assumed at first that the copy which he obtained from the Nazarenes was this very gospel.  The character of the quotations which he and Epiphanius give from it forbids the supposition that it was the true Hebrew gospel of Matthew.  It may have been a corrupted form of it, or an imitation of it.

14.  Of those who, in accordance with ancient testimony, believe that the original language of Matthew’s gospel was Hebrew, some assume that the apostle himself afterwards gave a Greek version of it.  In itself considered this hypothesis is not improbable.  Matthew, writing primarily for his countrymen in Palestine, might naturally employ the language which was to them vernacular.  But afterwards, when Christianity had begun to spread through the Roman empire, and it became evident that the Greek language was the proper medium for believers at large; and when also, as is not improbable, some of the existing canonical books of the New Testament had appeared in that language, we might well suppose that, in view of these circumstances, the apostle himself put his gospel into the present Greek form.  But it is certainly surprising that, in this case, no one of the ancient fathers should have had any knowledge of the matter.  In view of their ignorance it seems to be the part of modesty as well as prudence that we also should say with 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.