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Meanwhile the original Hebrew form of the gospel, being superseded by the Greek in all the congregations of believers except those that used exclusively the vernacular language of Palestine, gradually fell into disuse.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 Christ in three sets of fourteen each, chap. 1:17.  To effect this, certain kings of David’s line are omitted—­between Joram and Ozias (the Uzziah of the Hebrews), Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah; between Josias and Jechonias, Eliakim—­and David is reckoned twice; once as the last of a set of fourteen, then as the first of the following fourteen.  The thoroughly Jewish form of this introduction indicates the primary design of Matthew’s gospel, which was to exhibit to his countrymen Jesus of Nazareth as their long promised Messiah and king.  To this he has constant reference in the facts which he relates, and which he connects with the prophecies of the Old Testament by such forms of quotation as the following:  “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet,” chaps. 1:22; 2:15, 23; 13:35; 21:4; 27:35; “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet,” chaps. 4:11; 8:17; 12:17; “then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet,” chap. 2:17; etc.  His direct references to the Old