Hebrew Gospel hypothesis
group of theories for the synoptic problem, stating that a lost Hebrew or Aramaic gospel lies behind the canonical gospels; based upon a 2nd-century tradition from Papias of Hierapolis, that the apostle Matthew composed such a gospel
In the 18th and early 19th century, several scholars suggested that a Hebrew proto-gospel (a so-called Ur-Gospel) was the main source or one of several sources for the canonical gospels. This theorizing would later give birth to the two source-hypothesis that views Q as a proto-gospel but believes this proto-gospel to have been written in Koine Greek. After the widespread scholarly acceptance of the two-source hypothesis, scholarly interest in the Hebrew gospel hypothesis dwindled. Modern variants of the Hebrew gospel hypothesis survive, but have not found favor with scholars as a whole.
The foundation of the Hebrew gospel hypothesis is usually an early Christian tradition from the 2nd-century bishop Papias of Hierapolis. According to Papias, Matthew the Apostle was the first to compose a gospel, and he did so in Hebrew. Papias appeared to imply that this Hebrew or Aramaic gospel (sometimes called the Authentic Matthew) was subsequently translated into the canonical Gospel of Matthew. Jerome took this information one step further and claimed that all known Jewish-Christian gospels really were one and the same, and that this gospel was the authentic Matthew. As a consequence he assigned all known quotations from Jewish-Christian gospels to the "gospels of the Hebrews", but modern studies have shown this to be untenable.
The hypothesis has some overlap with the Aramaic original New Testament theory, which posits Gospels originally written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hebrew Gospel hypothesis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.