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Was the veil of the temple rent, as our Gospel of Matthew declares?
The Gospel of Matthew, it is affirmed, originally appeared in Hebrew, St. Jerome, who had this original version, says: “In that Gospel which is written in Hebrew letters, we read, not that the veil of the temple was rent, but that a lintel (or beam) of a prodigious size fell down.”
Commenting on this alleged prodigy, the rending of the veil, Strauss says: “Now the object of the divine Providence in effecting such a miracle could only have been this: to produce in the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus a deep impression of the importance of his death, and to furnish the first promulgators of the gospel with a fact to which they might appeal in support of their cause. But, as Schleiermacher has shown, nowhere else in the New Testament, either in the apostolic epistles or in Acts, or even in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in connection with the subject of which it could scarcely fail to be suggested, is this event mentioned: on the contrary, with the exception of this bare Synoptical notice, every trace of it is lost; which could scarcely have been the case if it had really formed a ground of apostolical argument. Thus the divine purpose in ordaining this miracle must have totally failed, or, since this is inconceivable, it cannot have been ordained for this object—in other words, since neither any other object of the miracle, nor yet a mode in which the event might happen naturally can be discovered, it cannot have happened at all” (Leben Jesu, p. 789).