"And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape, like a dove, upon him; and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased. And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness."
This is a consecutive sentence, and yet the genealogies have been clumsily pitchforked into the middle of it. (Luke iii. 23.)
And with regard to Matthew, it can, at least, be proved that Justin Martyr knew nothing of his genealogies.
"He was the Son of Man, either because of his birth by the Virgin, who was, as I said, of the family of David, and Jacob, and Isaac, and Abraham." Plainly Justin thought that it was the Virgin and not Joseph that had descended from Abraham.
But the suppressing of genealogies that were not invented until one hundred years after the Apostles were slumbering in forgotten tombs, was only a detail of their "heresy." Their gospel makes out Christ to be not the Logos masquerading in a human form, but a man and a prophet. "A prophet will the Lord our God raise up unto you from your brethren," he says. And prophets can sin, and he can sin, for he was plainly without the Holy Ghost until his baptism. It comes down, in the Hebrew gospel, not upon, but into him. And he is the Son of God from that moment, not before.
"Call me not good, for he that is good is one the Father in the heavens!" Pseudo-Matthew weakens this considerably, "There is none good but one, that is God."
"He that is good is one." That was the motto of the Essenes of Jerusalem. Tertullian tells us that certain "unlearned" Christians in his day protested against the Trinity. "They declare that we proclaim two or three gods, but they, they affirm, worship only one." (Adv. Prax. c. 3.) The unlearned were the Church of Jerusalem that still clung to the text, "He that is good is One."
We come to other "heresies." The early gospel knew nothing of Matthew's interpolation about John the Baptist eating locusts, because John the Baptist, as an Essene, could do nothing of the sort. And Jerome tells us that the wicked Ebionites garbled the passage, Luke xxii. 15, to make it appear that Jesus actually refused to eat flesh at the Passover supper.
This is all that can be restored of this in the Ebionite gospel:—
"... Where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the Passover?"