If these passages are from the original Gospel of Matthew, then the accepted Gospel of Matthew is spurious.
This Hebrew Gospel was the Gospel of the Ebionites and Nazarenes. Eusebius says: “They [the Ebionites] made use only of that which is called the Gospel According to the Hebrews.” Epiphanius says: “They [the Nazarenes] have the Gospel of Matthew most entire in the Hebrew language.” St. Jerome refers to it as “the Gospel which the Nazarenes and Ebionites use.”
Referring to these sects, Dr. Hug, the eminent Catholic critic, says: “The Ebionites denied the miraculous conception of Christ, and, with the Nazarenes, looked upon him only as an ordinary man.” The Gospel which these sects accepted as their authority could not have been our Gospel of Matthew, because the most important part of this Gospel is the story of the miraculous conception.
While the claim that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew is vigorously maintained, the claim that he afterwards translated it into Greek himself is so manifestly untenable that many have conceded its improbability. Jerome says: “Who afterwards translated it [Matthew] into Greek is not sufficiently certain.”
The consequences of this admission are thus reluctantly expressed by Michaelis: “If the original text of Matthew is lost, and we have nothing but a Greek translation: then, frankly, we cannot ascribe any divine inspiration to the words.”
Two texts may be cited from Matthew which prove a later date for the Gospel than that claimed. Jesus, in upbraiding the Jews, is reported to have used the following language:
“Upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar” (xxiii, 35).
Zacharias, the son of Baruch (Barouchos), who is undoubtedly meant, was slain in the temple about 69 A.D. Thus Matthew makes Jesus refer to an event that occurred forty years after his death and twenty or thirty years after the Gospel of Matthew is said to have been written.
Dr. Hug admits that this is the Zacharias referred to. He says: “There cannot be a doubt, if we attend to the name, the fact and its circumstances, and the object of Jesus in citing it, that it was the same Zacharias Barouchos, who, according to Josephus, a short time before the destruction of Jerusalem, was unjustly slain in the temple.”
Regarding this passage in Matthew, Professor Newman, of University College, London, says: “There is no other man known in history to whom this verse can allude. If so, it shows how late, how ignorant, how rash, is the composer of a text passed off on us as sacred truth” (Religion Not History, p. 46).