Was this taken from a collection of the recollections of St. Matthew, and the series 3 from another set of Apostolic Memorabilia? That it is not possible to decide.
Into the reasons which have led to this separation of the component parts 3, 4, the peculiarities of diction which serve to distinguish them, we cannot enter here; it would draw us too far from the main object of our inquiry.[288]
The theory that the Synoptical Gospels were composed of various disconnected materials, variously united into consecutive biographies, was accepted by Bishop Marsh, and it is the only theory which relieves the theologian from the unsatisfactory obligation of making “harmonies” of the Gospels. If we adopt the received popular conception of the composition of the Synoptical Gospels, we are driven to desperate shifts to fit them together, to reconcile their discrepancies.
The difficulty, the impossibility, of effecting such a harmony of the statements of the evangelists was felt [pg 190] by the early Christian writers. Origen says that the attempt to reconcile them made him giddy. Among the writings of Tatian was a Diatessaron or harmony of the Gospels. Eusebius adventured on an explanation, “of the discords of the Evangelists.” St. Ambrose exercised his pen on a concordance of St. Matthew with St. Luke; St. Augustine wrote “De consensu Evangelistarum,” and in his effort to force them into agreement was driven to strange suppositions—as that when our Lord went through Jericho there was a blind man by the road-side leading into the city, and another by the road-side leading out of it, and that both were healed under very similar circumstances.
Apollinaris, in the famous controversy about Easter, declared that it was irreconcilable with the Law that Christ should have suffered on the great feast-day, as related by St. Matthew, but that the Gospels disagreed among themselves on the day upon which he suffered.[289] The great Gerson sought to remove the difficulties in a “Concordance of the Evangelists,” or “Monotessaron.”
Such an admission as that the Synoptical Gospels were composed in the manner I have pointed out, in no way affects their incomparable value. They exhibit to us as in a mirror what the apostles taught and what their disciples believed. Faith does not depend on the chronological sequence of events, but on the verity of those events. “See!” exclaimed St. Chrysostom, “how through the contradictions in the evangelical history in minor particulars, the truth of the main facts transpires, and the trustworthiness of the authors is made manifest!”
In everything, both human and divine, there is an [pg 191] union of infallibility in that which is of supreme importance, and of fallibility in that which concerns not salvation. The lenses through which the light of the world shone to remote ages were human scribes liable to error. Θεῖα πάντα καὶ ἀνθρώπινα πάντα, was the motto Tholuck inscribed on his copy of the Sacred Oracles.
Having established the origin of the Gospel of St. Matthew, we are able now to see our way to establishing that of the Gospel of the Twelve, or Gospel of the Hebrews.
No doubt it also was a mosaic made out of the same materials as the Gospel of St. Matthew. There subsisted side by side in Palestine a Greek-speaking and an Aramaic-speaking community of Christians, the one composed of proselytes from among the Gentiles, the other of converts from among the Jews. This Gentile Church in Palestine was scarcely influenced by St. Paul; it was under the rule of St. Peter, and therefore was more united to the Church at Jerusalem in habits of thought, in religious customs, in reverence for the Law, than the Churches of “Asia” and Greece. There was no antagonism between them. There was, on the contrary, close intercourse and mutual sympathy.
Each community, probably, had its own copies of Apostolic Memorabilia, not identical, but similar. Some of the “recollections” were perhaps written only in Aramaic, or only in Greek, so that the collection of one community may have been more complete in some particulars than the collection of the other. The necessity to consolidate these Memorabilia into a consecutive narrative became obvious to both communities, and each composed “in order” the scraps of record of our Lord's sayings and doings they possessed and read in their sacred mysteries. St. Matthew's “Logia of the Lord” was used in the compilation of the Hebrew Gospel; one of the [pg 192] translations of it, which, according to Papias, were numerous, formed the basis also of the Greek Gospel.