original Greek text;(1) whilst of those who consider that they find traces of translation and of Hebrew origin,
some barely deny the independent originality of the Greek Gospel, and few assert more than substantial agreement with the original, with more or less variation and addition often of a very decided character.(1) The case, therefore, stands thus: The whole of the evidence which warrants our believing that Matthew wrote any
work at all, distinctly, invariably, and emphatically asserts that he wrote that work in Hebrew or Aramaic; a Greek Gospel, therefore, as connected with Matthew, can only be a translation by an unknown hand, whose accuracy we have not, and never have had, the means of verifying. Our Greek Gospel, however, being an independent original Greek text, there is no ground whatever for ascribing it even indirectly to Matthew at all, the whole evidence of antiquity being emphatically opposed, and the Gospel itself laying no claim, to such authorship.
One or other of these alternatives must be adopted for our first Gospel, and either is absolutely fatal to its direct Apostolic origin. Neither as a translation from the Hebrew nor as an original Greek text can it claim Apostolic authority. This has been so well recognized, if not admitted, that some writers, with greater zeal than discretion, have devised fanciful theories to obviate the difficulty. These maintain that Matthew himself wrote both in Hebrew and in Greek,(1) or at least that the translation was made during his own lifetime and under his own eye,(2) and so on. There is not, however, a particle of evidence for any of these assertions, which
are merely the arbitrary and groundless conjectures of embarrassed apologists.
It is manifest that upon this evidence both those who assert the Hebrew original of Matthew's work and those who maintain that our Gospel is not a translation but an original Greek composition, should logically deny its apostolicity. We need not say that this is not done, and that for dogmatic and other foregone conclusions many profess belief in the Apostolic authorship of the Gospel, although in doing so they wilfully ignore the facts, and in many cases merely claim a substantial but not absolute Apostolic origin for the work.(1) A much greater number of the most able and learned critics, however, both from external and internal evidence deny the Apostolic origin of our first Canonical Gospel.(3)
