Lost and Hostile Gospels

Another passage is not given to us verbatim by St. Jerome; he merely alludes to it in one of his Commentaries, saying that Jesus had declared him guilty of a grievous crime who saddened the spirit of his brother.190 It probably occurred in the portion of the Gospel of the Hebrews corresponding with the 18th chapter of St. Matthew, and may be restored somewhat as follows: “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh, and the soul of his brother be made sore. Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee,” &c.

Another passage is in perfect harmony with the teaching of our Lord, and, like that given last, may very possibly have formed part of his teaching. It is also given by St. Jerome, and therefore in Latin: “Be never glad unless ye are in charity with your brother.”191

St. Jerome, in his treatise against Pelagius, quotes from the Gospel of the Hebrews the following passage: “If thy brother has sinned in word against thee, and has made satisfaction, forgive him unto seven times a day. Simon, his disciple, said unto him, Until seven times! The Lord answered, saying, Verily I say unto thee, until seventy times seven;” and then probably, “for I say unto thee, Be never glad till thou art in charity with thy brother.”192

The Gospel of the Nazarenes supplied details not found in that of St. Matthew. It related of the man with the withered hand, healed by our Lord,193 that he was a mason,194 and gave the words of the appeal made to Jesus by the man invoking his compassion: “I was a mason, working for my bread with my hands. I pray thee, Jesus, restore me to soundness, that I eat not my bread in disgrace.”195

It relates, what is found in St. Mark and St. Luke, but not in St. Matthew, that Barabbas was cast into prison for sedition and murder;196 and it gives the interpretation of the name, “Son of a Rabbi.”197 These particulars may be correct; there is no reason to doubt them. The interpretation of the name may be only a gloss which found its way into the text.

Eusebius says that Papias “gives a history of a woman who had been accused of many sins before the Lord, which is also contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.”198 Of this we know nothing further, for the text is not quoted by any ancient writers; but probably it was the same story as that of the woman taken in adultery related in St. John's Gospel.199 But then, why did not Eusebius say that Papias gave “the history of the woman accused of adultery, which is also related in the Gospel of St. John”? Why does he speak of that story as being found in a Gospel written in the Syro-Chaldaean tongue, with which he himself was unacquainted,200 when the same story was in the well-known Canonical Greek Gospel of St. John? The conclusion one must arrive at is, either that the stories were sufficiently differently related for him not to recognize them as the same, or that the incident in St. John's Gospel is an excerpt from the Gospel of the Hebrews, or rather from a translation of it, grafted into the text of the Canonical Gospel. The latter opinion is favoured by some critics, who think that the story of the woman taken in adultery did not belong to the original text, but was inserted in it in the fourth or fifth century.

Those passages of the Gospel of the Nazarenes which most resemble passages in the Gospel of St. Matthew are not, however, identical with them; some differ only in the wording, but others by the form in which they are given.

And the remarkable peculiarity about them is, that the lessons in the Gospel of the Hebrews seem preferable to those in the Canonical Gospel. This was apparently the opinion of St. Jerome.

In chap. vi. ver. 11 of St. Matthew's Gospel, we have the article of the Lord's Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.” The words used in the Greek of St. Matthew are, τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον. The word ἐπιούσιος is one met with nowhere else, and is peculiar. The word οὐσία means originally that which is essential, and belongs to the true nature or property of things. In Stoic philosophy it had the same significance as ὕλη, matter; ἐπιούσιον ἄρτον would therefore seem most justly to be rendered by supersubstantial, the word employed by St. Jerome.

“Give us this day our supernatural bread.” But in the Gospel of the Nazarenes, according to St. Jerome, the Syro-Chaldaic word for ἐπιούσιον was מחד, which signifies “to-morrow's,” that is, our “future,” or “daily” bread. “Give us this day the bread for the morrow,”201 certainly was synonymous with, “Give us this day our daily bread.” It is curious that the Protestant Reformers, shrinking from translating the word ἐπιούσιον according to its apparently legitimate rendering, lest they should give colour to the Catholic idea of the daily bread of the Christian soul being the Eucharist, should have adopted a rendering more in accordance with an Apocryphal than with a Canonical Gospel.

In St. Matthew, xxiii. 35, Jesus reproaches the Jews for their treatment of the prophets, and declares them responsible for all the 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.”

Now the Zacharias to whom our Lord referred was Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, and not of Barachias, who was stoned “in the court of the house of the Lord” by order of Joash.202 Zacharias, son of Barachias, was not killed till long after the death of our Lord. He was massacred by the zealots inside the Temple, shortly before the siege, i. e. about A.D. 69.

Either, then, the Greek Gospel of St. Matthew was not written till after the siege of Jerusalem, and so this anachronism passed into it, or the error is due to a copyist, who, having heard of the murder of Zacharias, son of Barachias, but who knew nothing of the Zacharias mentioned in Chronicles, corrected the Jehoiada of the original into Barachias, thinking that thereby he was rectifying a mistake.

Now in the Gospel of the Nazarenes the name stood correctly, and the passage read, “from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, the son of Jehoiada.”203

In both these last quoted passages, the preference is to be given to the Nazarene Gospel, and probably also in that relating to forgiveness of a brother. The lost Gospel in that passage requires the brother to make satisfaction. It is no doubt the higher course to forgive a brother, whether he repent or not, seventy times seven times in the day; but it may almost certainly be concluded that our Lord meant that the forgiveness should be conditional on his repentance, for in St. Luke's Gospel the repentance of the trespassing brother is distinctly required. “If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him.”204 In St. Luke this is addressed to all the disciples; in St. Matthew, to Peter alone; but there can be little doubt that both passages refer to the same instruction, and that the fuller accounts in St. Luke and the Gospel of the Hebrews are the more correct. There may be less elevation in the precept, subject to the two restrictions, first, that the offence should be a verbal one, and secondly, that it should be apologized for; but it brings it more within compass of being practised.

We come next to a much longer fragment, which shall be placed parallel with the passage with which it corresponds in St. Matthew.

1“Dixit ad eum alter divitum: Magister, quid bonum faciens vivam? Dixit ei: Homo, leges et prophetas fac. Respondit ad eum: Feci. Dixit ei: Vade, vende omnia quae possides et divide pauperibus, et veni, sequere me. Caepit autem dives scalpere caput suum et non placuit ei. Et dixit ad eum Dominus: Quomodo dicis: Legem feci et prophetas, quoniam scriptum est in lege: Dilige proximum tuum sicut teipsum, et ecce multi fratres tui filii Abrahae amicti sunt stercore, morientes prae fame, et domus tua plena est multis bonis et non egreditur omnino aliquid ex ea ad eos. Et conversus dixit Simoni discipulo suo sedenti apud se: Simon fili Joannae, facilius eat camelum intrare per foramen acus quam divitem in regnum coelorum.” – Origen, Tract. viii. in Matt. xix. 19. The Greek text has been lost.

The comparison of these two accounts is not favourable to that in the Canonical Gospel. It is difficult to understand how a Jew could have asked, as did the rich young man, what commandments he ought to keep in order that he might enter into life. The Decalogue was known by heart by every Jew. Moreover, the narrative in the lost Gospel is more connected than in the Canonical Gospel. The reproach made by our Lord is admirably calculated to bring home to the rich man's conscience the truth, that, though professing to observe the letter of the Law, he was far from practising its spirit; and this leads up quite naturally to the declaration of the difficulty of a rich man obtaining salvation, or rather to our Lord's repeating a proverb probably common at the time in the East.205

And lastly, in the proverb addressed aside to Peter, instead of to the rich young man, that air of harshness which our Lord's words bear in the Canonical Gospel, as spoken to the young man in his sorrow, entirely disappears. The proverb is uttered, not in stern rebuke, but as the expression of sad disappointment, when the rich man has retired.

Another fragment from the Gospel of the Hebrews relates to the baptism of our Lord.

The Gospel of St. Matthew gives no explanation of the occasion, the motive, of Jesus coming to Jordan to the baptism of John. It says simply, “Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him.”206 But the Nazarene Gospel is more explicit.

“Behold, his mother and his brethren said unto him, John the Baptist baptizeth for the remission of sins; let us go and be baptized of him. But he said unto them, What sin have I committed, that I should be baptized of him, unless it be that in saying this I am in ignorance?”207

This is a very singular passage. We do not know the context, but we may presume that our Lord yields to the persuasion of his mother. Such is the tradition preserved in another apocryphal work, the “Preaching of St. Paul,” issuing from an entirely different source, from a school hostile to the Nazarenes.208

Another fragment continues the account after a gap.

“And when the Lord went up out of the water, the whole fountain of the Holy Spirit descended and rested upon him, and said unto him, My Son, I looked for thee in all the prophets, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest upon thee. For thou art my rest, thou art my first-begotten Son, who shalt reign throughout eternity.”209

But this is not the only version we have of the narrative in the Gospel of the Hebrews. St. Epiphanius gives us another, which shall be placed parallel with the corresponding account in St. Matthew.

1St. Epiph. Haeres. xxx. § 13. Τοῦ λαοῦ βαπτισθέντοσ, ἦλθε καὶ Ἰησοῦς καὶ ἐβαπτίσθη ὑπὸ τοῦ Ἰωάννου. Καί ὡς ἀνῆλθεν ἀπὸ τοῦ ὕδατος, ἠνοίχησαν οἱ οὐρανοὶ, καὶ εἴδε τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸ ἅγιον εἶδει ἐν περιστερὰς κατελθούσης καὶ εἰσελθούσης εἰς αὐτόν. Καὶ φωνὴ ἐγένετο ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, λέγουσα: Σύ μου εἴ ὁ ἀγαπητὸς, ἔν σοὶ ηὐδόκησα. Καὶ πάλιν; Ἐγω σήμερον γεγέννηκα σε. Καὶ εὐθὺς περιέλαμψε τὸν τόπον φῶς μέγα. Ὂ ἰδὼν ὁ Ἰωάννης λέγει αὐτῷ: Σύ τίς εἵ, κύριε? Καὶ πάλιν φωνὴ ἐξ οὐρανοῦ πρὸς αὐτόν: Οὗτος ἐστιν ὁ υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητὸς, ἐφ᾽ ὂν ηὐδόκησα. Καὶ τότε ὁ Ἰωάννης προσπεσὼν αὐτῷ ἔλεγε: Δέομαι σου, κύριε, σύ με βάπτισον. Ὁ δὲ ἐκώλυεν αὐτῷ, λέγων: Ἄφες, ὅτι οὔτως ἐστι πρέπον πληρωθῆναι πάντα.

That the Gospel stood as in this latter passage quoted in the second century among the orthodox Christians of Palestine is probable, because with it agrees the brief citation of Justin Martyr, who says that when our Lord was baptized, there shone a great light around, and a voice was heard from heaven, saying, “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.” Both occur in the Ebionite Gospel; neither in the Canonical Gospel.210

This Gospel was certainly known to the writer of the Canonical Epistle to the Hebrews, for he twice takes this statement as authoritative. “For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day, have I begotten thee?” and more remarkably, “Christ glorified not himself to be made an high-priest; but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son, to-day have I begotten thee.”211 In the latter passage the author is speaking of the calling of priests being miraculous and manifest; and then he cites this call of Christ to the priesthood as answering these requirements.

The order of events is not the same in the Gospel of Twelve and in that of St. Matthew: verses 14 and 15 of the latter, modified in an important point, come in the Ebionite Gospel after verses 16 and 17.

There is a serious discrepancy between the account of the baptism of our Lord in St. Matthew and in St. John. In the former Canonical Gospel, the Baptist forbids Christ to be baptized by him, saying, “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” But Jesus bids him: “Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” Then Jesus is baptized, and the heavens are opened. But in St. John's Gospel, the Baptist says, “I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining upon him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw, and bare record, that this is the Son of God.”212

Now the account in the Gospel of the Twelve removes this discrepancy. John does not know Jesus till after the light and the descent of the dove and the voice, and then he asks to be baptized by Jesus.

It is apparent that the passage in the lost Gospel is more correct than that in the Canonical one. In the latter there has been an inversion of verses destroying the succession of events, and thus producing discrepancy with the account in St. John's Gospel.

With these passages from the Gospel of the Twelve may be compared a curious one from the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. It occurs in the Testament of Levi, and is a prophecy of the Messiah. “The heavens shall open for thee, and from above the temple of glory the voice of the Father shall dispense sanctification upon him, as has been promised unto Abraham, the father of Isaac.”

The passage quoted by St. Epiphanius is wholly unobjectionable doctrinally. It is not so with that quoted by St. Jerome; it is of a very different character. It exhibits strongly the Gnostic ideas which infected the stricter sect of the Ebionites.

It was precisely on the baptism of the Lord that they laid the greatest stress; and it is in the account of that event that we should expect to find the greatest divergence between the texts employed by the orthodox and the heretical Nazarenes. Before his baptism he was nothing. It was then only that the “full fount of the Holy Ghost” descended on him, his election to the Messiahship was revealed, and divine power was communicated to him to execute the mission entrusted to him. A marked distinction was drawn between two portions in the life of Jesus – before and after his baptism. In the first they acknowledged nothing but the mere human nature, to the entire exclusion of everything supernatural; while the sudden accruing of supernatural aid at the baptism marked the moment when he became the Messiah. Thus the baptism was the beginning of their Gospel.

Before that, he is liable to sin, he suggests that his believing himself to be free from sin may have precipitated him into sin, the sin of ignorance. And “even in the prophets, after they had received the unction of the Holy Ghost, there was found sinful speech.”213 This quotation follows, in St. Jerome, immediately after the saying cited above enjoining forgiveness, but it in no way dovetails into it; the passage concerning the recommendation by St. Mary and the brethren that they should go up to be baptized of John for the remission of sins, comes in the same chapter, and there can be little doubt that this reference to the prophets as sinful formed part of the answer of the Virgin to Jesus when he spoke of his being sinless.

St. Jerome obtained his copy of the Gospel of the Hebrews from Beraea in Syria, and not therefore from the purest source. Had he copied and translated the codex he found in the library of Pamphilus at Caesarea, instead of that he procured from Beraea, it is probable that he would have found it not to contain the passages of Gnostic tendency.

These interpolations were made in the second century, when Gnostic ideas had begun to affect the Ebionites, and break them up into more or less heretical sects.

Their copies of the Gospel of the Hebrews differed, for the Gnostic Ebionites curtailed it in some places, and amplified it in others.

In reconstructing the primitive lost Gospel of the Nazarenes, it is very necessary to note these Gnostic passages, and to withdraw them from the text. We shall come to some more of their additions and alterations presently. It is sufficient for us to note here that the heretical Gospel in use among the Gnostic Ebionites was based on the orthodox Gospel of the Hebrews. The existence of these two versions explains the very different treatment their Gospel meets with at the hands of the Fathers of the Church. Some, and these the earliest, speak of this Gospel with reverence, and place it almost on a line with the Canonical Gospels; others speak of it with horror, as an heretical corruption of the Gospel of St. Matthew. The former saw the primitive text, the latter the curtailed and amplified version in use among the heretical Ebionites.

St. Paul, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, alludes to one of the appearances of our Lord after his resurrection, of which no mention is made in the Canonical Gospels: “After that, he was seen of James.”214 But according to his account, this appearance took place after several other manifestations, viz. after that to Cephas, that to the Twelve, and that to five hundred brethren at once. But it preceded another appearance to “all the apostles.” If we take the first and second to have occurred on Easter-day, and the last to have been the appearance to them again “after eight days,” when St. Thomas was present, then the appearance to St. James must have taken place between the “even” of Easter-day and Low Sunday.

Now the Gospel of the Hebrews gives a particular account of this visit to James, which however, according to this account, took place early on Easter-day, certainly before Christ stood in the midst of the apostles in the upper room on Easter-evening.

St. Jerome says, “The Gospel according to the Hebrews relates that after the resurrection of the Saviour, ‘The Lord, after he had given the napkin to the servant of the priest, went to James, and appeared to him. Now James had sworn with an oath that he would not eat bread from that hour when he drank the cup of the Lord, till he should behold him rising from amidst them that sleep.’ And again, a little after, ‘The Lord said, Bring a table and bread.’ And then, ‘He took bread and blessed and brake, and gave it to James the Just, and said unto him, My brother, eat thy bread, for the Son of Man is risen from among them that sleep.’ ”215

This touching incident is quite in keeping with what we know about St. James, the Lord's brother.

James the Just, according to Hegesippus, “neither drank wine nor fermented liquors, and abstained from animal food;”216 and though the account of Hegesippus is manifestly fabulous in some of its details, still there is no reason to doubt that James belonged to the ascetic school among the Jews, as did the Baptist before him, and as did the orthodox Ebionites after him. The oath to abstain from food till a certain event was accomplished was not unusual.217

What is meant by “the Saviour giving the napkin to the servant of the priest,” it is impossible to conjecture without the context. The napkin was probably that which had covered his face in the tomb, but whether the context linked this on to the cycle of sacred sindones impressed with the portrait of the Saviour's suffering face, cannot be told. The designation of “the Just” as applied to James is for the purpose of distinguishing him from James the brother of John. He does not bear that name in the Canonical Gospels, but the title may have been introduced by St. Jerome to avoid confusion, or it may have been a marginal gloss to the text.

The story of this appearance found its way into the writings of St. Gregory of Tours,218 who no doubt drew it from St. Jerome; and thence it passed into the Legenda Aurea of Jacques de Voragine.

If the Lord did appear to St. James on Easter-day, as related in this lost Gospel, then it may have been in the morning, and not after his appearance to the Twelve, or on his appearance in the evening he may have singled out and addressed James before all the others, as on that day week he addressed St. Thomas. In either case, St. Paul's version would be inaccurate as to the order of manifestations. The pseudo-Abdias, not in any way trustworthy, thus relates the circumstance:

“James the Less among the disciples was an object of special attachment to the Saviour, and he was inflamed with such zeal for his Master that he would take no meat when his Lord was crucified, and would only eat again when he should see Christ arisen from the dead; for he remembered that when Christ was alive he had given this precept to him and to his brethren. That is why he, with Mary Magdalene and Peter, was the first of all to whom Jesus Christ appeared, in order to confirm his disciples in the faith; and that he might not suffer him to fast any longer, a piece of an honeycomb having been offered him, he invited James to eat thereof.”219

Another fragment of the lost Gospel of the Hebrews also relates to the resurrection:

“And when he had come to [Peter and] those that were with Peter, he said unto them, Take, touch me, and see that I am not a bodiless spirit. And straightway they touched him and believed.”220

St. Ignatius, who cites these words, excepting only those within brackets, does not say whence he drew them; but St. Jerome informs us that they were taken from the Gospel of the Hebrews. At the same time he gives the passage with greater fulness than St. Ignatius.

The account in St. Matthew contains nothing at all like this; but St. Luke mentions these circumstances, though with considerable differences. The Lord having appeared in the midst of his disciples, they imagine that they see a spirit. Then he says, “Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”221

The narrative in St. Luke's Gospel is fuller than that in the Gospel of the Hebrews, and is not derived from it. In the Nazarene Gospel, as soon as the apostles see and touch, they believe. But in the Canonical Gospel of St. Luke, they are not convinced till they see Christ eat.

Justin Martyr cites a passage now found in the Canonical Gospel of St. John, but not exactly as there, evidently therefore obtaining it from an independent source, and that source was the Gospel of the Twelve, the only one with which he was acquainted, the only one then acknowledged as Canonical in the Nazarene Church.

The passage is, “Christ has said, Except ye be regenerate, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.”222

In St. John's Gospel the parallel passage is couched in the third person: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”223 The difference stands out more clearly in the Greek than in English.

We may conjecture that the primitive Gospel of the Hebrews contained an account of the interview of Nicodemus with our Lord. When we come to consider the Gospel used by the author of the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, we shall find that the instruction on new birth made to Nicodemus was familiar to him, but not exactly in the form in which it is recorded by St. John.