B. H. Streeter's book, The Four Gospels, first published in 1925, was so influential that it had, by 1964, gone through one revision and eleven impressions. Its influence, though, began to wane after 1960, as people increasingly saw the weaknesses of its hypothesis, which involved Markan priority and a hypothetical "Q" (Quelle) document. It could not, for example, explain what Streeter called the Minor Agreements (those places in the Triple Tradition where Matthew and Luke agreed with each other, sometimes to the exact wording, against Mark). Although Streeter tried to minimize their importance, the "Minor Agreements" were not minor at all.
It is, however, a fascinating book. On this lazy, Sunday morning I picked it up and looked for index references to Aramaic substratum, Hebrew substratum, or Semitic substratum. Not finding them, I looked for C. C. Torrey, who had believed i an Aramaic substratum in the Gospels, and the name index led me to p. 266, where I found this: "Professor C. C. Torrey argues on linguistic grounds the Lk. i.-ii. must have been translated, not merely from a Semitic language, but from Hebrew as distinct from Aramaic." This is quite a statement from Torrey, who believed the substratum was Aramaic, but it fits in perfectly with my "Layered Matthew" hypothesis, and in fact with any Hebrew substratum theory. I've looked at many examples of Semitic puns and other wordplay in Matthew. Most would have worked in either Aramaic or Hebrew, but in the cases where only one of those languages worked, it was usually Hebrew. Scholarly opinion, though, represented by such as Torrey and Matthew Black, favored Aramaic.
The Hebrew/Aramaic question is an example of how academic orthodoxy becomes dogma. Most Christian scholars believed that Hebrew had already become a "dead language" by the first century. So they thought that the substratum, if there was one, HAD to be in Aramaic. But any writing destined to take its place alongside the other "holy books" would have to be first written in "the holy language." Nor had Hebrew completely died. Texts were still being written in both Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, a situation that lasted into the Medieval period, and also in a mixture of Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, as in the case of the Shaprut Hebrew Matthew. What is Mishnaic Hebrew? It is a rabbinical form of Hebrew, the language of the Mishnah, and the ancestor of Modern Hebrew. Nevertheless, it became academic dogma that Aramaic was the more likely language. I've noticed a shift of position on this in recent years, and my own small research has also led me to favor Hebrew.
While we're on the subject of academic dogma, I'd like to mention another one: the idea that the Gospels were originally written in Greek. This position is the dominant one, in spite of a mountain of contrary evidence, and it is commonly stated without even offering any evidence. Or perhaps the "Peter/rock" pun (Mt. XVI:18), which works in Greek, will be mentioned. But that verse contains a different pun in Hebrew, that between "even" ("stone") and "evneh" (I will build), as George Howard points out on p. 185. So much for academic dogma.
But I am not going to write about dogmatic positions, or the first chapters of either Matthew or Luke right now. I need to maintain a tight focus, specifically on the "Sermon on the Mount." With that in mind, I'll go to the case of Matthew VII:6. This was mentioned by George Howard on page 184.
Canonical Matthew: "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you." The play on words is between "swine" (חזיר) and "turn" (יחזר). You would not see this wordplay in either the Hebrew of Delitzsch or that of Salkinson, because they used different words. You do see it, though in the Shaprut Hebrew Matthew, which is presumably closer to the original language. Clearly, one cannot just go through and mechanically check everything in a modern translation, even if written in Biblical Hebrew. We must check everything against Shaprut, too.
This passage also contains a translation variant or scribal error, as mentioned by Howard on p. 226. Canonical Mt. says "that which is holy," while the Shaprut Hebrew Matthew has "holy flesh." "That which" = "אשר" while "flesh" = "בשר" and the two Hebrew words can be easily confused either when translating a text or when copying a manuscript. So which is it? We just don't know.
(to be continued)
