The Lost Sheep of the House of Israel / Can We Reconstruct Matthew I?

The title of this post is based on a text that is not even found in the Tanakh: it is in Matthew 10.5-6:

"Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel..."

These are the words of Rabbi Yeshua, but of course Paul and his gang went there anyway.

In previous posts and Facebook Notes, I've written at some length about the Hebrew/Aramaic substratum in the New Testament. I have also written (in this blog) about the so-called Synoptic Problem (which is a puzzle rather than a problem), and solved it to my own satisfaction. The result of this study was my conclusion that an early form of the Gospel of Matthew was the first gospel to be written, and it was originally written in Hebrew. It has occurred to me to wonder whether that Hebrew can be reconstructed.

Let's take a closer look.

Delitzsch:

אֶל־דֶּרֵךְ הַגּוֹיִם אַל־תֵּלֵכוּ וְאֶל־עִיר הַשֹׁמְוֹנִים אַל־תָּבֹאוּ ׃

כִּי אִם־לְכוּ אֶל־הַצֹּאן הָאֹבְדוֹת לבֵית יִשְׂרָאֵל ׃

Salkinson:

אַל־תָּשִׂימוּ לְדֶרֶךְ הַגּוֹיִם פַּעֲמֵיכֶם וְאֶל־עָרֵי הַשֹׁמְרֹנִים אַל־תָּבֹאוּ ׃

כִּי אִם־לְצֹאן אֹבְדוֹת מִבֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל תֵּלֵכוּ ׃‎

Shaprut:

בארצות הגוים אל תלכו ובערי השמרונים אל תבואו ׃

לכו לצעאן אשר נדחו מבית ישראל ׃

Modern Hebrew (approximately):

לא ללכת לשום מקום בין הגויים, ולא להיכנס לעיר השומרונים, אלא ללכת אל הכבש האבוד של בית ישראל

Delitzsch is a nineteenth-century translation of the whole New Testament into excellent (though anachronistic) Biblical Hebrew.

Salkinson is a slightly later nineteenth-century translation, intentionally more periphrastic and idiomatic. Salkinson was, however a great admirer of Delitzsch's translation, and no doubt benefitted from it.

Shaprut is from the medieval polemical work Even Bohan, by Shem-Tob Ibn Shaprut, but it appears to be much earlier than that, and is textually closest to the oldest textual traditions, the Old Latin and the Old Syriac, but is not identical to either of them.

According to my Layered-Matthew Hypothesis, which can be diagrammed thus:

the Shaprut text is a text of the Matthew II intermediate text type. Luke used Matthew I and never saw Matthew II. Matthew III corresponds to canonical Matthew. For Matthew I we have Luke's borrowings (e.g. the Beatitudes and his version of the Pater Noster); Matthew II is reflected in Shaprut; the existence of Matthew III is self-evident. Thus, no hypothetical texts are required. All of this is dealt with in the series The Layers of Matthew, published in this blog in late 2018. It is explained most succinctly in The Layers of Matthew VI, published here on November 17 2018.

The first thing we notice in those Hebrew samples above is that the Shaprut text is unpointed, as any first-century Hebrew text would be. That makes it look, at first glance, a bit like Modern Hebrew.

Modern Hebrew is an expanded descendant of Mishnaic Hebrew, used by the rabbis in the early centuries CE. Let's see if we can spot some of the differences between the Shaprut version and the modern version.

One need not be an expert to see that what at first seemed similar is actually the most unlike the Shaprut text. We see the Modern Hebrew prohibitive לא where Biblical Hebrew (and Shaprut) have אל. We see the characteristic Modern Hebrew של for "of," where Biblical Hebrew and Shaprut use other constructions. In fact, the differences are too numerous to mention. The Shaprut text is not Medieval Hebrew, or even Mishnaic Hebrew. It is late Biblical Hebrew, with an occasional Mishnaic word or expression thrown in, which is exactly what we would expect of a first-century text of this type.

According to my Layered Mathew Hypothesis, what we are looking at in the (Shem-Tob Ibn) Shaprut text is an early, intermediate stage of the Gospel of Matthew, which I have called Matthew II. Can we use Luke to recover the Matthew I form? No, in this case we can't, because the citation we are considering is an indictment of Paul's mission to the Gentiles, and would never have been included in the Gospel of Luke, which was written for the Gentiles. The Gospel of Matthew, on the other hand, the first to be written, was written for the Jews.

As we will see, though, the earliest stage of the Gospel of  Matthew, Matthew I, can be recovered by translating key passages of Luke, such as the Beatitudes and the Avinu (Pater Noster) into Biblical Hebrew.

Text © 2018-2019 by Donald C. Traxler.