First of all, in my transcribing of the Hebrew text in preparation for pointing the Hebrew of this chapter of Matthew, I've reached the top of this page (or rather, the facing one). Transcribing isn't too difficult, but life gets in the way, and I have many interests. The actual pointing of the text is much more laborious. I am doing it to help myself and others to deal with an unpointed text in Biblical Hebrew. I am not a real Hebraist, as is Professor Howard, so my method is to refer to a Hebrew dictionary, to the two nineteenth-century translations of Matthew into Biblical Hebrew that are available to me (that of Delitzsch and that of Salkinson), and to a grammar of Biblical Hebrew (to look up verb forms). For me it's a daunting task, but I'm finding it to be a very educational one.
Looking at p. 19, I see that I've underlined three introductory phrases of the type "At that time Jesus said to his disciples." They occur at Mt. 5:20, 5:25, and 5:27. Professor Howard dealt with the extraordinary evidence of Matthew's compositional process presented by such introductory statements, on pp. 200-201. They have all been edited out of canonical, Greek Matthew (my Matthew III). Still, I need to be aware of them, in case any of them should appear in a textual tradition other than Hebrew Matthew. So far, none has, and this is a testament to the primitive nature of the Hebrew textual tradition in Matthew.
Also on p. 19, I see a penciled note at 5:27, underlining the phrase "to those of long ago," with the notation "Syr-c." It's a notation I made years ago, and I don't know where I got the information from. Both the Curetonian Syriac and the Sinaitic Syriac were discovered in the nineteenth century, and would have been unavailable to Shem-Tob in the fourteenth. Before I get too excited about this, though, I have to check to see whether this phrase appears in any textual tradition other than the Old Syriac. As it turns out, it does. Referring to my old and worn copy of the Nestlé-Aland NOVUM TESTAMENTUM GRAECE (which is NA25, by the way), I see in the apparatus to the verse that the phrase in question also appears in the Old Latin, many Greek witnesses, Irenaeus, and the Vulgate. This last is especially significant, because Shem-Tob would certainly have had access to the Vulgate, a fact that critics will be quick to pounce upon. Checking my edition of the Vulgate, I see that the word "antiquis" is indeed there. Incidentally, the same word would be used in Latin for "to the ancients" or "by the ancients," and this is why the KJV, whose translators were heavily influenced by the Vulgate, has "by them of old time." But such ambiguity does not exist in Hebrew, so we now know that the correct preposition is "to," not "by."
Sometimes the variants for a single verse will make your head spin. This is the case with Mt. 5:30, where D (the Greek part of Codex Bezae) and a few others, along with Syr-s (Sinaitic Syriac. a palimpsest ms of the fourth century, which is one of only two Old Syriac mss that have survived to our time, as well as the oldest and best) omit the whole verse. Some of the Greek mss say "right hand" instead of just "hand" as in the Hebrew. The word "right" may have been inserted into some families of Greek texts by analogy with "right" in verse 29. Its absence in the Hebrew suggests that it was not originally there, and no other textual tradition tells us this. One of the best takeaways from this is that Hebrew Matthew is not a translation of any known text or text type, but belongs to a unique text type. The suggestion by some of Professor Howard's critics that Shem-Tob may have simply "translated the Vulgate" shows that they were ignorant of his actual findings, which they had not bothered to read. Their closed minds did not deem it to be necessary.
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Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
