Pointing the text of Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew - Chapter 5

Last night I was preparing to again take up the task of adding the vowel points to Chapter 5 of Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew. First I had to find the blog post where I left off (11/18/2019). I was reminded by that post that there was a verse missing near the end. I had mislabeled it, but the verse missing is 47. This is very interesting, but I had forgotten just how interesting. There are only two other manuscripts of Matthew that omit this verse, and they are among the most ancient. Neither of them would have been available to Shem-Tob ibn Shaprut in fourteenth-century Spain. Both of them belong to the "Western" (Syro-Latin) text type, which is older than the Alexandrian Greek text-type of our "best" manuscripts. This, I think, is extremely significant.

The two manuscripts that Hebrew Matthew agrees with in omitting verse 47 are "k" (Codex Bobiensis) and Sinaiticus Syriacus (Syr-s). These are, respectively, the oldest Old Latin, and the oldest Old Syriac that we have. Bobiensis is a manuscript of the fourth or fifth century, similar to the type of text that Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, used in his writings in the third century. Further, it has been determined on paleographic grounds to be a copy of a second-century papyrus.

Syr-s, the Sinaitic Palimpsest, is a late fourth-century text that was over-written in the the seventh century with a biographical text of no great importance. It was discovered in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, in the late nineteenth century. It took all the technology of the late nineteenth century to transcribe and photograph the text. It is one of only two manuscripts of the Old Syriac text type to have survived, and it is the older of the two by about a century. It, too, would have been unavailable to Shem-Tob ibn Shaprut in the fourteenth century.

It is no coincidence that Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew agrees in this instance with the oldest Old Latin and the oldest Old Syriac. It is based on a Hebrew text that is of a type that is older still. All manuscripts of these very ancient text types were suppressed in favor of the Vulgate for Latin and the Peshitta for Syriac, ca. 400 CE, an effort to bring all scriptural texts into harmony with the Greek texts. This was a watershed event, and it served to obscure the Semitic roots of Christianity. It is a miracle that even one copy of Hebrew Matthew survived.

Text © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.