Countless careers have been built on the foundation of the fallacious notion, encouraged and abetted by the institutional Church, that the oldest, and indeed original, text of the Gospels is the Greek. Many of those who dared to dispute this erroneous hypothesis have had their own careers wrecked because of it.
About ten years ago I read an amazing and eye-opening book: THE SYRO-LATIN TEXT OF THE GOSPELS, by Frederick Henry Chase (published in 1895). Up to that time I had never heard of the book (or the author), but I immediately recognized its importance. Many, unfortunately, still haven't.
In his book, Chase showed that the text type that Westcott and Hort had referred to as "Western," and which he more appropriately called "Syro-Latin," was older than even the best Greek text. In other words, the textual type represented by the oldest surviving Old Syriac (Syr-s, the Sinaitic Syriac) and the oldest surviving Old Latin (
k, known as Bobiensis or Bobbiensis) is older than the best Greek textual type, represented by
א (Codex Sinaiticus) and B (Codex Vaticanus). Chase further hypothesized that the Syro-Latin text type likely originated in Antioch.
The owners of the aforementioned careers were not, and are not, pleased. An exception, as pointed out by William L. Petersen in his
Collected Essays, was B. F. Westcott, who (in the 1896 2nd Ed. of his and Hort's classic book) had the honesty to admit, in spite of a lifetime spent supporting the dominant, "Greek" hypothesis, that Chase was likely right.
There has been a conspiracy of silence, and it did not begin recently, or even in modern times.
In 382 CE, Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome to produce a revision of the Old Latin version of the Gospels, then in use. This Jerome did, and he eventually extended the work to include the entire Bible. This had the effect of bringing the accepted Latin text into closer agreement with the Greek text. There was a parallel development in the Syriac-speaking countries, with the Old Syriac being replaced by the Peshitta, sometimes referred to as the Vulgate of the East. These newer translations, supporting the Greek texts more closely, eventually became official, and the old versions, especially of the Syriac, were suppressed (to the extent that only two mss of the Old Syriac, both discovered in the nineteenth century have survived to our own time).
For some reason (or perhaps for many reasons), the institutional Church wanted to hang its hat on the Greek textual tradition, claiming it to be the original. But the truth, as we have shown in this series and elsewhere in this blog, is that, at least for the Gospel of Matthew, there was an earlier version, and it was written in Hebrew. Our canonical, Greek Matthew, was translated from an earlier Hebrew Matthew. That Hebrew Matthew survives, at least partly and with medieval emendations apparently intended to bring it more into line with the Greek, to our own time.
When George Howard published his 1987 book, The Gospel of Matthew according to a Primitive Hebrew Text, it was met with fury from the academic establishment, although Howard was a member in good standing of that establishment. That fury apparently induced him to walk back some of his assertions in his second edition (1995), which he simply titled Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. I have had Howard's second edition for years, and now also have his first. Professor Howard obviously continued his analysis between 1987 and 1995, but even in the 1995 edition, his analysis is only summarized. A great amount of work remains to be done.
In working with the Shem-Tob Hebrew Matthew, I have to do my own analysis. My conclusions will not necessarily be the same as those of Howard, and they are already not the same. But neither are they in opposition to his, and they agree much more than they disagree. Only time will tell, and the job is far too big for any one person.
