PREFACE.

THIS volume is meant to give the student of the Gospel according to Matthew an amount of illustration which he has hitherto been unable to gather except from many sources, and is meant at the same time, by the strictest avoidance of all expression or

implication of any theological opinion, to make his illustration it deserving of Agreeably to students of the most fidely diverse views. acceptance of

It will probably be thought by most that, while the latter aim is immeasurably the harder to achieve, such achievement, if attained, must be self-evident. And indeed I have no fear that any reader can suspect me either of covertly favouring or covertly opposing the doctrines of any church or sect. Churches and sects, however, are only fragments of two great religious parties-a Right which believes the accuracy of the New Testament narratives on all important points to be certain, and a Left which considers their accuracy on some important points to be uncertain-a large body of each party of course holding views much less qualified than these. And there are certain features in this commentary which, unless explained, might be interpreted by one party or the other as a violation of the writer's profession of neutrality.

It would, for instance, seem to most readers that some of my notes on the Flight into Egypt (ii. 13, 22) were written with the set design of showing the consistency of the details of the narrative with probability. The note (p. 35) on 'He shall be called a Nazarene '-that so the N. T. tells us that Jesus was called... in Galilee and Judea, in his life and after his death, by disciples and strangers, Jews and Romans, daemons and angels' with the accompanying references, might be con

carry of

(Carry

sidered the expression of a belief in the minutest verbal ext ness of the New Testament. And it might be thought that was assuming the part of an apologist in explaining a seeming discrepancy between xii. 40 and the narratives of the Resurrection. I can truly say that these notes, and any others of the kind which there may be, were written with no such objects,. but only because they were important illustrations of the pas (sages before me, illustrations whose omission would have been. practically an assumption hostile to the credit of the narrative.

Again, this commentary abounds in close parallels to the sayings of Jesus drawn from the Talmud and Midrashim, and I might be suspected of intending to imply that his teaching was. borrowed from Jewish Rabbis.

Now I have pointed out that a correct translation of the Greek in xiii. 24, xviii. 23, and xxii. 2, does imply that the three parables there introduced were quoted by Jesus and not composed by him. In vii. 1, 12, xxvi. 52 we find sayings of his more or less paralleled (though only the second closely) by sayings of the famous Hillel, who died during the boyhood of Jesus. And I am even prepared to admit that, since so much of the teaching of the Rabbis consisted in perpetuating the sayings of their predecessors, any other parallel saying attri buted to a Rabbi who did not live till after the death of Jesus ight/passi / my ponceivably have been first uttered by some other Rabbi

utter/

who lived before him or at the same time with him. I know of no conceptions of Jesus to which such admissions should seem in the very least degree irreverent-no conceptions which should insist that every precept of his was by him for the first time neuleated—no conceptions which should insist that, if any such precept had previously been inculcated by any Rabbi, he inculcation of it must studiously have avoided the

Aelivery/ in his own

words of that Rabbi.

But, on the other hand, it would be impossible to explain away, if I wished to do so, the fact that none but the merest possible fraction of such parallel sayings are attributed in the Talmud and Midrashim to Rabbis who taught before the death

of Jesus.

And to show this I have been careful in each case to state the period at which the Rabbi in question lived. I do not indeed hesitate to avow my belief that the sayings of Jesus must have been largely perpetuated in Jewish tradition, although the authorship of those sayings might for various reasons be concealed by the Rabbis who adopted them, or ignored by their successors. Not only does it seem to me on priori grounds almost certain that this must have been so, but I claim to have shown in my notes in vi. 30 and xv. 6 exceedingly strong ground for believing that one of the most distinguished Rabbis, Eliezer the Great, was distinctly influenced by the teaching of Jesus.

There is yet one question on which I desire to explain myself, the more especially as some words of mine on the subject in my work on the lost Gospel according to the Hebrews were misunderstood by a writer in one of the leading Reviews, and held up for evidence that I maintained a position which 'every critic' had agreed to be untenable. Let me say, then, that, in attributing certain characteristics from time to time to Matthew' or 'the evangelist,' I mean by those terms either this Gospel in its entirety or the writer of the particular passage under notice: which of these two the context will

always show. I see no reason to disbelieve the very early evi (Carry up dence that Matthew did write a work relating to Jesus, or to disbelieve that part or all of that work is contained in this Gospel, attributed to Matthew from the latter half of the 2nd cent. downwards: whether or not there is good ground to suppose that other early hands had supplemented the original work of Matthew by adding the synoptic tradition' or other matter, is a question on which I have implied no opinion in the past and imply none now.

I call this a new commentary because it seems to me to differ from all general commentaries known to me in one or more of three points—(1) its principle, above explained, of absolute theological neutrality; (2) its scope; (3) the method of its compilation.

The particular features included in its scope are the prominence given to illustration from Jewish sources, and the endeavour to set before the reader the most important corrections of the text adopted by modern editors with a summary of the chief evidence for and against them.

As regards the illustrations from Jewish sources, they will speak for their own importance. It would have been easy to multiply them almost indefinitely by inserting all the vaguer parallels and more recondite information which my authorities offered me but I have excluded all that did not seem really relevant to the purpose of this commentary.

In stating the chief corrections of the text adopted by modern editors, and the grounds for them, I have aimed not only to satisfy the intelligent general reader, but to save the theological student from having to keep referring to some critical edition of the Greek text. At the same time I have tried to give in the preliminary section entitled 'The Chief Authorities for the Text a clear outline of the first elements of textual criticism. In any future edition I may find it well merely to state the various readings in the footnotes, and to throw the collation of authorities into an appendix.

As for my method of compilation, I have gone very little indeed to commentaries, and have read through none on this Gospel except Alford's, upon the Greek text, and the Speaker's. It is nine years since last I read through Alford, and though I certainly owe something to him, it is probably not now very much: my debt to the Speaker's Commentary is limited to thirteen notes or additions to notes, each of which I separately acknowledge, in the last five chapters. I do not suppose that I have lost nothing by this neglect of commentaries: I may have lost much. But, with no leisure to read everything, I felt it wiser to spend the time which would have been occupied by reading more commentaries in reading the books to which commentators have gone, or should go, for materials. Thus, as a single instance, apart from the ordinary consultation of Smith's Dictionary of the Bible and Kitto's' Cyclopædia of