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of Matthew's disciples. For in other words quoted by Eusebius he says If maybe there came any one who had been in the following of the elders I asked the elders' words—what Andrew or what Peter had said; or what Philip, or what Thomas, or James; or what John or Matthew or any other one of the Lord's disciples; and the things that Aristion and the Elder John, the disciples of the Lord, say (Eusebius, ib.).

Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. v. 10) also preserves a tradition that the missionary Pantaenus near the end of the 2nd cent. found among the Indians the Aramaic Gospel according to Matthew, which had been given to them by Bartholomew. But Origen (earlier half of 3rd cent.) is the first writer after Papias who is known to have said that Matthew wrote in Hebrew (i.e. Aramaic): his words are quoted by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. vi. 25).

But there was at least as early as 180 A.D., and probably much earlier, a Gospel commonly known as the Gospel according to the Hebrews,' written in Aramaic, attributed to Matthew, and bearing in great part a strong likeness to our Greek Gospel. As the few fragments left of it prove, the two were not one in substance, nor (as I think I have shown in another work*) can the Aramaic 'Gospel according to the Hebrews' have been the original of our Greek Gospel according to Matthew-though there are weighty reasons for looking on it as a product of the same hand. Nevertheless Irenaeus, who wrote only. 50 years after Papias, calls this Aramaic Gospel 'the Gospel according to Matthew,' without any qualification, and at a later period such men as Epiphanius, Jerome, and Theodoret, regard it as the original of our Greek Gospel. And the question arises whether it was not this Aramaic 'Gospel according to the Hebrews' which Papias had in his mind when he spoke of a Gospel written by Matthew in Aramaic-a question which can only be settled, if settled at all, by the finding of the lost writings of Papias.

Origen (quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. vi. 25) says that this Gospel was written for those who believed from Judaism.' It certainly seems to have been meant in the main for Jews.

*The Gospel according to the Hebrews-its fragments translated and annotated, with a critical analysis of the external and internal evidence relating to it,' 1879,

Messiah and his kingdom are its repeated themes; the descent of Jesus is traced from Abraham and David; the title 'son of David' is found more often than in all the other three Gospels; references to and citations from the Old Testament are much more plentiful than in any of the others; the Gospel is constantly insisting that Jewish prophecy has been fulfilled in details of the life of Jesus; and it gives few explanations of Jewish customs and names.

The general tone of the Gospel is Jewish. Among its characteristics may be specially noted the prominence it gives to Divine direction and interposition: it alone tells of the visit of the Magi, Peter's walking on the sea, the rising of the bodies of holy men at the crucifixion, and the earthquake at the sepulchre, and it gives no fewer than five inspired dreams.

ex

The style is Jewish: there is frequent parallelism of words and clauses, and heavenly Father,' 'Father in the heavens, 'kingdom of the heavens,' 'kingdom of God,' end of the age are often found-but it must be remembered that these would be natural features of the language of Jesus himself. The phrase 'kingdom of the heavens' is, however, found nowhere else in the N. T., though 33 times in this Gospel. Among peculiarities which we can safely put down to the Gospel may be named the constant use of then,' the fondness for behold," and the -personal reference to passages of prophecy as 'that which was spoken.'

NOTES ON THE TITLE.

=

Gospel] In the Greek Evangelion, good tidings.' The older form of the English word was godspell, and this is commonly taken as gódspell, from gód good and spell 'tidings.' As early as the reign of John we are told by Ormin that 'goddspell on Ennglissh nemmnedd iss god word and god tipende— goddspell in English named is "good word" and "good tiding." And, since in the earliest English translations of the Gospels (about 950 A.D.) the word is used throughout as a rendering of evangelium, this derivation seems beyond the breath of doubt.

Yet in what is now the standard dictionary of English etymology the Rev. W. W. Skeat gives god 'God' as the former part of the word, which he interprets as God-story,'

that is, history of Jesus. His grounds are (1) 'that when the A. S. word was introduced into Iceland it took the form gospjall God-story, and not gód-spjall=good story; (2) that the O.[ld] H.[igh] G.[erman] word was

=

likewise

gotspel (=God-story), and not guot spel;' (3) that 'in compound substantives the former element is much more often a sb. [substantive] than an adjective.' But (1) it is as likely as not that godspell became godspell before the word reached Iceland; (2) our Winfrid (Boniface) was the great apostle of Germany, and no Old High German writing earlier than his date is known-why may not the German word be, like the Icelandic, an importation of the English word in its corrupted form? (3) it was natural to render the single Greek word by a single English word of like composition.

The word Evangelion, Gospel,' seems for a long time to have been used only of the general history of Jesus and not of any separate works treating of that history. The first clear case of the latter use is in Justin (about 140-50 A.D.), who speaking of the memoirs of the Apostles' adds which are called Gospels' (Apol. i. 66); but memoirs' was his own term, as oracles' seems to have been that of his contemporary Papias, so that' Gospels' was probably a new-fashioned title at that date.

6

according to Matthew] The Gospel according to Matthew' (not 'Matthew's Gospel') means 'the good tidings, as told by Matthew.' All the older authorities omit the article, but this is either because the word had taken the status of a proper name and did not need it, or from a habit of shortening headings: SV have only 'According to Matthew,' a still further shortening.

On the spelling of Matthew's name see note on ix. 9.

THE

GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW.

CHAPTER I.

THE

2

HE book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of
David, the son of Abraham.

1-17

L. iii. 23-38.

2 Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob Gen. xxi. 3, begat Judas and his brethren;

I. 1. The book of the generation] Render Roll of descent '-the heading of the pedigree which now follows.

Jesus] Iesous, the Greek form of Jeshua (sounded Yeshua), a shortening of Jehoshua, 'help [salvation] of Jehovah,' or 'Jehovah the helper [saviour]' or 'Jehovah [is my] help [salvation] '—sometimes further shortened to Jeshu (Keim, Jesus of Nazara, Eng. trans. ii. 97, from whom most of the following is taken).

Joshua is only another shortening of the name, and Joshua the son of Nun is called Jeshua in Neh. viii. 17, and Jesus in Acts vii. 45, Heb. iv. 8, while in the Septuagint he is always Jesus.

The name of which these are different forms is found before the Captivity in 1 Sam. vi. 14, 1 Chron. xxiv. 11 (name of one of the 24 courses of priests), and in Luke iii. 29 (according to the right reading) as the name of one of Jesus's own forefathers: Josephus also speaks of a son of Saul so named.

After the Captivity and before our era it is borne by the high priest mentioned in Ezra ii. 2 and elsewhere, by the writer of Ecclesiasticus (Ecclus. 1. 27), and, according to the prologue of that book, by his grandfather: Josephus speaks of two others of the name in this period.

After our era we find it borne in the N. T. by Jesus Justus (Col. iv. 11), and Elymas is called 'the son of Jesus [or Jesu]', Bar-Jesus [or u], while I have shown in an appendix on xxvii. 16

XXV. 26, & xxix. 35

101

ail

what strong ground there is for thinking that Bar-Abbas was named Jesus. Josephus speaks of at least 8 others between our era and the fall of Jerusalem.

The Jews of Palestine sometimes changed their names (as the Jews of England so often do) into a Gentile shape and sound, and Josephus tells us that Jesus who was high priest under Antiochus Epiphanes changed his name to Jason. We hear from him of another Jewish Jason and in Acts xvii. 5, Rom, xvi. 21, we meet with a kinsman of Paul so called.

The name was maybe a little less in use than Simon, Joseph, or Eleazar, but Farrar seems to speak hardly too strongly in saying that. 'at this time it was a name extraordinarily common among the Jews."

Christ] Christos, 'anointed,' a Greek word meaning the same as the Hebrew Mashiah, Aramaic Meshicha, Messiah.

The term mashiah is given in the O. T. to priests and kings, these being consecrated by anointment. For priests see for instance Num. iii. 3: 'the priests which were anointed, whom he consecrated to minister in the priest's office.' Even the vessels of the tabernacle were anointed-see Ex. xxx. 26 &c. Among kings we find Saul, David, Solomon, Joash, and Jehu thus hallowed: each of these needed some such rite to strengthen his title to the crown, but it may have been performed in other cases and mention of it may have been left out as needless. In Is xlv. 1 the LORD speaks 'to his anointed, to Cyrus,' but whether the term is there symbolical, or whether anointing was also a Persian (as it was an Egyptian) rite, or whether Cyrus let some Jewish prophet anoint him, is doubtful. In 1 Kings xix. 16 Elijah also anoints the prophet Elisha as his successor, the same verb being used.

In the prophecy of Dan. ix. 25 'an anointed one, a prince,' is spoken of, where the A. V. renders 'the Messiah, the Prince. Probably almost every one who is read in the literature of this famous. passage will allow that no interpretation of it is free from serious difficulty (the reader may see the Speaker's Commentary and Prof. Drummond's Jewish Messiah), and nowhere else in the O. T. is a Messiah foretold under the name mashiah.

But in Isaiah, Zechariah, Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah the coming of an heaven-sent king is very clearly foretold, and when such a king was at length generally looked for by the Jews he was known as the Mashiah, or in the Greek writings of Jews as Christos, which word had already been used in the Septuagint as the rendering of mashiah. In the N. T. Mashiah (in the Graecized form Messias or, as some authorities read, Mesias) is found only in John i. 41, iv. 25.

The beliefs of the Jews about the Messiah will be found in Prof.