Wednesday

We wake up to Uvalde this morning: it's obscene to think or speak of anything else. But the emotional weight of it, the grief, is physically unbearable. Children again. What are we?

It is enraging. Mea culpa, our fault, our own grievous fault and we do nothing: your God may be different; my God spits contemptuously on our prayers.

Broken and mendable but unmended, life continues for some of us, Earth turns, the Universe expands. Torn and breaking, my mind has to go somewhere, anywhere else for a moment, or I keep going down.

So this. I have a new curiosity. At least, it's new to me, and I've filled two days exploring it. It's what I was concentrating on when the news broke yesterday afternoon. As with "Secret Mark" or "Infancy Thomas", most of us Bible enthusiasts, non-academic but serious, never heard of it. It may even be a sort of wing-nut fringe sensationalism: the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. Suggestions by popular scholars that Matthew wrote his original message for his Jewish Christian audience not in Greek, but in Hebrew.

I don't think so. Over the years I've heard this suggested from Time to Time, but always from folks even more innocently ignorant than I realize myself to be. But literary, text-critical factors, and the source theory tying Matthew to Mark and Q, with Matthew elaborating on Mark, and Matthew lifting identical Greek passages from Mark, and, from Q, between Matthew and Luke, make it seem impossible that Matthew first wrote his gospel in Hebrew. It's not a reasonable possibility. Mark did not copy Matthew and shorten it, it doesn't work that way.

But could Matthew have translated his own Greek gospel into Hebrew for his Jewish Christian audience, such that Hebrew Matthew is as legitimate as Greek Matthew? Because, some are saying as I watch and listen, the first language of those Jews to whom Matthew wrote was not Aramaic or koine Greek, but Hebrew? I'm hearing that asserted. I think it's nonsense, but I'm all eyes and ears, listening and reading.

My parting Sunday School class session is this coming Sunday morning, and I don't have a lesson plan for the folks. They are so intelligent and inquisitive, and we've talked about so many eccentric things over the years, maybe we'll have a look at Hebrew Matthew?

IDK, I'll think on it.

art: Saint Matthew writing his gospel at the dictation of an angel. Manuscript illumination, c. 816-835 AD, from the Ebbo Gospels