Jewish-Christian Gospels - History of Scholarship in The Jewish-Christian Gospel Problem

History of Scholarship in The Jewish-Christian Gospel Problem

The early church fathers who are our sources for the Jewish-Christian gospels - Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Didymus the Blind, Epiphanius and Jerome - range from the late 2nd to the early 5th centuries. They frequently confuse one gospel with another, and all with a supposed Hebrew version of the gospel of Matthew. Nor were they all aware that there were different Jewish Christian communities with varying theologies, or that some of them (or at least one) was Aramaic-speaking and others knew only Greek.

This confusion has created uncertainty for modern scholars. There is agreement that the fragments cannot be traced back to a Hebrew/Aramaic version or revision of Matthew's gospel, as most of them have no parallel in the canonical gospels. There are good reasons for thinking that there must have been at least two Jewish-Christian gospels, since there are two differing accounts of the baptism and good evidence that some fragments were originally in Aramaic and others in Greek. Most modern scholars have concluded that there was one Jewish-Christian gospel in Aramaic/Hebrew and at least two in Greek. Most have argued that the total number was three (Bauer, Vielhauer and Strecker, Klijn), a minority that there were only two (Schlarb and Luhrmann).