I am able to teach thee what is said by thyself. But these are all blind, who say and hear, like sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal in which there is no consciousness of things which are understood by their sound.[1] And Jesus added, and said to Zaccheus, Every letter from Aleph to Tau[2] is known by its order; thou, therefore, first say what is Tau, and I will tell thee what Aleph is. And Jesus said again to them, They who know not Aleph, how can they say Tau, ye hypocrites? First say what Aleph is, and I shall then believe you when you say Beth. And Jesus began to ask the names of the separate letters, and said, Let the teacher of the law say what the first letter is, or why it hath many triangles, scalene,[3] acute-angled, equiangular, unequal-sided, with unequal angles, rectangular, rectilinear, and curvilinear.
Now when Levi heard this, he was amazed at such an arrangement of the names of the letters. Then
- ↑ Cf. 1 Cor. xiii. 1: xiv. 7.
- ↑ Instead of Tau, the Latin text reads Thet in each case: it is possible that the writer meant to give the name of Teth, but since the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet is required by the context, Tau has been employed in the translation.
- ↑ The words in the original are gradatos, subacutos, mediaton, obductos, productos, erectos, stratos, curvistratos. We are by no means confident that the terms we have given are the equivalents of these, or all correct; indeed it seems impossible to make sense of the passage as it stands. It is very well known that Christians as well as Jews have speculated, or rather, let their fancies run wild on the subject of the mystic properties of letters, as indicated by their names, forms, powers, positions in certain words, etc. The author of Pseudo-Matthew evidently wished to supply high authority for such laborious trifling.
