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of teaching, they asked Matthew to write them a history of all the words and deeds of Christ, that wheresoever they might be, they might have with them a statement of all that they believed. S. Jerome declares that he had seen S. Matthew’s Gospel, written in Hebrew, in the Library of Pamphilus the Martyr, at Cæsarea, and from it had transcribed his own copy. This Hebrew text is now, however, lost. For what Sebastian Munster, an unfrocked renegade, has offered to us, as though he had received it from the Jews, is suspected to have been written, or else falsified, by heretics or Jewish traitors, and has besides an offensive odour of spuriousness.
S. Matthew wrote a Gospel in Hebrew, at the bidding of the Apostles, says S. Epiphanius (Hæres. 51), in the same year that they took counsel about separating, that they might go to the Gentiles. This was in the year 37 after the birth of Christ, the fourth from the Passion. So that the opinion of Baronius is not so probable that Matthew wrote in A.D. 41. Still less probable is what S. Irenæus says (lib. 3, c. I), that he wrote whilst SS. Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome. For S. Peter did not come to Rome before the second year of the Emperor Claudius, and S. Paul not before the third year of Nero. Whence it would follow that S. Matthew did not write until the eighteenth or twentieth year after Christ’s ascension, which is evidently untrue.
Certainly S. Matthew’s Hebrew Gospel was immediately translated into Greek. This was done either by S. Matthew himself, S. John, or S. James, or by some such person. S. Athanasius, in his Synopsis of Holy Scripture, says, “Matthew’s Gospel was written by Matthew in the Hebrew dialect, published at Jerusalem, and a translation made by James, the Lord’s brother.” But Theophylact, in his Preface says, “John, it is reported, translated
