What does Jerome mean by saying he translated a Gospel from Hebrew?

What does Jerome mean by saying he translated a Gospel from Hebrew? First, we can dismiss the assertion of many N.T. scholars that when he said Hebrew he meant Aramaic. This assertion seems to depend on the assumption that he did not distinguish Hebrew from Aramaic. Such an assumption is unworkable, and says more about those that thought it up than it does about Jerome. Your implicit suggestion that by Hebrew he meant something in Hebrew script but not Hebrew language is in my opinion a very reasonable attempt at revising this line of argument so that it might work, but still seems to me not to be compatible with Jerome’s method of explaining himself. Besides, there is enough evidence from other sources that the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Nazarenes were both in Hebrew, though there could have been an Aramaic translation as well.

The Q theory has a lot in its favour but founders (in my judgment) on the need to assume an improbable method of composition. I can defend this statement rigorously but this is not the place. What matters here is that whether or not the Q theory works, it is not a datum that can be used to prove something else.

As to the question of the Primacy of one Gospel over another. First, it has long been argued, on several different and independent lines, that our Mark is an abridgment. One explanation for how and when Mark was abridged would be that this was done very late, when our set of four were published and promulgated as a set. Our Mark is only adequate because some necessary pericopes can be read in Matthew. Our Matthew is often vague where Mark has essential detail. The heading of our Mark is probably the heading of the original Gospel. What else would the book have been called except The Gospel of Jesus the Son of God? Anyway, Matthew and John have no title, and Luke, even though a special case, seems to need one. When we discuss the relative primacy of Matthew and Mark, do we mean a book of Mark and a book of Matthew each standing on its own as the Gospel book of one sect or movement or grouping? The question then becomes whether asking whether our Matthew came before our Mark is the right question. You will have seen the compelling arguments for the primacy of Mark over Matthew. Well, Enoch Powell has published a compelling set of arguments for the primacy of Matthew. (Yes, that Enoch Powell, the youngest ever full Professor at Sydney University before going into politics). It seems to me and to others better fitted to judge that the solution to the contradiction is that neither our Mark nor our Matthew ever stood separately.

This line of thinking would explain the surprising fact that speakers of Syriac used the Diatessaron for so long for all purposes, even scholarly commentary. I don’t mean to say the Diatessaron is the original, only that it was known to be close to the original.

This is not to deny that there were Gospel books from the beginning, but it could be argued that they were not as far apart as our four are from each other. The Gospel of the Hebrews is a good candidate for a representative type of text. I would suggest that if Matthew had such prominence in the Middle Ages it was because Jerome made it clear that it resembled the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Nazarenes, and that these were old and reliable.

Most of what is in the encyclopaedias and handbooks on this question ignores (a) the evidence for early Gospels in Hebrew; (b) the lateness of promulgation of our Greek text. I am not trying to diminish the importance of the Greek. I only mean that the Greek that we have in our hands NOW was apparently not known to Justin or Clement, and was promulgated in about 172 A.D., and does not seem to have been used by anyone before Irenaeus. Aside from this, the Gospels read like translations from Hebrew. They certainly gain in sharpness in translation into Syriac. I know this could be called a subjective argument.

I can claim to know the current state of knowledge on these questions. Whether what has been typed here helps or just causes confusion I don’t know. I hope it is useful. For your purposes, what matters is that our Matthew is close to a Gospel that once stood on its own, and people seem to have known that in the Middle Ages. But they also seem to have known that the Diatessaron and P were close to an old text, before they forgot where they came from.