On a Facebook page dedicated to the Synoptic Problem, I promoted my recent article on the Gospel of the Ebionites and I was reminded about another frequent commenter David Inglis’s post on the same subject. I wanted to interact further with his post, but I do not want to go into too much detail in a blog post. Instead, for those who do not have institutional access to the journal Catholic Biblical Quarterly, I have put up a much earlier pre-publication draft of my article before it was formatted and given page numbers for the journal on my academia.edu page. You will find more detailed source-critical analysis of the passages about John the Baptizer and Jesus’s baptism in my article.

Inglis’s post begins by looking at select Patristic statements about the original Hebrew version of Matthew’s logia (“oracles”) or Gospel and about the text(s) entitled as the Gospel According to the Hebrews as well as a sample of quotations from a handful of scholarly commentators. Some of the academic sources cited are dated (e.g., Inglis notes Montague Rhodes James’ misattribution of the Oxyrhynchus sayings to the Gospel According to the Hebrews which was disproved later after the discovery of the Gospel According to Thomas in the Nag Hammadi Library). The quotes from Epiphanius and Jerome clearly show that these fourth-century writers assumed that there was a single Gospel According to the Hebrews that was the original version of Matthew’s Gospel. Epiphanius drew a distinction between the Nazoraeans’ version of Matthew’s Gospel that they read in Hebrew from the Ebionites’ corrupted text of Matthews’ Gospel, while Jerome translated some extracts from the Gospel that that Nazoraeans read and thought that this was the same Gospel According to the Hebrews that was in the library at Caesarea.

The majority position among modern scholars that the Patristic writers were referencing three Gospels: the Gospel According to the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Nazoraeans (note that there is some debate about whether certain fragments have been rightly assigned to one of these three Gospels among contemporary “Three Gospel” theorists). The minority position that I hold, in both my publications and on my blog (e.g., here), is that there were only two non-canonical Jewish Gospels, one of which was quoted by Clement, Origen, Didymus, and Jerome, and the other that was quoted by Epiphanius, and that originally these Gospels had nothing to do with the mistaken tradition that there was an original Hebrew or Aramaic edition of the canonical Gospel of Matthew. Jerome may have also had excerpts from the Nazoraeans’ translation of Matthew’s Gospel. I still think that there are good reasons to distinguish the Gospel According to the Hebrews from the Gospel of the Ebionites (see my bibliography on the latter text):

• No other Patristic writers ascribe Epiphanius’s citations to the Gospel According to the Hebrews;
• The two texts have very different narratives about Jesus’s baptism;
• The Gospel of the Ebionites revises the Greek wording or conflates Greek passages from the Synoptic Gospels to a much greater extent than the Gospel According to the Hebrews.
• The Gospel According to the Hebrews was first quoted by Christian scholars in Alexandria, while the Gospel of the Ebionites has some affinities with Pseudo-Clementine sources that circulated in the Transjordan.
• In addition to misidentifying the Gospel that he had found in Cyprus with the Gospel of the Ebionites, Epiphanius wrongly infers that there was a single group of Ebionites who were also responsible for the Pseudo-Clementine literature and the Book of Elchasai in the thirtieth chapter of his Panarion.

Inglis compares Epiphanius’s citations from the Gospel of the Ebionites in his work Panarion (“Medicine Chest”) to the Synoptic Gospels. Here is a summary of some of Inglis’s suggestions:

• Pan. 30.13.6: he suggests that Luke depended on Mark and Matthew for the reference to Isaiah and the Gospel of the Ebionites for the reference to John the Baptizer’s parents.
• 30.13.4, 7-8: he notes the parallels with Mark 1:9-11, Matthew 3:13-17, and Luke 3:21-22, as well as the distinctive point about John’s diet, and suggests that its reading egkris (“cake”) was potentially original and misread as akrides (“locusts”, though note Mark has the accusative plural akridas and Matthew the nominative plural akrides). Since the Gospel of the Ebionites places the conversation between Jesus and John after they heard the voice from heaven, which makes more sense than Matthew 3:14-15 as it explains how John knew Jesus, Matthew could have mistakenly rearranged the order. He rejects the view that the Gospel of the Ebionites conflated the forms of the heavenly voice’s saying in Mark 1:11 and Luke 3:22 on the one hand and Matthew 3:14 on the other, arguing instead that it actually quotes a very early form of the saying which expands on the citation from Psalm 2:7 that is also attested in the Western reading of Luke 3:22. He follows some text critics in arguing that this variant was the original reading as it expresses a low Christology.
• 30.13.2-3: he infers that the Gospel of the Ebionite’s account of the calling of the twelve apostles in Peter’s house could have serves as the basis for the other Synoptic accounts since it is unlikely that it would have omitted the literary contexts in which these accounts placed their call narratives.
• 30.14.5: after comparing the passages about Jesus’s true family in the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Gospel of Marcion, and the Gospel According to Thomas, he proposes that the Synoptics expanded it with a verse setting the scene (i.e. Mark 3:31; Matthew 12:46; Luke 8:19).
• 30.16.5: he tentatively suggests that Mathew 9:13 could have depended on Jesus’s pronouncement that he came to abolish sacrifices in the Gospel of the Ebionites.
• 30.22.3-5: he makes the case that Luke 22:15-16 was added to the Gospel due to the lack of Synoptic parallels and the lack of attestation for verse 16 in Marcion’s Gospel according to Tertullian and Epiphanius. Further, noting that Luke 22:15 features a Semitism, he argues that the writer of 22:15-16 either drew on a common source shared with the Gospel of the Ebionites or on that Gospel itself. He adds that the Gospel of the Ebionites lack Jesus’s instructions to his disciples in all three Synoptics (though with less detail in Matthew) about finding a man who will lead them into the house where they would prepare the Passover.

Inglis has made some striking observations in his post and I realize that I have not factored in the recent debate about the relationship between Marcion’s Gospel and canonical Luke into my source critical analysis, so I would like to give the latter point more attention than I have time at the moment. However, my main objection would be his supposition that the Gospel of the Ebionites was intended to be a harmony of the Synoptic Gospels. Thus, he questions why it does not always replicate the Synoptics’ wording or omits the quotation from Isaiah at the beginning of the Gospel or particular details in the baptism narratives or the settings of the call of the twelve apostles. If the Gospel of the Ebionites was rather intended to replace the Synoptic Gospels, its author could have just borrowed and combined whatever details from the earlier Synoptic sources that served this author’s interests, and offered an improved narrative in other ways. Of course, we only have the small handful of extracts that Epiphanius has supplied to determine the literary relationship between the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Synoptic Gospels, but the points below offer either specific responses to his arguments or evidence for the dependence of the Gospel of the Ebionites on one or more of the Synoptic Gospels:

• 30.13.6: The line “it happened in the days of Herod king of Judea” agrees verbatim with Luke 1:5, but it is used in the Gospel of the Ebionites to introduce John’s baptizing ministry and dated at the same time as Caiaphas’s priesthood, even though Herod Antipas was the tetrarch of Galilee when Caiaphas was the high priest and John was baptizing people. The best explanation is that the author skipped from Luke 1:5 to 3:2-3 in order to deliberately excise the infancy narrative, but accidently kept the wrong title for the Herod in question.
• 30.13.4: The words egkris and akrides are not that close to be an accidental error, but this could be a deliberate wordplay. The question is why Mark would replace egkris, which alludes to the manna that the Israelites ate in the wilderness (see Exodus 16:31; Numbers 11:8 LXX), with akridas. Then, Matthew would have chosen to follow Mark’s Gospel rather than the Gospel of the Ebionites and also ignored the allusion to the manna in the latter text. The reverse is much easier to explain if the author of the Gospel of the Ebionites wanted to promote vegetarianism, was disgusted by the fact that John ate locusts, or wanted to add an allusion to the manna.
• 30.13.7-8: The Gospel of the Ebionites not only agrees with what the heavenly voice spoke in the three Synoptic Gospels, it reproduces Matthew’s redactional change to Mark in altering “you are” to “this is,” making the heavenly utterance a public proclamation. Further, it improves on Matthew’s narrative precisely in offering the missing explanation as to why John knew who Jesus was and wanted to be baptized by him (i.e. he saw the light and heard the voice). Finally, regardless of whether the textual variant in Luke 3:22 is original or not (note that Codex Bezae also expands the quotation of Psalm 2:7 in Acts 13:33), the author of the Gospel of the Ebionites could have been familiar with this reading from a manuscript copy of Luke’s Gospel and reused it because it supported the author’s lower Christology.
• 30.12.2-3: In the calling of the twelve apostles, the Gospel of the Ebionites identifies Matthew as a tax collector, which seems to be influenced by the redactional replacement of Levi in Mark 2:14 with Matthew in Matthew 9:9. It simply chose to locate Jesus in Peter’s house in Capernaum (cf. Mark 1:29) when he reminded his disciples of when he called them. There might be other echoes of Luke 3:23 in the note about Jesus’s age and Matthew 19:28 in Jesus’s words to the twelve, but that would only be persuasive if the other arguments for the dependence of the Gospel of the Ebionites on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke is judged persuasive.
• 30.14.5: This passage is closest to Matthew 12:47-50 and I would just be cautious about inferences about how a pericope may either be shortened or expanded over time since E. P. Sanders long ago showed evidence that both could occur. It may be difficult to prove the direction of dependence from this passage alone.
• 30.16.5: Matthew 9:9 is not a rejection of cultic sacrifice, though like Hosea it relatives its value in comparison to the command to show mercy, and the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Pseudo-Clementine texts go much further in completely rejecting the institution likely as a later rationalization for the loss of the temple cult. If anything, the saying is an inversion of the “I have come” saying in Matthew 5:17, which clearly affirms that Jesus did not come to abolish the Law.
• 30.22.3-5: Even allowing Inglis’s contention about the absence of Luke 22:16 in Marcion’s Gospel, I am not sure that he has demonstrated that Luke 22:15 was not original simply because it lacks Synoptic parallels and features a Semitism. Even if it was an addition, the Gospel of the Ebionites could be dependent on a copy of Luke that had it and purposely inserted the “not” to make it clear that Jesus would not eat “meat” at the Passover. The three Synoptic Gospels presuppose that Jesus had no qualms eating the Passover meal, which the Gospel of the Ebionites revises based on its vegetarian ethic and in line with how it revised John the Baptizer’s diet.
• One final note is that the post argues that there is no parallel with unique material in Mark, but 30.13.4 does agree with the order of Mark 1:4-6 in narrating John’s ministry, John’s popularity, and John’s clothing against Matthew’s order, while Luke omits the descriptions of John’s clothing.

Since I wrote a whole series on this blog where I tried to undercut the idea that Mark’s Gospel was a distinctly Pauline work, I want to call attention to a recent article by John Van Maaren, “Is the Gospel of Mark Distinctly Pauline? A Critical Evaluation” JBL 143.1 (2024): 125-142. Here is the abstract:

“The renewed interest in the relationship between the Gospel of Mark and the apostle Paul has led to more nuanced arguments for Paul’s influence on Mark based on refined methodologies. In this article, I critically evaluate the current state of the argument, concluding that it depends on too many variables and expects too much of our sparse evidence to make a convincing argument that Mark is distinctly Pauline. Therefore, the Gospel of Mark should be read independently of Paul so that its unique features might be first understood within its own narrative world, rather than interpreted through a Pauline lens.”

Wherever you stand on this issue, the article provides a helpful up-to-date survey of the scholarship on the question and I agree with the author’s criticisms of reading the Gospel of Mark through a Pauline lens.

It is often difficult for me to make the annual and international Society of Biblical Literature meetings and other academic conferences living in western Australia, so I look forward to when the conferences come here. First, I plan to attend the “Paul Within Paganism Symposium” hosted by Ridley College in Melbourne on July 22, 2024. The description for the conference and the call for papers can be found by clicking on the link. A few years ago they hosted a conference on “Paul within Judaism” and published the papers in Paul within Judaism: Perspectives on Paul and Jewish Identity (ed. Michael Bird, Ruben A. Bühner, Jörg Frey, and Brian Rosner; WUNT 507; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2023), which was made available as an open-access volume here if you click on eBook PDF. This symposium is scheduled right before the Society of New Testament Studies conference at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne on July 23-27, 2024. I am grateful that one of my colleagues who is a member of the society has applied to invite me along as a guest. If you happen to be going to one of these two conferences, I hope to see you there!

Update: the registration fees and conference program for the “Paul Within Paganism” Symposium is now available here. Note that there is another volume coming out with the title Paul within Paganism: Restoring the Mediterranean Context to the Apostle that is edited by Alexander Chantziantoniou, Paula Fredriksen, and Stephen L. Young and I look forward to reading it, but there will be a different volume coming out of this upcoming conference. Finally, the academic program for the following SNTS conference has also been posted.

The announcement for my article entitled “The Gospel of the Ebionites and the Synoptic Problem” has just been published for the Catholic Biblical Quarterly 86.2 (2024) has just been posted on their website. Here is my abstract:

“David B. Sloan and James R. Edwards have revived the antique hypothesis that there was a single Gospel according to the Hebrews underlying the diverse Patristic testimonies about it and that it was a significant source behind the Synoptic tradition. Specifically, Sloan and Edwards equate this reconstructed text with either Q or L, two hypothetical sources in B. H. Streeter’s classic solution to the Synoptic Problem, respectively. In this paper, I defend the common scholarly view that the text known to Epiphanius, which modern scholars entitle as the Gospel of the Ebionites to distinguish it from the Gospel according to the Hebrews, was a Greek text that, at points, harmonizes passages from the Synoptics. I will focus on this Gospel’s baptism narrative to demonstrate that it replicates Matthean and Lukan redactional elements, thus making it unlikely to be the source of the Synoptic double tradition or the Lukan Sondergut.”

I want to express my gratitude to Stephen Carlson and James Baker for accepting my proposal to present an earlier draft of this paper at a joint Synoptic Gospels and textual criticism session at the Society of Biblical Literature and to Barker for answering my questions on the Diatessaron. I also thank James Edwards and David Sloan for reading my initial draft, even though I reached the polar opposite conclusions than they did. Sloan’s extensive knowledge of the history of research on the Synoptic Problem is impressive and I look forward to his future books on Q, but our conclusions just differ on the place of the Gospel According to the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Ebionites in the Synoptic Problem (see also my earlier article “Did Papias of Hierapolis Use the ‘Gospel According to the Hebrews’ as a Source” JECS 25.1 [2017]: 29-53 and more recent discussion in Tax Collector to Gospel Writer: Patristic Traditions about the Evangelist Matthew [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023]).

As I have noted in an older post, my revised PhD published under the title The Gospel on the Margins: The Reception of Mark in the Second Century (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015) was greatly indebted to Brenda Deen Schildgen’s Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Detroit: Wayne University State Press, 1998). Another relevant publication that I completely managed to miss, unfortunately, was Seán P. Kealy’s Mark’s Gospel: A History of Its Interpretation (New York; Ramsey: Paulist Press, 1982) and A History of the Interpretation of the Gospel of Mark: Volume 1 Through the Nineteenth Century and Volume 2: The Twentieth Century (Lewiston – Queenston – Lampeter, Edwin Mellen Press, 2007). Since he covers so much data in these books, his surveys of the Patristic period do not go into too much depth, but he does also note the decline of interest in Mark’s Gospel throughout the Medieval area and into the modern period before the discovery of Markan priority.

Another important recent survey can be found in Joseph Verheyden’s chapter “The Reception History of the Gospel of Mark in the Early Church,” in Reading the Gospel of Mark in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Geert Van Oyen (BETL 301; Leuven: Peeters, 2019), 395–430. He also has an excellent survey of the 16 potential references to Mark’s Gospel in Irenaeus’s Against Heresies in “Four Gospels Indeed, but Where is Mark? On Irenaeus’s Use of the Gospel of Mark” in Irénée de Lyon et les débuts de la Bible chrétienne. Actes de la Journée du 1.VII.2014 à Lyon (IPM 77; Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 169-204. I appreciate Verheyden’s engagement with my own work as well as the ways he goes beyond it in closely examining the Patristic texts that do comment on Mark’s Gospel. I think that Verheyden’s work just further confirms the point that Mark’s Gospel, even though it was defended as an apostolic work and included in the New Testament canon, was mostly neglected in favour of the other canonical Gospels. Even for those who commented on specific passages in Mark’s text, their readings were often informed by the Synoptic parallels.