My Article “The Gospel of the Ebionites and the Synoptic Problem”

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]).