PREFACE
I launched the research on which this book is based at the end of the
s as my post-doctoral project at the Department of Biblical Studies
of the University of Helsinki. Having published my doctoral thesis on
the Gospel of Matthew, I had become intrigued by the question of
the history of Jewish Christianity after the completion of the synoptic
gospels. Originally, my plan was to write a book which would trace the
history of Jewish Christianity from pre-synoptic times through Matthew
and other New Testament material to post-synoptic apocryphal sources
and references by the church fathers. Because I had wrestled with the New
Testament material for my doctoral thesis for some time, I wanted get my
hands on some other sources and decided to start with the analysis of the
church fathers and their references.
I soon realized that the topic I had chosen was well worthy of Hans
Waitz’s often cited charaterization of being the most difficult which
the apocryphal literature presents: “Das Problem, um das es sich han-
delt, ist eines der schwierigsten der apokryphen Literatur, schwierig wegen
der Dürftigkeit und Unstimmigkeit der patristischen Zeugnisse, schwierig
auch wegen der sich vielfach widersprechenden Ergebnisse der wissen-
schaftlichen Forschung” (Waitz a, ). Moreover, after Waitz’s time,
scholars had further complicated the problem by becoming more aware
of the problems connected with the definition of Jewish Christianity
which was not so much an issue at the beginning of the th century.
In the beginning, I was relatively happy with the conventional story
about the Nazarenes and the Ebionites and the three gospels that were
attributed to early Jewish Christians (the Three Gospel Hypothesis=the
GH). However, a closer look at the sources started to reveal problems
of the kind that had given Waitz the reason for his statement. How is it
possible that a relatively late writer like Epiphanius has the most detailed
knowledge of the earliest phases of the sect of the Nazarenes? How is
it possible that scholars can be so sure about the Matthean character
of the “Gospel of the Nazarenes” even though the fragments themselves
are not so obviously Matthean? How can they be so sure that “Gnostic”
materials cannot stand together with synoptic-type gospel materials,
even though theGospelof Thomasclearly includes both types of material?
These and other observations led me to think that there are some serious