jewish-christian gospels recovered a gospel that was a sort of new (Aramaic) edition of Matthew or from a
clearly apocryphal gospel but from a gospel that creatively used materials
from several synoptic gospels (Matthew and Luke in particular) combin-
ing it with passages that do not have parallels in the canonical gospels.
The fourth major flaw of the GH is that it uncritically assigns a
group of variant readings entitledτ. /υδαϊκ!νto the “Gospel of the
Nazarenes.” These variants that are attributed to a “Jewish gospel”, appear
in the margins of some manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew. The
framers of the GH took it for granted that these references in the
margins of manuscripts , and ^17 were from the “Gospel of
the Nazarenes.” However, this view has been recently questioned,^18 and
with good reason.
There are thirteen of theseτ. /υδαϊκ!νreadings.^19 Tischendorf had
already published four of these in (cod. ; to Matt :; :;
:; :).^20 Schmidtke found two of Tischendorf’s readings (in Matt
:; :) and an additional one (in Matt :) in manuscript .
He found the rest of the thirteen readings in manuscript (th/th
(^17) In addition, in Matt :, manuscripts and share aτ. /υδαϊκ!νreading with
, and but the reading appears in the text itself. Thus, Schmidtke , .
(^18) See Frey a, –. According to Frey, the th edition of Hennecke’s collection
will list these variants separately—excluding them from the reconstruction of the “Gospel
of the Nazarenes.” See also Lührmann , –. Petersen , .
(^19) Vielhauer & Strecker (^2) ( (^1) ), , state erroneously: “in thesubscriptiones
of thirty-six Gospel manuscripts dating from the th to the th centuries there is a
reference to a gospel described asτ. /υδαϊκ!ν, and two of these manuscripts (codices
and ) adduce readings of the Judaikon as marginal notes to Matthew.” The same
mistake is to be found in the German edition as well (see Vielhauer & Strecker ,
–). In reality,τ. /υδαϊκ!νreferences have been found in only five manuscripts
(, , , , ) and always in the margins (or in the actual text) of the Gospel
of Matthew. Thirty-eight (thirty-six according to Schmidtke , –) manuscripts
have subscriptions referring to a manuscript on Mount Zion (= so-called “Zion Gospel
Edition”), and two of these ( and ) also have references toτ. /υδαϊκ!νin the
margins of Matthew. It seems that Vielhauer and Strecker have not made clear the
distinction between the Zion Gospel Edition andτ. /υδαϊκ!νreferences. The Zion
Gospel Edition andτ. /υδαϊκ!νreferences overlap in only two manuscripts which
together cover five variants (two in common) of all thirteen ofτ. /υδαϊκ!νreferences.
For correct information, see Petersen , –; Klijn , , –.
(^20) Tischendorf , . For some reason, Edwards , –, claims that there
would be fourτ. /υδαϊκ!νreadings in the Codex Sinaiticus. Possibly Edwards, who only
refers to Harnack (Harnack , ), has mistaken Harnack’s reference to Tischendorf
to mean that Tischendorf is describing the Codex Sinaiticus (!). However, Tischendorf,
in his work from the year (see above), describes manuscript . Harnack’s short
title for this work of Tischendorf’s is “Notit. edit. cod. Sin.” which may have led Edwards
astray. Today, when the Codex Sinaiticus is available on the internet, it is easy to check
this out in the original manuscript and to see there are noτ. /υδαϊκ!νreadings.