xpreface
problems in the conventional reconstructions and that detailed historical
study is needed to resolve them.
The overall picture presented in this book emerged slowly over the
course of historical-critical research. Initially, I became aware of some
of the problems in the traditional Vielhauer–Strecker–Klijn reconstruc-
tion of three apocryphal Jewish-Christian gospels in late s when I
wrote my contribution to the Finnish article that was intended to launch
a project on early Jewish Christianity at the University of Helsinki (Myl-
lykoski & Luomanen ). When I presented my first critical review
of the earlier research at the SBL Annual Meeting in (“What is
the Gospel of the Nazoreans?”; Denver, ), I had not yet any clear
ideas how to solve the problems I had found up to that time. The arti-
ficial nature of Epiphanius’ description of the Nazarenes dawned on
me two years later, in , when I was preparing an article on the
Nazarenes for the Finnish Journal of Theology (Luomanen a). In
, I was preparing an enlarged version of a paper delivered at the
SBL International meeting for publication (Groningen, ). At that
point, I started to play with Jerome’s references to the “Gospel of the
Nazarenes” in order to see if it was possible to reconstruct a gospel
used by the Nazarenes on the basis of more neutral criteria than what
was applied in the GH. This experimenting led me to recovering the
Nazarenes’ collection of anti-rabbinic Matthew passages. The fact that
this collection cohered with the Nazarenes’ anti-rabbinic Isaiah collec-
tion convinced me that I might be on the right track. Even more so,
when I realized that my attempts to reconstruct the “Gospel of the
Nazarenes” had actually made a distinct gospel with that name disap-
pear from the scene—a result that joined neatly with my earlier analy-
sis of Epiphanius’ Nazarenes. Because the reconstruction of the “Gospel
of the Nazarenes” was originally treated as a problem of its own, the
arguments presented were in no way dependant on my earlier analysis
of Epiphanius’ Nazarenes, which had shown the artificial, stereotyped
character of Epiphanius’ description. Because the basic ideas and argu-
ments of this book have been developed in conference papers and articles
that were originally written in view of a monograph, I have been able to
make use of much of their contents, although with modifications and
additions. I have listed the earlier articles used in this volume in Chap-
ter ..
Over the years, I have become indebted to several persons who have
helped me with various academic and practical issues connected to
this research undertaking. In the beginning, a valuable framework was