jewish-christian gospels recovered . Both collections entertain the hope for the Israelites conversion and
submission to their ruler. According to Matt :, “your house” (= the
Temple or the house of Israel?) will be left desolate but people will finally
bless Jesus as the one who “comes in the name of the Lord.” According to
Comm. Isa. .–, the “sons of Israel” who earlier fought with the devil
and denied the Son of God will become tributaries of the church.There are four fragments whose origin still needs to be discussed (,
, a and b). Of these four, the GH attributes and
to theGospel of the Hebrewsand a and b to the “Gospel of the
Nazarenes.”^69
It was already noted that fragment (which deals with Jesus’ bap-
tism) has a thematic connection to fragment (Jesus taken by one of his
hairs) which made it suspect of being derived from another gospel. The
fact that there seems to be no connection between fragment and the
anti-rabbinic Matthean collection confirms this assumption.
Fragment (Jerome,Comm. Ezech. .–) only paraphrases the
wording of the “Gospel according to the Hebrews.” It is difficult to say
anything definite about the fragment’s relation to the synoptic gospels
but there is no apparent passage in the synoptic tradition to which it
could be connected. Judging on the basis of the Matthean fragments, the
Nazarenes were using a Semitic copy of Matthew that did not differ very
much from the Greek version. Of course, this may have included some
passages that are unknown within the synoptic tradition but because
fragment emphasizes the obligation not to distress the spirit of one’s
brother, it is usually attributed to the same gospel as fragment . Since
there seems to be no connection to the Matthean anti-rabbinic collection,
the fragment probably comes from a different source.
Finally, there is the question about the origin of fragments a and
b that was suspended because earlier it was impossible to decide
which one of these two (or both) should be excluded from the Nazarene
collection. The method of exclusion resulted in detecting a coherent
collection of Nazarene fragments, but there is no apparent connection
between the reconstructed Nazarene collection and these two fragments.
This suggests that Jerome did not get these passages from the Nazarenes.
(^69) See, Vielhauer & Strecker (^2) ( (^1) ), –; Klijn , –.