Chapter 13

Now the account in the Gospel of the Twelve removes this discrepancy. John does not know Jesus till after the light and the descent of the dove and the voice, and then he asks to be baptized by Jesus.It is apparent that the passage in the lost Gospel is more correct than that in the Canonical one. In the latter there has been an inversion of verses destroying the succession of events, and thus producing discrepancy with the account in St. John's Gospel.With these passages from the Gospel of the Twelve may be compared a curious one from the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. It occurs in the Testament of[pg 146]Levi, and is a prophecy of the Messiah.“The heavens shall open for thee, and from above the temple of glory the voice of the Father shall dispense sanctification upon him, as has been promised unto Abraham, the father of Isaac.”The passage quoted by St. Epiphanius is wholly unobjectionable doctrinally. It is not so with that quoted by St. Jerome; it is of a very different character. It exhibits strongly the Gnostic ideas which infected the stricter sect of the Ebionites.It was precisely on the baptism of the Lord that they laid the greatest stress; and it is in the account of that event that we should expect to find the greatest divergence between the texts employed by the orthodox and the heretical Nazarenes. Before his baptism he was nothing. It was then only that the“full fount of the Holy Ghost”descended on him, his election to the Messiahship was revealed, and divine power was communicated to him to execute the mission entrusted to him. A marked distinction was drawn between two portions in the life of Jesus—before and after his baptism. In the first they acknowledged nothing but the mere human nature, to the entire exclusion of everything supernatural; while the sudden accruing of supernatural aid at the baptism marked the moment when he became the Messiah. Thus the baptism was the beginning of their Gospel.Before that, he is liable to sin, he suggests that his believing himself to be free from sin may have precipitated him into sin, the sin of ignorance. And“even in the prophets, after they had received the unction of the Holy Ghost, there was found sinful speech.”215This quotation follows, in St. Jerome, immediately after the saying[pg 147]cited above enjoining forgiveness, but it in no way dovetails into it; the passage concerning the recommendation by St. Mary and the brethren that they should go up to be baptized of John for the remission of sins, comes in the same chapter, and there can be little doubt that this reference to the prophets as sinful formed part of the answer of the Virgin to Jesus when he spoke of his being sinless.St. Jerome obtained his copy of the Gospel of the Hebrews from Beraea in Syria, and not therefore from the purest source. Had he copied and translated the codex he found in the library of Pamphilus at Caesarea, instead of that he procured from Beraea, it is probable that he would have found it not to contain the passages of Gnostic tendency.These interpolations were made in the second century, when Gnostic ideas had begun to affect the Ebionites, and break them up into more or less heretical sects.Their copies of the Gospel of the Hebrews differed, for the Gnostic Ebionites curtailed it in some places, and amplified it in others.In reconstructing the primitive lost Gospel of the Nazarenes, it is very necessary to note these Gnostic passages, and to withdraw them from the text. We shall come to some more of their additions and alterations presently. It is sufficient for us to note here that the heretical Gospel in use among the Gnostic Ebionites was based on the orthodox Gospel of the Hebrews. The existence of these two versions explains the very different treatment their Gospel meets with at the hands of the Fathers of the Church. Some, and these the earliest, speak of this Gospel with reverence, and place it almost on a line with the Canonical Gospels; others speak of[pg 148]it with horror, as an heretical corruption of the Gospel of St. Matthew. The former saw the primitive text, the latter the curtailed and amplified version in use among the heretical Ebionites.St. Paul, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, alludes to one of the appearances of our Lord after his resurrection, of which no mention is made in the Canonical Gospels:“After that, he was seen of James.”216But according to his account, this appearance took place after several other manifestations, viz. after that to Cephas, that to the Twelve, and that to five hundred brethren at once. But it preceded another appearance to“all the apostles.”If we take the first and second to have occurred on Easter-day, and the last to have been the appearance to them again“after eight days,”when St. Thomas was present, then the appearance to St. James must have taken place between the“even”of Easter-day and Low Sunday.Now the Gospel of the Hebrews gives a particular account of this visit to James, which however, according to this account, took place early on Easter-day, certainly before Christ stood in the midst of the apostles in the upper room on Easter-evening.St. Jerome says,“The Gospel according to the Hebrews relates that after the resurrection of the Saviour,‘The Lord, after he had given the napkin to the servant of the priest, went to James, and appeared to him. Now James had sworn with an oath that he would not eat bread from that hour when he drank the cup of the Lord, till he should behold him rising from amidst them that sleep.’And again, a little after,‘The Lord said, Bring a table and bread.’And then,‘He took bread and blessed and brake, and gave it to James the Just, and said unto[pg 149]him, My brother, eat thy bread, for the Son of Man is risen from among them that sleep.’”217This touching incident is quite in keeping with what we know about St. James, the Lord's brother.James the Just, according to Hegesippus,“neither drank wine nor fermented liquors, and abstained from animal food;”218and though the account of Hegesippus is manifestly fabulous in some of its details, still there is no reason to doubt that James belonged to the ascetic school among the Jews, as did the Baptist before him, and as did the orthodox Ebionites after him. The oath to abstain from food till a certain event was accomplished was not unusual.219What is meant by“the Saviour giving the napkin to the servant of the priest,”it is impossible to conjecture without the context. The napkin was probably that which had covered his face in the tomb, but whether the context linked this on to the cycle of sacred sindones impressed with the portrait of the Saviour's suffering face, cannot be told. The designation of“the Just”as applied to James is for the purpose of distinguishing him from James the brother of John. He does not bear that name in the Canonical Gospels, but the title may have been introduced by St. Jerome to avoid confusion, or it may have been a marginal gloss to the text.The story of this appearance found its way into the[pg 150]writings of St. Gregory of Tours,220who no doubt drew it from St. Jerome; and thence it passed into the Legenda Aurea of Jacques de Voragine.If the Lord did appear to St. James on Easter-day, as related in this lost Gospel, then it may have been in the morning, and not after his appearance to the Twelve, or on his appearance in the evening he may have singled out and addressed James before all the others, as on that day week he addressed St. Thomas. In either case, St. Paul's version would be inaccurate as to the order of manifestations. The pseudo-Abdias, not in any way trustworthy, thus relates the circumstance:“James the Less among the disciples was an object of special attachment to the Saviour, and he was inflamed with such zeal for his Master that he would take no meat when his Lord was crucified, and would only eat again when he should see Christ arisen from the dead; for he remembered that when Christ was alive he had given this precept to him and to his brethren. That is why he, with Mary Magdalene and Peter, was the first of all to whom Jesus Christ appeared, in order to confirm his disciples in the faith; and that he might not suffer him to fast any longer, a piece of an honeycomb having been offered him, he invited James to eat thereof.”221Another fragment of the lost Gospel of the Hebrews also relates to the resurrection:[pg 151]“And when he had come to [Peter and] those that were with Peter, he said unto them, Take, touch me, and see that I am not a bodiless spirit. And straightway they touched him and believed.”222St. Ignatius, who cites these words, excepting only those within brackets, does not say whence he drew them; but St. Jerome informs us that they were taken from the Gospel of the Hebrews. At the same time he gives the passage with greater fulness than St. Ignatius.The account in St. Matthew contains nothing at all like this; but St. Luke mentions these circumstances, though with considerable differences. The Lord having appeared in the midst of his disciples, they imagine that they see a spirit. Then he says,“Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”223The narrative in St. Luke's Gospel is fuller than that in the Gospel of the Hebrews, and is not derived from it. In the Nazarene Gospel, as soon as the apostles see and touch, they believe. But in the Canonical Gospel of St. Luke, they are not convinced till they see Christ eat.Justin Martyr cites a passage now found in the Canonical Gospel of St. John, but not exactly as there, evidently therefore obtaining it from an independent source, and that source was the Gospel of the Twelve,[pg 152]the only one with which he was acquainted, the only one then acknowledged as Canonical in the Nazarene Church.The passage is,“Christ has said, Except ye be regenerate, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.”224In St. John's Gospel the parallel passage is couched in the third person:“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”225The difference stands out more clearly in the Greek than in English.We may conjecture that the primitive Gospel of the Hebrews contained an account of the interview of Nicodemus with our Lord. When we come to consider the Gospel used by the author of the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, we shall find that the instruction on new birth made to Nicodemus was familiar to him, but not exactly in the form in which it is recorded by St. John.St. Jerome informs us that the lost Gospel we are considering did not relate that the veil of the Temple was rent in twain when Jesus gave up the ghost, but that the lintel stone, a huge stone, fell down.226That this tradition may be true is not unlikely. The rocks were rent, and the earth quaked, and it is probable enough that the Temple was so shaken that the great lintel stone fell.St. Epiphanius gives us another fragment:“I am come to abolish the sacrifices: if ye cease not from sacrificing, the wrath of God will not cease from weighing upon you.”227[pg 153]In the Clementine Recognitions, a work issuing from the Ebionite anti-Gnostic school, we find that the abolition of the sacrifices was strongly insisted on. The abomination of idolatry is first exposed, and the strong hold that Egyptian idolatry had upon the Israelites is pointed out; then we are told Moses received the Law, and, in consideration of the prejudices of the people, tolerated sacrifice:“When Moses perceived that the vice of sacrificing to idols had been deeply ingrained into the people from their association with the Egyptians, and that the root of this evil could not be extracted from them, he allowed them to sacrifice indeed, but permitted it to be done only to God, that by any means he might cut off one half of the deeply ingrained evil, leaving the other half to be corrected by another, and at a future time; by him, namely, concerning whom he said himself, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise unto you, whom ye shall hear, even as myself, according to all things which he shall say to you. Whosoever shall not hear that prophet, his soul shall be cut off from his people.”228In another place the Jewish sacrifices are spoken of as sin.229This hostility to the Jewish sacrificial system by Ebionites who observed all the other Mosaic institutions was due to their having sprung out of the old sect of the Essenes, who held the sacrifices in the same abhorrence.230That our Lord may have spoken against the sacrifices is possible enough. The passage may have stood thus:“Think not that I am come to destroy the Law and the Prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil; nevertheless, I tell you the truth, I am come to destroy the[pg 154]sacrifices. But be ye approved money-changers, choose that which is good metal, reject that which is bad.”It is probable that in the original Hebrew Gospel there was some such passage, for St. Paul, or whoever was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, apparently alludes to it twice. He says,“When he cometh into the world he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared me.”231The plain meaning of which is, not that David had used those words centuries before, in prophecy, but that Jesus had used them himself when he came into the world. If the writer of the Epistle did quote a passage from the Hebrew Gospel, it will have been the second from the same source.In the Ebionite Gospel,“by a criminal fraud,”says St. Epiphanius, a protestation has been placed in the mouth of the Lord against the Paschal Sacrifice of the Lamb, by changing a positive phrase into a negative one.When the disciples ask Jesus where they shall prepare the Passover, he is made to reply, not, as in St. Luke, that with desire he had desired to eat this Passover, but,“Have I then any desire to eat the flesh of the Paschal Lamb with you?”232The purpose of this interpolation of two words is clear. The Samaritan Ebionites, like the Essenes, did not touch meat, regarding all animal food with the greatest repugnance.233By the addition of two words they were able to convert the saying of our Lord into a sanction of their superstition. But this saying of Jesus[pg 155]is now found only in St. Luke's Gospel. It must have stood originally without the Μὴ and the κρέας in the Gospel of the Twelve.Another of their alterations of the Gospel was to the same intent. Instead of making St. John the Baptist eat locusts and wild honey, they gave him for his nourishment wild honey only, ἐγχρίδας, instead of ἀχρίδας and μελί ἄγριον.The passage in which this curious change was made is remarkable. It served as the introduction to the Gospel in use among the Gnostic Ebionites.“A certain man, named Jesus, being about thirty years of age, hath chosen us; and having come to Capernaum, he entered into the house of Simon, whose surname was Peter, and he said unto him, As I passed by the Sea of Tiberias, I chose John and James, the sons of Zebedee, Simon and Andrew, Thaddaeus, Simon Zelotes and Judas Iscariot; and thee, Matthew, when thou wast sitting at thy tax-gatherer's table, then I called thee, and thou didst follow me. And you do I choose to be my twelve apostles to bear witness unto Israel.“John baptized; and the Pharisees came to him, and they were baptized of him, and all Jerusalem also. He had a garment of camels' hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins, and his meat was wild honey, and the taste thereof was as manna, and as a cake of oil.”Apparently after this announcement of his choice of the apostles there followed something analogous to the preface in St. Luke's Gospel, to the effect that these apostles, having assembled together, had taken in hand to write down those things that they remembered concerning Christ and his teaching. And it was on this account that the Gospel obtained the name of the“Recollections of the Apostles,”or the“Gospel of the Twelve.”[pg 156]The special notice taken of St. Matthew, who is singled out from the others in this address, is significant of the relation supposed to exist between the Gospel and the converted publican. If we had the complete introduction, we should probably find that in it he was said to have been the scribe who wrote down the apostolic recollections.

It is apparent that the passage in the lost Gospel is more correct than that in the Canonical one. In the latter there has been an inversion of verses destroying the succession of events, and thus producing discrepancy with the account in St. John's Gospel.

With these passages from the Gospel of the Twelve may be compared a curious one from the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. It occurs in the Testament of[pg 146]Levi, and is a prophecy of the Messiah.“The heavens shall open for thee, and from above the temple of glory the voice of the Father shall dispense sanctification upon him, as has been promised unto Abraham, the father of Isaac.”

The passage quoted by St. Epiphanius is wholly unobjectionable doctrinally. It is not so with that quoted by St. Jerome; it is of a very different character. It exhibits strongly the Gnostic ideas which infected the stricter sect of the Ebionites.

It was precisely on the baptism of the Lord that they laid the greatest stress; and it is in the account of that event that we should expect to find the greatest divergence between the texts employed by the orthodox and the heretical Nazarenes. Before his baptism he was nothing. It was then only that the“full fount of the Holy Ghost”descended on him, his election to the Messiahship was revealed, and divine power was communicated to him to execute the mission entrusted to him. A marked distinction was drawn between two portions in the life of Jesus—before and after his baptism. In the first they acknowledged nothing but the mere human nature, to the entire exclusion of everything supernatural; while the sudden accruing of supernatural aid at the baptism marked the moment when he became the Messiah. Thus the baptism was the beginning of their Gospel.

Before that, he is liable to sin, he suggests that his believing himself to be free from sin may have precipitated him into sin, the sin of ignorance. And“even in the prophets, after they had received the unction of the Holy Ghost, there was found sinful speech.”215This quotation follows, in St. Jerome, immediately after the saying[pg 147]cited above enjoining forgiveness, but it in no way dovetails into it; the passage concerning the recommendation by St. Mary and the brethren that they should go up to be baptized of John for the remission of sins, comes in the same chapter, and there can be little doubt that this reference to the prophets as sinful formed part of the answer of the Virgin to Jesus when he spoke of his being sinless.

St. Jerome obtained his copy of the Gospel of the Hebrews from Beraea in Syria, and not therefore from the purest source. Had he copied and translated the codex he found in the library of Pamphilus at Caesarea, instead of that he procured from Beraea, it is probable that he would have found it not to contain the passages of Gnostic tendency.

These interpolations were made in the second century, when Gnostic ideas had begun to affect the Ebionites, and break them up into more or less heretical sects.

Their copies of the Gospel of the Hebrews differed, for the Gnostic Ebionites curtailed it in some places, and amplified it in others.

In reconstructing the primitive lost Gospel of the Nazarenes, it is very necessary to note these Gnostic passages, and to withdraw them from the text. We shall come to some more of their additions and alterations presently. It is sufficient for us to note here that the heretical Gospel in use among the Gnostic Ebionites was based on the orthodox Gospel of the Hebrews. The existence of these two versions explains the very different treatment their Gospel meets with at the hands of the Fathers of the Church. Some, and these the earliest, speak of this Gospel with reverence, and place it almost on a line with the Canonical Gospels; others speak of[pg 148]it with horror, as an heretical corruption of the Gospel of St. Matthew. The former saw the primitive text, the latter the curtailed and amplified version in use among the heretical Ebionites.

St. Paul, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, alludes to one of the appearances of our Lord after his resurrection, of which no mention is made in the Canonical Gospels:“After that, he was seen of James.”216But according to his account, this appearance took place after several other manifestations, viz. after that to Cephas, that to the Twelve, and that to five hundred brethren at once. But it preceded another appearance to“all the apostles.”If we take the first and second to have occurred on Easter-day, and the last to have been the appearance to them again“after eight days,”when St. Thomas was present, then the appearance to St. James must have taken place between the“even”of Easter-day and Low Sunday.

Now the Gospel of the Hebrews gives a particular account of this visit to James, which however, according to this account, took place early on Easter-day, certainly before Christ stood in the midst of the apostles in the upper room on Easter-evening.

St. Jerome says,“The Gospel according to the Hebrews relates that after the resurrection of the Saviour,‘The Lord, after he had given the napkin to the servant of the priest, went to James, and appeared to him. Now James had sworn with an oath that he would not eat bread from that hour when he drank the cup of the Lord, till he should behold him rising from amidst them that sleep.’And again, a little after,‘The Lord said, Bring a table and bread.’And then,‘He took bread and blessed and brake, and gave it to James the Just, and said unto[pg 149]him, My brother, eat thy bread, for the Son of Man is risen from among them that sleep.’”217

This touching incident is quite in keeping with what we know about St. James, the Lord's brother.

James the Just, according to Hegesippus,“neither drank wine nor fermented liquors, and abstained from animal food;”218and though the account of Hegesippus is manifestly fabulous in some of its details, still there is no reason to doubt that James belonged to the ascetic school among the Jews, as did the Baptist before him, and as did the orthodox Ebionites after him. The oath to abstain from food till a certain event was accomplished was not unusual.219

What is meant by“the Saviour giving the napkin to the servant of the priest,”it is impossible to conjecture without the context. The napkin was probably that which had covered his face in the tomb, but whether the context linked this on to the cycle of sacred sindones impressed with the portrait of the Saviour's suffering face, cannot be told. The designation of“the Just”as applied to James is for the purpose of distinguishing him from James the brother of John. He does not bear that name in the Canonical Gospels, but the title may have been introduced by St. Jerome to avoid confusion, or it may have been a marginal gloss to the text.

The story of this appearance found its way into the[pg 150]writings of St. Gregory of Tours,220who no doubt drew it from St. Jerome; and thence it passed into the Legenda Aurea of Jacques de Voragine.

If the Lord did appear to St. James on Easter-day, as related in this lost Gospel, then it may have been in the morning, and not after his appearance to the Twelve, or on his appearance in the evening he may have singled out and addressed James before all the others, as on that day week he addressed St. Thomas. In either case, St. Paul's version would be inaccurate as to the order of manifestations. The pseudo-Abdias, not in any way trustworthy, thus relates the circumstance:

“James the Less among the disciples was an object of special attachment to the Saviour, and he was inflamed with such zeal for his Master that he would take no meat when his Lord was crucified, and would only eat again when he should see Christ arisen from the dead; for he remembered that when Christ was alive he had given this precept to him and to his brethren. That is why he, with Mary Magdalene and Peter, was the first of all to whom Jesus Christ appeared, in order to confirm his disciples in the faith; and that he might not suffer him to fast any longer, a piece of an honeycomb having been offered him, he invited James to eat thereof.”221

Another fragment of the lost Gospel of the Hebrews also relates to the resurrection:

“And when he had come to [Peter and] those that were with Peter, he said unto them, Take, touch me, and see that I am not a bodiless spirit. And straightway they touched him and believed.”222

St. Ignatius, who cites these words, excepting only those within brackets, does not say whence he drew them; but St. Jerome informs us that they were taken from the Gospel of the Hebrews. At the same time he gives the passage with greater fulness than St. Ignatius.

The account in St. Matthew contains nothing at all like this; but St. Luke mentions these circumstances, though with considerable differences. The Lord having appeared in the midst of his disciples, they imagine that they see a spirit. Then he says,“Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”223

The narrative in St. Luke's Gospel is fuller than that in the Gospel of the Hebrews, and is not derived from it. In the Nazarene Gospel, as soon as the apostles see and touch, they believe. But in the Canonical Gospel of St. Luke, they are not convinced till they see Christ eat.

Justin Martyr cites a passage now found in the Canonical Gospel of St. John, but not exactly as there, evidently therefore obtaining it from an independent source, and that source was the Gospel of the Twelve,[pg 152]the only one with which he was acquainted, the only one then acknowledged as Canonical in the Nazarene Church.

The passage is,“Christ has said, Except ye be regenerate, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.”224

In St. John's Gospel the parallel passage is couched in the third person:“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”225The difference stands out more clearly in the Greek than in English.

We may conjecture that the primitive Gospel of the Hebrews contained an account of the interview of Nicodemus with our Lord. When we come to consider the Gospel used by the author of the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, we shall find that the instruction on new birth made to Nicodemus was familiar to him, but not exactly in the form in which it is recorded by St. John.

St. Jerome informs us that the lost Gospel we are considering did not relate that the veil of the Temple was rent in twain when Jesus gave up the ghost, but that the lintel stone, a huge stone, fell down.226

That this tradition may be true is not unlikely. The rocks were rent, and the earth quaked, and it is probable enough that the Temple was so shaken that the great lintel stone fell.

St. Epiphanius gives us another fragment:

“I am come to abolish the sacrifices: if ye cease not from sacrificing, the wrath of God will not cease from weighing upon you.”227

In the Clementine Recognitions, a work issuing from the Ebionite anti-Gnostic school, we find that the abolition of the sacrifices was strongly insisted on. The abomination of idolatry is first exposed, and the strong hold that Egyptian idolatry had upon the Israelites is pointed out; then we are told Moses received the Law, and, in consideration of the prejudices of the people, tolerated sacrifice:

“When Moses perceived that the vice of sacrificing to idols had been deeply ingrained into the people from their association with the Egyptians, and that the root of this evil could not be extracted from them, he allowed them to sacrifice indeed, but permitted it to be done only to God, that by any means he might cut off one half of the deeply ingrained evil, leaving the other half to be corrected by another, and at a future time; by him, namely, concerning whom he said himself, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise unto you, whom ye shall hear, even as myself, according to all things which he shall say to you. Whosoever shall not hear that prophet, his soul shall be cut off from his people.”228

In another place the Jewish sacrifices are spoken of as sin.229

This hostility to the Jewish sacrificial system by Ebionites who observed all the other Mosaic institutions was due to their having sprung out of the old sect of the Essenes, who held the sacrifices in the same abhorrence.230

That our Lord may have spoken against the sacrifices is possible enough. The passage may have stood thus:“Think not that I am come to destroy the Law and the Prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil; nevertheless, I tell you the truth, I am come to destroy the[pg 154]sacrifices. But be ye approved money-changers, choose that which is good metal, reject that which is bad.”

It is probable that in the original Hebrew Gospel there was some such passage, for St. Paul, or whoever was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, apparently alludes to it twice. He says,“When he cometh into the world he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared me.”231The plain meaning of which is, not that David had used those words centuries before, in prophecy, but that Jesus had used them himself when he came into the world. If the writer of the Epistle did quote a passage from the Hebrew Gospel, it will have been the second from the same source.

In the Ebionite Gospel,“by a criminal fraud,”says St. Epiphanius, a protestation has been placed in the mouth of the Lord against the Paschal Sacrifice of the Lamb, by changing a positive phrase into a negative one.

When the disciples ask Jesus where they shall prepare the Passover, he is made to reply, not, as in St. Luke, that with desire he had desired to eat this Passover, but,“Have I then any desire to eat the flesh of the Paschal Lamb with you?”232

The purpose of this interpolation of two words is clear. The Samaritan Ebionites, like the Essenes, did not touch meat, regarding all animal food with the greatest repugnance.233By the addition of two words they were able to convert the saying of our Lord into a sanction of their superstition. But this saying of Jesus[pg 155]is now found only in St. Luke's Gospel. It must have stood originally without the Μὴ and the κρέας in the Gospel of the Twelve.

Another of their alterations of the Gospel was to the same intent. Instead of making St. John the Baptist eat locusts and wild honey, they gave him for his nourishment wild honey only, ἐγχρίδας, instead of ἀχρίδας and μελί ἄγριον.

The passage in which this curious change was made is remarkable. It served as the introduction to the Gospel in use among the Gnostic Ebionites.

“A certain man, named Jesus, being about thirty years of age, hath chosen us; and having come to Capernaum, he entered into the house of Simon, whose surname was Peter, and he said unto him, As I passed by the Sea of Tiberias, I chose John and James, the sons of Zebedee, Simon and Andrew, Thaddaeus, Simon Zelotes and Judas Iscariot; and thee, Matthew, when thou wast sitting at thy tax-gatherer's table, then I called thee, and thou didst follow me. And you do I choose to be my twelve apostles to bear witness unto Israel.

“John baptized; and the Pharisees came to him, and they were baptized of him, and all Jerusalem also. He had a garment of camels' hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins, and his meat was wild honey, and the taste thereof was as manna, and as a cake of oil.”

Apparently after this announcement of his choice of the apostles there followed something analogous to the preface in St. Luke's Gospel, to the effect that these apostles, having assembled together, had taken in hand to write down those things that they remembered concerning Christ and his teaching. And it was on this account that the Gospel obtained the name of the“Recollections of the Apostles,”or the“Gospel of the Twelve.”

The special notice taken of St. Matthew, who is singled out from the others in this address, is significant of the relation supposed to exist between the Gospel and the converted publican. If we had the complete introduction, we should probably find that in it he was said to have been the scribe who wrote down the apostolic recollections.

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