r/AcademicBiblical • u/Adventurous_Vanilla2 • 6d ago

Question Gospel of Matthew in Greek?

How do we know the gospel of Matthew was written in Greek without using Markan Priority?

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u/liamstrain 6d ago

Aside from the oldest existing fragments being in greek? (e.g. P37). Per Kurt Aland, "The Text of the New Testament"

I don't think we've ever found early copies of Matthew in any other language. It is an argument from silence, but aside from a quote from Irenaeus in 180 about Matthew writing a a gospel "among the Hebrews in their own dialect" - Against Heresies 3:1:1, we don't really know. Hebrew was not really a common written language in widespread use among the general population at the time (Cohen "From the Maccabeess to the Mishnah), and while Matthew spoke Aramaic, it's not clear that was the most common language for written communications like this. They even mostly used greek copies of the Torah. So it may well be that Irenaeus was referencing greek. We just don't know.

Papias and Origen both make other claims, one Aramaic, one Hebrew. But both are also another 100 years later.

So - argument from silence or not - Greek seems to be the only one supported by any physical evidence for now.

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u/Ok-Survey-4380 6d ago

Jerome claims to have a hebrew version of Matthew (De Vir. II. 3), so it’s possible a hebrew version was floating around.