Page "Gospel of the Nazarenes" Paragraph 14

Philipp Vielhauer writes of the Greek / Latin fragments collected as the Gospel of the Nazarenes of the that " Its literary character shows the GN secondary as compared with the canonical Mt ; again, from the point of view of form-criticism and the history of tradition, as well as from that of language, it presents no proto-Matthew but a development of the Greek Gospel of Matthew ( against Waitz ).

' It is scarcely to be assumed that in it we are dealing with an independent development of older Aramaic traditions ; this assumption is already prohibited by the close relationship with Mt.

Likewise, as regards the Syriac fragments, Vielhauer writes " the Aramaic ( Syriac ) GN cannot be explained as a retroversion of the Greek Mt ; the novelistic expansions, new formations, abbreviations and corrections forbid that.

In literary terms the GN may best be characterised as a targum-like rendering of the canonical Matthew.

" From this view the GN fragments are linked to the canonical version of Matthew, with minor differences.

For example, GN replaces " daily bread " with " bread for tomorrow " in the Lord's Prayer ( GN 5 ), states that the man whose hand was withered ( GN 10, compare ) was a stonemason, and narrates there having been two rich men addressed by Jesus in instead of one ( GN 16 ).