Page:Lapide vol1.djvu/39

xxxviii GENERAL PREFACE. this Gospel out of Hebrew into Greek.” Some again are of opinion that Barnabas was the translator of this Gospel from Hebrew into Greek. Among others this is asserted by Sixtus Senensis. But Anastasius Sinaita says that Luke and Paul were the translators. The Syriac version of S. Matthew was certainly translated not from the Hebrew, but the Greek. S. Jerome also, when by the command of Pope Damasus, he corrected the Latin translation of the four Gospels, made S. Matthew conform to the Greek rather than the Hebrew, as he tells us in his preface to the Gospels. I may observe in passing that when S. Jerome, at the bidding of Damasus, translated the Old Testament out of Hebrew into Latin, he did not translate afresh the New Testament, but brought the existing translation into accordance with the Greek original.

So that the translator of the New Testament was not S. Jerome, but some one much earlier, though far from being a good Latinist, as is plain to every reader.

S. Jerome says, that when S. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, he appears to have followed the Hebrew original in his citations from the Old Testament. But the Greek translator has preferred to cite them from the Septuagint, as better known to the Gentiles.

Whether S. Matthew wrote in pure Hebrew, such as that of Moses and the Prophets, or in the corrupt Hebrew current after the Babylonish captivity, usually called Syriac, is not plain. It is certain that the Jews in the time of Christ did not speak pure Hebrew. Syriac was their vernacular. It is very evident that the rest of the New Testament was translated from Greek into Syriac, and the same person apparently translated all the books. The Hebrew words quoted in the Greek text differ from the Syriac words used in the Syriac version now extant.