"[3] Some have claimed that by "Hebrew" Papias would have meant Aramaic, the common language of the Middle East besides Koine Greek.

Jerome claims to have seen a gospel in Aramaic that contained all the quotations he assigns to it, but it can be demonstrated that some of them could never have existed in a Semitic language.

But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings.

]Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an apostle, first of all composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed.

[10] It probably originated in a Jewish-Christian community in Roman Syria towards the end of the first century AD,[11] and there is little doubt among modern scholars that it was composed in Koine Greek, the daily language of the time.

[15] An early modern advocate of the proto-gospel hypothesis was Eichhorn who suggested the existence of an Ur-Gospel in 1794–1804, but this theory won little support in the following years.

[19][20] In 1838, Christian Hermann Weisse took Schleiermacher's suggestion of a sayings source (Q) and combined it with the idea of Marcan priority to formulate what is now called the Two-source hypothesis.

Jean Carmignac studied the Dead Sea Scrolls and found that translating Mark from Greek to Hebrew was surprisingly easy.

Jean-Marie Van Cangh has supported Carmignac's hypothesis since and authored in 2005 a Hebrew retroversion of the Gospel according to Mark under the title L'Evangile de Marc : un original hébreu ?

The most widely held solution to the problem today is the two-source theory, which holds that Mark, plus another, hypothetical source, Q, were used by Matthew and Luke.

But while this theory has widespread support, there is a notable minority view that Mark was written last using Matthew and Luke (the two-gospel hypothesis).

Still other scholars accept Markan priority, but argue that Q never existed, and that Luke used Matthew as a source as well as Mark (the Farrer hypothesis).

[33][34] He was followed by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn,[35] who in 1804 provided a comprehensive basis for the proto-gospel hypothesis and argued for an Aramaic original gospel that each of the Synoptic evangelists had in a different intermediate form.

The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915) in its article Gospel of the Hebrews noted that Nicholson cannot be said...[to] have carried conviction to the minds of New Testament scholars.

[45] During the 20th century Léon Vaganay (1940),[46] Lucien Cerfaux, Xavier Léon-Dufour and Antonio Gaboury (1952) attempted to revive Lessing's proto-gospel hypothesis.

[53][54] Setting him apart from some earlier scholars, Zahn did not believe Hebrew Matthew was identical to the surviving fragments of the Jewish-Christian gospels; instead, he understood them as derivative works.

Casey suggests that this is what Papias meant when he said that "each (person) translated/interpreted them as he was able" and that later Church fathers confused proto-Matthew with the Greek Gospel of Matthew.