Shem Tob's Hebrew Gospel of Matthew

Hebrew Matthew has been preserved in the book XII or XIII (according to the two recensions of the piece of religious controversy “The Touchstone” of Shem Tob Ibn Shaprut)[4] of the most significant manuscripts which have lasted to our times.

Petersen notices the presence of possible common readings with a Flemish middle ages diatessaron,[9] something which might reinforce a Medieval origin for Hebrew Matthew.

The edition of George Howard is based on a manuscript preserved in the British Library, Adler 26964, for Mt 1,1- 23,22 and complemented by the missing final part, 23,23-28,20, with another version from the Theological Seminary of New York (Ms. 2426 [Marx 16]).

[clarification needed] However, the edition unfortunately omits those variants that according to Niclós[10] are the most ancient and worthwhile, because they contain words in medieval romance, preserved in manuscripts of Italian libraries.

The use of some vocabulary and lexica in Catalan or Pyrenees romance languages raised the option of tracing its Sitz im Leben back to the Middle Ages and more precisely to locate it in the region of Provence and Catalonia.

[11] Another paper,[12] later on, studied carefully the Romance lexicon, especially rich in some fields as legal terminology, daily life, trades and roles, as well as cosmology; moreover, the Hebrew syntax of the text, concluded with narrative patterns based on correct biblical secuences and some rabbinical linguistic idioms.

In his latest paper, Niclós offers a final section about the Vulgate tradition of southern France, a tradition which derives from the Mozarab community (Christian minority under Muslim rule) from the south of Spain (Seville or Cordoba), who migrated to Catalonia (Ripoll), and finally entering the South of France by Carcassonne or Saint Victor of Marseille, making up the Provençal recension of the Vulgate.

The reason for that multicultural presence lies in the fact that the region of Septimania or Provence and northern Catalonia were functioning as a cultural unit where the recension of the Bible referred to by Samuel Berger as Provençal was used both for liturgy and Romance translations.

The second novelty of the paper consists in tracing back the Ordinary gloss introduced in Mt to a letter from Saint Jerome and a fragment of Rabanus Maurus Commentary of Matthew and other Medieval Scholars.

The second stage of our gospel was the translation of the New Testament into Provençal, probably from the abovementioned recension of the Vulgate from the south of France, of Visigoth and Septimanian origins.

This translation to vernacular was permitted by the church despite the prohibition of 1229 in Toulouse or 1235 in Tarragona against the Waldensian romance versions; or from 1317 against the Beguines, it is unknown to what extent local and ephemeral.

At that moment, the Gospel of Matthew achieved a third layer from the Semitic language of the Old Testament, preserving numerous words of the Catalan from the Pyrenees as evidence of the previous stage.

Finally, around 1386, in Tudela (Spain) a Jewish rabbi, Shem Tob Ibn Shaprut accurately copied the Hebrew version made a century earlier by an anonymous Jew, apparently converted, and incorporated his critical commentaries in a piece of religious controversy against Christians, Eben Boḥan (“the Touchstone”).