Early in the second century a bishop of Asia Minor wrote down what the elders of his youth had told him about the gospels, and among the things he recorded was this: that Matthew had gathered the sayings of the Lord in the Hebrew language, and that each person translated them as best he could. For the next three centuries the writers of the church kept mentioning a gospel in Hebrew letters, read by the Jewish believers, sometimes called the gospel according to the Hebrews. Some of them had seen it. A few quoted it. Then it disappeared, along with the people who read it.
What survives is a handful of fragments, a few dozen sentences, preserved in the writings of a teacher of Alexandria, the first historian of the church, the bishop of Salamis, and above all the learned monk of Bethlehem who met the Nazarenes in Syria and copied their book. This page gathers what the fellowship has found most alive in them.
Three Gospels or One?
The ancient writers were not careful to distinguish one Jewish gospel from another, and the monk of Bethlehem, who claimed to have translated the Hebrew gospel into Greek and Latin, called everything he saw by the same name. Modern scholars, sorting the fragments by language and content, usually divide them among three books. The Gospel of the Hebrews, known in Egypt, seems to have been a distinct gospel of its own, with stories found nowhere else. The Gospel of the Nazarenes, read in Syria, was close to Matthew and written in Aramaic. The Gospel of the Ebionites, quoted by the bishop of Salamis, was a Greek harmony of the gospels reshaped by a community that refused sacrifice and flesh.
The sorting is disputed, and the fellowship does not insist on it. What matters to us is that all three came from the same people: Jews who followed Jesus and kept the Law, whom the church called Nazarenes and Ebionites, and whose own books it allowed to perish. In these fragments, and almost nowhere else, we hear them speak.
The Spirit as Mother
In Hebrew the word for spirit, ruach, is feminine, and the Gospel of the Hebrews takes the grammar seriously. In one fragment Jesus says: even now my mother, the Holy Spirit, took me by one of my hairs and carried me away to the great mountain Tabor. In another, at his baptism, the whole fount of the Holy Spirit came down upon him and rested on him, and said to him: my son, in all the prophets I was waiting for you, that you should come and I might rest in you. For you are my rest. You are my firstborn son, who reigns forever.
The fellowship reads the second fragment more often than almost any other ancient text outside the scrolls. It is a reading of the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, the chapter of the branch from Jesse's stump, on whom the spirit of the Lord shall rest. But it turns the prophecy inside out. The spirit is not a power bestowed on the chosen one. It is a mother who has been waiting through all the generations of the prophets for a child in whom she can finally rest. A student who has kept the hours for many years and wondered whether anything was waiting for her may find in that sentence an answer she did not expect.
Seeking and Resting
A teacher of Alexandria quotes from the Gospel of the Hebrews a saying that also stands near the beginning of the Gospel of Thomas: the one who seeks will not cease until he finds; and having found, he will marvel; and having marveled, he will reign; and having reigned, he will rest. The Coptic version of Thomas adds a step: the one who finds will first be troubled, and only then astonished. The difference is worth a week of mornings.
The fellowship hears in the saying the shape of the whole path of study. Seeking is the work of the first years. Finding comes, usually without warning. Then the trouble, and after it the marvel, as the student realizes what she has found and what it will ask of her. Then a kind of sovereignty over herself that she did not have before. And at the end, rest, which is not the end of the work but the end of the striving. The Lection of the Ladder says you do not climb the ladder; you become the one who can stand on each rung. This saying names the rungs.
The Brother
Three fragments of the Gospel of the Hebrews concern the brother, and the fellowship has gathered them together.
The monk of Bethlehem quotes it as saying: never be glad, except when you look upon your brother in love. And he says it numbers among the gravest of sins the act of one who has grieved the spirit of his brother.
And it tells, as no other gospel does, of the risen Lord's appearance to his own brother James, who had sworn not to eat bread until he saw him risen, and to whom the Lord gave bread with his own hands. The James page tells that story in full. A community led by the brother of the Lord remembered the Lord's love for his brother, and made of it a rule: your joy is measured by how you look at the one beside you.
The Nazarenes' Matthew
The fragments of the Gospel of the Nazarenes are mostly small differences from the Matthew the church kept, and they are worth having for the differences.
The man with the withered hand speaks. I was a mason, it has him say, earning my living with my hands; I pray you, Jesus, restore my health, so that I need not beg shamefully for my bread. The healing becomes the restoration of a working man to his work and his dignity, which is how a community of the poor would remember it.
The rich man who asks what he must do is answered at greater length. How can you say, I have kept the Law and the prophets? For it is written in the Law, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, and behold, many of your brothers, sons of Abraham, are clothed in filth and dying of hunger, and your house is full of many good things, and nothing at all goes out of it to them. It is the sharpest sentence about wealth in any gospel, and it is entirely Jewish: the rich man is condemned not by a new law but by the oldest one.
Before the baptism, his mother and brothers say to him: John is baptizing for the forgiveness of sins; let us go and be baptized by him. And he answers: in what have I sinned, that I should go and be baptized by him? Unless perhaps what I have just said is ignorance. The monk of Bethlehem also says that where the church's gospel has give us this day our daily bread, the Hebrew gospel had bread for tomorrow: the bread of the coming day, given today.
The Ebionites' Gospel
The third gospel, the one the bishop of Salamis quoted against the Ebionites, gave John cakes of honey instead of locusts and had Jesus say that he came to abolish the sacrifices. Its fragments are described on The Poor, with the fellowship's cautions about what they can and cannot tell us.
How the Fellowship Reads Them
A fragment is a shard of a broken jar, and every one of these shards was picked up by someone with a purpose. The teacher of Alexandria quoted a saying because it agreed with him. The bishop quoted the Ebionites because they did not. The monk of Bethlehem quoted what illuminated a point in his commentaries, and was not always careful to say which book he was quoting. We do not know what the whole jars looked like. We should not build a doctrine on a single shard.
But we can hold one in the hand. The fellowship suggests that a student take one fragment a week to the Morning Watch, read it twice, the second time aloud, and carry it through the day, as the How We Read page describes. Begin with never be glad except when you look upon your brother in love, and see how many hours of the day it rules out. It will be fewer than you hope and more than you fear. That is how the Nazarenes, who lost almost everything else, can still teach.