Hebräisches Evangelium und synoptische Überlieferung

Guido Baltes argues that the quest for possible Hebrew origins of the gospel tradition might provide a useful methodological tool for work on the synoptic problem. He sets out to paint a picture of a trilingual language milieu for the period of Second Temple Judaism in which spoken Hebrew is used alongside Aramaic and Greek both as a vernacular and literary language and suggests that Hebrew should therefore be considered as a possible linguistic milieu of origin for the early gospel tradition. Selected passages from the synoptic tradition are hypothetically retroverted into a linguistically plausible Hebrew language form to enable their placement within the context of early Jewish literature. From here, a possible history of tradition is reconstructed that includes the transition from the Hebrew to the Greek language milieu and the formation of different synoptic variants. The results of the study tentatively point into the direction of an early proto-matthaean stage of the gospel tradition preceding the three canonical gospels.