Hebrew Gospel Pearls #26 – Another Jesus?

You are listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: I actually saw this years ago. I was at Mount Scopus in the archaeology library and there was this guy who would just sit there day after day after day after day, as many of us did, reading, and one day he gets up and he shouts, “Eureka! I found it!”

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Gospel Pearls episode 26, where we will be speaking about Matthew chapter 5 verse 19. What are you doing? Are you playing cards?

Keith: I’m holding my hand!

Nehemia: You’re holding your hand?

Keith: I’m holding in my hand.

Nehemia: Matthew 5:19, one of my favorite verses in the Gospel of Matthew, and I’m excited to talk about this. I can’t wait.

Keith: Matthew 5:19 is a game changer, it’s a game changer Nehemia, I’m going to tell you what – the reason I’m holding these cards is, you know how people say they hold their cards close to their chest?

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: No more holding the cards close to the chest! I’m going to tell you what’s in my hand.

Nehemia: What’s your hand?

Keith: Do you ever play poker?

Nehemia: Not really.

Keith: Have you never played poker? Anything? Five card…

Nehemia: I think when I was a kid, but I didn’t really understand the rules.

Keith: Let me tell you this – what do you think is the best hand you could get out of five cards?

Nehemia: Like a royal flush?

Keith: That’s pretty darn good.

Nehemia: Is there something better?

Keith: I’ll tell you what I have in my hand.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Keith: King high, first of all.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: And four aces.

Nehemia: Is that highest cards they have?

Keith: This is like huge; this is huge forces. The reason I’m saying this, Nehemia, is that 5:19 was where you literally did something, and I know folks hear me say change the game, but you literally changed the game. And I actually sent a picture to you, and I want you to be able to share this picture, because what you did was, when you called from 5:18 and said, “Okay Keith, let’s study together again.” I said, “Well, how are we going to study together again?” And this is going to open up a door for you to do some explaining. You have to do some explaining.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: So, you said, “Okay, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go through the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, and then we’re going to check it letter by letter.” Put up the picture Nehemia.

Nehemia: Okay. So here’s the picture you asked to put up. Tell us what we’ve got here Keith.

Keith: What Nehemia’s got here, and I want you to help explain this. So there’s three things that I have here; this is my desk. This is you saying, “Okay Keith, you want to get serious about studying the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, here’s what I’m going to ask you to do.” Do you remember what you asked me to do?

Nehemia: Remind me.

Keith: This over here is Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew. This over here is a manuscript from?

Nehemia: That’s the British Library Manuscript.

Keith: Absolutely. And what’s that over there to the left?

Nehemia: That there is from a book I put together called The Naming of Jesus in Hebrew Matthew, in which I went through a section of Hebrew Matthew letter by letter, essentially helping people to understand what you would find in the British Library Manuscript, how you could read it, what the different textual features are. I gave actually a chart there; this is the letter Shin in this manuscript, this is what the letter Tav looks like, this is the final Kaf, so that anybody could take any section and be able to read it for themselves.

Keith: This is so amazing. So you said to me, “Keith, what we’re going to do is we’re going to be checking letter by letter between the manuscripts,” and I’ve got that as a reminder, because I’m saying, well I don’t remember, this is cursive, this is different than what I’m reading over there. So, letter by letter we’re going to go through it. And then this is when I found out something about Nehemia, guys. I found out something about Nehemia. Every once in a while, he Howard’s the text. What do you mean he Howard’s the text? Sometimes Nehemia will look at the text, the Hebrew will be there, and then he’ll say, “I’m just not 100% sure.” Now I’m going to let you explain “Howarding the text”, but… go ahead.

Nehemia: To be fair to Howard, there’s a challenge you have in dealing with manuscripts. There’s a scholar of the Greek New Testament who says, “we have this embarrassment of riches.” When you’re dealing with the manuscript of Plato or Aristotle, you’ve one, maybe two manuscripts, and there’s not a lot of difference between the manuscripts because you only have a couple. So they might be completely corrupt or difficult to understand because something has been changed, but you would never know it because you only have a very small number of manuscripts.

The Greek New Testament, we have thousands of manuscripts, and Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew we have 28, and in this particular section we’re dealing with we have 20. So, what you do is you systematically compare the manuscripts, and you try to figure out what does the original text – maybe not what Matthew wrote in the 1st century – but the original text, in this case that Shem Tov wrote in 1380. Because we have copies of copies of what Shem Tov wrote, we don’t have the autograph that Shem Tov himself copied. We’re trying to get back to what’s called the ur text, that’s a German word, the U-R text, the original text. In this case, the ur text of Shem Tov when he copied it around 1380.

So, you’re comparing and checking these different manuscripts and looking for the differences, and what you’re looking for is errors. You’re trying to figure out if this is an error. If there’s 20 manuscripts, and 15 of them read one thing, and five of them read another, and one of those seems like it’s an error, then you go with the ones that make sense.

Now, sometimes you don’t. There’s a principle in textual criticism called dificili oralectio, the more difficult reading is preferable, and it doesn’t make sense. Why would that be? Why would the more difficult reading be preferable? Because it’s the nature of copyists to try to make things easier. So, it’s true that copyists make mistakes all the time, but it’s also the nature of copyist to see something they don’t understand and say, “Okay, I’ll fix this.” And to fix what weren’t really mistakes, what was intended in the first place.

The reason I call this Howarding – and I think that’s why you call it Howarding – really goes back to the book I wrote, The Hebrew Yeshua Versus the Greek Jesus. In The Hebrew Yeshua Versus the Greek Jesus, Matthew 23 says, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat; all therefore that they bid you observe, that observe, and do.” And you look in the Hebrew text, and instead of “all therefore that they bid you,” it says something to the effect of – it’s been years so I’m paraphrasing here – you could read it for me, Matthew 23 verse 2, 3 in Howard’s text.

In the Hebrew it says, “Kol asher yomar lachem,” “all that he says to you, diligently do.” What Howard naturally does is, he says, “He says? Who’s the he? Obviously, this is a mistake, and it’s supposed to be ‘all that they say to you.’” And indeed, many manuscripts have “they say to you.” So, he fixes it. Why does he fix it? Because the other version makes no sense to him. It sounds like gibberish, and if it’s gibberish – that happens in manuscripts, there’s a mistake, fix the mistake. We call that “Howarding the text”.

Keith: So, Nehemia, here we have Howard. On the left side, we’ve got Hebrew, on the right side we have English. This is where he Howard’s it. On the left sometimes, it’s right there.

Nehemia: So, in the Hebrew on the left it says, “all that yomar”, “that he says.”

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And on the right it says “they” in parentheses. Here’s the beautiful thing about that example. I have a testimony from a gentleman named Ross Nichols, who went to a conference where he heard Professor Howard speak. Howard spoke about this passage, and Nichols raised his hand and said – and this is before I even heard of Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew, or this whole issue of Matthew 23, so this is years before that – he says, “Well, Professor Howard, but what if it is ‘he says’ referring to Moses?” Howard said, “I never thought of that.”

So because he never thought of it, he fixed the text, air quotes “fixed,” fixed thereby he corrected it. So this is interesting – we talk about the difficult version being preferable sometimes. The difficult reading is preferable, and that’s because something scribes in the Middle Ages had a tendency to do, which was fix the text, i.e., change it to fit their preconceptions and understanding. Well, modern scholars do that too, and we’ve called that “Howarding the text”, and now I think Keith is about to expose me Howarding the text.

Keith: There are times… letter-by-letter-by-letter, hours letter-by-letter, and what I want to say about that, Nehemia, is you gave me a chance to do something that I just wouldn’t have had an opportunity to do had you not provided it. You said, “Okay Keith, your job is to go behind me, and go letter-by-letter, learning the cursive in that particular manuscript.” There’s so many different cursive…

Nehemia: Semi-cursive.

Keith: Semi-cursive. But then I thought to myself, “I wonder if there’s ever been a time when Nehemia has done this?” I just happened to bring this. This is The Gospel of Matthew According to a Primitive Hebrew Text; if you haven’t watched episode 22 or 23, we talked about this. This was the first thing that Nehemia sent me, and so in preparation for episode 19 I opened this up just for fun.

Nehemia: And to put it in context, I sent you that sometime in early 2000s.

Keith: Oh, it was, yeah, a long time ago. So, I thought to myself, “I wonder if there’s ever an example where the scribe, I mean Nehemia, I mean Howard, I mean whoever, would actually do like a note or anything. And so it’s now time for us to go to episode, this is happening in real time folks, we are at episode number twenty-what?

Nehemia: This is episode 26.

Keith: 26, and we are reading from Matthew 5:19, which was a game changer.

Nehemia: What page is this?

Keith: This is page number 19. Can you tell me… there’s some writing over the top of this, Nehemia, I don’t know if we’ll be able to show this.

Nehemia: Here’s what I did. I was at the Mount Scopus Library in Jerusalem and I took this book of Howard, The Gospel of Matthew According to a Primitive Hebrew Text, I went down to the basement, photocopied the whole thing. Later I made a second copy for you, but initially I had my own copy. As I was reading through my own copy, I came to Matthew 5:19 and I saw this word Alef-Lamed-Mem-Daled, alemed, that I teach, asher alemed, that I teach, and I said, “Well that doesn’t make any sense,” and I wrote in pencil “R dot”, which means read it, veyelamed, “and he will teach”.

Keith: Okay folks!

Nehemia: So, I corrected the text because the text didn’t make any sense at the time, and then I sent you a photocopy including my correction.

Keith: And I found it. So there were times when we we’re going through this where we’d say, “Is this a Howard issue?” Now Nehemia, we’re now going to 5:19.

Nehemia: Yes, I Howarded the text!

Keith: Matthew chapter 5 verse 19, this is the beauty of having people looking, what you’ve always said is this, “Let’s look at the source.” Matthew 5:19, folks, really was a game changer, because Matthew 5:19, there’s a word that potentially could be interpreted differently. I don’t want to go into great depth, Nehemia, but the second thing that you did that changed the game is after we went through that whole process, you said, “In order for us to send this manuscript to a vowel pointer in Israel,” one of the best, “we need to make sure that we have it right.” And we even found some things that he did, I think they’re even in this verse.

Nehemia: Oh, boy.

Keith: So Nehemia, can you just explain, just a little bit before we get into this, why it was that you said that we should have this vowel pointed? Can you just help me with that?

Nehemia: So, first of all I want to make this accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

Keith: There it is! There it is!

Nehemia: What I could do is say, “Okay, there’s 28 manuscripts. Go and learn to read a half a dozen different types of scripts, and you’ll be able to read these yourself, and you don’t need me.” But the average person can’t do that, or if he could do it, not the average person, even the scholars who say, “I don’t have time to do that.” So I wanted to make it as accessible as possible, and so putting vowels in the text makes it possible for somebody with a rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew to be able to read it and understand it a lot better than if you don’t have any vowels. Now, when you put in vowels, you’re also interpreting things.

Keith: That’s big.

Nehemia: Now sometimes there’s only one way to read things, but other times there’s multiple ways, multiple potentiality’s with how you put the vowels in. And what I wanted to do is put those vowels in, show people, “Here’s one way to read it based on these manuscripts.” And ultimately what I want to do is have it so that people can read it from any manuscript.

Keith: There you go.

Nehemia: In other words, there are technologies out there that we’re still exploring, where you could say, “You know what? I want to see what Manuscript C says,” and have that text with full vowels. “I want to see Manuscript F,” click a button and have that with full vowels. I want to see Manuscript C compared to Manuscript F, and dynamically this software, we don’t have that software yet, we’re working with some people try to apply that to Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew. But make it so that people have access to this kind of… I’m looking here at a spreadsheet, literally an Excel spreadsheet, that has hundreds and hundreds of columns, and each column is a different word in a different manuscript. This blew me away when we were preparing this. We were originally talking about doing all of chapter 5, beginning in verse 13 through the end, and I said, “Keith, this is over 10,000 data points.”

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: There’s X number of words times 20 manuscripts. And starting in verse 27 there’s more than 20 manuscripts. This is over 10,000 data points. This could take a little bit longer than we anticipated. So we took a smaller section and did it in more detail. So the purpose of the vowels for me is, number one, make it accessible, and number two, to provide people with the different understandings of different ways to read it. Because sometimes – and this is what happened initially when I made that Howard correction in the text, I Howarded the text, because I read the text as it appeared with my preconceptions of what I thought it should say, and it made zero sense to me. So I said “This has to be an error” and I corrected it. Now, maybe it is an error, and my correction was right, but what I want to do is say, “Okay, here is the text we have. What does it mean based on the way it’s written?”

This was actually a profound experience I had when I was studying at Hebrew University. I had this class, and in the class the professor was talking about one of the great scholars of the mid-20th century who was a professor at Hebrew University. What he was famous for was correcting the text. And I don’t mean the correcting of the Gospel of Matthew, he was correcting the text of Amos; he was correcting the text of Isaiah; he was correcting the text of the Torah. He would read a passage and say, “That can’t be what it means,” and he would modify the text to fit his understanding of what it should mean. This type of correction is called an emendation, and that’s a technical term in textual criticism. Emendation doesn’t just mean you amended the text; it means you changed the text based on conjecture. Conjecture, meaning you don’t have a manuscript that says that, but that’s what you think the text should say.

So, I’m studying in this class, doing my master’s degree in Hebrew University and we’re talking about Professor Tur-Sinai, who was famous for changing the text, and he says, “What do we have that Professor Tur-Sinai didn’t have?” And everyone’s trying to say, “Oh, well we have the Vatican Manuscript,” another person says, “No, we’ve got the Paris Manuscript.” “Well now we’ve got the Aleppo Codex.” And the professor said, “No, what we have is the text the way it was written, and what Tur-Sinai had was a text of his own creation.” That really struck me to my core, and I made a decision that whenever I was dealing with the text, I wanted to deal with the text as it’s come down to us. Now, there are situations where you have no choice but to insert emendations.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: In other words, a change based on a conjecture, or a change based on an actual manuscript, which is always preferable. Therefore, when it’s based on a manuscript it’s not conjecture, it’s based on evidence. But even then you have to consider all the evidence and say, “Alright, some manuscripts have this, some have that. And what is your reason for accepting A versus B? Well, I accept B, because B makes more sense to me.” Well, what does A mean? Does it have a meaning at all? Or is it just gibberish? And look, sometimes it’s gibberish.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: You have no choice but to amend the text, or to go with the readings of one manuscript over the other.

Keith: So, I want to give you just the two cards. First card Nehemia says, “Keith, I’m going to let you be my assistant editor of the Hebrew Matthew project.” That’s king high. Second thing Nehemia says, “We’re going to get this vowel pointed.” That’s my first ace.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: Now, let’s start talking about 5:19. I want you to read it in Hebrew and read it in English, and then let’s get into why do you make certain decisions.

Nehemia: Now, you mentioned about our vowel pointer.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And we actually dug up the email – I have a screenshot here of the email. I don’t know if I should show the screenshot, but at least I’ll read it. No, I’m going to show the screenshot. This guy is a brilliant scholar, and one of the things I said to him, on March 28th, 2017, at 12:48 PM…

Keith: Wait, 2017, right?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Okay, go ahead.

Nehemia: I said, “Derech agav, ain leteken et ha’itzurim,” I said, “By the way, do not change the consonants! Your job is to put in vowels, do not change the consonants,” “gam im timtzah ta’uyot,” “even if you find mistakes.” Because that is what was in the manuscript that I copied from, and I bring him an example where it makes zero sense in the text.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: I shouldn’t say zero, but it makes very little sense, and I said, “Obviously it should be read this other way, but I want to represent the consonantal text exactly as it appears in the manuscript,” the manuscript that I found. So, we have very specific instructions.

Keith: Very specific.

Nehemia: Do not change the consonants, only put in vowels.

Keith: 95% of what he did – perfecto.

Nehemia: Perfecto.

Keith: A couple percent, in some of the places… he Howarded it.

Nehemia: In some of the places, he didn’t even Howard it.

Keith: No, he didn’t Howard it.

Nehemia: At least Howard is saying “Look, this text doesn’t make sense. I’ve got to change it based on my own conjecture or based on other manuscripts that I have.” What our language editor did, who put in the vowels – and maybe he even did this subconsciously – he said to himself, I think, “Well, the Academy of the Hebrew Language has established a certain set of rules for how to write a Hebrew text that has vowels in it, and it’s supposed to be written in a different way when there’s no vowels in it.” It’s a standard that’s established by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, and there were cases where he changed the consonants of the text because he said, “There’s vowels here, we don’t need this extra Yud,” “there’s vowels here, we don’t need this extra Vav.” Vav is an extra? It’s in the manuscript, you’ve got to represent it because those were your instructions. And I think probably on an unconscious level he did that – he made it fit not just his preconceptions, but the set of rules that he’d been trained in. And he’s one of the top people in the world to point according to these rules, but for our purposes… And look, he did this over a period of a significant amount of time, so maybe he didn’t remember what I wrote in an email in 2017.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: And so, he’s like, “Okay, I see there’s an extra Yud here, let me take that out, and put it in the vowel, an extra Vav, I’ll put a kubutz instead of a shuruk.”

Keith: But what’s amazing here, Nehemia, is we’re able to find out where those things were done. Now we read 5:19.

Nehemia: Okay, and we found the original file that we sent to him, because at first, we were like, “Well, maybe we did this.”

Keith: Made a mistake.

Nehemia: Maybe Nehemia miscopied it, and we found the file we sent him in the email from 2017, and we proved definitively that he was the one who changed our text. So, the text is going to have to go through some revisions to fix it. Alright, so Matthew chapter 5 verse 19.

Keith: Can I read the NASB before you do it?

Nehemia: Absolutely.

Keith: The NASB says, “Therefore whoever nullifies one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same,” italics, “to do the same,” “shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever keeps and teaches them,” italics, “he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Howard, verse 19, “He who shall transgress one word of these commandments,” parentheses, “(and shall teach) others, shall be called a vain person,” parentheses “(in the kingdom of heaven), but whoever upholds and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” That’s Howard.

Nehemia: Parentheses in Howard means that’s not what’s in the Hebrew text on the other side of his page. It’s generally based on readings from other manuscripts that he has in the notes in the lower part of the page in the Hebrew.

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: Or it’s what he thinks it should say.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: So, 19, and this is based on the comparison of the 20 surviving manuscripts.

Keith: This is good.

Nehemia: Let’s see, is it actually 20 for this particular verse? Let me just see here, I don’t remember. Yeah, it’s exactly 20 manuscripts. “Ve’asher ya’avor ma’amar echad mi’hamitzvot eileh,” or “mi’mi’mitzvot eileh,” and then here we have two major different versions, I’ll read each of them. “Asher elamed acherim,” or “acharim,” “ken hevel yikareh bemalchut shamayim, ve’hamekayem ve’ha’melamed gadol yikreh malchut shamayim.” We went through whole verses where there were no differences between any of the manuscripts.

Keith: This one’s golden with it.

Nehemia: Here there are huge differences. Here we have a sub-family which is five manuscripts, which the main one is the British Library Manuscript, the one that Howard uses as base text. Why is that the main manuscript? Really, just because Howard used it. I would actually argue that Manuscript V is more important than Z.

So, we have five manuscripts that are part of a sub-family. All of those manuscripts are part of family B, but within family B is a sub-family, and four of these manuscripts have a very interesting characteristic. That characteristic is they don’t have the complete Gospel of Matthew; they all end in Matthew chapter 23, I believe it’s verse 22. Now, if one manuscript ends in Matthew 23:22, I’m sure the rest of it was there and the rat came and ate those pages, or bookworms came and ate those pages, or they got wet, they fell off. And that happens all the time, you know. What are you missing in many of your books, those who still have print books? The beginning of the book and the end of the book. It’s very, very common, and extremely common with manuscripts where you had literally bookworms that will come and eat parts of it, and you had mold and all kinds of things, and you lose pages.

So, if one manuscript is missing the rest of Matthew after the end of 23 and the rest of the Gospel, it was a worm or something like that, or mold, or water damage. Well, we have four manuscripts that all end in Matthew 23:22. What does that tell you? That means they’re all copied from a single source, and it’s possible that that source is one of those four manuscripts. What’s interesting is the fifth member of that group, Manuscript V, is identical in almost every detail to the other four, except it goes all the way to the end of Matthew. Now you can be sure Manuscript V was not copied from those other four, because where else would it get the end of Matthew? It didn’t get it from the British Library Manuscript; the British Library Manuscript doesn’t have it.

So, this sub-family of manuscripts… and look, Howard only knew about two of these, Z and C. He didn’t know about N, T, and V.

Keith: Where are those from?

Nehemia: Different places, I don’t remember off the top my head what those codes stand for; there’s 28, I have a list. So, all five of those manuscripts, the Z subgroup, or maybe the V subgroup it’s better to call it, they all have a different reading than the rest of the manuscripts. All of the other manuscripts have, “He who violates one word from these commandments.” Everybody agrees on that so far; that’s essentially identical in all the manuscripts.

Keith: You know you didn’t give us the English of your Hebrew?

Nehemia: Oh, I didn’t?

Keith: No. I thought you did it on purpose because you didn’t want to go to the controversy.

Nehemia: Oh no, I thought I’d translated it because I was reading it and understood it. Alright, so let’s read the two possibilities.

Keith: Did you guys hear what he just said?

Nehemia: So, let’s read the two possibilities. Let’s read first the majority reading.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: Which is both families A and B; remember we talked about those two families? A and B both have the same thing, more or less, meaning there are some differences. “He who violates one of these commandments,” and some manuscripts have, “the smallest of these commandments,” “and shall teach others, son of emptiness,” and we’ll come back to son of emptiness, “son of vanity, son of emptiness he will be called in the kingdom of heaven, and he who keeps and teaches, great he will be called in the kingdom of heaven.” That’s the majority reading with some minor variations. Some of the manuscripts don’t have the word “least” or “small”, they just have “one of these” “ma’amar,” “the saying of one of these commandments.” Some of them have the “one small saying of these commandments,” it’s a slight difference, but other than that, that is the reading you’re going to find in 15 of the manuscripts.

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: What’s interesting by the way, mentioning our vocalizer, the word for “these.” This is a very trivial point, but the word for “these” in the manuscripts is eilu, Alef-Lamed-Vav. He changed it to Alef-Lamed-Hey, eileh, because eileh is standard in modern Hebrew. But the manuscripts, all 20 of the manuscripts say eilu. Actually, one of them, literally a worm ate that part of it so we don’t know, but 19 of the manuscripts have eilo or ha’eulu, so he actually changed a consonant based on what he considerd to be standard Hebrew grammar, modern Hebrew grammar, and we’re trying to represent what’s in the manuscripts. Alright, now here is where the difference comes. So, “teaches one of the least of these commandments,” or “the smallest of these commandments,” or literally it’s either “one word of these commandments,” or “one small word of these commandments,” and then there’s two versions here. The majority version in both families, A and B says, “ve’yelamed acherim ken,” “and shall teach other so,” “hevel ikareh be’malchut shamayim,” “emptiness he will be called in the kingdom of heaven.” Now we’re going to get back to emptiness, so let’s not focus on that for a minute, “he will teach others”. In other words, “anybody who violates one small word of these commandments”, or just “one of these commandments”, whether it’s small or not, there’s two different versions, “and shall teach others so, he will be called hevel in the kingdom of heaven,” he will be called vanity, emptiness, breath, in the kingdom of heaven.

So that’s the majority reading. Then we have the Z subgroup, which is five manuscripts. And when I originally read this, I said, “This is an obvious textual error. It’s an obvious mistake, it makes no sense; read it as ve’yelamed, according to the majority.” That’s what you found there in that photocopy of my photocopy where I wrote notes.

Keith: You’re a Masorete.

Nehemia: I was a Masorete. I was a Howard here.

Keith: You’re giving me notes.

Nehemia: I was Howarding it. However, later I asked the question, “Alright, I understand that this could be a mistake, but what if it’s not a mistake? If it’s not a mistake, what could this possibly mean?” What do I have that this scholar, Tur-Sinai, didn’t have? I have the text that’s come down to us. Instead of creating and fashioning a text according to my own understanding of what it should be, is there some way I can make sense of the text? And maybe it is an error, but let’s first consider the possibility that it’s not.

I had this incredible realization, “This could make perfect sense.” And what would it mean, the Z group representing five manuscripts? “He who violates one word of these commandments that I teach,” “acherim” “I will utterly destroy.” Now, if you read it as acherim, others, which is what it would mean in the context of the other 15 manuscripts, it makes no sense. Why doesn’t it make sense? Because it would mean “he who violates one word of these commandments that I teach others.” That I teach others? I don’t know what sense it can make; maybe it does make sense to somebody. To me it was kind of like what Howard said, “Matthew 23:2-3 doesn’t make sense; let’s put the correct translation in parentheses, because our Hebrew doesn’t make sense.” But I realized we don’t know what the vowels are; we don’t have the vowels in Shem Tov’s text. And maybe what it means is acharim rather than acherim; acharim is from the word cherem, to destroy, acharim, I utterly destroy. So, could that be what Yeshua’s saying?

Keith: So, card number three.

Nehemia: Yes.

Keith: When you said to me that there was the possibility of that for 5:19, what I said to myself is there’s no way we can deal with that translation unless we look at all the possibilities of what you’re actually looking at. What you did, I want to say thank you again, Nehemia, because you brought in Nelson, who is a research assistant, and we sat down and we went for hours, I mean we literally went back and forth on this verse. I want people to get a chance in this next section to do what I did with you, what you did with Nelson and I. What you did, literally, I’ll just say this, it changes the game for appreciation of these manuscripts, and not only the manuscripts, what you went through to get access to them. Can you just explain one more time? There’re some people that don’t know the story. Howard had…

Nehemia: Nine manuscripts.

Keith: And what did you have to do to get access to the other…

Nehemia: 19 manuscripts.

Keith: What did you do? Give me just some of it, this is important. So let me tell you why this is important also folks. We’re at the end of season 2 with this episode, can I tell them that?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Can I talk about it?

Nehemia: I mean we clearly are.

Keith: We’re at the end of season 2 with this episode, which means we did a season one which is 1 through 12, we did the Biblical Beatitudes series, which we called this a season unto its own.

Nehemia: So, it makes this episode the end of season 3.

Keith: I’m sorry season 3.

Nehemia: Meaning chapters 1 through 4 of Matthew would be season 1.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: The Beatitudes by themselves 5, 1 through 12 is season 2, and now 5:13 through 19 is really a theme unto itself.

Keith: It’s a theme unto itself, and I think if we don’t do anything else, 5:17, 18 and 19, be’et hahee, at that time.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: But Nehemia, in getting access to those other manuscripts, which literally changed the game for us, you said, “Let’s now look at the manuscripts.” That was ultimately why you said, “Let’s do Hebrew Gospel Pearls; let’s compare and contrast everything we have.” What did you have to go through?

Nehemia: Here was the process, and if I did it today it would be slightly different. But what I had to do at the time is, first of all I knew that Hebrew Matthew was part of a book Shem Tov wrote called Even Bochan. So, the first thing I did is I sat down at the National Library of Israel in the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, and I pulled up on their ALEF computer system, which we could say ALEF of blessed memory.

Keith: You brought me down there.

Nehemia: Oh no, it’s not just down there; their computer system called ALEF no longer exists. I was actually there at the library in Jerusalem when they announced that they were imminently about to end this system, and one of the scholars who was down there said, “You don’t understand; 80% of the new discoveries in Jewish studies take place in this room using ALEF, and we’ve had this system for decades. If you abolish the ALEF system, we won’t be able to continue doing research.” And there was actually a protest.

Keith: Get out of here!

Nehemia: And I was part of this protest saying, “You guys can’t do this, you can’t abolish the ALEF database.” It was incredible! Here’s a great story Keith. My sister Ayala, who lives in Modi’in, Israel, invited me to Shabbat lunch at her house with her family. She’s an orthodox Jew, and she invited these other folks because they had heard I’m a Karaite and they wanted to meet a Karaite. So, we’re sitting down at Shabbat lunch and her friend, who’s a woman about her age, she’s there with her husband and this woman says, “You know, I was at the National Library of Israel in the basement in the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts and these scholars were protesting,” and I said, “I was there, and I was one of the leaders of the protest.”

So, back up about 15 years before this protest, quite a few before that. I’m sitting there typing away in the ALEF database of blessed memory, and I’m looking for every manuscript of Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew. That’s number one. Then what I have to do is I fill out this little petek, this little piece of paper, and I hand it to the librarian. They disappear, and they come back with a microfilm.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: I pull out the microfilm and I go through the microfilm looking in Even Bochan, the book that Shem Tov wrote called The Touchstone. I’m looking for Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew. Sometimes it’s a manuscript of Shem Tov’s book and it ends in chapter 5, and it never gets to Hebrew Matthew. Why does it end in chapter 5? Because worms came and ate those pages, so it doesn’t include Hebrew Matthew. So I go through every manuscript of Even Bochan to find the ones that have Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew.

Then I say, “Let me take this one step further. Let me look for everything in the catalog that mentions brit chadashah, the New Testament, that mentions Matthew.” And I go through dozens and dozens of microfilms looking to see what they have, and I find all kinds of interesting things. I find there’s The Gospel of Matthew in this University of Stockholm or something like that, somewhere in Sweden, I don’t remember where even. I find all these different Hebrew New Testament texts, but I’m not finding there Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew. And then I start looking for anything that mentions collections, because here was the Achilles heel. Not everything was fully catalogued that I needed to find. What do I mean by catalogued? So, a lot of times there was a Jew in the Middle Ages who maybe he was a doctor or some kind of government official, but he was also a scholar in his spare time, and he would go to the local scribe, and he’d say, “I’m interested in this subject. Can you put together a manuscript for me?” And these weren’t printed, these were custom handwritten documents. “Put together a manuscript for me that has something on grammar, something on Jewish arguments with Christians, something on history, maybe a little bit about Bible commentary.” And the scribe would go to his shelf, and he would pull out different books and he would copy all or parts of those books into this manuscript. And so you have a certain type of manuscript that is a kovetz, a collection. What’s in those collections? Sometimes we have detailed information of what’s on every page, sometimes we don’t; sometimes the catalog just says collection. So, I went and looked at dozens, maybe hundreds of these collections looking for Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew thinking maybe it’s in there. And I found some.

Keith: Wow.

Nehemia: And that’s how I ended up with 28 manuscripts.

Keith: Wow.

Nehemia: Once I had those manuscripts… first I had them in microfilm, and then I had to get permission to image them, let’s put it that way. And in some cases back then, the only way I could get images is they’d say, “Well, we can’t give you permission to take a photocopy.” That’s what people could do back then, “because when we,” we, the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, “we traveled to the Vatican, and they said, ‘Yeah, you can photograph our manuscripts, but only if you agree not to let anybody make copies of them. If they want copies, they should contact us and pay us money.’”

I ended up contacting numerous libraries, and in some cases I bought my own black and white microfilm. This is before digitization, and actually as we were doing the study, in the middle of the study I said, “Wait a minute, I think I still have some of these microfilms.” And I went and pulled it out from a shelf, and I had a box that said “Microfilms” on it, and I opened it up and I found a bunch of microfilms. Some of these microfilms I’ve had for over 15 years, and I realized, wait a minute. I have those digitized, but that was digitized 15 years ago. I could do a lot better today; we have much higher resolution. So, I sent them away to a company. I haven’t gotten them back yet, but I sent them away to this company to re-digitize some of those manuscripts. But in order to do the basic work that we’re doing, first I had to do that painstaking legwork, in which I spent hundreds of hours, looking through things. 99% of what I opened up had nothing to do with Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew, but I wouldn’t know that until I looked through it. And I was able to eventually collect a list of 28 manuscripts that have Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew or portions of Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew.

Keith: So, you’ve gone through that whole process Nehemia, and I asked you that question because we’re just about to go to the real, what I call “the moneyball”, which is you showing us the process and some of the comparing and contrasting.

Nehemia: And this is an even number episode, 26, so the Plus is going to be on NehemiasWall.com for real this time.

Keith: Absolutely

Nehemia: And in the Plus, we get to share some really cool things that we didn’t have time to get to here. I see we’re a little bit overtime as it is.

Keith: Yeah, yeah, but Nehemia, the reason I say that it’s important. I said I’ve got two more cards here, I got two more aces for your Plus episode that I want to share with people. I want people to understand that the process that we’ve been going through for years, and the process that you’ve gone through for years, decades now, is a painstaking process. But man, I’m telling you, the pearls that are coming forward…

Nehemia: This is actually something a lot of people don’t understand about scholarship; they think it’s all exciting and fun. There’s part of it that’s exciting and fun, but 98 or 99% of it is, back in the day, sitting in the library day after day after day, hunched over books, writing notes, hunched over a computer, writing notes. And I said, “Back in the day in the library,” now a lot of it is done from home because of COVID, over the internet. But it’s hunched over a computer, hunched over books taking notes. I actually saw this years ago. I was at Mount Scopus in the archaeology library, and there was this guy who would just sit there day after day after day after day as many of us did, reading, and one day he gets up and he shouts, “Eureka! I found it!”

And this is a guy who had been sitting there for months, for years, doing research trying to put together the pieces of different pottery, and look in books trying to find the parallels, and one day just like that he found it.

Keith: Wow.

Nehemia: And it’s a lot of that; it’s a lot of sifting through massive amounts of data looking for those pearls.

Keith: Now I want to ask a question before we switch to the Plus.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: I asked this question as I was going through this. Do you adhere to the words of Yeshua? I’m not talking to you; I’m talking to our audience. Do you adhere to the words of Yeshua? Or do you adhere to what people say about Yeshua? What I am excited about with Hebrew Gospel Pearls, working with my friend Nehemia Gordon, scholar of scholars, is that we are looking at what potentially could happen by looking at the Greek, to be clear, looking at the English, looking at the Hebrew, finding the Latin and everything else. And asking the question, potentially what does it mean? This next verse stopped me in my tracks. If you have not done any Plus episodes, if you’re only going to do one, please go to Nehemias Wall for this Plus episode. This stopped me in my tracks Nehemia, it stopped me from what I remember was 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, five-and-a-half years. I got stopped in my tracks on the Red Letter Series until we could do what you and I and Nelson did, and I’m telling you right now, it literally changes the game for me, so you introduce what happens next so we can get to…

Nehemia: Alright, let’s pray here. Yehovah, Father in heaven, give us the wisdom as we go forward into this Plus episode to share these incredible pearls.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: That You’ve given us the opportunity and the means and the techniques, the tools to uncover and share with the people. Yehovah, I want to thank all the people who supported my ministry, NehemiasWall.com, Makor Hebrew Foundation, who have supported Keith and BFAInternational.com, because without them we couldn’t have done this. Without them we wouldn’t have the resources to do this, the time to do this, the ability to do this, the infrastructure to do this. Thank you so much, Yehovah, for those people who are our partners, who are sharing in this ministry with us, who are standing with me on the wall, and standing with Keith, building the foundations. This is such a great blessing to us, and through this, may we bless many people. I know I’ve certainly been profoundly blessed. Amen.

Keith: Father, I want to thank you so much for the process, the painstakingly difficult, sometimes I’ve been so impatient, sometimes I’ve been frustrated, I’ve wanted to force the issue, but in Your good time You have given us this opportunity. Even through the circumstances taking place over the last year, year-and-a-half, Nehemia and I have been able to dig down, slow down, take a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth look, seventh look at some of these things, and it’s just humbling that You’ve given me the opportunity to study with Nehemia, and now our study partners that will go with us into the Plus episode. These are study partners that, we pray Father that You will motivate them, give them focus, that we could all study together in Your name. Amen.

You have been listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has been a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the transcript has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If this teaching has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting Nehemia's research and teachings, so he can continue to empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!