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Jesus’ Coming or Jesus’ Presence—Which?The Watchtower—1996 | August 15
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We see this from the 1995 book Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, by Professor George Howard. The book focused on a 14th-century polemic against Christianity by the Jewish physician Shem-Tob ben Isaac Ibn Shaprut. That document set out a Hebrew text of Matthew’s Gospel. There is evidence that rather than being translated from Latin or Greek in Shem-Tob’s time, this text of Matthew was very old and was originally composed in Hebrew.c It thus may bring us closer to what was said on the Mount of Olives.
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Jesus’ Coming or Jesus’ Presence—Which?The Watchtower—1996 | August 15
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c One evidence is that it contains the Hebrew expression “The Name,” written out or abbreviated, 19 times. Professor Howard writes: “The reading of the Divine Name in a Christian document quoted by a Jewish polemist is remarkable. If this were a Hebrew translation of a Greek or Latin Christian document, one would expect to find adonai [Lord] in the text, not a symbol for the ineffable divine name YHWH. . . . For him to have added the ineffable name is inexplicable. The evidence strongly suggests that Shem-Tob received his Matthew with the Divine Name already within the text and that he probably preserved it rather than run the risk of being guilty of removing it.” The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures—With References uses Shem-Tob’s Matthew (J2) as support for using the divine name in the Christian Greek Scriptures.
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