HKB
This apostle was also regarded as author of the Gospel according to the Hebrews*, a heretical product of *c. 120, current in Greek among the Jewish Christians of Palestine (Ebionites).
It is indispensable to a historical appreciation of the environment out of which any gospel has arisen that we realize that no community ever produced and permanently adopted as its "gospel" a partial presentation of the message of salvation. To its mind the writing must have embodied, for the time at least, the message, the whole message, and nothing but the message. Change of mind as to the essential contents of the message would involve supplementation or alteration of the written gospel employed. No writing of the kind would be produced with tacit reference to some other for another aspect of the truth.
It was not, then, the mere limitation of its language which caused the ancient Matthæan Sayings (the so-called Logia) to be superseded and disappear; nor is mere "translation" the word to describe that which took its place. The growth of Christianity in the Greek-speaking world not only called upon Jerusalem to pour out its treasure of evangelic tradition in the language of the empire, but stimulated a sense of its own increasing need. That which could once be supplied by eye-witnesses, the testimony of Jesus' mighty works, his death and resurrection, was now fast disappearing. And simultaneously the appreciation of its importance was growing. It was impossible to be blind to the conquests made by the gospel about Jesus. Enclosed in it, as part of its substance the gospel of Jesus found its final resting-place, much as the mother church itself was later taken up and incorporated in a catholic Christendom. So it is that in the Elder's time the church of the 'apostles, elders and witnesses' have done more than merely supersede their Aramaic(?) Syntagma of the Precepts by "translations." They had adopted alongside of it from Rome Mark's "Memorabilia of Peter" as to "things either said or done by the Lord." We can see indeed from the apologetic way in which 'the Elder' speaks of Mark's limitations (Peter is not to be held responsible for the lack of order) that Mark's authority is still held quite secondary to Matthew's; but the very fact that his work is given authoritative standing at all, still more the fact that it has become the framework into which the old-time syntagma has been set, marks a great and fundamental change of view as to what constitutes "the gospel."