The Biblical Quotations in Matthew

In his most recent book, the great Semitist, Professor Charles Cutler Torrey, presents a new theory to explain the phenomena of the Old Testament quotations in the Gospel of Matthew, and thus adds one more element to the recurrent debate on Aramaic origins of the gospels. Hitherto most critics have held that the vast majority of citations in the first gospel were taken over from the Septuagint (or, more properly, the Old Greek) version, the chief exceptions being the Reflexionszitate or “formula citations,” a group of passages introduced by some such formula as “in order that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet, saying” (1:22). The latter were thought to have been made on the basis of the Hebrew text, either directly by the evangelist, or borrowed from an old book of Christian testimonies or proof-texts, or, as Bacon believed, taken over from the Aramaic “targumic material” which had grown up in Syria around Mark's gospel. Torrey completely rejects this usual view, which assumes that our Mt. was originally written in Greek. The original Mt., he says, was in Aramaic, and its principal source was the originally Aramaic Mk.; its biblical quotations were, however, in the Hebrew of the Bible. If, at many points, quotations in the Greek Mt. agree with Greek Mk., it is only because the translator of Mt. made use of the latter.