A medieval Hebrew text of Matthew survives embedded in Even Boḥan, a polemical work completed around 1380 by the Spanish rabbi Shem-Tov ben Isaac ben Shaprut. American scholar George Howard argued in 1987 that this Hebrew version may preserve readings older than the Greek manuscript tradition, rather than being a later translation from Greek into Hebrew — a claim that remains debated among textual scholars.
One of the most-discussed features of Shem-Tov's text is its use of HaShem (“the Name,” abbreviated in the manuscripts) at roughly twenty points where the Greek text of Matthew has Kyrios (“Lord”). Where Greek collapses several distinct underlying ideas into one title, the Hebrew text's use of the traditional circumlocution for the divine name draws a sharper line between addressing God directly and addressing Jesus as teacher or master — a distinction the Greek Kyrios can obscure. Scholars disagree on what this pattern proves about the text's origins, but it is a genuine and well-documented textual feature.
In their 2009 study A Prayer to Our Father, Karaite Jewish scholar Nehemia Gordon and pastor Keith Johnson focused specifically on the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 5–6) as it appears in Hebrew Matthew manuscripts, calling it by its traditional Hebrew name, the Avinu (“Our Father”) prayer. Their central argument is that certain phrases left ambiguous in the Greek text resolve cleanly once read against their Hebrew idiom — the kind of wordplay and set phrasing that would be native to a Hebrew composition but difficult to reconstruct from a Greek translation alone.
These notes summarize publicly documented scholarly claims about Hebrew Matthew; no text from Howard's, Gordon's, or Johnson's translations is reproduced here. Their published editions remain under copyright — see the sources below for the full studies.
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