An Old Hebrew Text of St. Matthew’s Gospel

Hugh Joseph Schonfield was one of the most fascinating and amazing personalities of the 20th Century. He became a source of inspiration of the thinking of such celebrities as John Lennon. For some, the ideas he proposed were challenging and revealing, whilst others found them to be preposterous or even ridiculous. For certain groups they were even blasphemous and apparently worthy of death.Apart from this obviously popular side to his work, it may be less known that he was also historian of the Suez Canal and was instrumental behind the scenes in a number of high level negotiations in the Middle East. So apart from being one of the most erudite historians of New Testament times, he was politically active in a most novel way. His official work in the Republic which he had caused to come to fruition would lead him to make proposals to governments, many of which would be integrated into final agreements. It has been suggested, for example, that his ideas played a role in the passing of the Test Ban Treaty.
He was a prodigious and skilled writer and researcher and was always on the look out for uncovering the truth and discovering novel interpretations.
It was these efforts and particularly his work for world peace which in fact caused him to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He fought inexhaustibly for this cause to his last dying breath, convinced that there was an eternal plan for a servant people (a "Dienstvolk" instead of a "Herrenvolk") to arise as the only lasting way of saving man from seemingly inevitable disaster..
He was also the first and only Jew to have translated the New Testament into English. I might add that this rendering is also one of the most informative, beautiful and understandable versions. (From "A Life for Mankind - The Biography of Hugh Joseph Schonfield")

In the spring of 1925 the writer purchased from a London antiquarian bookseller a small volume, dated A.D. 1555, containing the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew, followed by a series of Jewish objections to the Gospel to the number of twenty-three, also in Hebrew. The text of the Gospel was accompanied at the end of the volume by a Latin translation. A dedicatory epistle to Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, relates how Jean du Tillet, Bishop of Brieu, while travelling in Italy in the year 1553, found the Hebrew manuscript among the Jews, and brought it back with him to Paris, where he commissioned a Hebrew scholar, Jean Mercier, to translate it into Latin. Mercier, however, has a slightly different tale to tell. In his own preface he states that the Bishop of Brieu had extorted the MS. from the Jews of Rome for the purpose of examination. Confirmatory evidence of this statement appears in the fact that, on 12th August 1553, Pope Julius III. signed a decree for the suppression of the Talmud on the representation of the anti-Semitic Pietro, Cardinal Caraffa, the Inquisitor-General, afterwards Pope Paul IV. This decree was carried into effect in Rome with great ruthlessness on Rosh Hashanna (Jewish New Year's Day), 9th September 1553, for not only were copies of the Talmud seized, on the plea that it was inimical to Christianity, but every Hebrew book on which the minions of the Inquisition could lay their hands. It is highly probable that the Bishop of Brieu found the Hebrew MS. of Matthew's Gospel among the confiscated books.