James R. Edwards


James R. Edwards is an American New Testament scholar and minister of the Presbyterian Church.
In 1997 he joined the faculty at Whitworth University, Spokane where he is currently Bruner-Welch Professor of Theology.

The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition

In 2009, Edwards advanced a controversial theory that the synoptic Gospels are partly dependent on the "Hebrew Gospel" which includes Gospel of the Hebrews, a syncretistic Jewish–Christian text believed by most scholars to have been composed in Koine Greek, the Hebrew Gospel hypothesis of Lessing and others, and traditions of a writing of Matthew's supposed to have been written by him “in the Hebrew language” and Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, 1385, a rabbinical translation of Matthew's gospel. Edwards argues that patristic citations from "the Hebrew Gospel" correlate more distinctly and repeatedly with sections called "Special Luke" in Gospel of Luke than with either Gospel of Matthew or Gospel of Mark.
Two separate reviews were published by the Society of Biblical Literature in which the reviewers were not convinced of Edwards' thesis. John S. Kloppenborg also reviewed Edwards' thesis negatively.
Edwards also rejects the modern division, by Schneemelcher and others, of the Jewish-Christian Gospels' fragments into three or more separate lost Gospels.

Works

Commentaries

Other books