Jesus Rabbi and Lord: The Hebrew Story of Jesus Behind Our Gospels

In 1945, Robert Lisle Lindsey from Norman, Oklahoma, found himself the pastor of a small Baptist congregation in Jerusalem, Israel. With his Hebrew-speaking congregants in mind, he began a translation of the Greek texts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and soon concluded there must lie behind these Gospels--even if distantly--an early Hebrew story of Jesus. To his surprise, he also found that Luke almost always showed Greek texts which could easily be translated literally to Hebrew. The same was true of Matthew, wherever he was not copying Mark's Gospel.In 1962, Lindsey met Professor David Flusser of Hebrew University and the two pursued the question of whether we can get back to the earliest semitic story and words of Jesus. 'It is clear,' say Lindsey and Flusser, 'that our synoptic texts originated mainly in one Greek translation of a Hebrew biography of Jesus, probably written by the Matthew of tradition. The materials are too Hebraic to have originated in Greek, as many scholars