Summary Luke in toto Part 3

We spent a lot of time discussing the first two chapters of Luke in some detail because that is where the relationship to Matthew is, IMO, the most obvious. Whether or not the two are related significantly affects our interpretation of the rest of the gospel. Honestly, the bare presence of a birth narrative and a genealogy in both the gospels presents a strong prima facie case that the two are related. That each came to the same place for the overriding concepts of these two elements independently of the other beggars belief; but what Luke does with the concepts introduced by Matthew give us a lot of insight into the redactional attitude of Luke throughout the rest of his gospel. In a word, Luke is “correcting” Matthew, and the differences can in large part be ascribed to this motive in Luke. For the most apparent difference between the two birth narratives is the much higher degree of detail and a much more developed story line in Luke; on top of that, we get the focus on Mary and the inclusion of the Baptist into the family tree of Jesus. Providing Jesus’ heritage from the perspective of Mary is eminently logical; after all, she was the true–and only–human parent of Jesus. So right out of the gate Luke is correcting Matthew; if Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, then Joseph is essentially a surrogate, or even a step-father. In turn, this means that the genealogy provided by Luke is likely to be that of Mary. Eusebios–or really, most ancient commentators–was unlikely to consider this possibility because, I mean, who cares about the matrilineal descent? The solution proposed by Eusebios, that the lineage was due to a brother marrying the widow of his brother and so being counted as the father is clever and not to be discarded lightly; however, given the context of the focus on Mary and her kin, including the mother of the Baptist, rather than Joseph, I’m not sure it entirely makes sense, and some ancient commentators suggested this alternative. 

To summarize, the significance of the first two chapters is that they serve as sort of an introduction to Luke’s approach. In the most important way he models and follows Matthew very closely. In both, Jesus is a divine entity–a son of (a) g/God–who owes his inception to the Sacred Breath of God, who exhaled the soul of Jesus into Mary’s womb. But then comes the second part of Luke’s agenda: he does not intend to let Matthew stand as it is. Rather, Luke announces from the very outset that he intends to expand on the narrative, and, where necessary, correct the places Matthew got wrong. The expansion came with the story of John’s birth, and then goes much further. In Matthew, Joseph is told by the angel in a dream; it’s very short, somewhat offhand, and completely unsatisfactory. The lower-case annunciation is concerned more with legal niceties so that Joseph not divorce a woman who was carrying a child that was not his. IOW, Joseph would not be stuck with another man’s bastard. 

For Luke, this simply will not do. First, we cut to brass tacks and excise Joseph from this part of the narrative completely. He is not necessary, and more, he doesn’t belong since it was only “supposed” that Joseph was the father of Jesus. No, the person who matters is Mary, and here we get the upper-case Annunciation, the appearance of Gabriel to Mary and the interaction between them. Mary is given the particulars. It’s a complete story rather than a hasty explanation inserted where it needed to be. We are told from the beginning of God’s plan for Jesus, that he should take the throne of David. In this way Jesus’ kingship is foretold not by astrological phenomena as interpreted by some shady astrologers from the non-believing East. No, the kingship is directly from God, explained directly to Mary with no intermediaries. As an interesting aside, this gospel was probably written under the Principate of Domitian. In the world of NT scholarship, his emperor is associated with an deliberate and rather nasty persecution of Christians; one current trend of thought is that it is this persecution that served as the model for the author of Revelations. Domitian also had a real love-hate thing going with astrologers. While he was, apparently, a sincere believer, he also feared them. Many (most?) Roman Emperors shared this latter distaste because they feared that the astrologers could foretell the day of the emperor’s coming death, which gave them highly-classified information. So here’s the question: did Luke flush the Magi story because it provided what we now call “bad optics”? Did he not want to associate Christians with a class of people hated by the Emperor? And here’s one better: what if the Magi story in Matthew was part of the reason that Domitian selected Christians for persecution?  

So there we have the first two underlying principles of Luke’s redactional approach: expand and explain. We will get to the third one later.

Luke also has stories after the birth, up to and including the story of how he was left behind in Jerusalem. The first comes on the occasion of Jesus’ circumcision, on the eight day after his birth. This is still the customary day when the bris is held. Aside note: eight days after December 25 is January 1, what we call New Year’s Day*. On this occasion the Holy Family (is that strictly a Catholic term?) encountered two elderly prophets, Anna and Simeon. Both had been promised that they would live until they saw the Messiah; upon seeing the infant Jesus, both realized that the promise had been fulfilled, and Simeon responded with the prayer that is now called the Nunc Dimittis, These are the first two words of the prayer in Latin, which mean, “Dismiss now (your servant, O Lord). This and the Magnificat of Mary are still staples of Catholic and High Church Episcopalian church music, bequeathed to us by Luke. My daughters sang numerous versions of each in their years in the Royal School of Church Music. The experience of Anna and Simeon merges into the story of Jesus in the Temple when he was twelve. He was discoursing on the HS, and amazing all who heard him; AND they connect back to John the Baptist. 

*Back when I was a lad, in the Roman Rite this was called the Feast of the Circumcision, and it was a Holy Day of Obligation. This meant you had to go to church on pain of your immortal soul. I’m sure there were more than a few hung-over attendees, at least until they started having an evening mass on NY Eve. And, BTW, the name of the feast has since been changed to the Solemnity of Mary, to recognize that she had some part to play in the birth of Jesus. This was the length of time required before Mary was considered ritually pure in Jewish practice. 

The point of these last two stories and that of John the Baptist is to create a framework wherein Jesus can be fitted fully into Jewish tradition. John remained within the mainstream of Jewish tradition, of the time. At some point he was fully co-opted by the Christians, and at some point–perhaps the same point–he fell out of the Jewish tradition. Josephus treats John in a longer passage than he gives Jesus; the obvious implication is that he felt John was more significant to the Jewish story, due, no doubt, to John’s entanglement with Herod Antipas, who had John executed. Josephus wrote his Antiquities at more or less the same time as Luke wrote his gospel, give or take a few years. (I have come to suspect a certain amount of cross-pollination between the two, but that is irrelevant.) So it may very well be that the transfer of John from the Jewish to the Christian tradition happened just after the two of these men wrote their magni opera in the 90s. Putting John in the family tree of Jesus may have been the final straw that caused the decisive transition. 

But that is all tangential to our our concern of the moment. By making John and Jesus kin, Luke ties Jesus firmly to the longer pedigree of Judaism. Then, Anna and Simeon fix the connexion permanently. Being aged (two-syllable pronunciation) and and well-steeped in Jewish law and tradition, they are the perfect pair to affix their imprimatur (fudging the meaning a little) to the identity of the Christ-child. As has been mentioned many times, in the ancient world novelty was not considered a good thing. Respect was given to age and antiquity, so it was very important that Christianity not be seen as a “new thing” if it hoped to attract converts. Judaism had won the respect of many pagans; there were people known as “God-fearers”, pagans who attached themselves to a synagogue and learned about Judaism without necessarily converting. The Christians wanted to be seen in the same light as Jews as a time-honoured belief. Luke creates the context for this very early, by the end of Chapter 2, in fact.

Chapter 3 takes us to the preaching of John and then the Temptations of Jesus by the devil (ho diabolos). It is frequently said that Luke and Matthew never agree against Mark, but they do in the name given to the tempter. In Mark it is Satan; in Matthew and Luke, it is the devil. The word “satan” is Hebrew for “enemy”, and it can mean any sort of enemy, human or otherwise. In the HS, the Hebrew armies are confronted by the armies of their opponents, who are called “satan(s)”, the word being a standard, lower-case noun with no special implications, and certainly not a proper name. The word means “slanderer”. I’m sure that the Q people do not consider this a time when Mt&Lk agree against Mark. Just as the birth narratives don’t count. And, while Q is supposedly a collection of the sayings of Jesus, both the preaching of John and the longer version of the Temptations story, including the dialogue between Jesus and Old Scratch, are part of Q. This seems like as clear a case of retrofitting the data to fit the theory. John the Baptist and the Temptations are not sayings of Jesus; they are stories told about John or about Jesus. Let’s think about this for a moment, focusing on the Temptations. In Mark, we found the shell of the story, the bare-bones outline. Here, we get the dialogue that fills them out. Are we to suppose that the dialogue and the outline circulated separately for a couple of decades, until the outline was written down by Mark, but the dialogue had to wait another decade until Matthew fitted the Q material into the outline? And then are we to suppose that the same thing happened when Luke found where the dialogue fit into Mark’s narrative? Could it have happened? Sure. Does it seem likely? No. And it has to be conceded that there is no reason why the dialogue had to exist separately from the outline; both could have been a single unit that was recorded in Q.

But let’s think about that. In order for this to fit the Q hypothesis, the original story with both outline and dialogue was recorded in Q. The, the dialogue with the interchange between Jesus and the Tempter was ripped out, and the story circulated in just the outline as it was recorded by Mark. Seems implausible, no? OK, we don’t need that scenario. The third possibility is that the tradition was bifurcated; part of it only contained the bare outline, and this was handed down until Mark wrote it down. The other half of the tradition contained both the dialogue and the outline and was recorded by Q, and handed down to Matthew and, later–and separately–to Luke. Ah, but there is also a fourth possibility. The story circulated in outline until it was recorded by Mark, and then the dialogue was added to put some flesh on the the bare bones. This could have occurred between the time of Mark and Matthew, or Matthew could have composed the dialogue himself, which Luke read when he read or heard Matthew’s gospel. 

Let’s go back to the birth narratives. Where did they come from? No one is suggesting that they were part of Q, so that’s off the table. Where did they originate and when did they start to circulate? Did they exist when Mark wrote? If so, why didn’t he include them? Honestly, the most plausible answer is that they did not exist in the early 70s. So if you compare Mark to Matthew, the most immediate impression received is just how much more is in Matthew. It’s the birth narratives and the dialogue in the Temptations pericope (can’t believe I used that word seriously. And I just learned that it’s pronounced pair-IH-co-pea; short ‘o’ in ‘co’ syllable. It is not pronounced like “periscope” without the ‘s’.) But most of all, the difference between Mark and Matthew (and Luke) is the sheer volume of Jesus’ teaching in the later books that was not present in Mark. What we have, IOW, is a florescence of NT writing. In turn this translates to “the legend was growing”. One of the biggest failings in NT scholarship is to more or less pretend that the 40-50 year gap between Jesus’ death and the first gospel, and the even longer gap to the subsequent gospels, simply does not exist. The pious fiction (intended) is that the record of the gospels accurately reflects the opinions of, the attitudes towards, and the beliefs about held about Jesus when he was executed. This is, frankly, preposterous because it is, frankly, impossible. The corollary to this is the assumption that all the evangelists are telling the same story, that there existed a single, unitary narrative. This allows cutting and pasting parts of one gospel into another, like the Magi coming to the stable rather than Joseph & Mary’s house. We saw just within the limited confines of Mark that the attitude towards Jesus and who he was was evolving as the gospel progressed. Jesus entered as a wonder-worker and ended as the Christ.

So given all this, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that the dialogue between Jesus and The Devil was invented after Mark. Yes, it’s a bit of a jump because I’ve explained it thoroughly, but each gospel adds to the one previous. It gets to the point where the whole of John is more or less an add-on because more than half the episodes in John are only in John. Mark, Mark + so-callled Q material = Matthew; Matthew + Good Samaritan + Widow of Nain + Prodigal Son, etc = Luke. A few select elements from the Synoptics (Feeding 5,000, e.g.) + a whole lot of new stuff = John.  

But not only do both subsequent gospels add more in volume to the predecessor, it adds to the interpretation of Jesus. Mark, in what I see as a very real sense, is sort of his own sequel; he start with one Jesus and ends with another. Matthew completely eliminates the attitude of the first segment of Mark and expands on the interpretation of the second part. That is, Matthew excises the Jesus the Wonder-Worker and presents  Jesus The Christ. Luke mostly follows Matthew because both contain the so-called Q material; however, “Q material” could be a code word for the assumption by Luke of much of the material Matthew added. This is a roundabout way to say that Luke was fully aware of Matthew.

The intent of all of this is to show the overall development of the Christ-explanation for Jesus. For the moment, the direction and the actual different content of the gospels is not important. What matters is that we recognize that this development existed. Each gospel has a different emphasis which changes the story it tells to some degree. This conclusion will be unavoidable when we get to John and “in the beginning was the Logos”; but even there, John is only increasing the emphasis on Jesus’ divinity, and the emphasis on Jesus’ divinity was the major development begun in Matthew and restated by Luke. So now that this has been established, let’s take a look at some of the ways Luke both reiterates the message of Matthew and how he revises the message of Matthew.

 

Summary Luke in toto Part 2 — Updated

One thing Luke decided to change was the birth narrative. He gives a story that is entirely different from Matthew. Or did he?

Common Features shared by Matthew and Luke:

• The fact that there is a birth narrative at all
• Dating the birth to a ruler (Herod/Quirinius)
• The Holy Family does a Road Trip (to Egypt/to Bethlehem)
• Notice of impending birth given by angel
• Conceived by Holy Spirit
• Virgin birth
• Joseph the surrogate father
• Bethlehem
• Celestial phenomenon announcing birth (Star/Heavenly Host)
• Visited by others (Magi/Shepherds)
• The move to Nazareth
• Genealogy

Note the significant amount of overlap. Yes, the birth narratives are very different between the two gospels, each having its own peculiar set of details. There is no Slaughter of the Innocents in Luke, and no story about the manger in Matthew. But look at that list. All of these features occur in two places in the NT: in Matthew’s gospel and Luke’s gospel. Yet these similarities are never discussed when the discussion turns to Q. They never enter the discussion. They are never mentioned. They are pretty much completely ignored. How can it be possible to have this many connexions between the two stories if Luke was not aware of Matthew? Where did Luke get Joseph and Bethlehem, which are not in Mark in any conceivable way. Mark introduces him as Jesus of Nazareth with no hint that he was born elsewhere. The reason for this, I will posit, is that the messiah identity had not been fully formed when Mark wrote. But, by the time Matthew did, the Christ was integral, so Matthew had to come up with further evidence to support the contention. Hence Bethlehem, the city of David. Jesus’ birth had to be an event of cosmic significance, hence the Star. Jesus’ birth had to be foretold, hence the Virgin Birth which hearkens back to Isaiah. Sort of. Isaiah says that “he” will be born to a young girl, which in Hebrew does not have the concept of virginity that it present in the Greek “parthenos” (note: a feminine noun despite the -os ending which is almost always masculine). Hence we have Athene Parthenos, Virgin Athene, whose temple on the acropolis is called The Parthenon The word occurs only once in Acts and Revelation, and several times in Paul. In none of these instances are the references to the Virgin Mary, but to common garden-variety virginity and virgins. 

In and of itself this should get our attention, but an even more improbable “coincidence” is Joseph. The only Joseph in Mark is Joseph of Arimathea. Mark calls Jesus the son of Mary in Chapter 6, with no mention of Joseph. Virgin birth? Not so much. Both Matthew and Luke have a genealogy, but they are very different, and this is used as an argument that, had he known Matthew, Luke would have taken over the former’s genealogy. I disagree. Luke is correcting Matthew, or providing an alternative. Eusebios ascribes the difference to Luke’s use of Levirite marriage, wherein a man was obligated to marry the widow of his brother if the brother had died childless. Others suggest Luke was giving Mary’s lineage, and given the Mary-centric aspect of the early chapters of Luke, this has a certain appeal. 

 

As for the genealogies, I would argue that the differences indicate that Luke knew about Matthew’s. As we read through the text I pointed out numerous times when it seemed, IMO, that Luke was “correcting” Matthew. He did this mostly by agreeing with Mark, usually putting back text or details where Matthew abridged, or condensed stories that Mark had told. But there are also some little things, like his insistence that Jesus lived in Nazareth and did not move to Caphernaum as Matthew explicitly stated. But the choices are that Luke included a genealogy ignorant of Matthew’s, or because of the one Matthew provided. Seriously, how likely is it that both evangelists came to this idea independently. Yes, it could be an indication that the lineage of Jesus had become a hot topic and so both evangelists felt the societal pressure. On top of this, Matthew’s only goes back to David; Luke pushes all the way back to Adam (actually to God). As such, he is certainly completing the genealogy, but there is more. It comes to the very end, where Luke says that Joseph was considered the father of Jesus, whereas Matthew states specifically that Joseph was the father of Jesus. Of course this catches Matthew in a contradiction: he states both that Joseph was Jesus’ father and that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Both cannot be correct. My suggestion is that Matthew provided what had become the “official” lineage of Jesus, which does three things. First and foremost, it demonstrates the antiquity of the Jewish tradition as a whole, one that included a royal house. Then it connects Jesus to this royal House of David, so Jesus lineage is not only ancient, but kingly. Finally, it bestowed upon Jesus a human father to counter the scandalous gossip that Jesus was a bastard whose father was unknown.

That’s a lot but it seems that Luke felt the need to go one-up. Tracing back to Abraham is fine, but why stop there? So he pushes Jesus back to God himself. Thus Jesus becomes not just a metaphorical son of a god, but the Son of God; or, at least, descended in a direct line from God. This is the sort of thing that would appeal to the pagan, especially the Greek, mind, where every hero was the son of one god or goddess or the other. If Luke was trying to one-up Matthew, that necessitates that Luke was aware of Matthew. That statement is barely a syllogism, let alone a proof, or proof in any logical sense. However, this line of reasoning, to my mind, carries at least as much logical weight as the idea that Luke would have been a fool or madman to change the Q material so masterfully organized by Matthew. The latter is strictly a value judgement based on taste and aesthetics and nothing more. The comparison of genealogies has a certain amount of objective reality. They should, theoretically, be the same. They are not. Why not? And why does Luke’s go back so much further? Of course, there is no answer to this question; we can only offer conjectures. How can this addition of names be explained in a redactionally consistent manner? This is whence arises the suggestion that Luke was trying to go one-up on Matthew, or to “correct” Matthew. We have traced this tendency throughout the gospel, which means it’s both redactional (pertaining to editorial choice) and consistent. So take all of this together, the elements of the birth story and the comparative genealogies and I would be interested to hear someone try to explain all of this away. This would be particularly interesting since the Q arguments pretty much ignore the birth stories. Apparently, the differences are so large and decisive that no one could possibly suggest that Luke was aware of Matthew. This is another situation where, even if the argument cannot be sustained, the question must be asked. There are too many of these “assumptions” lurking in the nooks and crannies of the biblical accounts.

Addendum:

There is one thing that needs to be added here regarding the birth narrative: Bethlehem. It would seem that that the tradition of Jesus of Nazareth was fixed to some extent by the time Matthew wrote. Mark is very sketchy on Nazareth; there is the proclamation in Mk 1:1, but that is easily interpolated. In Chapter 6, however, when Mark had the opportunity to fix Jesus home town, he does not do so. A prophet, Mark has Jesus say, is not honored in his own land; however, Mark neglects to mention the name of the home town (Mk 6:1-6) What is interesting, and what I just noticed, is that Matthew does not name the town either (Mt 13:54-58). Luke, however, specifically states that Jesus went to Nazareth (Lk 4:16) where he had been raised. Here Luke seems to be going out of his way to set the record straight. However, is not exactly the point, even if it does lend some off-hand support to Luke’s awareness of Matthew. What matters is that the tradition of Jesus of Nazareth was not fixed by the time Mark wrote, but it had been by the time Matthew wrote; it was no longer possible for Jesus to be anyone other than Jesus of Nazareth.

So this created a conundrum for Matthew: how to have Jesus born in Bethlehem, the City of David, while yet being Jesus of Nazareth? The implication here is that the idea of Jesus the Christ had also become fixed and immutable between the time of Mark and Matthew. And if Jesus had become the Messiah, being part of the line of David was more or less a de facto requirement, which meant that Jesus had to be born in Bethlehem. Matthew solved this conundrum by splitting Jesus birthplace–Bethlehem–from where he grew up, in Nazareth. Even so, it was not entirely a simple matter of just splitting the two. He had to explain why someone born in Bethlehem became Jesus of Nazareth. This required the move to Nazareth upon returning from Egypt. The whole ploy of the Magi and Herod and the Flight to Egypt and the Slaughter of the Innocents was probably more elaborate than was absolutely necessary, but it got the job done.

Now Luke was faced with the same conundrum, which he solved in his own manner. Luke’s story has one advantage over that of Matthew: in the former’s account, Jesus was truly from Nazareth, even though his birthplace had been elsewhere. To nail this down then, Luke ignores the move to Caphernaum and makes sure to tell us that the prophet was unwelcome in his own town, which was Nazareth. Why didn’t Luke just follow Matthew’s story?

Thank you for asking. There is one final point about the birth narratives. When we think of the birth of Jesus we think of the stable and the animals, about the manger, no room at the inn, the heavenly host and the shepherds. Most of Matthew’s story is forgotten, with the exceptions of the Star and the Magi. Every creche is set in the stable with the animals, but it comes with the Three Wise Men from the East who are properly reserved for Epiphany. When we hear mass on Christmas we hear Luke’s version of the story, the Star and the Magi conveniently forgotten. Why? Because Luke told a better story. It’s human and warm and heart-felt, it’s tender and sweet and heartwarming, the poor couple (by implication) and the birth of the Mighty King in the humble stable, the newborn laid not in a crib, but in the box from which animals ate. For all these reasons, it’s a much better story. Let us return to the question of why someone choses to write a gospel when somebody already did it. Someone choses such a bizarre undertaking because one believes one has something worthwhile to say. The question becomes whether Luke sat down, independently, and a) decided that Jesus needed a birth story; and b) that it should include a chap named Joseph, that the birth should take place in Bethlehem, that it should be announced by an angel, & c. If you count the bullet points above, there are ten, minus the genealogy. So to believe Luke was not aware of Matthew, we have to believe that, independently, Luke conceived of a narrative with these ten elements, which BTW, “happen” to resemble Matthew’s in no small degree. Yes, some of them can be called a stretch; the Star and the Heavenly Host, one might suggest. But stars were celestial entities, and the difference between “in the sky”, “celestial”, and “Heavenly” was pretty thin. OTOH, Joseph, Bethlehem, and the angel’s annunciation are identical. Does it matter so much that the angel tells Joseph in a dream, or that the angel comes to Mary while she is awake? The latter is much more definitive, it’s much more obvious, and more obviously a visitation from God, even though “a dream, too, is from Zeus” as Homer says. 

Now, I can hear all the protests. All this comparison demonstrates is that Matthew and Luke derived from a common source. So we have Q.2? Well, the source was oral. Then where did the differences come from? There were different sources. Well, this just pushes the question back one level. Instead of Matthew and Luke coming up with two versions independently that overlapped on ten major thematic points, it was the oral sources that came up independently with two stories that overlapped on ten major thematic points. By far the simpler and far more likely answer is that Luke revised Matthew’s story by dressing the thematic points in very different ways. And let’s be serious: Luke is a darn good storyteller. The Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are foundational stories of western culture, as is the Babe in the Manger. And let’s not forget what he does to Paul’s story of conversion: by using the basic points of Paul’s story, he provides a dramatic flair that has also become a standard expression in English/Western culture: the Road to Damascus moment. With Luke we are dealing a first-rate novelist, a top-notch creative talent. The simplest, most probable explanation is that Luke read Matthew, absorbed the message, and then recast it into the story that has been known and loved for centuries.  

It is entirely possible that the name of Joseph was “out there”, that it had been supplied by the oral tradition. Perhaps this is where Matthew got it, and perhaps it was there where Luke could pick it up and use it. Any three or four of the ten themes above could have been incorporated easily by both evangelists while still remaining within the confines of the probability of coincidence. Ten, however, exceeds that. So lets look at how Joseph is used by Luke and Matthew. Of course Matthew refers to Mary’s husband in the first few chapters. But then something odd occurs. In the scene where Jesus returns to Nazareth resulting in Jesus’ declaration that a prophet is without honour in his own land, Luke has the bystanders say, “Is this not the son of Joseph?” Recall that in Mark Jesus was called the son of Mary. Using Joseph’s name is more in tune with the practice of the ancient world, where the Greeks and Jews used patronymics; in fact, the bar, as in Peter bar Jonah, is a patronymic designation, Peter son of Jonah. So Mark’s use of “son of Mary” left Christians to defend that Jesus was not a bastard, a charge leveled by a lot of non-Christians over the years. Curiously, in Matthew, Jesus is also referred to as the “son of Mary”. Joseph is not mentioned. In fact, after the end of the birth narrative, the name Joseph completely disappears from Matthew, until it pops up again with Joseph of Arimathaea. This is quite odd. It is especially odd for Matthew to do this when he purposely inserts the person of Joseph specifically to obviate the charge that Jesus was illegitimate. In his hometown in particular, we would expect the denizens to recall who Jesus father (supposedly) was and to call him thus. But they don’t. This becomes even more curious, curiouser and curiouser, in fact, because Matthew follows Mark and repeats the names of Jesus’ brothers; Luke, OTOH, gives us the patronymic but omits the list of siblings. Odd, no? Here is yet another example where Luke “corrects” Matthew, but then leaves out material that both Mark and Matthew cover. We have pointed this out numerous times. Of course, there are stories covered by all three–The Triple Tradition material–but in most cases the length of Luke’s version seems to depend on the length of Matthew’s version relative to that of Mark; where both are long, as in the events leading up to the arrest, Luke’s version is noticeably shorter. Mark and Matthew both mentioned that Jesus was flogged; Luke omits this, with rather an odd grammatical construction resulting. Then where Matthew shortens Mark, as in the Geresene Demonaic, Luke adds the material back in.

Coincidence? 

In fact this carries through the baptism by John. Or rather, it doesn’t. Of course Mark and Matthew cover this. Matthew adds the little passage where John demurs and Jesus tells him to proceed so that the (completely unspecified) scriptures will be fulfilled. The problem, of course, is that Jesus has grown in stature since Mark wrote, so having Jesus appear as the disciple, or follower, of John is beneath the former’s dignity. Luke glosses over the actual baptism*. Scholars point out that in Luke’s version, John has already been arrested when Jesus comes on the scene; the chronology of how this is all supposed to work is a bit ragged as a result. We somehow “know” that Jesus gets baptised, but yet we are not told this explicitly by Luke. A number of scholars have pounced on this; Matthew solved the problem the inequality of stature between Jesus and John so gracefully that Luke’s failure to use it is proof–proof, I say!–that Luke was not aware of Matthew. And they stand on firm ground in making this claim, at least to some degree. Had he read Matthew, why didn’t Luke follow Matthew? It’s a legitimate question. And it’s an instance where Luke never agrees with Matthew against Mark, except for all the times when he does, but Q, you know. Think about that: never. That is an absolute; does it not seem odd that this never occurs? By sheer probability, it should happen at least once or twice. Well, it does happen a few times, but these are merely the Minor Agreements, and for various–but never specified–reasons they don’t count. Seriously, to say that they never agree is close to an admission that Luke made a series of deliberate choices to stick with Mark precisely because he knew that Matthew had diverged.

*Sentence updated

Just want to touch on the teachings of John the Baptist. For whatever reason, these are considered part of Q. This is postulated despite the fact that Q is a collection of the sayings of Jesus. Why should John’s preaching be included? The peculiarity of this is made double when we consider the Temptations of Jesus. For reasons not fully explained, these dialogues are included it what is supposed to be a sayings gospel, specifically the sayings of Jesus. The inclusion of these two sections does not entirely make sense, but there they are. The inclusion of these two sections seem to make Q a very elastic document. It’s a sayings gospel, the sayings of Jesus, except when it’s not. This does not strike me as redactionally consistent.

—to be continued—