Summary John Chapter 9

This is being published on Good Friday, 2024, at 3:15, a quarter-hour after the traditional time of Jesus’ death. The tradition I was taught as a lad at Maple Grove St Michaels is that he was on the cross from noon until 3:00.

According to my records, I have not posted since late January, a full two months ago. Since I’m no longer working for the man–or anyone–I should theoretically have a plethora of time. Theoretically. But let’s also be honest: I got involved in reading  piece of theology written in Latin by St Bonaventure, who went on to found a university in Olean, NY. Naturally, doing the translating took longer than expected, but I cannot stress enough the importance of reading other primary sources in their original Greek or Latin if one wishes to have a reasonable understanding of how other languages work. Bonaventure wrote in the 12th century so he uses a bunch of “standard” words rather differently than Classical authors. This is good practice to help broaden one’s approach: if you’re paying attention, you will become aware of alternative nuances which may color your understanding of what the text could mean. If you approach a work like the NT with this more open understanding, you will realize that some passages can be read in different ways. My latest is paradidomai, “to hand down or hand over”. In that crucial passage of 1 Cor 11:23-29, Paul uses the word at least twice. Once it is translated, pretty much universally, as he “handed down” the word that have become the words of the consecration of the bread in Catholic & Episcopalian (and other?) masses. The other time it is translated as “betrayed”. Both are valid. But–a key aspect of the Passion Narrative is based on that reading of “betrayed”. This is the closest piece we have approaching a primary source for the Lord’s Supper and what happened. If that is not “betrayed”, then the whole Judas thing disappears. Think about that.

Anyway, the point here is that learning “NT Greek” is good, but, by itself, it won’t give you a real grasp of how the Greek works and how reading the original will provide new insights. Of course, I am a Classicist, and we are known to be snobs, and with justification. We are snobbish and pompous and those are our good qualities.

To the text.

The chapter tells the story of how Jesus gives sight to a man blind from birth. Since this was congenital, we cannot say that Jesus “restored” the man’s sight since he had never had it. This detail is meant to emphasize the wonder and power of the mighty work–remember, there are no ‘miracles’ in the NT. Restoration is more readily effected since the apparatus was in place and operational at some point. Jesus is, in effect, creating the man’s sight from scratch, if not quite ex nihilo. And it appears that this is the only instance where Jesus actually gave someone sight for the first time; in other instances, Jesus restored a faculty that had been lost. In fact, John stresses the point in Verse 32 where the healed man says that it has never been heard that someone born blind has had sight given to them. This does help explain why the authorities drag his parents into the discussion. This emphasis explains why the newly-sighted man suggests that this is a sign. More on that later.

The most pertinent passage of this chapter, IMO, starts with Verse 6. This is where Jesus spits on dirt to make mud. As we mentioned in the commentary, this detailed description–or prescription– for restoring or initiating a man’s sight appeared in Mark, but was scrubbed from Matthew and Luke for reasons we can only guess. The process described can only be called a “magical practice”, as I have named it; that is to say it’s the sort of thing one might expect to find in a grimoire. For those who may not know, a grimoire is a book of how to cast spells; sort of a magician’s cookbook, as it were. I’ve read excerpts from a few different ones. I’m about halfway through translating Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy from the original Latin. First, “occult” is misleading. The Latin is de Occulta Philosophia, so the root is obvious, but the meaning is not. This is one of those words where the meaning has shifted over time; occulta, simply means “hidden”, but the meaning can be completely non-sinister. For example, kids might play a game of occulta-and-go-seek. It can simply mean not obvious to the naked eye. Like magnetism. Or gravity. Both could be understood to be “occult” phenomena, or powers, according to the Latin meaning of the term. But in any case, Agrippa has hundreds of little “cures” or “prescriptions” involving body parts of various animals or stones to cure ailments or afflictions. It’s where the “Eye of newt/and toe of frog” came from in Macbeth, IV.1. The description of Jesus’ actions here–and in Mark–are fully consistent with the sort of thing that Agrippa would discuss a millennium-and-a-half later, 

And that is very interesting. Magic, as in the real thing with hocus-pocus and wands went in and out of favor amongst the Roman elite over the course of the first century. Tiberius was dead-set against it, and the records indicate that he executed a large number of magicians during his reign. Interestingly, Jesus was executed during the reign of Tiberius. Coincidence? I am increasingly of the opinion that it may not have been. I have come to suspect that Jesus was executed precisely because he was considered a magician. Pilate could easily have had Jesus arrested and executed as a magician and his boss Tiberius would have applauded the effort. Two points: First, there is solid and a not-insignificant amount of evidence that later pagans, into the second century and beyond, considered Jesus to have been a powerful magician, to the point that pagan magicians invoke Jesus as a power that can help cast an effective spell. His name appears on gemstones used as amulets, on lead tablets that were used to cast spells, and he is mentioned in pagan texts on magic. Second, Apollonius of Tyana–who has been called the “Pagan Jesus/Christ”, and whose name still gives the Vatican the willies–also had to fend off charges of being a magician. He, too, lived an ascetic life as a wandering teacher who cured people, and there were those who said he did it by magic. And “magic” at the time, carried heavy connotations of the invocation of spirits, who were not always benign.

So there was good reason for Matthew and Luke to scrub such magical practices from their versions of the gospel. It was a safe thing to do; it removed the possibility of misunderstandings and helped prevent Jesus’ name from falling into disrepute. It helped keep him respectable. This being the case, we have to ask why John put this back into his gospel? Of course, that brings up the question of whether or not John was aware of his predecessors. Personally, I find the idea that he was not to be rather ludicrous. There was an entity that can justifiably be called a “Church” by the time John wrote, and this Church kept things moving. I think that people don’t realize how much travel occurred within the Roman Empire in the First and Second Centuries. These were the years of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, and trade and commerce were thriving, and all sorts of people were traveling for all sorts of reasons. In fact, in the Second Century a chap named Pausanias wrote a what can only be described as a guidebook for tourists visiting Greece. The Christian communities communicated with each other. The Didache, written somewhere in the early-mid Second Century describes how communities should treat visiting preachers. These various communities were not isolated islands, but part of a network of believers. The aforementioned Apollonius of Tyana and Philipp the Apostle both supposedly traveled to India. Part of the reason people want to believe that John was not aware of the Synoptics is that this keeps John as an independent source, which bolsters the credibility of the records preserved in the gospels. But, as with Q, wishing it true don’t make it so.

The description of the process by which Jesus made the man whole is, while not verbatim, identical. The closeness of the details of the account can only have come about in two different ways. The first is that John read Mark. Otherwise, we almost have to posit that the early Christian communities continued a tradition of restoring sight by using saliva to make mud which is then applied to the eyes of the sufferer. Honestly, this argument would be easier to make, and make coherent, than the “argument” for Q. The ritual was described in the 70s, and then again 30-50 years later.

So why does John bring this back? Because it was omitted by Matthew and Luke? We have seen how ofttimes Luke restored things that had been in Mark that Matthew omitted. The Gerasene Demonaic is a good example of Luke restoring detail to the account that Matthew cut from his. Of course, it’s difficult not to suggest that the overall opinion of magic had changed since the times Matthew and Luke wrote. What had been scandalous, perhaps to the point of dangerous, for them had become benign in the subsequent generation.

Was Jesus a magician? Some people thought so. Josephus has an unusual term for Jesus: a man who performed paradoxōn ergōn, a man who did unexpected or extraordinary things, deeds one  normally wouldn’t expect. The word itself is rather unusual, rarely used by pagan writers and appearing less than a dozen times in the NT, and in most of these instances it is used to indicate someone (usually Jesus) who was not acting as one would expect a practicing Jew to act. Often this meant transgressions against the Sabbath. It’s difficult to tell what Josephus means by using the word; a single instance by an author is not really sufficient to get a sense of what s/he means by the word. It generally gets translated as “wonderful” as in the sense of a “wonder-worker”, but given the usage in the NT, one has to wonder what Josephus is saying about Jesus. Was he calling him a wonder worker? Or was he calling Jesus someone who did not behave as a pious Jew might be expected to behave? That’s how it’s used in the NT for the most part, and Josephus was a rough contemporary of Matthew and Luke.

That discussion ran longer than expected. Much longer, in fact. But in the final analysis it’s the most unusual aspect of the whole chapter. Most of the rest is something of a recapitulation of the themes that we have encountered to this point. Jesus is in contention with “The Jews”, the leading citizens and/or prominent members of the synagogue or the community. If you’ll recall, it’s not entirely clear where exactly Jesus is, and where this action unfolded. He was “passing by” and saw the man born blind. Not that the end of Chapter 8 is necessarily going to provide reasonable information on this, but he was in the Temple last chapter. If we are to assume, or infer, or surmise that he still is, that would make the authorities truly “The Jews”, the religious and more or less (puppet) secular leaders of the population of Jerusalem. With one exception, it’s interesting to note that the name of Caiaphas, who was supposedly the High Priest, does not occur in any of the gospels until we get to the Passion Narrative. That exception will crop up in Chapter 11 of John. I will have more to say on that when we get to it.

Regardless of where this occurred, we have the authorities refusing to accept that Jesus is an agent of God. The Man Born Blind is incredulous about this; surely, he said, Jesus has performed a Sign, and yet the authorities question whether he is from God? How can that be? This is largely a recapitulation of the interactions Jesus had with “The Jews” in most of the other chapters we’ve read. In some ways this is analogous to the “Messianic Secret” encountered in Mark. To underscore, we get the loaded question at the very end of the chapter when some of the Pharisees ask “are we blind?” I referred to this as a loaded question; perhaps “rhetorical question” is more accurate. Of course they are blind. That is why John is writing this gospel: to show the world just how blind “The Jews” were. After all, in this chapter Jesus performs an actual Sign and they ask how he can be from God if he doesn’t observe the Sabbath? How much more blind can one be? Recall that the crowed asked for–demanded?–a sign in Mark 10, and earlier in this gospel when Jesus crossed back to Caphernaum from feeding the 5,000. I guess they wanted it hand-delivered with a bow and an instruction manual and “SIGN” written in big red letters.

Really though, the insistence that this was, indeed, a sign just makes the inclusion of, and description of, the magical practice all that more curious. Why does God need to make a plaster? God made the eyes to begin with; surely he can retrofit an operational pair of them into a factory reject? The biggest problem that people had with magic was that it usually involved the invocation of a spirit, or daimon, or some lesser superhuman entity, and that these entities were often not to be trusted. God created the kosmos in six days ex nihilo, from nothing. And if Jesus is one with the father, the mere thought or intent should have been enough to give the man his sight.

Curious, indeed.

Summary John Chapter 8

Where to start? We started our commentary with the story of the woman caught in adultery. This story is not in all mss traditions, and there is good reason to suspect that it was not part of the original text as written by “John”. That being said, the NIV, NASB, ESV, RSVP, NRSVC, and KJV all include it in the chapter. The REB does not. It’s a famous story, and it appears more often than not, so it’s worth a few words of summary.

It would be extremely valuable to know when, where, and how this got added into the text, but we don’t. Regardless, it’s a great example of how little we know about the actual texts as they were written, before they were copied many multiple times over. It’s a great lesson on how stuff gets added to the text; I’ve said many times that legends grow over time. The stories get longer and more complex as details an even entire people are added–not subtracted–from the legend. Always bear that in mind. A story like the Centurion’s Slave is another great example. It wasn’t in Mark, and it wasn’t in Q because there was no such thing. This leaves us to conclude that the story was added, the whole thing. It was created after–probably long after–Jesus’ death, and probably even after Mark. Then there are the stories unique to Matthew and Luke, such as the Talents, or Workers in the Vineyard and the Widow of Nain, or Zaccheus; where did those come from? In this instance we are fortunate to have competing mss traditions that tell us in no uncertain terms that at least some of the content of the texts is a bit dodgy at best. It can be argued that the story was original to John and omitted in some traditions, which makes the story…I’m not sure what. Think about it: what monk, or what believer is going to take it upon himself to cut out a story about the Lord? Seems a bit presumptuous, to put it mildly. Of course the scribe could have just lost his place in the ms, but to skip over 11 lines is really falling asleep on the job.

As for the story itself, it’s very interesting, in no small part because the message is not as obvious as we might suppose. The people in the Temple are very willing, even eager, to punish the sinner, and the Law said they had legal justification to do so. Jesus, however, intervenes with his famous axiom about sin. With that we may be forgiven to think that the message is one of mercy: She, and so we, should not be put to death for our sins; but there is an element missing, and it’s arguably the most important part of the message. Jesus does not forgive her. He tells her to sin no more, but there is no, “Daughter, your sins are forgiven”. He forgave the sins of the paralytic at the Sheep Gate/Pool. Why did he not forgive hers? That is a doctrinal question way above my pay grade. It seems inconsistent with the message we get elsewhere, when we are told that all sins can be forgiven, except for one against the spirit. Adultery is more or less the defining “sin of the flesh”, so it should be forgivable, but forgiveness is not forthcoming. So what we get is that Jesus is more than willing to intervene and to stand against the pitiless strictures of the Law, but he is not willing to forgive her sin. Was she not repentant? Was the paralytic? Not really, but it can be argued that his sin was not so overt, but how do we know that? The conclusion to be drawn seems to be that the story was added by someone who sympathized with the Prodigal Son’s older brother, or the Vineyard Workers who worked the whole day. Or something. Bottom line is that I do not have the chops to explain this.

From here we get back to the ongoing debate or argument or whatever between Jesus and “The Jews” in which Jesus seeks to explain how things have changed now that he is in their midst. As such, the Cast the First Stone story is a not unsuitable introduction. Jesus is very clearly demonstrating that the Law is not necessarily the proper standard any longer. Yes, she “should” have been stoned to comply with the Law, but such compliance is no longer the concern. Another standard has taken hold. “The Jews” do not understand, or do not realize this so they have to have it spelled out for them. Now, this is arguably the reason why they do not understand who Jesus is, or why he is, and why he says that they are not the children of Abraham, but the children of the Devil. And their lack of understanding means that they will die in their sins. That is a very harsh judgement. The last several chapters have involved Jesus in dialogue with people in the Temple, and for the most part it has not been exactly friendly. There is tension, most of which is due to Jesus chastising his audience for not understanding who Jesus is, or what Jesus’ message is. To the casual observer, to some degree, the puzzlement, or ignorance of the audience can be understood; after all, Jesus is presenting a novel message, no? Or is Jesus a bit peeved–and he sure seems to be–because “The Jews” are not understanding the full message of their own sacred writings? Or is it both of the above?

But if we step back to look at the bigger picture, this ongoing discussion between Jesus and his fictional audience began in Chapter 5 and ends here with Chapter 8. Despite some minor contextual differences, these chapters more or less form a unit, the theme of which is Jesus attempting to  explain who he is to “The Jews”. Of course, the real audience is not “the Jews”, but us. In Chapter 5 we had the healing of the paralytic at the Sheep Pool, which led to a discussion of Jesus’ right to break the Sabbath and his temerity to call God his father. Here Jesus begins to explain what the Son of Man is allowed to do, and the scope is extensive, including the ability to give life and to pass judgement. Of course, these would normally be considered the prerogatives of God alone, and so of course “The Jews” are outraged and wish to kill him for claiming equality with God. In Chapter 6 we had John’s version of the Feeding story. This led to Jesus’ declaration that he is the Bread of Life. This event took place (at least partially) in Galilee, and so Jesus’ presumption resulted in him outraging and entirely new group of Jews, especially when he claimed to have come down from heaven.

As a side note, I’m not sure I caught this at the appropriate time. In Chapter 6, after Jesus has fed the 5,000, he crosses the Sea of Galilee (V-16), departing from Tiberias to return to Caphernaum. The folks from Tiberias who had witnessed the feeding follow, and it is with this group that Jesus has his discussion, during which he made the claim about coming down from the sky in Verse 38. Without any sense that the location of the discussion, or the participants have changed, the crowd grumbles and says, do we not know that this is the son of Joseph? We know his father and mother. How can he claim to come from the sky? This takes us back to the discussion of whether Jesus was actually from Nazareth. As many of you know, I do not believe he was. Mark mentions Nazareth exactly once, in 1:9. John mentions it twice, in 1:45 & 1:46, when Philipp and Nathaniel are talking about Jesus. And here we have John very strongly implying that the crowd in Caphernaum know his family. Recall that Nazareth is some distance from Caphernaum. A quick Google puts the distance at 50 km by the modern roadway, but another entry says Jesus walked 40 miles to get from one to the other. The two don’t quite square since 49.7 km = 30 miles. Close enough. Or rather, either way the distance is much more than a casual stroll. Average walking speed is 3 mph, so that’s a ten-hour hike for 30 miles. I say this to demonstrate that the amount of back-and-forth between the two towns would not have been substantial. It takes purpose to walk for ten hours, so the chances of the people of Caphernaum knowing Joseph and Mary are not great. Some of them probably did, but not all of them. Yes, one can posit a lot of plausible ways for the crowd to come to know Jesus family, but we’re making stuff up when we do that. We don’t know if Jesus’ entire family moved to Caphernaum when he did. We don’t know if/how/why the residents of Caphernaum knew Jesus’ family if they didn’t reside there. My point is that we need to determine what the text tells us. Mark tells us once, in a passage that could easily be an interpolation added later when Nazareth became fixed on the tradition. Strictly speaking, Matthew and Luke disagree. Matthew tells us Jesus, Mary, and Joseph actually lived in Bethlehem, and only moved to Nazareth after their return from Egypt. Luke is actually the most definite on the Nazareth tradition, stating that they lived in Nazareth but the birth occurred in Bethlehem due to the cockamamie notion that Joseph had to return there to be counted in a census that likely never happened. But then he reinforces this in 4:16, in the Prophet Without Honor story which he says took place in Nazareth. The point is that John places this story in Caphernaum. Whether Jesus was from Nazareth is, frankly, at best peripheral to the message of the gospels, so we are best off taking the weight of the textual evidence which puts him in Caphernaum.

In Chapter 7 we get a discussion of Jesus vis à vis Moses. In Chapter 8 we tuned to Abraham and slavery and other assorted issues. There are threats, or the desire to kill Jesus, but mostly he’s still trying to explain himself. Chapter 8 is a crescendo of sorts because Jesus tells the Jews that they are going to die in their sin. Having now finished Ehrman’s Jesus Before The Gospels, I can pass along some of his insights. This is cheating to a degree, because my purpose was to do the translation and commentary more or less cold without secondary sources or interpretation. That way I see what I see, not what someone else tells me is there. This may seem like a very noble goal, and it is, more or less. In some ways. Yes, we get my opinion, . My opinion is just that, my opinion often unsupported by any outside evidence. This is perhaps as much a bug as a feature. Be that as it may, having Prof Ehrman’s insight is useful for Chapter 8.

I am pleased to inform you that my instincts for historical and/or textual analysis seem to be pretty good. He agrees with me (ahem) that the overall theme of John is very different from that of the Synoptics, whether singly or as a group. As I said above, John is interested in telling us, definitively and in no uncertain terms, who and what Jesus was: A divine entity that was somehow the same as, yet different from God the Father. We have spent the last four chapters reading about how Jesus went about explaining himself. Ehrman says that this attempt to summarize and/or explain is due in some part to the timing of when the gospel was written. At the time of writing Christians and Jews had become two separate and distinct groups. And of course, in John’s opinion, the Jews were completely wrong. Hence we get the condemnation that they will die in their sins. By this time “The Jews” had rejected Jesus which meant the path to salvation was closed to them, so there would be no eternal life for them. So here in Chapter 8 we got the pronouncement of the verdict, or perhaps the sentence: They would die in their sins.

While John contrasts with the Synoptics, there are parallels, just as I have drawn parallels to the birth stories of Matthew and Luke. They are different, but they share an underlying organization; that is, the logos of the two gospels is very similar, or perhaps even identical in the essential* qualities. Just as the Sermon on the Mount gave us many of the foundational principles of Christian ethics and practice, so John gives us many of the statements that tell us who Jesus is. He is The Word who was there In the Beginning. He is the Light of the World. He is the Bread of Life. He is the Resurrection and the Life. As Dr Ehrman says, Jesus “proclaims his divine identity publicly and repeatedly” throughout the gospel. So I stick by my earlier assessment that John’s gospel is, in effect, a summary of Jesus’ career, with the purpose to let us all know that Jesus is, in some very real and essential* way.

*Essence in the technical, philosophical, Aristotelean definition, essence being the nature of an entity’s being at the most fundamental and inalterable level.

Summary John Chapter 5 Part 2: Content

The next major theme of the commentary dealt with Jesus’ “persecution” by “The Jews” and with the reasons for his execution. We have discussed the word ἐδίωκον numerous times in the past, most notably with Paul. All of my crib translations chose to render this as “persecute”, which is also the case in many other instances where the word is used. The standard meaning in pagan Greek is something more like “to pursue”, “to chase”, and so “to hunt”. Given this, one could plausibly maintain that I am splitting hairs here to justify my variant reading. To support my variance, I offer the REB (which is my paper copy) chose to render as “began to take action against Jesus”. To ignore other times the word is used, in this particular instance I believe my translation is especially appropriate. The gist of the story is that when the crowd found out that it was Jesus who had performed the healing on the Sabbath, they went after him. That is, they pursued him or chased him down in order to confront him. I’m not sure how one can read that as “they persecuted him” unless one takes “persecute” in a very broad sense; however, “began to take action” does work here, even if it’s not what could be considered as the plain meaning of the text. Since I persecuted this topic at some length in the commentary to the passage, we can let it rest there. Did I say persecuted? I think “pursued” would be more accurate.

Just a final point on this. The verb tense of “pursued” is the imperfect. This suggests either continuing action or past progressive. They were persecuting Jesus over time, or at that moment they were in the act of chasing Jesus. Of the two choices, the second makes more sense, but just barely, so it’s worth further consideration. Since this is the first time John used this word, it would seem that he may have the continuation of this action in mind. As such, the NRSVC may be on the right track when they render this as “they started to persecute” Jesus; however, I would prefer “the started their pursuit of Jesus”. The REB follows a similar line that I believe is more accurate, reading “they started to take action against Jesus”. The meaning would be that this was the beginning of the time when Temple authorities and/or certain segments of the mainstream Judaism felt that Jesus was no longer in the arc of mainstream belief. This is an enormously complex question, or topic. Ultimately it pulls us back to the reason(s) for Jesus being executed, and who the motive force behind the execution might be. Was it some aspect or coterie of “The Jews,” or was it the Romans?

For the moment, I believe we can sidestep the question of agency as being only tangentially relevant to the gospel narrative. Or, it might be more accurate to say that the gospel–and in particular, this chapter–and the cause or agent of Jesus’ execution are only thematically related. Or that this chapter is an explanation of where and how Jesus and Judaism parted ways. The main theme of the chapter began as a discussion of Jesus’ relationship with Jewish tradition of the Sabbath, but also in a broader sense of his relation with God, or to God. The discussion in the commentaries on each post grew long and fairly involved in most case, and I don’t want to recapitulate that here. John specifically states that the issue that set off the contention was Jesus referring to God as “my father”; in so doing, the opinion of the Jewish thinkers was that Jesus was making himself the equal of God. That is, Jesus was committing blasphemy.

As we conceded in the commentary, by the standards and definitions of the times, Jesus arguably was committing blasphemy. I think the key here, though, is that Jesus’ life and ministry represented a change in those standards; his followers understood this, but Jews didn’t, which led to their rejection of Jesus as the anointed one. Part of the reason for the rejection is was that the anointed one was never prophesied to be the equal of God, or to be divine in any sense of the word that we would accept. The messiah would be divine inasmuch as he was sent by God, but he was not to be related to God, as Jesus claims here. The “son of (a) god” is a thoroughly pagan concept, and Greek and Roman lore is replete with individuals–always men–who were the son of a god in the literal sense of the meaning, the offspring of a god (or goddess) and a mortal. These individuals were called “heroes” in a sense that the description was something of a technical term. Ordinary persons could not be considered a “hero” by performing a signal act of bravery; the term a priori implied that the individual had actual divine blood in his veins, the product of being the literal descendent of a god or goddess, even if their immediate parents were not gods. Achilles had a goddess for a mother, whereas Herakles had a divine father. Odysseus was the great-grandson of Hermes, so he qualifies for the designation. These men were heroes in that technical sense. But divine parentage did not make them divine, nor even immortal. In an awe-inspiring scene in the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus journeys down into Hades and there sees the shade of the glorious Achilles, carrying out his fate of eternal (?) existence in that gloomy lad of eternal shadow. Some heroes were eventually granted post-mortem immortality, like Herakles, but most did not attain this honor.

Now, in one sense, all humans were sons or daughters of God, but it was not considered polite to refer to YHWH as “father”. That was presumptuous; nay, that was blasphemous*, but that is what Jesus did. By thus point in the development of the Jesus movement, the idea of Jesus being a divine individual was widespread, if not quite universal. The group that produced the Didache may not have been convinced that Jesus was divine, but such aberrations were becoming ever more rare. Of course, at least several centuries would yet be required to work out the specific nature and implications of this divinity–if it has been settled. These sorts of debates on nature and implications becomes a subset of theology known as Christology. But I suspect that most of those coming to John’s gospel brought the accepted at least the possibility that Jesus was divine, even if they were not fully convinced. When considering the predisposition of those interested in exploring the idea of becoming a member of the nascent church, we need to bear in mind that the vast majority of new converts came from paganism rather than Judaism. In support of that statement is simple statistics: there were many, many more pagans than Jews in the Empire. Google just told me that 2.2% of the population of the US is Jewish, however defined. Given the number of thriving Jewish enclaves in major cities throughout the Empire, I would accept without much cavil that the percent in the Empire may have been, but probably wasn’t, twice that. Yes, there were enclaves in major cities, but there were huge stretches of hinterland where there the percentage was approaching zero. Recall that both “pagan” and “heathen” could be translated into English as “country bumpkin”. While of course there would be individual Jews, or even Jewish families that chose to turn to Christianity; there still are such individuals just as there are Christians who turn to Judaism. But statistically, the vast majority of converts, probably since the time of Matthew, if not Mark, had been pagans. This, I believe, is part of the reason why the idea of writing the teachings down seemed like a good idea to Mark, and why Matthew and Luke added a layer of pagan thought to their gospels: that was the intended audience, and they sought to use terms that pagans would understand. [This is a bold statement that requires substantiation; however, much of my argument for this can be found scattered throughout my commentaries on the Synoptics. At some point I hope to collect these scattered pieces and work them into a proper argument.]

At some point in the commentary I have put forth my “definitions” of each evangelist, the noun that describes the point of view of the author. Mark was a journalist, short and pithy. Matthew was a rabbi, attempting to tie Jesus to the Hebrew Scriptures. Luke was a novelist, who wanted to tell an entertaining story in the manner of Hellenistic “novels” current at the time; the idea that Acts in particular reads like such a “novel” is not original with me. John, finally, was a theologian. This last has a peculiar quirk to it: theology had not been invented in the First or early Second Centuries CE. It was created by several generations of Christian thinkers who sought to explain Jesus in terms that would be familiar to pagan philosophers. Of course, this attempt was not novel with Christians; Philo of Alexandria sought to do the same with Judaism, attempting to  re-case Judaism in terms of Plato. Thinkers such as Tertullian, Cyprian, and most famously Augustine tried to do the same with Christianity. The rules were still evolving, with the result that a number of these proto-theologians ended up crossing into heresy towards the end of their lives.

The gospel we are reading was a seminal work for the later thinkers. And this chapter is, I believe, a key part of John’s thinking. The commentaries I created for the sections of the chapter were long, involved, and rather detailed. Many of them were commentaries on three or four verses at a time. That happened because the amount of theology contained in those short passages far exceeded the brevity of the text covered. Trying to recapitulate that discussion point-by-point would require a monumental duplication of effort; re-inventing the wheel, as it were. But there are two main topics, or perhaps themes that stand out. The first is John’s attempt to reconcile both the absolute and the relative roles of Jesus and the father; the second is to tie Jesus firmly to the HS. In a very real sense, what John is doing here is inventing Christian theology, or at least he is laying the foundations for at least two of the major subjects that would engage Christian theologians and thinkers for the next, oh, let’s say two thousand+ years.

Of course, the relative positions of Jesus relative to the Father is a deeply fraught theological question. How does one posit a father and a son while remaining in the bounds of monotheism? How does one explain how the father and the son are simultaneously co-equal, co-aeval, and yet the father somehow has priority? It is a very fine line to walk, especially at a time when the concept of the Trinity was still a few centuries in the future. Yet this is exactly what John attempted to do here in Chapter 5. As we discussed, the result was something very close to Arianism if it did not cross the line. To be honest, I’m not sure it didn’t; the subtleties of the argument are not entirely clear to me. I have a tendency to come to a point where one is faced with a binary decision, but that is likely an intellectual failing on my part. OTOH, there is the analogy how I am both a son AND a father. Obviously, I had an earthly father and mother, so I am their son. Then I offsprang** my own children, so I became a father while still being a son. This actually works to some degree, but closer consideration reveals essentially that “the child is the father of the man” (William Wordsworth).

In the final analysis, I’m not sure John was successful here. While the logos was there in the beginning with the father, in this chapter the son is ultimately subordinate to the father. This is not meant as a slight to John or his talent; he recognized and understood the problem, that the existence of the son was either a lessening of the father who was no longer the sole deity, or that the son was not the equal of the father. This thorny topic has spawned debate for centuries, and, truth be told, it has never been truly solved on philosophical grounds. The Catholic teaching is that it’s a mystery, something that is beyond the human capacity for reason and logic. That is certainly a reasonable, if unsatisfying, answer. The later addition of the Holy Spirit, the reification and/or personification of the emanation of God, neither helps nor hinders the discussion. If there can be two separate persons in one God (which is the Catholic formulation, which is the only one I am familiar with), there is no reason there cannot be three. Since John was not successful, he left the door open for the later development of Arianism, which was the most dangerous threat to what became orthodox Christianity.

It’s interesting to note that Arianism did not crop up until after Constantine legalized Christianity as a religion after the Edict of Milan in 313, a year after his victory at the Milvian Bridge. Arius set forth his position in 319, and all hell broke loose after that. Many of the Germanic invaders in the later Fourth and then the Fifth Centuries converted to Arian Christianity. It has been suggested that it was more sensible from a pagan perspective that was accustomed to divine hierarchies, but that is another discussion. The most serious and sustained threat came from the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, which comprised the entire Iberian Peninsula. The Visigoths (the West Goths) had moved into the peninsula in the Fourth Century and then established an independent kingdom which came to be one of the stronger successor-states after the Empire collapsed in the west. Gregory of Tours was an Orthodox bishop in Gaul, which was beginning its transition to becoming France about this time. While the Visigoths passed through to Spain, the Franks settled down in what became France and bequeathed their name to the nascent country. In contrast to the Visigoths, the Franks under their King Clovis (which is the origin of the name “Louis”) converted to orthodox Christianity. Gregory wrote History of the Franks in the 7th Century. The work is an invaluable piece of historical writing that sheds light on what would otherwise have been a “dark age” in Western historiography. It is also something of a propaganda piece for orthodox Christianity as led by the Bishop of Rome who had, more or less, become the Pope, at least in name. In his work Gregory excoriates the heretics in Spain pretty much every time he has cause to mention them. Given its seat among the powerful Visigoths, the final vestiges of Arianism were not dispelled until the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century; IOW, it was Islam that finally put an ed to the heresy. Arianism had a very long and successful run, and it was a legitimate threat to orthodoxy for those several centuries. It is important to realize that, as the Adoptionist heresy had its roots in Mark, Arianism had roots in John. In both cases the heretics could present a case for their teaching based on Scripture.

The other part of this chapter concerns Jesus’ teachings about his relationship to the Hebrew Scriptures. The argument as presented by John is a bit convoluted, involving both the Baptist and Moses. The more recent of the had attested to Jesus; John repeats the standard assertion found in the Synoptics that John came as Jesus’ forerunner and messenger, his herald. In Greek, the both the last two words would be rendered as aggelos, transliterated into Latin as angelos. This idea, of course, is a commonplace in Christianity, resting on the famous passage from Isaiah. The problem, of course, is that the text really doesn’t support this in any meaningful way. Yes, we have the conversations between the Baptist and those coming to be baptized, but even most of those don’t have much to do with Jesus if you think about it. We are told the Baptist preached repentance of sins, and Josephus corroborates this; however, this is the standard message of all the prophets in the HS, so this is not exactly something unique to the Baptist. The “brood of vipers” (my favorite rendering) accusation is of a piece with any prophet preaching repentance. Yes, as reported in the NT, there are aspects of John’s preaching that do refer to Jesus, but these aspects are attested nowhere else. Most of them are a bit vague: another is coming, I am not fit to loosen his sandals, and he asked the brood of vipers who had warned them of the coming wrath? In this gospel the Evangelist takes it one step further and has the Baptist proclaim Jesus as the Lamb of God in front of countless witnesses.

Reading through this, I got the distinct impression that the Evangelist was trying to settle the question of the Baptist in some sort of conclusive manner, to put it to rest once and for all. I found it extremely curious that Jesus said that those questioning him had once found John appealing, but later turned on him. This made me wonder if the lines of the Baptist incident had grown a tad hazy, to the point that the Evangelist could mould the issue to suit his needs. Luke and the kinship between Jesus and John was perhaps a decade old by now; had it become imbedded in the Jesus story? Or had it been largely overlooked? One thing that needs to be pointed out when trying to answer such a question is that, while the Evangelist may have been fully conscious of his predecessors, this does not mean that the general populace would have been aware of them. In fact, there is a good chance that John was writing for people unfamiliar with the Synoptics; after all, converts come from those unaware rather from those who already know the story. The Didache indicates that preachers did travel between communities, but that’s not to say the members of the community visited traveled very much. Yes, some travel occurred; that is one of the remarkable things about the Pax Romana: it allowed and fostered trade and travel over even large distances. This is not to say that everyone traveled, but we cannot assume that people didn’t. The point here is that such wandering preachers could easily have carried a copy of one of the gospels with them, a copy which then would be available to someone literate, a necessary condition if one wished to write a gospel. This is all by way of saying that someone like John the Evangelist would have conceived the idea of writing a new gospel to suit the needs and background of an audience in the Jerusalem area. As with Luke “correcting” the imbalances Matthew created between his gospel and that of Mark, so it may be that John wanted to settle some of the issues and questions that faced the early Church. The relation between the Baptist and Jesus was one of these. The Evangelist went out of his way to “demonstrate” conclusively that the Baptist was subordinate to, and a function of the mission of Jesus; that is, without Jesus, there would have been no John the Baptist.

The rest of the chapter is Jesus taking his audience to task for both their lack of understanding which leads to a lack of faith. It more or less connects to the Baptist, in the sense that they didn’t believe John, so it’s perhaps not surprising that they don’t believe Moses, either. Trust me, I’m aware that the preceding sentences don’t entirely make sense. The final result is that Jesus feels that “the Jews” have not accepted him, which is certainly true enough, or, it would have been by the time the Evangelist wrote this gospel; however, these words were supposedly spoken in the 30s, in Jesus’ lifetime. Was it entirely appropriate for Jesus to say that he had been rejected, when, according to the story thus far, Jesus had only begun his ministry? Not really. Jesus’ had only begun teaching, so it would not have been entirely clear what the eventual outcome was going to be. This is a great example of how to identify an anachronism in the narrative: does it make sense in the time it was supposed to take place? This is the criterion I used to argue that the stories about Jews no longer being in the front of the line for salvation probably don’t date to Jesus’ lifetime; rather, these are stories created later to explain why there were more pagans than Jews in the various ekklesiai scattered about. And so here: the Evangelist is writing in the 2nd Century that “the Jews” had rejected Jesus almost a century before the Evangelist had set these words to paper.

This is part of the discourse Jesus provides on Moses. Calling it a discussion would not be an accurate description, since Jesus does all of the talking. As for the topic, it is another commonplace in Christian doctrine that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophecies made in the HS. We are all familiar with the quote first found in Mark alluded to above about the Baptist being the Voice in the Wilderness, and the is the aggelos sent to clear the path for “you”. Mark cites this as Isaiah, but a little closer checking show that the first line of the quote, “I send my aggelos” is actually from Malichi 3:1; however, this is often read as a quote or paraphrase of Isaiah in the Book of Malachi. The other familiar quote is the prophecy of the “young girl/maiden/virgin” who will give birth, which is also from Isaiah. The status of the person predicted depends rather on the language in which one reads the passage. But there are others. My hard-copy of the Greek NT very conveniently provides marginal cites for all passages that refer to, or correlate with, passages elsewhere throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as well as the Christian NT. Most of the cites are from the latter. What is interesting is that the quote in Mark 1:2 is one of the very few that identifies the source of the quote. We talked about the way that none of the evangelists cite each other, or any of the other authors in the NT; as a result, the degree to which they quote each other is a complete mystery. The whole Q thing would have been avoided if Luke had prefaced a few passages with, “as the evangelist Matthew said…” But he didn’t, nor did the other two; Mark can be excused as being the first. Anyway, as it turns out, the authors of the NT do quote or paraphrase passages in the HS, but they generally neglect to inform us that they are doing so, this reference being an exception; there may be others, but not many.

As a case in point, we have the rest of the discussion in this chapter. Jesus accuses the audience of disbelieving Moses; this is interesting, and it potentially undercuts my contention that John was writing his gospel for pagans rather than Jews. Of course we understand the point without difficulty: Jesus is referring to the passages in the Pentateuch, which tradition says was written by Moses, to the coming messiah. But would new members of the community who had recently been pagans grasp that without further clarification? It seems unlikely, but then if the gospel was read aloud there was probably opportunity for the reader to elaborate and answer questions. This was more or less the process in Jewish synagogues as described in Luke 4:16 ff. Is that what would have happened here? There just doesn’t seem to be enough information for a new convert, so I’m not entirely comfortable with the motivation for this. It’s perhaps not unreasonable that the Evangelist was perhaps closer to his Jewish roots than we might have suspected. This might also explain some of the bitterness he seems to express towards “The Jews”: he was disappointed that they had not come to understand the significance of Jesus the way he had.

Or is there another explanation? Let’s recall that in the ancient world, novelty was not a good thing; people respected a tradition of long standing, a pedigree of antiquity. Judaism professed such a pedigree, even if it did not stretch back so far as we have long believe. However, we are only now beginning to come to grips with a Judaism that perhaps does not predate the Babylonian captivity, so it would be a bit much to expect people at the time to have understood this. Judaism could boast a large body of scripture that stretched back to a time before Egypt, to the very beginning of the world. These oldest parts of Jewish history, recorded in the Pentateuch, had been written by Moses. So by bringing Moses into the discussion as John does here, he is presenting this pedigree of antiquity to the audience, John is reminding–if not informing them for the first time–his audience that Jesus is the culmination of that very long stretch of history and tradition. Jesus had been predicted by Moses, and now he had appeared; the majority of Jews, however, did not see, or did not accept this heritage of Jesus. John, however, did. So perhaps he was somewhat bitter about this lack of perception on their part.

*As an aside, it occurs to me that the Jewish conception of blasphemy is not altogether different from the Greek concept of ubris. Both stem from the idea of a human forgetting his/her place by overstepping the boundaries of what is human ad crossing over into the milieu that is reserved for the divine. 

**To coin a phrase?

Summary to Galatians Version 2, in toto

There are a lot of interesting topics for discussion in Galatians, which is why I decided to do it a second time. Be that as it may, Galatians is first and foremost all about Chapter 2 and Chapter 1, in that order, with Chapter 3 coming in a decent third. In other words, the overriding significance of Galatians is Paul’s version of the Synod of Jerusalem, which Luke will recapitulate–and change to no small extent–in Acts. Following this is Paul’s version of his conversion, which likewise will get a different spin in Acts. I want to get to Acts to do a thorough-going comparison of the two, but it will have to wait until after John. Finally, Galatians is about Paul’s brilliant analogy of the difference between the Law and the Promise. This latter will set the tone for the rest of Paul’s teaching. Or, rather, it should, but it really doesn’t. Rather, it’s a one-off. Once Paul has provided the explanation in Chapter 2, it’s just there for the rest of time, pretty much ignored because the friction between Paul and the Jerusalem Assembly apparently becomes more or less irrelevant.

This last point in and of itself is rather a bigger deal than is often discussed, and I will spend some time on it below. That is a new insight I’ve gained in reading this the second time. The other new insight was the idea of the resurrection of the body that we discussed at the end of the Summary to Chapter 6. This, of course, is the obvious benefit of reading something more than once. New insights can and do present themselves, as long as we are willing to maintain an open mind and not presume that we’ve milked the writing dry the first time around. Such an attitude is either incredibly presumptuous–I’m so brilliant that I got it all the first time–or incredibly closed-minded. Although upon further reflection, the latter often does arise from the former. I’m so brilliant that my first thought captured everything perfectly, so any changes will only degrade the result.

Obviously the tale of the friction at the Synod of Jerusalem is embarrassing to a point. Those in charge of the new movement in the first decades after Jesus’ death did not agree with each other. Consider that. The leaders of the Jerusalem Assembly were people who presumably knew Jesus during the latter’s lifetime. They had heard what he said; they were the best positioned to have a handle on how to present the message to others because they knew it best. Indeed, this principle of direct Apostolic succession became a huge factor as the various assemblies became a church, or The Church. Books were deemed canonical or not based in no small degree to whether the purported author was likely to be part of that chain. According to Elaine Pagels, later Gnostic–and other–texts were rejected precisely on those grounds. By so choosing, the Church excluded the concept of continued revelation. Only what could be traced back to the actual Apostles* was acceptable. Of course, being able to sort out fact from hearsay was perhaps not a talent most in the Church were apt to possess. This is particularly interesting is to note since neither Peter nor James, brother of Jesus, wrote a gospel. Each have epistles credited to their names, but I don’t think anyone takes their authorship seriously. Interestingly, I would tend to credit the Epistle of James as more likely to be authentic than those of Peter. So, the fact that the people who knew the most about Jesus, and the real apostle who founded numerous churches in pagan communities makes it difficult to say with conviction exactly what it was that Jesus believed and taught. So how to determine apostolic succession?

First, a word about the word and the concept of Apostle: anyone who’s been following me for any length of time will understand that I have serious doubts about whether or not Jesus ever used the word. In the gospels the Twelve are sent out and return within a couple of verses. The descriptions of the Sending of the Twelve sure feel like later insertions that are not particularly convincing in their authenticity. I would suggest it far more likely that James and his group were the ones who sent out apostles. In fact, we know they did because Paul tells us they did. They sent out what Paul considered spies who sought to undercut Paul’s message by teaching another gospel. Not only that, the Pillars in Jerusalem did this in direct contravention of the agreements supposedly reached at the Synod of Jerusalem. That is the point of this Epistle to the Galatians: to convince the Galatians to adhere to Paul’s message, rather than that of James’ emissaries. This doubtless created all sorts of problems for those trying to found The Church as an ongoing concern. 

After the Destruction of the Temple in 70, the Jerusalem Assembly was dispersed, if not more or less obliterated. That meant leadership had to migrate elsewhere and a new nucleus had to be formed. Two sites where this happened were Antioch and Rome. Of these, Antioch was the more likely place for leadership to coalesce; it’s not all that far from Jerusalem and had a sizable Jewish population, so it would not have been all that difficult for the survivors to relocate there. It was certainly more convenient than Rome. And yet, that’s where it ended up. The story, the tradition, of course, is that Peter and Paul both ended up in Rome and both were, presumably, martyred there. The only problem with this tradition is that it’s based on absolutely no contemporary evidence. The sole “proof” is that Peter was said to have been martyred, and that Paul was heading to Rome at the end of Acts. That Paul never made it to Rome is, supposedly, “proof” that Acts was a contemporary source. But, even if it were, the author–or a follower of the author, couldn’t have finished the story? That the story was left hanging in the 50s/60s makes no more sense than it being left hanging in the 90s. In fact, it makes more sense that it was left “unfinished”, with Paul’s fate undetermined written in the 90s. By then, who really knew what had happened to Paul? Most of the contemporaries would have been 20 years (or so) dead when Luke wrote Acts. So Luke could finish the story as he saw fit. He could have had Paul go to Rome. But he didn’t. Why not? Because no one had any stories, credible stories, about what happened to him there. There was no tradition about it because Paul never got to Rome so Luke had nothing to report. Then the tradition was filled in by those with a vested interest. 

We simply don’t know when or how or by whom the tradition of Peter and Paul being in Rome began. The earliest records we have are from Ignatius of Antioch (died ca 107) and from Clement, Bishop of Rome (died ca 99). The former says that Peter and Paul admonished the Romans, which is understood to mean that they were there in Rome doing this. While certainly a legitimate interpretation, the only thing that is certain is that it is an interpretation rather than hard and fast evidence. Clement merely says, or at least implies that Peter was martyred; time, place and method unspecified. This fits in with the end of John where Jesus seems to imply that Peter will be crucified. However, recall that John was written around the transition from First to Second Century. This means the author of John could have been influenced by Clement. From there, we skip to the middle of the Second Century. IOW, the tradition began late, some 50-100 years after Jesus. Even this would be what is called a “low” date, meaning it’s about as early as can possibly be tortured out of the evidence. A “high” date would be more likely posit 70-150 years later. Even by the time of Clement (Peter, Linus, (Ana)Cletus, Clement) there was a structure in place that we could recognize as an organized church, more or less. That is, there were established bishoprics with a line of succession established, at least in the tradition. Clement was the fourth Bishop of Rome.

All of this is by way of introduction. I would dearly love to debate the evidence for Petrine Primacy, but this is not the time nor place. It’s enough to know that Paul gives us a glimpse into the world before the Petrine Primacy had been put to paper by the author of Matthew. It’s also good to point out that Peter does not fare well in this letter, nor in the Gospel of Mark. His reputation begins to be restored by Matthew, and I would suggest that the claims of the Bishop of Rome date are roughly contemporary with that Gospel. Which came first, the gospel or the claim can never really be sorted out. We should note that Matthew supposedly wrote in Antioch, which was the true rival of Rome to a claim of primacy. As such, it would prima facie be surprising for a member of that assembly to give the Roman bishop such a wonderful piece of propaganda to use against the Bishop of Antioch, but let’s think about this for a moment. That the concept of Petrine Primacy favours the Bishop of Rome rests on the (altogether unproven) assumption that Peter actually went to Rome. What if he didn’t go to Rome? Then what is the benefit of Petrine Primacy? BUT: while we do not have any real evidence that Peter went to Rome, we have a great bit of evidence that Peter went to Antioch. Paul has told us. James, brother of Jesus did not survive the Destruction of 70, the evidence of Josephus carries some weight on this. But suppose Peter did, and then fled to Antioch with the remnants of the Jerusalem Assembly. Or, perhaps Peter had established himself there prior to 70, or even before the death of James and Peter was the first Bishop of Antioch.

Alas, to my chagrin, this is not a novel idea. In fact, according to no less than the Catholic Encyclopedia, Peter was the first Bishop of Antioch. This source then credits Ignatius as the third, rather than as the first as several modern sources (Brittanica, e.g.) state. But, so far as I can tell, no one has suggested that Matthew–and perhaps the author of John’s gospel–meant to elevate the status of the Bishop of Antioch to something more than a primus inter pares relationship. By this I mean that the Roman Bishop pushed his claim to supremacy early and often, whereas the Bishop of Antioch did not–at least, not to the extent of the Bishop of Rome did. When we read this in Matthew, I suggested that the “thou art Peter” line was a later interpolation, put there at the behest of, or even by order of, the Roman Bishop. I’ve read about the difficulties of doing this given the number of mss traditions that exist for the NT, but the earliest texts of Matthew 16:18 is not very early at all. The Bishop of Rome would have had centuries to establish the version with “Thou art Peter” in it. Difficult? Sure. Impossible? Not really. But Antioch is one of the locations most often suggested where Matthew wrote. It’s not impossible that he intended to push the claims of Antioch against the upstart Bishop of Rome. However, we’ve really gone down the rabbit hole here. This sort of thing requires some serious argument; OTOH, let’s recognize that there is just as much evidence, real, live, hard evidence, to prove the Antioch theory as there is for Q. Which is to say, none.

The conclusion of all of this is that I find it scandalous that the evidence of Galatians Chapter 2 is almost wholly ignored in the reconstruction of the Early Church. In some six hundred pages, JD Crossan scarcely mentions Galatians at all in his door-stop sized The Birth of Christianity. In fact, the subject index (which is all there is) does not list Galatians at all. That is borderline criminal; or, it would be if the book actually dealt with the earliest years of the Christian movement. It really doesn’t. Like most histories of Christianity, Crossan’s book starts with the assumption that the gospels provide the factual basis for the whole Jesus story. Oh, there are minor quibbles here and there, but, for the largest part, it swallows the reliable historicity of the gospels whole, never stopping to realize that their arguments for so much of their “history” is internally inconsistent, if not flat-out self-contradictory. The NT has no obligation to be consistent or logical, but those purporting to write history do have such an obligation. Ah yes, there I go once again. Always remember, in the final analysis I’m a guy with a blog. I do not claim to have solutions to a lot of this stuff–not yet, anyway; my role as I perceive it is not to provide answers, but to ask the correct questions that NT students most assiduously do not.

So the dynamics of the earliest years of the Jesus movement is far and away the most significant aspect of this letter. This is not, however, the only aspect of major significance. The other is that it provides the rationale for the severance of Christianity from Judaism. And here again my biases may play a large role in my judgement. Perhaps I value the historical record over the doctrinal aspect because my background is history. It is certainly arguable that the splitting of Christianity from Judaism is one of the most significant events in all of Western History. Indeed, this parting of ways was the foundational moment for what would become Western Civilization, an act that still carries huge ramifications to the present day. But let’s make no mistake: Paul’s answer to the question definitely put Jews on a lower rung of the ladder. They were The Law, the acts, the rituals, the dietary restrictions; most of all, however they were circumcision, an act that is mentioned numerous times in the text. In fact, it pretty much falls into the category of rhetorical “scare-word”, an extremist position meant to make the entire belief system unpalatable. Paul makes the denigration as subtle and non-judgemental as he can (which may be damning with faint praise), protesting that being a Jew is not a disadvantage; in reality, however, any us-vs-them distinction is necessarily disparaging to the “them” part. As much as the Greeks admired non-Greek cultures–especially the Egyptians–in the end, non-Greeks were barbaroi, “babblers”.  What Paul did, in fact, is to set the stage for the next two thousand-plus years of Christian development. I was given a version of this in my Catholic elementary school. Jews were legalistic, Catholics were loving. BTW, the term “Christian” was rarely used except in the most generic of situations; this gave the nuns a two-fer: looking down on Jews while also slighting those “Christians” who weren’t Catholic. This is how it works, the subtle conditioning of an outlook, cultivated over years. Nothing overt was ever said, but the accumulation of these little bits of encouragement adds up to a definite us-vs-them mindset in which they are decidedly lesser.  

The preceding, however, is to describe the socio-cultural implications; the theological import and impact of Paul’s distinction was profound. There has been debate about whether it was Paul or Jesus who founded Christianity, whether the more correct term would be Paulianity. That is taking it much too far, as I see it, but there are definite veins (as in a vein of ore in the surrounding rock) of Pauline thinking in what we know as Christianity, or at least in the attitudes of some Christians.

It’s probably not necessary it is to recapitulate the nuts and bolts of Paul’s interpretation, the Law vs the Promise; what does matter is that Paul’s primary emphasis was on the idea of personal salvation. This was an idea that had been percolating around the Ancient Mediterranean World, largely in response to the conquests of Alexander and the spread of Hellenic culture in the kingdoms of the Diadochoi. This was the so-called Hellenistic Age, and it’s the reason that the NT was written in Greek rather than Aramaic or something such. The  absorption of so many smaller political and cultural units into the greater Greek World shattered the world-experience of many people. The local gods didn’t really work any more, or the local gods were understood to be not so local as the various pantheons were melded with their Greek counterparts; Ishtar, Astarte, and Aphrodite is a wonderful example, or the identification of Zeus and Ammon-Re (himself something of an amalgam), or the way the chief god of the Germania was, as Tacitus tells us, Mercury. Hence we have Miercoles in Spanish, Mercredi in French–the day of Mercury–which becomes Wotansday in English. Wotan was/is the German form of the Norse Odin, but modern Germans take a more practical approach and it became Mittwoch, mid-week.

In any case, these local cults were collective in nature. Judaism started as such, so the idea of salvation was collective or corporate rather than personal or individual. The religions of the Greek poleis were similar in nature, the emphasis on the community rather than the person. But once these political units with their local cults were swallowed in the larger kingdoms of Seleucus, Antigonus, and Ptolemy, the local gods lost much of their raison-d’etre, and the individual was left to his or her own devices. So for the last centuries BCE, there was a drift towards the idea of some sort of personal salvation. The idea had long been latent in Greek thought. The Homeric idea of Hades, a shadowy realm of gloom and, well, shadows, was supplemented by the idea of the Elysian Fields for heroes which led to vague ideas of a place of reward. This is the same period when the idea of the resurrection of the body infiltrated into Jewish thought. So in Paul’s thinking as a whole we get an amalgam of these ideas, personal salvation in terms of the Jewish resurrection of the body. This latter is very clear from 1 Thessalonians 5, where the saved will rise into the air to meet Jesus as he comes down on a cloud. By putting this idea of personal salvation front and center, Paul shifted the emphasis of ancient religion from the cultic/communal to the personal. And it’s important to understand that the communal cult idea did not die suddenly, especially in the more conservative Western half of the Roman Empire. The root of such persecution as Christians suffered from Rome did not stem from religious intolerance such as Europe experienced in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Christians were not heretics or apostates; they were traitors to the Roman state. The idea of the communal cult of Rome was very much alive, and it was thought that anyone who did not support and actively participate in the state cult was betraying Roma as a political entity.

I don’t want to oversell this idea, at least within the context of this particular epistle. We aren’t there yet; indeed, in Paul as a whole we never quite get to the later idea of an immortal soul going to Heaven or Hell after death. Actually, we never really get to that fully-formed concept in the NT. There are smatterings of it here and there that can be collected into something that begins to resemble the Heaven and Hell of Christian tradition, as depicted in so much of the artwork of the subsequent millennia. Most of these ideas that are Biblical come from the Book of the Apocalypse. Rather, Paul’s major accomplishment and his major contribution to the history and development of Christianity is that he found a way to effect the separation that would lead down the path to our own ideas. This required a break, not only with Judaism, but with ancient ideas of religion in general. He made it about the individual leading a good life as an individual, apart from the concept of corporate guilt or salvation, leading to the individual being rewarded for this good life. Paul made this message explicit. And he essentially made it universal, something for everyone. It did not depend on observation of Jewish ritual, or Greek ritual. For there would be no Jew or Greek, male or female, free or slave. The Law is concrete; the Promise was not in the sense that it did not prescribe specific behaviour in the way that the Law certainly did. By moving from strict Thou Shalt/Shalt Not to the lovely ambiguity of a Promise, Paul opened the gates of heaven to everyone. This was the heart of his mission, and he sets out the details for us in this very important epistle.

Summary Luke, in toto. Some last words. Really.

There are a few more words to say about Luke as a whole. To this point, all we’ve really examined is how he relates to Mark and Matthew, and how the whole Q debate is formulated. What about his theology? and Christology? There are other such topics, all of which will cast some light on the development of Christian thinking and belief and, possibly, dogma by the time Luke wrote.

First and foremost, Luke’s conception of Jesus is fairly close to that of Matthew. That may sound unremarkable, but recall that Mark’s Jesus was very different, and John’s Jesus will be different again. In Mark, Jesus is sort of a hybrid; adopted by God at his baptism, a potent wonder-worker whose name will be invoked against demons for centuries by pagans, who eventually becomes the Christ in the last half or so of the gospel. In Matthew and Luke Jesus is decidedly divine from before he was born, as the two remarkably similar birth narratives convey. Yes, the narratives differ wildly in their details and even their overall setting, but the underlying message is theologically and Christologically identical in both. This is not to be devalued, but it is virtually ignored when comparing Matthew and Luke. Then in John Jesus is the pre-existent Logos, who is identical with the Father. That is a significant change. And John opens with this: In the beginning was the Logos. No, it’s not sufficient that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, that he was a more or less a demigod in a manner that would be immediately comprehensible to a someone with an understanding of Greek and Roman mythology, which was replete with such god-begotten Heroes. Were we to go through a line-by-line comparison of the way the two evangelists describe Jesus, it would not be shocking to come up with some minor differences in conception. But they would be minor. Both Matthew and Luke take pains to let us know that Jesus was not adopted, he did not become the Christ, and that he was, in fact, both divine and the Christ from the moment of conception by the Divine Breath. John then takes Jesus’ identity to its logical conclusion: he the same as, but distinct from, God the Father.

Secondly, while Jesus still performs many miracles, the aura of the wonder-worker has been toned down significantly. On the whole, most biblical scholars do not pay much attention to the many, many other wonder-workers who were more or less the contemporaries of Jesus. The most famous is Apollonius of Tyana, who was born within a few years of Jesus, but who lived into the reigns of Domitian and Nerva, almost making to the Second Century. Traditional dates are 3 – 97 CE; however, while both dates are a bit sketchy, the date of birth especially has to be looked at with a semi-jaundiced eye. They didn’t issue birth certificates, and when these people became famous, it was a bit of a scramble to come up with a date of birth. Regardless, he could easily be called the Pagan Jesus; in fact when the followers of Jesus became The Church, Apollonius was their particular bête noir; the Church founders loathed and detested all heretics, individuals like Marcion or even Simon Magus, but they held an especially vicious animosity for Apollonius because his life, in so many ways, resembled that of Jesus. His followers claimed he was the son of a god, he lived a life of an ascetic, wandering preacher who traveled about the Eastern Mediterranean with his followers, teaching and working wonders. When he died, his followers said that he rose from the dead–if he actually died at all. 

Any of this sound familiar?

It was likely the similarities between the lives of the two men–or Divine Entities, if you will–that particularly alarmed the founders of The Church. So much similarity made it seem, to the casual outside viewer, that perhaps Jesus hadn’t been so special after all. The two men also shared one other common experience: both were put on trial. We “know all about” the trial of Jesus. Philostratus describes the trial of Apollonius in the biography he wrote; there are questions, of course. about how far we can trust this account. As was the case with Jesus, the followers of Apollonius are quite concerned to claim that he was accused falsely. The charge against Apollonius was that he was a magician. This can mean so many things in the First Century, anything from being a poisoner, to being an astrologer, to being someone who actually practiced–or attempted to–what we would call sorcery, or witchcraft, or such, like turning someone into a donkey. Or a newt. Different emperors had different attitudes towards “magic”. Per the sources, most of them relied on astrologers, but astrologers were also periodically expelled from Rome. One emperor who was particularly anti-magic was Tiberius. In his reign some 30-40 people were executed for magic. I have suspected that one of them may have been Jesus.

Mark wrote during the reign of Vespasian, who was a bit less stringent about such things. Matthew and Luke, however, were likely writing under Domitian, who was much less tolerant–of magic, of Christians, and other things. The Persecutions of Domitian are more or less an accepted fact by most NT people, but I am not familiar with the source material on which this judgement is based. Overall, it would seem that the tales of persecution of Christians were a bit (?) exaggerated, sporadic, episodic, unpredictable if often brutal. The Romans were brutal people when it suited their needs. And we are told that the trial of Apollonius was held during Domitian’s reign. So if the imperial mood was anti-magic, then this would be a great reason for Matthew and Luke to tone down the wonder-worker aspect of Jesus, especially if he had been executed as a magician. This matters to some extent because even in the Second and Third Centuries, Christians were defending Jesus and denying charges made by pagans that he had been a magician. If the rumours about Jesus persisted that long, that has to make us stop and wonder. Not all of it was fictitious slander, either. There are amulets and spells that invoke pagan gods and daimons and Jesus to perform some sort of magic, and all in the names are in same text, sequentially. Jesus was considered particularly effective as an exorcist. Which is precisely what Matthew eliminated from Chapter 1 of Mark’s gospel, the episode that Luke restored after he provided his version of the Prophet in his Own Land story at the beginning of Chapter 4; in both Mark and Luke, we saw, used this as the first wonder of Jesus’ public career. Is this mere coincidence?

It matters to some degree because, offhand, I would find it odd that both Matthew and Luke chose to remove all of the descriptions of magical practices set out in Mark. That Luke agreed with Matthew on this against Mark (which, recall, never happens) so consistently and thoroughly would actually provide pretty good evidence that Luke certainly was aware of Matthew. I would dearly wish to use this as an argument against Q. You mean the two of them came to this decision independently? Well, given the imperial dislike of such things, we have a reason why Matthew and Luke could have come to this decision independently. Since Domitian took a dim view of magical practice, it would be prudent for anyone writing about Jesus to tone down that aspect of his career. This, unfortunately undercuts this as an argument against Q; however, it will still be fun to throw this into the mix and see what the pQ people think. There is one reason, however, that may demonstrate that Luke did get the idea from Matthew: Luke took it a step further. One of the points raised by Kloppenborg is to ask why Luke omitted the visit of the Magi. Luke, he says, was very interested in how pagans reacted and were involved, so it makes no sense to eliminate the Magi from the birth narrative. Or does it? If Luke wants to remove the references to magic, getting rid of the Magi makes a lot of sense. After all, the root of the Latin word magia is magus, or magos, magi/magoi in Latin and Greek respectively. That would be on the order of excising references to Marxism from a text in the USA during the McCarthy craze of the 1950s, but leaving in a favorable mention of Karl Marx. As a final note to this, Josephus tells us about a wonder-working teacher named Eleazar who lived about the time the gospels were being written. And, indeed, Roman Emperors got in on the act, including Vespasian and Hadrian. In fact in Tacitus and Suetonius, Vespasian is credited with a miraculous cure of a man who was lame, and of a blind man. This latter is of especial interest since Tacitus tells us he used a method rather similar to that of Mark in 8:22-25. This is where Jesus applies saliva to the man’s eyes to effect the cure. 

In any case, this is something that needs to be discussed by persons more learnèd in the NT than I am. The Q debate is almost entirely textual; it needs to be more contextual. This is to say, it needs to consider the history as well as the text itself.

And as a final word about Apollonius, the biography by Philostratus makes an interesting comparison to the gospels. First of all, it’s very long; it requires two volumes in the Loeb Classical Series, so it’s longer–by about twice–than the entire NT. And it is clearly and obviously what we would call a biography. This demonstrates decisively that, whatever the literary form the gospels fall into, they are not to be classified as biographies of Jesus. There was a website I used to visit of a grad student working in Mark. One of his aims was trying to identify the literary form of the gospels. I don’t recall what his conclusion was, but IMO the gospels really do not fit any of the standard literary forms known in the ancient world, which should make us very reluctant to accept then as factual about anything. And Apollonius is said to have traveled widely, from Spain to India, where he spent considerable time.

So what is peculiar to Luke? We have the stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. These are powerful stories that describe our interactions with each other. It’s not like the Parable of the Tares, or of The Talents, or the ten Virgins which are unique to Matthew. Those speak more to a person’s relationship with God; the good and bad will be sorted out, but there is no sense of what it means to be good or bad. In the second, we are to use our talents, but there is nothing specific about what we should do with them. In the final one we are to be on our watch because the day is coming, but we know not when. This is not to say that Matthew has nothing about how individuals should act and interact with other persons, but it seems not to get the emphasis it does in Luke. Or, is it just that the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son are so overwhelming that their weight is outsized? After all, both terms are deeply ingrained into Western/European culture, to the point that they are understood just by their names by the vast majority of those of European descent regardless of how religious they are or are not. It is easy to overstate this, but if you tell a dozen people that someone was a good Samaritan, chances are eleven of them will understand the allusion. The shining hallmark of Matthew’s gospel is the Sermon on the Mount, but really, not all of it. I daresay a lot of people have no idea how long it goes on. I didn’t. Generally Christians get snippets here and there, and probably not the whole thing. Then let’s talk about the Birth Narrative. All people usually know about Matthew, or what comes to mind about Matthew’s narrative are the Star and the Magi. When we go to church on Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day, we get Luke with the no room at the inn, the stable and the manger, all topped off with Hark the Herald Angels Sing, or Angels We Have Heard On High. Those are the details we think of about Jesus’ birth. After all, the countless creches that are erected in churches and homes (and not so much in public spaces any more, but that is actually a good thing) are giving us the Story of Jesus’ Birth as told by Luke. 

What does all this mean? It means that I’ve just completed Luke, so his material is fresher in my mind. When I think back to Matthew, I think of the very long slog it took to get to the end. Yes, I am giving value judgements and not historical judgements, but these values, I think, are precisely the point. I think Luke read Mark. I think he read Matthew. What he saw was a gospel that was, perhaps, too short and another that was, equally perhaps, too long. So Luke endeavored to give us one that was just right. He did this by eliminating much of the material where Mark and Matthew provided all the information we need. He cut down on the arrest of the Baptist, he got rid of the storm on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus walking on water. He condensed significant portions even of the Passion Narrative. And he edited out rather lengthy passages that constitute the so-called “M” material, the wording that is unique to Matthew. (Of course, he included a lot of what Matthew added to Mark, except that gets called Q.) Then, instead of the stuff that was already covered, we got the two mentioned plus the Widow of Nain, Zacchaeus, and more. Looking at the gospel as a whole, and in comparison to Matthew, I see a deliberate and calculated attempt to rework Matthew’s narrative, to eliminate what could be, and to replace the cuts with other, new stories. I have asked the question countless times: Why does someone sit down to write a gospel? Answer, because that person believes they have something to say. Luke retained a lot of Matthew’s new material, but not all of it, just as Matthew retained most of Mark, but not all of it.

In short, I think that Luke humanized the story in a way that made it accessible. Or something like that. Just think about it.

 

Sorry can’t resist. This from Wikipedia, on Apollonius of Tyana:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_of_Tyana

Historical facts [edit] 

With the exception of the Adana Inscription from 3rd or 4th century CE, little can be derived from sources other than Philostratus (about the life of Apollonius).

The Adana Inscription has been translated by C.P. Jones as: ” ‘This man, named after Apollo, and shining forth from Tyana, extinguished the faults of men. The tomb in Tyana (received) his body, but in truth heaven received him so that he might drive out the pains of men’.”

The C.P. Jones whose name is highlighted was one of my professors at the University of Toronto. I had him twice, once in second year for a class on Suetonius’ Divus Iulius, and in fourth year for a class on Tacitus’ Annales, of which we read up through Gaius. The Suetonius lasted a semester, and had something like five or six people (in a second year class) and Tacitus lasted a full year and consisted of me, Prof Jones, and another student named Charles, whose last name I can’t recall. I think it was Keefe. Prof Jones decamped for a spot at Harvard shortly after I left (one could say he followed me to Boston) and there he recently translated Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius for the Loeb Classical Series, which is published by Harvard University Press. The citation above is from that work. Yes, I am bragging. The Classics Dept at the University of Toronto was an intense place. There were maybe 30-40 undergrads, and we had access to full professors on a regular basis. Due to the small number of students, all classes were essentially conducted as seminars. I think the largest class I had was the 300-level Herodotus, which had perhaps a dozen at most, and probably a few less. 

Also, check out this paragraph by Bart Ehrman that’s under the rubric Comparisons to Jesus.

Even before he was born, it was known that he would be someone special. A supernatural being informed his mother that the child she was to conceive would not be a mere mortal but would be divine. He was born miraculously, and he became an unusually precocious young man. As an adult he left home and went on an itinerant preaching ministry, urging his listeners to live, not for the material things of this world, but for what is spiritual. He gathered a number of disciples around him, who became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired, in no small part because he himself was divine. He proved it to them by doing many miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. But at the end of his life he roused opposition, and his enemies delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment. Still, after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly realm. Later some of his followers wrote books about him.

He is, of course, describing Apollonius.

 

Luke Summary in toto, Part 5

As mentioned at the end of Part 4, I had considered ending on that note. However, the way Luke treats balance between Mark and Matthew is the most important aspect of the third gospel, IMO. It especially has ramifications for the Q debate, and we all know how much that interests me. So we continue. But before we go on, there are a couple more minor discrepancies between Matthew and Luke the early parts of Jesus’ ministry that bear mentioning.

The first occurs in the Temptations of Jesus. The order is different. Both start with changing rocks into bread, but then Matthew moves on to the pinnacle of the Temple and finishes by offering Jesus the kingdoms of the world. Luke reverses these last two. Why? And, which is he “correct” order? That is to say, what is the order of these in Q?

Now, since Kloppenborg, the biggest advocate of Q as far as I can tell, has produced a volume that he and his colleagues claim to be the most likely version of Q, we can check for the “official” word. This volume, the Q-Thomas Reader agrees with Matthew, and puts the kingdoms of the world at the end. And I tend to agree that this order seems to make more sense, as it provides ever-increasing offers. Why go from the kingdoms of the world to casting himself from the top of the Temple? Surely putting the kingdoms of the world is the logical progression. So why did Luke take them out of order? Seriously, why? I have not seen much in the way of discussion about this; in fact, I have seen none, but that may just be because I need to get out more. But let’s think about this for a moment. Which of the two choices for the third temptation represents a step up from the previous one? Is the offer of the kingdoms of the world really a superior temptation? At first glance, it may seem so, but perhaps the second look may provide a different insight.

For Jesus to cast himself from the temple and have angels catch him is not just worldly power, but a defiance of natural law. And in Jesus’ day world conquest was not idle speculation, but a reality. After all, Rome had attained worldly (more less) dominion, but no emperor (or private citizen–at least theoretically) had ever defied the laws of nature to such degree. This is to say that the third temptation in Luke actually demonstrates more of a step up from the second than is the case with Matthew’s arrangement. In Luke, we move from the mere physical need of food, to dominion of the physical world–no small feat, but it had been done– to defiance of what was not-yet called gravity. The conclusion to be drawn is that Luke changed the order of either Matthew or Q. This carries a certain amount of implication, since Luke is generally held to be the more “primitive” of the two gospels, meaning that Luke is closer to Q than Matthew. Of course, this assertion relies heavily on the difference between “Blessed are the poor” and “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. However, the two gospels are said to be alternatively primitive, which means that neither one can actually be said to be the “more primitive”; however, it’s not considered polite to say that out loud when others might hear. In the end, though, whether Luke changed Q or he changed Matthew because Q did not exist, does not really matter. The point is that he obviously made the change, which means the question is not which did he change, but why? The glib non-answer is that Luke made the re-arrangement because it it made redactional sense to him, but this verges on circularity and does not answer the question for we are then compelled to ask: why did it make redactional sense?

IMO, the simplest and most obvious reason is that he thought it told a better story, that it made for a more dramatic impact, that the lesson of the story would run deeper and so be more meaningful for his audience. That is, it was an editorial choice based on what would sell, so to speak. Now, before this explanation is dismissed out of hand as facetious, stop and think about the birth narrative. A stable? A manger? Really? If those are not dramatic devices, I’m not sure what would be. The mighty-king-born-in-a-humble-stable is perhaps the greatest rags-to-riches (to-rags-again–perhaps) story in the history of Western Literature. It has resonated for the past two millennia, more or less having become THE official birth narrative, despite borrowing the Star and the Magi-and pretty much only those tropes–from Matthew. And let’s not forget the Road to Damascus. If you read Paul’s version of his conversion, one is immediately struck by how little it resembles the more famous version in Acts. But is it so different? The version in Acts is much more dramatic, to be sure, but it tells much the same story: Paul’s conversion was sudden, a revelation rather than a steady movement, like the conversion experienced by Augustine. The final leap to full conversion may have been an abrupt break for Augustine, but he was consciously considering its belief system prior to the final jump. I have mentioned that Luke has the sensibilities of a novelist, and I think his search for the dramatic plays a consistent role in his editorial decisions; IOW, he is redactionally consistent.

In and of itself, the decision to change either Matthew or Q (or both, really) has no real impact on the Q debate. We absolutely know he changed Matthew because the evidence is in front of us. In this, he made a conscious decision to make this change. That statement borders on tautology. And very shortly after, he moves the story of the Rejection in Nazareth from it’s Markan location later in the narrative, and puts it right up front, turning this into the first public action of Jesus’ ministry. In other words, Luke shows us that he has no qualms about rearranging content. But if he’s willing to rearrange this content, how does that reflect on his willingness to change or rearrange other content of Q? Or of Matthew. Luke was not afraid to rearrange Mark, so why should he feel differently about his other predecessor, whether it be Q or Matthew? The answer, he probably did not. I bring all of this up because this does have some import for the Q debate. It may be oblique, but it’s no less real for that. As I’ve stated a thousand times, it seems that the chief argument in favour of Q is Matthew’s masterful arrangement of the material in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s so good that only a fool or madman would change it. Coupled to this is a corollary point. We must show that Luke had a redactionally consistent reason for every change he makes from Matthew. As far as arguments and case-building go, neither of these carry much weight. Luke changed stuff because he wanted to change stuff, and because there was no point in writing a new gospel if all he was going to do is parrot Matthew. Or Q. I mean, what is the point? Matthew already existed so why write Matthew-dot-2? Someone decides to write a second or third gospel because one believes one has something to add. This is, after all, why Matthew wrote. He wanted–one would guess–to tell us more about the things Jesus said. Whether Matthew created these teachings himself, or whether Q was somehow discovered after Mark had written, Matthew had something–a lot of something–to add to the story.

A large part of the problem here is that biblical scholars believe that all of the teachings in the gospels all trace back to the time of Jesus. It may not be literally all of them–there are usually exceptions–but the number who don’t believe this are likely to be statistically insignificant. IOW, they are so few as to be effectively meaningless. Scholars talk about the sources used by John that had eluded all previous evangelists, in the way that Q eluded Mark. The problem is that this belief rests on no solid evidence. There is nothing to show that Jesus said or did half the things in the last three gospels. Mark is the most likely to contain material going back to Jesus, but that is a very double-edged sword for NT scholarship since the Jesus portrayed in Mark does not necessarily resemble the one of the other three gospels. Yes, the Christ appears at the end, but only at the end. Most of the gospel concerns Jesus as a wonder-worker; or, if we dare use the term, a magician. This version of Jesus, apparently, did not actually do much teaching. He told parables, The Sower, The Mustard Seed, a few others, but the sophisticated theology of the subsequent gospels is largely absent. Now, there will be vehement blowback against what I am saying, and there will be impassioned attempts to show that “largely absent” is horribly mistaken, or is at least overstated. What there won’t be is evidence to show that Jesus actually gave the Sermon on the Mount, that he told the story of the Prodigal Son, or that he cleansed the Temple twice. That lack should give us pause, but it hasn’t. As for Jesus the Magician, I have gotten on a distribution list for papers that discuss a lot of magical practice among pagans, and a certain amount deals with the period starting perhaps in the Second, but definitely in the Third Century. What is very clear is that Jesus retained or maintained a reputation as a powerful magician even among pagan magicians. In particular, his name was considered especially efficacious for exorcising demons. IOW, for doing exactly what Mark provided as the first action of Jesus’ public ministry.

So as for what Matthew had to say that needed to be added to the Legend of Jesus, we have to ask where it came from. Naturally, the official answer is that Matthew came across a volume of Q that was in circulation and realized that this material had to be worked into the gospel narrative. And Luke, being unaware of Matthew, did essentially the same thing. Except Matthew added things that appear only in his gospel, like the Parable of the Talents, and so did Luke, like the Good Samaritan. These additions that are not part of Q are attributed to other unknown and undetected sources, the M source and the L source respectively. So it is not just Q, but there are numerous other subterranean sources that flowed underground to reach later evangelists; some of them did not surface until John. And then they mysteriously disappear, just as they mysteriously appeared for the individual authors. In all cases, however, it is taken as gospel (pun intended) that the stories trace back, in a straight line, to the time of Jesus, if maybe not Jesus himself. Indeed, this provenance is never explored; it is simply assumed as self-evident.

There are two points in all this. The first is this should make us all look much more critically–which is to say, skeptically–at Q than we do. The second is that, if we weaken the support for Q, we have to consider Luke’s redactional decisions in a new light. Let’s take the example here, of Luke switching the order of the last two temptations. If Kloppenborg is correct and Matthew has the correct version of Q, then Luke decided to change Q. If he does it here–without explanation–he can do it elsewhere. The Q proponents conveniently overlook things like this when discussing editorial decisions, just as they brush off the “minor agreements” which are not exactly minor when word choice is almost identical. I believe that “why” Luke made the change could have big implications. I believe that, to no small extent, Luke’s intention was to “correct” Matthew, or at least to “set the record straight” in some meaningful way. He believed that his version was an improvement on Matthew as a means of emphasizing Jesus’ identity as the Divine Messiah. Thus the temptation to hurl himself off the Temple to be caught by angels is the temptation to reveal his divinity for all to see. Being king of the world is certainly impressive, but it’s still a human accomplishment. Being caught by angels in mid-air, however, most certainly is not.

Along with this we get another, similar correction to Matthew. It concerns Jesus presence in Caphernaum. I firmly believe that Jesus was raised in Caphernaum rather than Nazareth, or that he at least spent much of his life there prior to taking his act on the road around Galilee. Mark is vague, due to compression, but I believe Mark strongly implies that Jesus either lived in, or had relocated to, Caphernaum in the story of the paralytic borne by four. We are told that word got out that he was home, or in the house, or something such, the phrase strongly implying that it was in his house. The Greek is “en oikō”, literally in the house, but with the strong implication of in his house. Matthew is explicit that Jesus moved to Caphernaum. In addition, in Mark’s version of the rejection at Nazareth, Mark never specifies the name of his home town. We all assume it was Nazareth, but who’s to say? These stories grow up organically and details such as the name of the town are often not added until later. It is noteworthy, IMO, that Matthew does not name the town, either. Both use the term “patrida autou”, his homeland (more technically, the land of his fathers, from “patēr”, father.) Luke, OTOH, is not shy about this. He asserts that Jesus was rejected specifically in Nazareth, and he states that Jesus only traveled to Caphernaum, giving no implication of a relocation. The result is that Luke clarifies the ambiguities of Mark and Matthew. In short, he has set the record straight. Jesus was rejected in his home town, which was Nazareth. He did not move to Caphernaum.

I considered it important to dwell on these two bits, minor as they are. It is precisely that they are minor that they have such importance. I mean, why bother? Who would have noticed? Well, Luke did, and apparently this sort of slipshod storytelling with ambiguities and a lack of clarity bothered him. So he did something about it by removing the ambiguities and providing clarity. This is an editorial policy that will carry through the rest of the gospel. We will examine a sample of those incidents in what will, with luck, be the final installment of the Summary of Luke, in toto.

 

 

Summary Luke in toto Part 4

Now it’s time to get specific about how Luke stacks up with both his predecessors. Up to this point, with the exceptions of the ministry of the Baptist and the Temptations, the comparison has only been between Matthew and Luke because the first few chapters of each contain material that is not found in Mark in any form. I realize that has been the topic of the discussion through the first three parts of this Summary in toto. Still, let it sink in. 

Truly, the first point of divergence between the three is the baptism of Jesus itself. While all three have the Voice of God coming down when Jesus is raised from the water (Luke), the actual baptism is handled differently by all three. In Mark, John baptises Jesus without demur; in Matthew, John demurs, but Jesus tells him to proceed. These are not necessarily contradictory stories, since Mark could have omitted the demurral, or, more likely IMO, Matthew added it to indicate the actual disparity in rank between the two. Luke chose a third course, and omitted the actual act of the baptism altogether. Luke’s account is problematic, as has been pointed out numerous times as this is supposedly support for the existence of Q. In Luke, John has been arrested by the time Jesus gets baptized, so it’s really not clear who actually performed the baptism; all we know is that Jesus was baptised, at which point came the Voice from Heaven. The Q proponents claim that since Matthew had so effectively solved the problem of Jesus being baptised by an “inferior”, that Luke’s refusal to follow is clear proof that Luke was unaware of Matthew. Admittedly, this carries a certain amount of weight and, in and of itself, may seem convincing. But we need to look at the overall picture because here we have a microcosm of the redactional approach of Luke that the Q people demand so vociferously.

In Mark and Matthew, the arrest and execution of John form what is more or less a stand-alone story that, honestly, could be inserted almost anywhere. More, the story is consistent with what Josephus relates about the execution of John. It is not impossible that Josephus got the story from the gospels; this possibility is never discussed in the literature for reasons beyond my ken; but I do have suspicions. By maintaining Josephus’ independence from the gospels, he can be shown off as an “independent” source. Realize, though, that Josephus wrote more or less the same time as Luke; by this point, the Christians were the ones who were most concerned with Judea in the 30s; they had been telling the story of Jesus for thirty (or more) years by the time Josephus wrote. Philo, who wrote about the period in discussing the relations between Jews and Gaius Caligula (reigned 37-41 CE), does not mention John, but there was no reason for him to do so. Assuming Luke is correct that Jesus was executed under Tiberius*, Caligula’s reign was still years in the future. So we have Josephus and no one else. The point is that a stand-alone story could easily represent a summarised version of how the episode was remembered in the popular culture. In a sense, it’s similar to the story of the Gerasene Demoniac. It’s perhaps difficult to come up with a modern analogy for such a block of legend. In our written culture, the closest analogy would be some of the folk songs sung about legendary figures such as John Henry (who? Well, he had a hammer) or Jesse James.

*Whether this is a reasonable assumption or not depends on a skein of arguments that are outside of scope at this particular juncture.

However, Luke basically ignores the pre-fabricated block. In fact, he eschews the entire story mentioning John’s arrest in passing, as it were. So we have sort of a curious situation. This represents something like a double abridgement. Following the order as presented in Luke, the first is the extremely shortened mention of John’s arrest, followed very quickly by the self-administering baptism. How do we interpret this? All along, I’ve been saying that Luke often will shorten a story that has been adequately covered by both Mark and Matthew. Both of them provide the full story of John’s arrest and execution (if a bit later in the narrative), and they also fully present the story of the baptism. Why doesn’t Luke tell us about John’s arrest, or who baptised Jesus? He didn’t feel the need. The audience is fully aware of the story of John, and they know that John baptised Jesus. There is no need to repeat either of these. But then it’s important to notice, and to note, what follows. After the baptism, Luke provides the whole story of the Temptation of Jesus, including the dialogue between Jesus and Satan as added to Mark by Matthew. IOW, we have the inverse of the previous situations: the dialogue was only presented by Matthew, so Luke doesn’t feel he’s being redundant to include it. This abridgement/inclusion is a pattern that will repeat itself throughout the rest of the gospel.

Much of the rest of Chapter 4 consists of two stories. The first is found in Mark Chapter 6, which is much further along in the gospel due to Mark’s shorter length. Here we come to the story wherein Jesus returns to his home town only to be rejected by those who had known him. Mark and Matthew merely state that Jesus had returned to his “home town” (patrida, in Greek), both using the same word and neither naming the town. Luke breaks ranks; he both specifies that Jesus has come to Nazareth, and that this was where he had been raised. But Luke does not recite the list of Jesus’ siblings as do the other gospels; once again, that topic has been covered. But then Luke inserts an entirely new bit of information. In all three versions, Jesus goes to the synagogue where he preaches, thereby causing an uproar because no one will credit him with insight, having known him since he was a kid. Luke alone, however, tells us what Jesus preached about. It was a section of Isaiah which could be interpreted to refer to the coming of the anointed one. Jesus then proclaims that the scripture has been fulfilled, since this refers to him.

It’s not difficult to understand why this upset his audience. Jesus declared himself to be the messiah in front of a synagogue full of people. One has to suspect that the Jews were darn tired of waiting for the promised messiah, but also apt to be very skeptical of anyone claiming to be the one. There is that phenomenon wherein after waiting for a long time for something, one has come to accept that it’s not going to happen. And then it does and everyone is unprepared and so is not usually on board with the idea. This is exactly the message of the analogy of the slave waiting for his master to return, but then gets lackadaisical about it and the master catches him unawares. And the synagogue full of people was upset, indeed, to the point that they were going to hurl him off the top of the hill on which the town was built. The purposes behind these two related incidents, or both halves of the single incident, is plain enough. And purposes is plural; Jesus making the announcement is the bold, definitive declaration that Jesus made so there can be no doubt among Luke’s audience of who Jesus is. And the announcement was obviously not made for the benefit of the people in the synagogue; they had missed the boat decades before. No, the proclamation is for the edification of Luke’s audience.

Here’s a peculiarity of the circumstances in which Luke was writing. If you’ll recall, in Mark, Jesus went out of his way to keep his identity secret. In the 70s, Mark had to explain to any non-Jews how it was possible that the Jews rejected Jesus. After all, he was the long-awaited and much-anticipated messiah, so why weren’t they behind Jesus? Well, because Jesus kept all this under wraps, to the point that even his disciples didn’t fully catch on. But Luke was writing in the 90s; by Luke’s time the term “Christian” was common. There were enough of them that they came to the attention of Pliny the Younger in his role of governor of Bythinia-Pontus (modern Turkey). Even so, Luke still had to explain to the pagan world how it was that the Jews missed the event they’d been anticipating for so long, but he had to answer it from a slightly different perspective, or provide the answer to a somewhat different question. Here Luke is saying that, goodness gracious boy howdy, how dense could they be? He flat-out told them and they still didn’t believe him. And the fact that they got so agitated about the declaration was indicative of their degree of resistance to the idea. As such, it foreshadows Jesus’ eventual fate, wherein he was crucified by these same Jews who did not, or could not, accept who he was, but the audience hearing Luke was fully informed. This proclamation of Jesus is sort of the exclamation point at the end of the birth narrative. It signals the true opening of Jesus’ ministry. As such, there is no surprise that Luke pulled this passage out of its “Markan” context. That Luke was willing to move pericopes (!) of Mark from one place to another should remove the stigma that Q proponents try to attach to those instances when Luke re-arranges the order and/or context of the stuff in Matthew. No one disputes Luke’s awareness of Mark; so if Luke is willing to rearrange Mark, why should it be so distressing that he does the same thing with Matthew? Luke puts things where they need to be to make the most impact. 

But wait, there’s more. Following the Rejection at Nazareth in which Jesus proclaims his identity, we have Jesus following up with an action that proves what he says. And he does this by putting back one of the few stories in Mark that Matthew did not include in his gospel, the driving out of an unclean spirit from a man in Caphernaum. Offhand, I am not aware of any discussion of why Matthew omitted this story. It was, after all, the first wonder Jesus had worked, so it would seem rather important. And Matthew doesn’t just move the story elsewhere, as we saw with Luke moving the rejection in Nazareth; the story is simply not included. Why? As I said, I am not aware of the literature on this, so shame on me. No doubt there are many wise and insightful reasons suggested for this, and all of them are no doubt as convincing as the argument for Q. Of course, I have my own opinion. It has to do with who Jesus was at this point in the narrative of Mark and Matthew respectively. This occurs very early in Mark, when Jesus is a wonder-worker rather than the Christ. In fact, aside from the use of Christ in Mark 1:1, and a questionable use in 1:34, the term christos does not occur in Mark before Chapter 8, when the transition to the Christ-Narrative has begun. Think about that for a moment. But then, upon looking at the occurrence of the word in Matthew, it occurs five times before Chapter 11, and three of them are in the genealogy. This is a good indication of how deeply set in the tradition the wonder-worker narrative was; whether consciously or not, Matthew follows Mark on this. Mark did not use the word, and neither did Matthew. OTOH, Luke uses it early and often.

To some degree, the non-use of the term in Matthew undercuts my theory on why Matthew left out the story of expelling the unclean spirit. My suggestion is that Matthew eliminated the story so that the first true public act of Jesus is the Sermon on the Mount. The first four chapters of Matthew were, more or less, setting up the very long passage that is the Sermon. It begins at the outset of Chapter 5 and runs through to the end of Chapter 7. As such, this serves as Jesus’ notice to the world; it is Jesus’ proclamation of Jesus’ message which is more or less synonymous with who Jesus is. Matthew’s gospel is about Jesus the Teacher, the Wise Sage with a message of love and redemption and the kingdom, interlaced with trenchant aphorisms. This is an editorial choice, or the choice an author makes when he’s setting up the scene for the story he’s about to tell. The teachings presented under the rubric The Sermon on the Mount are, arguably, the most important aspect of Jesus in the opinion of Matthew. That statement is, IMO, incontrovertible. So by removing the story of the Unclean Spirit, Matthew has seriously de-emphasized Jesus as the wonder-worker, at least for the time being. In his place, he has set up Jesus the Teacher, who seeks to convert the hearts of his listeners with a message of love rather than to wow and dazzle them with his extraordinary power. As an aside, I’m not at all saying that this element is not lacking in Matthew: Jesus’ first action coming down the mount was to heal a leper. Rather, it’s a matter of emphasis.

The arrangement of Matthew and the subsequent arrangement of Luke is a big part of the reason I firmly believe that Luke was completely aware of Matthew. We are told, ad nauseam, that Matthew’s arrangement of the Q material–as demonstrated by the Sermon on the Mount–was “masterful”, to the point that only a fool or a madman would alter it after reading it. Since Luke was neither, then Luke was not aware of Matthew.* This is tendentious in the extreme, largely because it’s based not on fact or argumentation, but on a subjective appraisal of the literary quality of Matthew’s Sermon. Rather, I see the arrangement of Luke as masterful, and I believe I have an argument to support.

*This is a good example of the Modus Tollens theoren: p ⊃ q; ~q; therefore ~p. (translated: If p then q; not q; therefore not p). Except here it would be ; p ⊃ (q v r); ~(q v r); therefore ~p.  (translated: if p then q or r.  not (p or r–neither of these is correct]; therefore not p. 

Mark started Jesus’ public career with the story of the Unclean Spirit. This introduces Jesus as a wonder-worker, with powers over the realm of kakodaimones, what we can call evil spirits. Really, in modern English, we can refer to them as demons. This is the introduction Jesus gives to the world, as related by Mark. We saw that one of the key features of Matthew was to de-emphasize the wonders and put the focus on the teachings and on Jesus as Christ. So Luke had two different approaches to choose from; mostly, he follows Matthew and by choosing the Christ over the wonder-worker. Luke uses the term christos more often in the early part of his gospel, and again in Acts, but the difference between him and Matthew is not overwhelming. There is a lesson to be drawn from this, but I’m not sure what it might be, and I cannot quite come up with an interesting theory. I suspect it involves some continuation of the precedent set by Mark, where only certain pericopes are to be associated with the Christ. This would require more study than is practicable for this format. I do suggest some connexion with Mark because the two places where some form of christos is used a lot are in John and in Paul. IOW, the Christ brackets the Synoptic Gospels; it is used before and after Mark, Matthew, and Luke (the chronological order of the three) and then it becomes a major theme throughout John, which was written after. I was prepared to argue that the increased use of christos by Luke was the result of the influence of Paul, but that really doesn’t hold up given the only minimal increase in the use of the term in the early stages of Luke.

Let us, however, return to the actual topic at hand, which is the story of the Unclean Spirit, because I believe this provides some excellent insight into the Q question. Mark begins with Jesus the wonder-worker; Matthew begins with Jesus the Teacher. Luke steers closer to Matthew than Mark, but he still charts his own course that is more or less independent of the two, but that contains elements of both. In Luke’s introduction of Jesus, we really get neither teacher nor wonder-worker; instead, we get Jesus the Christ as he reads the passage of Isaiah promising the Messiah and then proclaims to all and sundry that he has fulfilled the prophecy. That is, Jesus says that he is the Christ. So, like in Matthew, Jesus does not begin his public ministry with a wonder, but rather with teaching, or at least the interpretation of Scripture, which is, after all, teaching. But–and here’s where it gets interesting–we get this announcement twice, sandwiched around a wonder. In Mark the first entity to call Jesus the Holy One of God is the unclean spirit, and we get that in Luke as well. So Jesus tells us who he is, drives out a demon, then has the demon tell us who Jesus is. As did Matthew, Luke tones down the magical aspect of Jesus’ career, leaving out all of the magical practices described by Mark, partly by not making the exorcism Jesus’ opening act. But, at the same time, we get Luke “correcting” Matthew by restoring this story. It does seem important to do so because of the demon’s acknowledgement of Jesus’ identity. Jesus tells us, the demon tells us, thereby corroborating Jesus’ statement rather than being the entity who is first to break the news. So this is why Luke Chapter 4 has such implications for a lot of things.

I’ve heard it said that the use of wonders in the gospels were supposedly to demonstrate the arrival of the Kingdom. Sure. Here’s the thing. Christians and biblical scholars like to ignore this, but the reality is that Jesus was considered a very powerful magician, a reputation that stuck with him–even among pagans–for centuries. I’ve been reading this series of papers that discuss magical amulets, curse tablets, and other magical paraphernalia, mostly of pagan provenance, and the name of Jesus features very prominently among a number of them. These are artifacts dug up from wells, found inside walls, and extracted from other places where it was customary to secrete such things. Even more, it seems like one of the functions in which the name of Jesus was considered particularly efficacious was in the exorcising of demons, or unclean spirits, or what the pagans would have termed kakodaimones. Was Matthew particularly concerned to shoot down this aspect of Jesus’ reputation? After all, Christian apologists were denying that Jesus was a magician well into the 3rd, if not the 4th Century (which takes us into the Christian Empire). Whether being considered a magician was good or bad depended greatly upon the time one lived. It was a bad thing during Tiberius’ reign, when Jesus was supposedly executed, and there is no real good reason to dispute this chronology. It came and went depending on the outlook of the particular emperor. Most of them were not fond of seers of the future, or casters of horoscopes, the idea being that these talents would be, or could be used to foretell the death of the emperor which was problematic.

Writing in the 80s, under the first Flavian Emperors, one would think that Matthew would not need to be terribly concerned about imperial persecution, but we know that he was indeed concerned to play down the magical aspects of Jesus. All we have to do to confirm this is to note what parts of Mark that Matthew omitted. One very obvious thing Matthew excluded was all the descriptions of magical practices that Jesus used. Luke did the same. Here we have a very clear instance of a situation in which Luke agreed with Matthew against Mark. This is odd, really, because the Q proponents are quick to point out that this never happens. Except for the whole constellation of themes around the birth narratives such as Joseph and Bethlehem–and the very idea of a birth narrative, and a genealogy–and now here. And all the minor agreements which are meaningless. Oh, and all the Q material, but that doesn’t count because we’re using this material to prove the premise which also happens to be the conclusion. There is Q because of the stuff Matthew and Luke share. But Matthew and Luke never agree with each other against Mark. Except for the Q material. But that doesn’t count because this material is, by definition, the Q material. And this argument is, by definition, the fallacy of begging the question (in the actual meaning of the term), or a circular argument. Why is it the best? Because it’s the most popular. Why is it the most popular? Because it’s the best. 

Anyway, the point here is that the fact that both Matthew and Luke are concerned to downplay Jesus the wonder-worker (i.e., magician) the fact that Luke puts the story back in carries a lot of weight. This is perhaps the most salient example of Luke adding back material that Matthew abridged, as Luke did with the Gerasene Demonaic. Yes, it’s possible that Luke simply included the story here because this is where Mark included it in his narrative. But at the outset of the chapter, Luke adds the Rejection in Nazareth, which is a drastic rearrangement of Markan material. Because the point here is that Luke restores the story, but only does so after introducing Jesus as the Christ before we get to the exorcism. It is this combination that is significant. Luke really went out of his way to rearrange the narrative; and, since we know he was neither a fool nor a madman, we can infer that Luke made this rearrangement for considered reasons.The main of these reasons is, IMO, to set up Jesus as the Christ before introducing Jesus the magician. As a divine Being, conceived by God and so the son of a god just as Hercules was, and by virtue of being the Christ Jesus would have authority over such unclean spirits, an authority that the spirit itself concedes by calling Jesus the “Holy One of God”. 

There are numerous other instances like this in Luke, where he goes back over Matthew and “corrects” the record. Or he shortens stuff that has already been told in sufficient detail. I was thinking about calling it quits with this piece, but I think further examples will be useful. So, 

      To Be Continued…

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—

Summary Luke in toto: Part 1

Given the length of time it took to produce this piece, I’ve decided to split it into smaller chunks. So this is the downpayment, as it were, more or less the first two or three chapters of Luke. Merry Christmas, everyone.

When considering how to approach a summation of the entire Gospel according to Luke, the most obvious method seems to be a comparison of Luke to its two predecessors, with perhaps more emphasis on Matthew than Mark. After all, an argument can be made that Luke’s gospel, following hard upon Matthew, is pretty much redundant. Isn’t it? Matthew runs to 28 chapters, while Luke falls four short of that number. Matthew has the Sermon on the Mount, a Nativity Story, many more teachings of Jesus taken from Q, and a much-expanded conception of Jesus’ divinity. Honestly, forget about messing up the Sermon on the Mount; if you want to make an argument that Luke was unaware of Matthew, the one that, IMO, makes most sense is to ask, if Luke knew Matthew, why would Luke bother to write an entirely new gospel? Matthew has the complete story, from before Jesus was born (the genealogy of Jesus) to the return to Galilee after the Resurrection. What more do you need? Of course, had Luke not written, there would be no Good Samaritan or Prodigal Son; those two stories, surely, can justify the rest of the gospel, no? But can, or do, two stories–no matter how powerful, and they are indeed powerful–really warrant the additional twenty-three chapters? (Assuming the two stories would constitute a single chapter. One can quibble.)

However, since Luke decided to write, we have to conclude that Luke saw the story of Jesus as still incomplete, or that neither Mark nor Matthew had gotten it quite properly correct. Mark’s gospel is simply too short, Jesus’ divinity is too unfulfilled. To my mind, there is no doubt that Matthew set out to rectify these “failings” of Mark, to fill in the many blank spaces left by Mark and to establish Jesus as a divine entity, whose coming was worthy of his own cosmic sign, the Star of Bethlehem. So whatever Luke thought was lacking, or incorrect, he saw the deficiency was in Matthew. 

Notice what I did there rhetorically. The initial question was “whether?”; by the end I had concluded that Luke found Matthew deficient. Such a finding entails that Luke was aware of Matthew. Had I been less scrupulous, the narrative would have continued unabated, taking my inference as proven fact. The “argument” for Q does much the same thing: it posits that Matthew’s handling of the Q material, the Sermon on the Mount in particular, is so masterful that only a madman or a fool would have changed it. This established, it never looks.back, but continues blithely onward as if Q is a proven fact. It is not.

The question that is never raised is how Luke could have been unaware of Matthew and yet mimicked the first few chapters of Matthew so faithfully? In approach, the two are nearly identical, despite the wild divergence in the details. Again, just to reiterate, Joseph and Bethlehem are found nowhere else besides the middle two evangelists. The announcement of Jesus’ divine parentage is conveyed by an angel, although Luke expands the announcement into an Annunciation. And “expands” is a key word. This is what Luke did to the birth narrative as a whole: he expanded it. But he also took it in an entirely new direction. In Mark, and even Matthew, Mary is a bit of a cipher, almost but not quite a bit of background scenery. She really has no role, no lines, and is only mentioned a few times. Luke changes this, and he changes it radically. While Joseph is fleshed out even less in Matthew than Mary, Luke diminished his role even further. The message from the angel regarding Jesus’ conception is delivered to Mary rather than to Joseph. In fact, it would not be far wrong to say that she is the most important character in the first two chapters. Yes, there is the story of the conception and birth of the Baptist, but the significance of this story in no small degree rests upon the fact that the Baptist’s mother is a relative of Mary. 

It is a truism of a lot of biblical scholarship that Christians were “embarrassed” by John the Baptist. Specifically, Christians are supposedly embarrassed that it appears that Jesus started in a position that was subordinate to the Baptist. Matthew tried to fix this by having John demur, claim that Jesus should be the one doing the baptising. I disagree. I’ve probably mentioned that a few times, but Chapter 1 of Luke should put that notion to bed once for all. If Christians were so embarrassed, then why would Luke invent this whole story that John and Jesus were first cousins once removed? (Seems the “official” story is that Elisabeth was Mary’s aunt, being the sister of Mary’s mother, but of course this the equivalent of naming the Magi.) The acceptance of this story by proto- and then orthodox Christianity demonstrates that, far from being embarrassed, Christians were embracing the Baptist. He is a saint in the Catholic Church. That there was some connexion between John and the early followers of Jesus is likely to be true, largely because it is a trifle embarrassing. Jesus was clearly subordinate in Mark, only coming to the fore after John was arrested. Thus, there is at least some non-zero probability that this tradition have have a degree of authenticity. But Matthew started the ball rolling to greater acceptance when he gave John all that vitriol (Brood of vipers!) early on in his gospel. Luke took that and not only ran with it, he expanded upon it, to the point of putting John in Jesus’ family. 

This has two major implications, or we should interpret this expanded role for John in two ways. First, it’s another indication that the legend of Jesus was growing. People were being added (Kleopas–only in Luke & John) and other people had their roles expanded. In Mark and Matthew, Mary Magdalene only shows up for the Crucifixion and Resurrection, but in Luke she shows up about halfway through, and we are told Jesus drove seven devils from her. It’s not much, but these things tend to build over time, to the point that the “tradition” of the early Church has all sorts of stories about all sorts of people: Thomas going to India, for example. Philip, who only appears in John, has a whole raft of stories told about him. As I have said consistently, this is what happens when legends become popular. And I have consistently cited the example of the Arthur legend as the example ne plus ultra. These additional people allow for an expansion of the scope of the story. More people can do more things, and they can provide more and varied examples of proper behaviour, to the point where a lot of them were, supposedly, martyred. Some of this, of course, was the church telling stories to demonstrate how awful things (supposedly) were when they were being persecuted, and the staunch fortitude of these people as they met their horrific fates. Butler’s Lives of the Saints is chock-a-block full of tales of martyrs killed in the most excruciating manners. There is a pornographic element to the details of being roasted alive, or flayed alive, or a hundred other things.

John has been taken up into this legend-making apparatus. His execution is also told by Josephus, which, supposedly, confirms at least some of the details of the gospel account. I have come to suspect that Josephus may have gotten some of his information from Christian sources, if not Christian texts. He was writing and researching more or less at the same time Luke was writing. But Josephus has a bit more detail than the gospels, which indicates that he had sources other than the gospels for John’s life. And why not? John never became a follower of Jesus, remaining much more fully in the mainstream of Jewish belief and practice, so why wouldn’t Josephus, who was Jewish, have Jewish sources for John? 

Here’s a thought: did John’s execution by Antipas provide the model for Jesus execution? John was executed for his preaching and was greatly admired for this. Did this give the followers of Jesus the kernel of the idea for Jesus’ execution, that it was due to Jesus’ teaching? This ties in to the other reason for the expanded role for John. People in the ancient world were not big fans of novelty, of new things. In Latin, “new things” would translate to res novae, and this expression was the one used for revolution. Conservative people, and the ancients were pretty conservative in the non-political sense of the word. They had a reverence for antiquity. Old things were good things. Religious ideas fell into this category, too. The Christians would come to debate whether Moses or Homer came first. (Spoiler alert: Moses usually beat the pagan.) When Luke was writing, Jesus had lived & died in the living memory of a lot of his audience. If not the audience themselves, those hearing Luke’s word could have been told about Jesus by their grandparents. I have such an understanding of the Great Depression which is just about ninety years past. No, I didn’t experience it myself, but I heard my parents (who were old enough to be my grandparents) had lived through it and told me stories of their first-hand experience. Just so with Jesus, who would have been of an age with the grandparents of someone 20-30 years old in the 90s. Luke was largely addressing pagans, so they probably hadn’t heard first-hand stories of Jesus, but they had heard stories about the times of Augustus and Tiberius, whose reigns bracket Jesus’ life. Thus, Jesus was a newcomer, he was novel, so he lacked the substance that came from the weight of antiquity. Jews, on the other hand, were greatly admired by a lot of pagans due to the sheer (exaggerated) age of the Jewish faith. This made it eminently credible, or at least something to be taken seriously. Jesus? Someone who died sixty years prior? Not so much. As such, it behooved Christian preachers to stress Jesus’ connexion to the Jewish tradition. He wasn’t a Jewish schismatic, or even heretic; he was the fulfillment of Judaism. And so a story came about, loosely modeled on John, of how Jesus, like John, attempted to reform the Jewish authorities, but, like John, Jesus was executed by these authorities. Ergo, Jesus was firmly part of the Jewish heritage, even if he represented the culmination of that heritage.

So there you have it. Two reasons for creating a myth to include John in Jesus family tree.