Its alleged Judaism

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This judgment modifies itself very considerably, however, as soon as, on the basis of the newest investigations now before us concerning the Marcionite Gospel, it must above all be asked what belongs to the original stock of the Gospel, and what has been added only by the hand of the later reviser. If the whole preliminary narrative drops out at once, a very considerable step has already been taken thereby toward coming nearer to the original unity of the Gospel, as one so decidedly Pauline. But of the rest also, which Schwegler has gathered under the same point of view, very little remains on closer consideration. The passage on the eternal validity of the Mosaic law, 16:17, which in substance coincides with the Matthaean 8:18, as also the promise to the disciples that in the kingdom to come, seated on thrones, they will judge the twelve tribes of Israel, 22:30—these two so specifically Judaizing passages are likewise not original. On the two passages 5:14 and 17:14, in which those healed of leprosy are directed to show themselves to the priest, one can lay no special weight, since this direction can also have only the purpose of demonstrating the reality of the healing that has taken place in a way attested by a document. Since the paralleling of the messianic and the demonic, which comes forward especially in our Gospel, does not really belong here, it is only still the Ebionite contrast of the αἰὼν οὗτος and the αἰὼν μέλλων, and the view of poverty and wealth connected with it, that comes into consideration in judging the character of our Gospel. That view is expressed most strongly, as in the macarisms and anathematisms of the Sermon on the Mount (Luke 6:20f.), so in particular in the parable of the rich man. It cannot be mistaken: “the rich man is not punished for the sake of his hard-heartedness, but because he was rich; the poor man who stands over against him is not blessed for the sake of his piety, but because he was poor; the crime of the one consists only in wealth, the merit of the other only in poverty; and as the standard

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at the future recompense, what counts is not the evil done and committed in this life, but the ill suffered here and the good enjoyed.”¹ One can say this with good ground; only, the matter is not yet set entirely in the right light by it. The stark relation in which wealth and poverty, like the present world and the world to come, stand over against one another is softened if one considers what belongs essentially to the concept of poverty here. It certainly has a deep historical significance that in so many sayings of Jesus which we may reckon among the surest traditions of his teaching, poverty is spoken of in so emphatic a way. In the class of the poor and the oppressed Christianity really gained its first adherents. The more closely, however, poverty in the proper sense is thus grown together with the origin of Christianity itself, the less one may overlook how this poverty itself has become the expression and symbol of the most original feeling and consciousness that underlies Christianity. It is not outward poverty as such that has so great a significance; it has such a significance only because of the disposition that cannot be separated from the concept of that poverty. If Schwegler himself remarks that it was the voluntarily chosen bodily poverty which counted for the Ebionites as especially meritorious, this very fact of its being voluntarily chosen must hold us back from taking poverty in this stark, outward sense. The first Christians were bodily poor. What made them Christians as poor people was first this: that they also willed to be, with their full self-consciousness, what they were. In this poverty the original Christian fundamental feeling speaks itself out as one that withdraws from the outward world into itself. One wills to have nothing in the world, because from the outward world, as it is, one feels oneself only driven back into oneself; but this not-having and not-willing-to-have thus becomes only the negative expression for everything positive in Christianity. Because this being bodily poor, as a willing-to-be-poor, has the most intensive moral significance, there joins itself to poverty the religious view of the world that, in the same proportion in which one has nothing here, one has all the more there. Those are the poor of the Gospel, who as bodily poor are at the same time spiritually poor. One may assume as one will that Luke, over against Matthew, gives us the macarisms of the Sermon on the Mount in the original wording, and that πνεύματι in Matthew 5:3 was added to πτωχοί only later: let one at least not assert

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that it is an addition that distorts the sense. If one sees, to be sure, how little New Testament exegesis, despite the mass of the most varied apparatus which it has piled up in its commentaries especially on the Sermon on the Mount, knows how to give the oldest Christian name its clear and definite sense, one cannot wonder at the expedient of getting rid of the expression that is still so little understood. Had one only known how to grasp more correctly the explanation already given by the ancients, that the πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι are the voluntarily poor, one would have come far nearer the matter. But since one always proceeded from the opinion that the added determination τῷ πνεύματι must make the poverty itself a merely spiritual one, one has come to a series of explanations among which the choice is in fact very difficult, but only for the reason that they all have equally great trouble uniting the sense first read into the words with the expression that is given. Precisely the explanation which seems to the newest interpreter to deserve the preference over all the rest, Tholuck’s, according to which the πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι are supposed to be those who feel themselves poor in their spirit in respect of δικαιοσύνη, and so on, shows this disproportion of concept and expression most clearly. This feeling oneself poor would then in turn be the greatest wealth, and the πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι could equally well be called the πλούσιοι τῷ πνεύματι. Let one therefore, before everything else, only let the πτωχοὺς τῷ πνεύματι be what they are and actually were: true and real poor, bodily poor. Because, however, they were not merely poor, but also willed to be what they were, and were it with full consciousness, they are not simply πτωχοί, but the πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι. The explanation therefore seems to lie nearest, that by τῷ πνεύματι precisely this freely chosen, principle-like character, poverty as a self-determination of the spirit, is expressed; only, this too may still not be what is adequate to the expression. When the bodily and the spiritual, the outward and the inward, the actual and the ideal stand over against one another in such a way as here, where the πτωχοί as πτωχοί are also the πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι, it belongs to the character of the ancient way of viewing things that the bodily itself in turn becomes an image of the spiritual. In that these poor also willed to be what they were, and for that very reason had a view of their poverty according to which their poverty was not only nothing that conflicted with the kingdom of God, but, because of the disposition which they displayed in their poverty, precisely that which constituted their receptivity and capacity for the kingdom

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of God as mediating it, there came to consciousness in them, in their poverty, precisely that which was their greatest wealth. Their outward poverty thus itself became an image and symbol of something else, which seemed to be its direct opposite. What in the one relation was only poverty was, in the other, in the spiritual, figurative sense, only wealth. As poor they were in themselves rich. In their bodily poverty itself, as soon as it was considered in the light of a spiritual way of viewing things, their inner wealth was mirrored. So understood, the πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι are nothing other than the emphatic, pregnant expression of the genuinely Ebionite teaching, which we ourselves may regard as the most genuine expression of primitive Christian consciousness: that the true partaker of the messianic kingdom, in the same proportion in which he has nothing in this world (because this not-having, as a not-willing-to-have, is the most essential element of a mind directed to the blessedness of the messianic kingdom), has all the more in the world to come. It is therefore the contrast of the αἰὼν οὗτος and the αἰὼν μέλλων that comes to view in the contrast of poverty and wealth. Poverty is itself the figurative reflection of the wealth that stands over against it ideally, because one cannot think of that poverty without, by virtue of the contrast, becoming conscious of its correlate, spiritual wealth.¹ However stark and unmediated, then, the relation may so often seem to be—as especially in the parable of the rich man—in which poverty and wealth are set to the present and the future world, we may not take these concepts out of the connection of thought developed here, to which they essentially belong. From this, however, it results for us only that, little as their Ebionite fundamental stamp can be mistaken, they are just as little un-Pauline. Indeed, they contain nothing other than what the apostle Paul says almost in the same words, when he expresses the Christian fundamental consciousness that animates him, in 2 Corinthians 6:10, with the words: ὡς λυπούμενοι, ἀεὶ δὲ χαίροντες, ὡς πτωχοί, πολλοὺς δὲ πλουτίζοντες, ὡς μηδὲν ἔχοντες, καὶ πάντα κατέχοντες. That is the genuinely apostolic echo of the macarisms of the Sermon on the Mount: μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοί, ὅτι ὑμετέρα ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ—μακάριοι οἱ κλαίοντες νῦν, ὅτι γελάσετε,

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Luke 6:20, 21. With those words the apostle depicts himself. He, as apostle, is, in his poverty, the one who makes many rich; but whoever can make others rich must himself be rich. If we now take this self-characterization of the apostle, in its more general sense, as a characterization of the oldest Christians in general, who are those poor who in their poverty are in themselves rich, those who have nothing and yet have everything—who are they other than the poor of the Gospel, the πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι?

On the same Ebionite, or primitive Christian, fundamental view rests the so often misunderstood parable of the so-called unjust steward (Luke 16:1f.). To the usual torments of the interpreters over this parable Strauss may indeed, as Ritschl remarks, have put an end by recalling the necessity of regarding now this trait, now that, as indifferent for the matter itself in interpreting the parables. As, then, in the parables on prayer (11:5f.; 18:2f.) one must abstract from God’s being represented both in a sluggish friend and in an unjust judge, so in the parable of the steward the circumstance is only a side matter, that the beneficence for which he is praised rests on a fraud. But the chief difficulty lies in this: that upon the parable itself there still follow sayings, vv. 10f., in which a moral quality is recommended which the steward not only did not have, but of which the direct opposite even obtained in his case. Even if, then, one is good-natured enough to overlook the fact that his beneficence is fraud, one cannot possibly keep silent at this: that he, the unjust steward, is now even to be set up as a model of the directly opposite quality, of faithfulness and righteousness. Strauss now removes the difficulty only by saying that one would be moved to allow the verses in question an influence on the interpretation of the parable—since this has its most satisfying close in the moral of v. 9, and incorrect combinations in Luke are by no means without example—only if a close kinship of the content lay open to view, whereas what is present is rather the opposite, the most disturbing disparity. Besides, he says, it is not hard to show what may have led Luke here into a false combination. In the parable there had been talk of the μαμωνᾶς τῆς ἀδικίας; this had awakened in him the memory of a similar-sounding saying of Jesus, that whoever proves himself faithful in the ἀδίκῳ μαμωνᾷ, as the lesser thing, to him also

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the higher can be entrusted. But once there had been talk of mammon, how could the author have helped recalling the well-known saying of Jesus about God and mammon as two irreconcilable masters, and into the bargain also adding this v. 10? That through these additions the parable discourse previously reported was set in an entirely false light concerned the reporter little. He had perhaps not grasped its sense clearly himself, or, in the effort to empty out his gospel memory completely, had taken no heed of the connection. One ought in general, Strauss adds further on this occasion, to be more conscious that, in those of our evangelists who, according to the assumption now prevailing, wrote down an oral tradition, the memory, in the composition of their writings, had been drawn upon in a way that had to push back the activity of reflection. For this reason the ruling bond in their reports is the association of ideas, with its laws, which in part hold to what is outward; and we ought not to wonder at finding, in particular, many discourses of Jesus strung together according to the mere assonance of certain catchwords.¹ This latter remark is altogether very characteristic of the standpoint of Strauss’s criticism; but precisely in that lies also the determining ground for modifying it very considerably. The more decidedly the newest criticism must declare itself against the presupposition that the Gospels, in their whole extent, are throughout mere aggregates of traditions of very different kinds, only accidentally connected with one another in just this way; the more unquestionably some of our Gospels prove to be tendency-writings: the more the judgment on the lack of connection of a passage such as the present one must also be restricted, all the more when one considers how much the analogy of such cases is diminished by the distinction of the different constituents of our Gospel. Should it therefore not be possible to win from the passage in question another view? The close kinship of the content, after all, cannot be denied so outright. Here as there the same concept of ἀδικία meets us. Wherein, then, does this ἀδικία consist, and what makes the steward an οἰκονόμος τῆς ἀδικίας (as one usually takes these words together)? The answer to that can lie only in the ἄδικος μαμωνᾶς of v. 11. The μαμωνᾶς is an ἄδικος because everyone in whose possession

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it is either is already an ἄδικος in himself, or through it becomes an ἄδικος. The υἱοὶ αἰῶνος τούτου of v. 8, in whose hand is the mammon that belongs, as it were, to the substance of the αἰὼν οὗτος, are in themselves, in their difference from the υἱοὶ τοῦ φωτός, the ἄδικοι; and the υἱοὶ τοῦ φωτός, even if they occupy themselves with mammon, thereby themselves also become ἄδικοι, because they, as υἱοὶ τοῦ φωτός, have no right to mammon, and only wrongfully reach into a sphere in which they are to regard themselves only as poor, and may have only so much as their necessary existence in this world requires. That steward, now, presents entirely in himself the image of the υἱοὶ τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου. For that reason he is depicted above all as a waster. The children of this world, who as such are in possession of mammon, can make no other use of their mammon, or wealth, than that, like the rich man of the parable, they live splendidly and in joy. He is designated as a mere steward in the service of a master because the children of this world also are not in the true and real possession of the goods of this world. The absolute lord of everything is, after all, only God. Under him, in the last resort, stands everything, in the present world as in the world to come, even if, by virtue of the contrast in which the present world stands to the world to come, mammon, which is, as it were, itself the god of the present world, itself enters into a contrast with the highest God, who stands in his absolute exaltation above both worlds. For that reason the children of this world are obliged to give him an account of the use they make of the goods of this world, and in the end, like the rich man of the parable, fall under his penal judgment. Nothing is therefore more mistaken than the interpretation which makes the master the ἄρχων τοῦ κόσμου τούτου. As an ἄνθρωπος πλούσιος, to whom those who make of the goods of this world the use corresponding to the αἰὼν οὗτος stand only in the relation of a steward, he is rather to recall the absolute lordship of God over everything. Only in the steward does the αἰὼν οὗτος present itself to us; and for that reason, since everything he does refers to the μαμωνᾶς τῆς ἀδικίας, the predicate of ἀδικία is itself given him. But he too has a side that gives him a certain relation to the υἱοὶ τοῦ φωτός: the prudence by virtue of which he knows how to act in such a way that his action is determined by the right, adequate relation of the means to the end. That he, although a υἱὸς τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, does not hang merely on the momentary enjoyment of the present,

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that for him there is also a future, to which he seeks to set the present in the relation of a means calculated for a definite end—even though, to be sure, this future itself falls only within the sphere of the αἰὼν οὗτος—this is a moral quality which is essentially the same fundamental quality without which the children of the light cannot be what, according to their concept, they are supposed to be. For they become children of the light only by knowing how, theoretically and practically, to set the αἰὼν οὗτος in the right relation to the αἰὼν μέλλων, the relation appropriate to the nature of the case: in consciousness of the essential difference of the two, holding it for the better to renounce rather everything that belongs to the αἰὼν οὗτος, in order the more certainly to gain the αἰὼν μέλλων. This too is a matter of a prudence which places the action of the human being entirely under the point of view of the relation of means and end, so that, as soon as a definite end stands firm—as this must be presupposed, in accordance with their concept, both in the children of the light and in the children of the world—everything that is an object of action is calculated according to whether it is the means suited to the attainment of the end. Prudence is therefore a quality of the one as of the other, and in both, formally considered, equally praiseworthy. Only, it is ascribed to the children of the world in a higher degree than to the children of the light, since the latter, even if they are already in themselves children of the light, are affected in various ways by the world in which they live, and are so often of a divided mind, as is not the case with the children of the world. The summons which goes out in v. 9, with a reference to the unjust steward, to the children of the light, to make friends for themselves with the mammon of unrighteousness, so that, when they depart, these may receive them into the eternal habitations, can be understood only in this way: that what the children of the world always do only in relation to the present world, the children of the light are to do only with a view to the world to come. But how, one must ask, can the children of the light make friends for themselves with the mammon of unrighteousness, since they cannot be in possession of the μαμωνᾶς τῆς ἀδικίας without themselves being ἄδικοι? For that very reason that summons can have only the sense of not occupying oneself with the mammon of unrighteousness at all, but of ridding oneself of it entirely, and therefore of using it for purposes of beneficence, because the αἰὼν οὗτος and the αἰὼν μέλλων mutually exclude one another, and one can, only on the presupposition that one does not belong to the one, belong to the

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other. To this entirely satisfying sense of the parable the following sayings attach themselves very naturally, as soon as one only does not lose sight of the contrast of the αἰὼν οὗτος and the αἰὼν μέλλων, as it has been determined above, together with the concepts connected with it, and understands the faithfulness and righteousness of which there is talk here as nothing other than the conduct of the human being toward the one αἰών as toward the other. The sense of these sayings is expressed most clearly in the sentence of v. 12: if you were not faithful in what is foreign, who will give you what is your own? What for the children of the light is the foreign, what does not concern them, can only be the ἄδικος μαμωνᾶς that belongs to the αἰὼν οὗτος. The faithfulness they prove in it can therefore consist only in their regarding it as what it is for them, as an ἀλλότριον, and also acting accordingly, by giving it away and using it for beneficent purposes. In the same proportion in which they thus prove that the αἰὼν οὗτος is for them the ἀλλότριον, they prove that, as children of the light, they belong to the αἰὼν μέλλων, that it is what truly belongs to them. In the same sense it says in v. 11: if you were not faithful in the mammon, which is after all always only an unrighteous possession, to which you have no true right, who will entrust to you that which is to be your true property? V. 10 also, therefore, can mean by the ἐλάχιστον and the πολύ nothing other than the same contrast. One is faithful in what is small when one uses the goods of the αἰὼν οὗτος only for beneficent purposes; and this faithfulness in what is small is also faithfulness in what is great, because, through what one does in relation to the αἰὼν οὗτος, which stands so far beneath the αἰὼν μέλλων, one only proves one’s mind for the αἰὼν μέλλων, just as, on the other hand, when one occupies oneself with the ἄδικος μαμωνᾶς, to which, as an unrighteous possession, one has no right, one only shows thereby that one also has no right to the αἰὼν μέλλων. The last words, v. 13, only express still more definitely the contrast that runs through the parable and the whole section. One can be devoted to the αἰὼν μέλλων, or to God, to whose idea the αἰὼν μέλλων is wholly adequate, only with the same mind with which one turns away from the αἰὼν οὗτος and from mammon as its god, and likewise the reverse. The one is always already contained in the other, since one can arrive at the αἰὼν μέλλων only by passing through the αἰὼν οὗτος.

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Jewish conceptions of reward and recompense, connected with the Ebionite view of the relation of the αἰὼν οὗτος and the μέλλων, Schwegler will recognize, as in the parable of the unjust steward, so also in sayings such as 6:35 (cf. 11:41), where likewise beneficence is recommended from the side of its usefulness in relation to the future reward that is linked with it, wholly in contradiction with other Pauline pieces of the Gospel, for example sayings such as 17:7–10, where it is expressly inculcated that the human being, even if he has done everything, may still raise no claims over against God. Even if we here leave aside the fact that the passage 17:7–10 likewise does not belong to the original Luke, those sayings too lose what is offensive that one wants to find in them, as soon as one considers that they are to be regarded only as having proceeded from that primitive Christian view of the world. It is therefore not beneficence as such, as a merely outward doing, on which so great a value is laid, but only insofar as the mind that turns away from the present world and goes back into itself proves itself in it, without which one cannot belong to the world to come. In the genuinely evangelical sense of poverty of the πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι, then, the two Gospels, the Pauline Gospel of Luke and the Judaizing Gospel of Matthew, touch one another most immediately; and the more strongly the traits referring to it are expressed precisely in the former, the more certainly we may regard this common element as the most essential element of primitive Christian consciousness.

After the character and the tendency of the Gospel in general have been established thus far, we can go on to the further question whether, by comparison with the Gospel of Matthew, the plan and composition of our Gospel cannot be investigated and determined still more exactly. In the Gospel of Matthew we have the only secure standard for judging what is characteristic of our Gospel. The more peculiar, however, the relation is in which it stands to that Gospel—in that on the one side it shares with it so considerable a part of its content, but on the other departs from it in so various a way—the more the question arises whether the ground character that distinguishes our Gospel from that of Matthew can be demonstrated still more closely in detail, with respect to its differences from Matthew, as the principle that conditions and determines its composition.