The canonical Gospel of Luke

III. The Canonical Gospel of Luke

It now remains for us, after we have come to know the character of the original Gospel, still to investigate how the matter stands with those constituent parts of the Gospel of Luke which originally did not belong to it, but first through the hand of a reviser

[p. 502]

came in, and together with which the original Gospel then first became our canonical Gospel of Luke.

The peculiar literary character of our Gospel has been defined by more recent critics thus: it is said to be a neutralizing juxtaposition of Pauline and Judaistic discourses and narrative pieces, a working of them into one, in which the Pauline elements appear as the fundamental stock of the Gospel, the Judaistic as what has been inserted and added on. If, through this placing side by side and this interweaving of heterogeneous materials, the Pauline fundamental character of the Gospel is on the one hand blurred and drained of its color, it is on the other hand, they say, thereby moved back into the foreground, in that the pieces of the opposite kind have, for the most part, by the path of revision and free recasting, or through modifications attached to them, the specifically Judaistic coloring taken away from them.¹ If, then, criticism can explain the character of the Gospel, so various as it is, only by the assumption of interpolations and of a revision, the separation of the two elements of the Gospel, which has now first become possible on the basis of the Marcionite Gospel, gives the key to the explanation of its peculiar character. It contains not only pieces of very different, wholly opposite kinds; it divides, according to its whole content, into constituent parts that arose at two different times and come from different authors. And since, as has already been shown, it is in its first plan and in its fundamental stock essentially Pauline, it follows of itself that the pieces which came in only later bear the opposite character all the more. Only, it soon appears that we may not presuppose, even in the second reviser of our Gospel, a purely Judaistic tendency. The joining, effected by him, of Judaistic pieces with the original Gospel has proceeded from the same irenic interest to which so many writings of our canon, in particular the Acts of the Apostles, which belongs so closely with our Gospel, owed their origin. The Pauline fundamental stock has therefore indeed remained; but by omissions, interpolations, and alterations, what was original has here and there had its Pauline point taken off, especially where the Gospel used by Marcion seemed to sound altogether too favorable to the heretic. The greatest concession, however, was made to the Judaists by the taking up of an infancy narrative, which

[p. 503]

sets Jesus before one’s eyes, through his birth and descent, and through his whole surroundings, with all the marks of the Jewish Messiah.

The first two chapters have a strikingly Jewish, even Old Testament, stamp. There can therefore be no doubt that they arose wholly within the circle of the Jewish way of looking at things, whether the later reviser of the Gospel already found them before him as a connected whole, or himself first brought various pieces into this connection. The entrance of the Messiah into the world is here fitted out with everything that Jewish imagination could muster. The views and ideas that meet us here are Jewish through and through, and the visible endeavor is to give this Old Testament foreground as broad a basis as possible, and to set the persons who appear upon it in the brightest light. What contrasts most with the Pauline universalism of the original Gospel is the specifically Jewish determination given to the Messiah, when he is depicted as an offshoot of the Davidic line, and the salvation that goes out from him is praised as the blessing, already promised to the fathers of the Old Testament, now coming to fulfillment upon his people (1:32, 33, 54f., 68f.). If, further, the author of the original Gospel, in order only to shut out everything Jewish, granted even to the Baptist and forerunner no place in it, the second reviser was all the more intent on weaving together, already, the first beginnings of the history of both, of the Messiah and of his forerunner, in such a way that one can see in it only the unity of a divine plan. This alone, Schwegler remarks, points to a dogmatic interest such as only a Jewish Christian could have had; no less does the exactness with which the fulfillment of the ritual law, the punctual performance of circumcision, the offering of the firstling sacrifices, is narrated and depicted, and so on.¹ Yet this is only one of the two possible cases, inasmuch as a Pauline writer too could appropriate to himself this Jewish-Christian interest, and, by taking up such pieces, could at least make this concession to Jewish Christianity for his irenic purposes. Pauline traits therefore keep showing through even in this part of the Gospel. The world-historical dating by which the first author marked the appearance of Jesus, the second carried over, in connection with other chronological determinations that have the same intention, onto the appearance of the Baptist, so as to fix the beginning of the Gospel

[p. 504]

history in terms of world history. These determinations, taken for the most part from profane history, plainly do not fit well with the purely Jewish stamp of the narratives to which they are added; and one can see in them, as also in the census decree of the Emperor Augustus, which is too great an offense against history and chronology to count as very old, and also looks too un-Jewish to be held equally original with the rest of the content of these pieces, only the joints at which the second author inserted these Judaizing narratives into a Gospel that already, in the chronological determination with which it began, announced its non-Jewish character. As the original author had Jesus appear in the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, so, in entire analogy with that, the second attached the birth of Jesus to the census which, as he supposed, was already then held under Augustus by the governor of Syria, Quirinus. Very characteristic of the procedure of a writer who gladly bends pieces of Judaizing content back into his Pauline universalism is the genealogy of Jesus, which he dates not merely from Abraham, as Matthew does, but carries out to Adam, the progenitor of the human race, and even to God, who, as the common Father of all men, is God not of the Jews only, but of the Gentiles also (Rom. 3:29). One sees plainly that this is done only with the intention of combining the interests of both sides, the Jewish-Christian and the Gentile-Christian. As both things are equally characteristic of these first chapters, the Judaizing content together with individual Pauline traits, so they also betray, not unclearly, the redacting hand of the later reviser. In Matthew 4:12 it has altogether the look of a genuinely historical notice when he has Jesus, on the news of the Baptist’s imprisonment, go away into Galilee. To the reviser of the Gospel of Luke this notice, at 4:14, may have seemed less suitably placed. He therefore attached it to what the third chapter contained about the activity of the Baptist, in doing which he seems also to have been guided by the thought that the Messiah, filled with the Holy Spirit, could not well be determined, by a motive of this kind, which one could also all too easily understand of the danger threatening him himself, to go to Galilee. He therefore has him return to Galilee ἐν τῇ δυνάμει τοῦ πνεύματος and begin his public activity there, where the report of him soon spread everywhere. If, as de Wette remarks, the baptism

[p. 505]

of Jesus (3:21, 22) is narrated only summarily, and by no means in the usual Gospel tone, this can have its ground only in the fact that the redacting reviser was here concerned, as at verses 19 and 20, only to take up still, briefly, for the sake of completeness, such occurrences of the Gospel history as could not be missing. They therefore stand rather without connection, and isolated, just as the genealogy of Jesus that follows is also inserted, at a place where one does not exactly expect it, more artificially than naturally, only in order, at the close of the infancy narrative, to supply after the event these data, which properly refer to the birth of Jesus. One likewise sees the joining hand of the redacting reviser, helping the connection along by intermediate remarks, in the addition made only by him at 4:26: οὗ ἦν τεθραμμένος. It stands at the place where the infancy narrative, still missing at the beginning, had to be led over into the original Gospel, which the later author believed he could not do without a transposition of the two narratives that form the real beginning of the Gospel. In our present Gospel Jesus does not, as in the original, appear first in Capernaum and then in Nazareth, but conversely, first in Nazareth and then in Capernaum. The second author no doubt believed that he was here only restoring the original order, in that he held it most natural that Jesus should first have appeared at his previous place of residence, in Nazareth, where he had been brought up (as indeed in Matthew 4:13 also he leaves Nazareth only in order to go to Capernaum). Yet another consideration, without doubt, determined him in this as well. The first author has placed the scene in Capernaum, which he narrates, first, because it seemed to him to make the most significant impression of Jesus’ first appearance. For the second, what happened in Nazareth had greater importance, not merely because it showed the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies in the person of Jesus (verse 21), but also because it gave him occasion to bring into application a saying of Jesus which seemed to him to find its fitting place here in particular. Matthew narrates, at 13:53, that Jesus, when he later once came to Nazareth, saw himself moved, by the conduct of the Nazarethans toward him, to the saying: οὐκ ἔστι προφήτης ἄτιμος, εἰ μὴ ἐν τῇ πατρίδι αὐτοῦ. The reviser

[p. 506]

of our Gospel has Jesus utter this saying already at that time, and indeed in connection with further words in which, with a reference to the preference which Elijah and Elisha gave to Gentiles, the setting-back of the Jews in favor of the Gentiles, in respect of the Gospel, is expressed. If the sense of the examples adduced were to be determined only as de Wette gives it—that prophetic activity turned away from what was near and toward what was far, and so also the activity of Jesus from Nazareth to Capernaum—this sense would already, on account of the slight distance of Capernaum from Nazareth, not fit very well; but it would also wholly overlook the fact that both the widow at Sarepta and Naaman the Syrian were non-Jews. In a Gospel in which the opposition of Jews and Gentiles has so great a significance, this cannot be held for accidental. Even if, therefore, in the saying taken from Matthew 13:53, πατρίς is in the first instance Nazareth as the native city of Jesus, the evangelist at the same time takes the πατρίς in a wider sense, in order to regard what was done by the Nazarethans as a type of what Jesus had in general to expect from his fellow countrymen. The saying in verse 24 does indeed seem insufficiently motivated by what precedes; but the Nazarethans, by their subsequent conduct, confirm all the more the presupposition that lies in that saying. In that they thrust Jesus from them and drive him out, they themselves bear the guilt that he turns away from them, and from his fellow countrymen in general, to the Gentiles, as is said in the Old Testament passages adduced. What, then, the same writer, as author of the Acts of the Apostles, makes the chief moment of his apology for the apostle—that he always proclaimed it to the Gentiles only in consequence of his being cast out by the Jews, and of their rejection of the Gospel—this already has its precedent in the history of Jesus himself. Jesus himself, then, has already had this experience, which redounds to so great a reproach against the Jews; this is the real sense of the familiar saying of Jesus: ὅτι οὐδεὶς προφήτης δεκτός ἐστιν ἐν τῇ πατρίδι αὐτοῦ. The reviser of the Gospel would accordingly only have brought out more definitely what in itself already lay in the presentation of the original Gospel, insofar as it has Jesus, already at 9:51, turn from the so unreceptive Galilee to the more receptive Samaria: that this proclamation of the Gospel, passing over from the Jews to the Gentiles, has its cause in the Jews’ own conduct; that they therefore, if they will see in it only a preference of the Gentiles that infringes upon them, have only themselves to blame for it.

Already from the first chapters of our canonical Gospel it can

[p. 507]

in this way be seen in what relation its later, present form stands to the original. In order to bring the further passages that bear on this under definite points of view, we can classify them in the following way. There are (1) passages in which an anti-Marcionite tendency can hardly be missed; (2) such as those in which Pauline ideas are expressed with particular clarity; (3) but also passages of the opposite kind, Judaizing ones, which the reviser can have taken up only with the intention of balancing the interests of both sides against one another as far as possible; (4) such as those from which a reference to the later party relations seems to look out; (5) such as those which have been added only out of regard for the completeness of the presentation of the Gospel history.

(1) That there are passages with an anti-Marcionite tendency cannot surprise us. For even if the original Gospel was by no means a Marcionite one, so that it would first have had to be catholicized as a heretical one, it yet had an anti-Jewish tendency, in which it came near enough to Marcionitism, and it contained many passages which the Marcionites could use very well for the recommendation of their teaching. Since, besides, Marcion held exclusively to the apostle Paul, and made his authority alone count as the genuinely apostolic one, it must have lain very much in the interest of the later Pauline reviser to meet the opinion, prejudicial to his Gospel, that Paulinism and Marcionitism stand in so close a kinship with one another; and it was therefore very natural that he altered passages which offered the Marcionites a convenient handle for their polemic. Ritschl has therefore rightly explained the alteration of some passages, in which our present text reads otherwise than the original, from an anti-Marcionite tendency. Among the passages which Ritschl has reckoned in this class there are at least three in which this assumption can be subject to no doubt. At chapter 8:20 the words of Jesus, τίς ἡ μήτηρ μου καὶ τίνες οἱ ἀδελφοί μου; have been omitted. Since the same words have remained unassailed at Matthew 12:46, their omission from our Gospel can have its ground only in this, that the Marcionites who made use of it sought to prove from this passage precisely their Docetic doctrine of the person of Christ. At chapter 10, verse 22, the original reading, securely attested, οὐδεὶς ἔγνω, τίς ἐστιν ὁ πατήρ, εἰ μὴ ὁ υἱός, and so on, was first altered into the present one, in order to take from the Gnostics, namely the Marcionites, the proof

[p. 508]

which they were accustomed to draw from those words, and especially from the aorist ἔγνω, for their doctrine of the unknown God.¹ The passage 16:17 could, as Ritschl remarks, in connection with verse 16, be used very well by the Marcionites for the separation of the law and the Gospel which they asserted. In order to render it harmless, the ecclesiastically minded reviser substituted for λόγων μου, without regard to the connection, the word νόμου, all the more since, according to Matthew 5:18, he could believe that he was only restoring what was original. Of less importance are the passages 10:21, with the addition καὶ τῆς γῆς; 20:35, with the omission of ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ after καταξιωθέντες; and 24:25, with the alteration of the words ἐλάλησεν ὑμῖν into ἐλάλησαν οἱ προφῆται, and so on.²

(2) Passages of the second kind are in part such as contain the Pauline doctrine of the need of forgiveness, of the lack of merit in works, and so on, as in the parable of the prodigal son, and at 17:7–10; in part such as hold up to the Jews the guilt of their unbelief, and thereby motivate the preference given to the Gentiles over them. To this class belong passages such as 13:28–30, where the addition concerning the exclusion of the Jews is indeed taken from Matthew 8:11, 12 and 20:16, but in such a way that the combination has a clear antithetical reference; further, 13:1–9; 13:34, 35; 19:41–44. The destruction of Jerusalem is in these passages plainly presented as a punishment for the unbelief of the Jews. When, in the first passage, 13:1–9, Jesus no more wants the eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell than those Galileans to be regarded as more guilty than all the other inhabitants of Jerusalem, this happens only because they all bear the same guilt of unbelief, in consequence of which they fall victim to the punishment they have deserved all the more certainly, the longer a respite is still left them for their conversion. The fig tree, finally cut down after so long a barrenness, is an image of the Jewish people, and of that guilt to which the apostle Paul again and again calls attention when he sets Jews and Gentiles over against one another in relation to the kingdom of God.

(3) Among the passages of the third class, by far the most important is the infancy narrative, already discussed. Next to it stands the narrative of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, in taking up which the second author of the Gospel

[p. 509]

has left wholly unheeded the anti-Jewish interest that determined the first author to omit it. He took it up because he had not the same hesitation about letting Jesus appear wholly in the form of the Jewish Messiah. The distinction which thereby came to the Jews was to be left to them undiminished; from it, after all, only so much the greater a guilt fell back upon them. Into the same category there would further belong, according to Ritschl’s assertion, all those passages in which the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies is pointed out. Ritschl remarks, on the occasion of the passage 18:31–34, that in the whole part of Luke from chapter 4 to chapter 23 the formula πληρωθῆναι τὴν γραφήν, or something similar, is found only in the following passages: σήμερον πεπλήρωται ἡ γραφὴ αὕτη ἐν τοῖς ὠσὶν ὑμῶν, 4:21; ἔτι τοῦτο τὸ γεγραμμένον δεῖ τελεσθῆναι ἐν ἐμοί, τό· καὶ μετὰ ἀνόμων ἐλογίσθη, 22:37; ἡμέραι ἐκδικήσεως αὗταί εἰσι, τοῦ τελεσθῆναι πάντα τὰ γεγραμμένα, 21:22. These citation formulas, however, he says, all belong to passages whose originality is, on other grounds, more than doubtful. Marcion’s Gospel, he says, did not indeed lack appeals to the Old Testament (compare 6:3; 7:27; 20:41–44), but this definite formula is found only in those sections, and it therefore appears as the literary manner of the reviser.¹ The passages in which it is found still further, besides 18:31–34, namely 24:27 and verse 32 (καὶ ὡς διήνοιγε τὰς γραφάς), and verses 44–46, Ritschl also puts to the account of the reviser. Yet this is a doubtful point. It would be very characteristic for the Gospel in its original and in its later form if the passage in chapter 4 had at first read only as Ritschl, with Hahn, assumes: verse 16, καὶ ἦλθεν εἰς τὴν Ναζαρέτ καὶ εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὴν συναγωγήν; verse 20, καὶ ἐκάθισεν καὶ πάντων ἐν τῇ συναγωγῇ οἱ ὀφθαλμοὶ ἦσαν ἀτενίζοντες αὐτῷ; verse 21, καὶ ἤρξατο λέγειν πρὸς αὐτούς; then verses 22, 23, 28–30. This, however, is a mere conjecture, not sufficiently grounded by Tertullian’s silence. It is indeed very significant that at 24:25 the reviser has altered the original ἐλάλησεν ὑμῖν (just as at verse 6) into ἐλάλησαν οἱ προφῆται, from which it is to be concluded that he set much store by the pointing out of such prophetic passages; yet it is likewise mere conjecture that those passages are interpolations. It is the same with 9:31, where the remark that the men of the Old Testament, at the transfiguration, spoke with Jesus about his

[p. 510]

departure to Jerusalem is also supposed only to have been interpolated, without its being possible to assume this securely enough.

(4) The passages of the fourth class can at bottom be taken together with those of the second; yet one parable deserves to be singled out here, which seems to give too vivid a picture of the later party relations for it to be set in one category with those other passages. The parable of the prodigal son refers, according to the interpretation lately given it, as aptly as it is acute,¹ to the Jews and the Gentiles in their relation to the messianic kingdom. The younger son, who strays so far from home, squanders his inheritance in debauchery, but then, after in his misery he has stilled his hunger even with the food of the swine, returns to the father in humble repentance and with the self-accusation that he has sinned against heaven and is no longer worthy to be called his son: he represents in himself the Gentile world. The elder, the firstborn, who always remains at home and boasts that he has already served the father so long and has transgressed none of his commandments, is an equally apt image of the Jewish people. Already such traits fit very well the interpretation given to the parable. What, however, is quite especially characteristic of the parable, and sets the relations of the later time so clearly before one’s eyes, is the envious, jaundiced disposition which the elder brother displays toward the younger, whom, as he complains, the father has preferred. Who does not see here the conduct, familiar from the Epistle to the Romans, of the Jewish Christians toward the Gentile Christians and toward Pauline Christianity? As the elder brother, sulking over the joyful reception of the one who has returned from his wandering, holds himself aloof and will take no part in the feast of joy that has been prepared, so the Jewish Christians would know nothing of a brotherly fellowship with the Gentile Christians, because in their reception into the messianic kingdom—which here too, as elsewhere (compare, for example, Luke 13:29), is presented under the image of a festal meal—they believed they had to see an overreaching by the Gentile Christians, a curtailment of the rights that had belonged to them from of old. Here it is not merely a question of Gentiles and Jews, of their faith and unbelief, of the gracious reception of the one and the casting out of the other, but of Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians, as two associates, with equal rights, of the

[p. 511]

messianic kingdom. The one is from the beginning in possession and enjoyment of all the rights of the father’s house; something which he did not already have before need not first be conferred on him. The other has indeed in himself the same rights, since God is not the God of the Jews only, but of the Gentiles also (Rom. 3:29); but he must first be received into them again. His reception back, however, has only so much the greater significance. In the readiness with which the younger son returns, full of repentance and humility, to the father, and in the joy with which the father receives him, Gentile Christianity comes before us in the full consciousness of the significance it had already attained. All the more, however, must it also have mattered to the Pauline Christians to meet the breach which, through the distrustful and grudging conduct of the Jewish Christians, threatened to come into the fellowship that was only then forming. This was the endeavor of the apostle in the Epistle to the Romans. He sought to instruct the Jewish Christians about their whole position both toward the Gentile Christians and toward the messianic kingdom in general, and to convince them how little cause they have to regard the reception of the Gentile Christians as a wrong committed against them. The same interest one had to have in the sequel. Only if the equal right of both parties was acknowledged could both join together into the unity of an ecclesiastical fellowship. At the equalization of both parties, at conceding to each of the two, as far as possible, what he could rightly demand of the other, those irenic, conciliatory endeavors aimed, as we know them especially from the Acts of the Apostles, so closely akin to our Gospel. In what other sense, then, can it be taken, when the father in the parable reassures the son, who is dissatisfied over his supposed setting-back, with the words: τέκνον, σὺ πάντοτε μετ’ ἐμοῦ εἶ, καὶ πάντα τὰ ἐμὰ σά ἐστιν· εὐφρανθῆναι δὲ καὶ χαρῆναι δεῖ, ὅτι ὁ ἀδελφός σου οὗτος νεκρὸς ἦν, καὶ ἀνέζησε, καὶ ἀπολωλὼς ἦν, καὶ εὑρέθη, in which words, at the same time, the conversion of the sinner is conceived, in Pauline fashion, as the coming to life again of one who is dead (Rom. 6:13)? All these traits, held together with the relations of the later time, have so concrete a truth that the parable, at least in the form in which we have it here, can have arisen only out of them.¹ The parable in Matthew (21:

[p. 512]

28–31), of the two sons of a father, of whom the one is disobedient in word and obedient in deed, the other obedient in word but disobedient in deed, cannot be compared with ours, since it does not contain precisely the trait that concerns the Jewish Christians; and the preference given to the tax collectors and harlots over the Pharisees, zealous for the law, referred to the relation of the Gentiles and the Jews, states only that same casting-out of the latter of which there is talk elsewhere also. Two unequal sons of one father, such as both parables have, are a very natural image for the two religious parties that stand over against one another in relation to the kingdom of God. A not unsuitable image of the same kind might be the two malefactors crucified with Jesus, but conducting themselves so differently toward him. They too have been interpreted, in a way that carries conviction, of the relation in which the Jews and the Gentiles set themselves to the preaching of the crucified Messiah.¹ Since in any case they can be referred only to that, and not to the relation of the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians, the parable of the prodigal son occupies, among the interpolated sections of our Gospel, which therefore also belong only to a later time, a place all the more remarkable.

(5) There now remains to us a considerable number of passages which can have been taken up merely out of regard for the completeness of the historical narrative. Since all these interpolations agree more or less with passages of Matthew, Ritschl has classified them thus: (1) such as those in which a verbal agreement takes place: Luke 10:13–15 (Matt. 11:21–23); Luke 13:34, 35 (Matt. 23:37–39); Luke 7:31–35 (Matt. 11:16–19); (2) such as those which look like revisions of passages of Matthew, in which, however, the assumption becomes uncertain that Matthew is the source of a series of interpolations in Luke: Luke 7:29, 30 (Matt. 21:32); Luke 11:48–51 (Matt. 23:30–36); Luke 21:21, 22 (Matt. 24:16); Luke 22:24–30 (Matt. 20:25–28; 19:28); (3) such as those in which one must let fall the assumption that the interpolations derive from the Gospel of Matthew in its present form: Luke 4:38, 39 (Matt. 8:14, 15); Luke 11:29–32 (Matt. 12:39–42); Luke 11:42 (Matt. 23:33); Luke 12:6, 7 (Matt. 10:29–31); Luke 12:33, 34 (Matt. 6:19–21); Luke 18:31–34 (Matt. 20:17–19); Luke 19:29–38 (Matt. 21,

[p. 513]

1–9); Luke 19:45, 46 (Matt. 21:12, 13); Luke 20:9–18 (Matt. 21:33–44); Luke 20:37, 38 (Matt. 22:31, 32); Luke 22:49–51 (Matt. 26:51–54).¹ I cannot here agree with Ritschl, and am rather of the view that we are fully justified in extending the relation of dependence on Matthew, which cannot be missed already in the original Gospel, to the passages as well which have still come in, as interpolations, in our canonical Luke. If, as Ritschl says, it is not to be seen for what purpose the interpolator undertook the alteration of Matthaean passages which distinguish themselves so considerably, by an intelligible connection, above the parallel passages of Luke, it is to be remarked against this that, even if he kept to Matthew, it must at the same time have mattered to him not to follow him too verbally, and that the whole plan of his Gospel brought it about that the passages taken from Matthew came to stand in another connection. Ritschl, however, rests his assertion on two cases in which the presentation of Luke is even supposed to distinguish itself above the parallel sections of Matthew. In the discourse piece on the sign of Jonah (Luke 11:29–32), the point of comparison between Jonah and Jesus, on which the understanding of the whole depends, is said to be given in Luke plainly correctly: καθὼς ἐγένετο Ἰωνᾶς σημεῖον τοῖς Νινευΐταις, οὕτως ἔσται καὶ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου τῇ γενεᾷ ταύτῃ, whereas in Matthew this point is not only not specially brought out, but between the announcement of a sign such as Jonah was, and the inference, agreeing with Luke, that the Ninevites and the queen of the South will condemn this generation, there steps, at Matthew 12:40, the interpretation, here wholly incongruous and forced: ὥσπερ ἦν Ἰωνᾶς ἐν τῇ κοιλίᾳ τοῦ κήτους τρεῖς ἡμέρας καὶ τρεῖς νύκτας, οὕτως ἔσται ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ τῆς γῆς τρεῖς ἡμέρας καὶ τρεῖς νύκτας. But is this interpretation so incongruous and forced? Strauss too asserts² that Jesus referred the Pharisees to the σημεῖον Ἰωνᾶ only in the sense in which Luke has him explain it: that, as Jonah himself, his mere presence and his preaching of repentance, without a miracle, sufficed the Ninevites as a divine sign, so his contemporaries too, instead of snatching after signs and wonders, should content themselves with his person and his preaching. This conception

[p. 514]

is said to be the only one suited to the connection of Jesus’ discourse in Matthew as well. But in that case Jesus ought simply to say that no sign at all will be given them (as it originally read in Luke also, since the words εἰ μὴ τὸ σημεῖον Ἰωνᾶ τοῦ προφήτου already belong to the interpolation), and not speak of another sign; for a σημεῖον, in the sense in which a σημεῖον is spoken of here, the mere presence and preaching of Jonah was not. Something more still belongs to a σημεῖον. Nor can one say that in the case of Jonah too, even according to the expression of Matthew, it was merely his κήρυγμα upon which the Ninevites repented, since nothing is more natural than the presupposition that the effect of the κήρυγμα was strengthened by the σημεῖον. If one considers further that both in Matthew and in Luke futures expressly stand (σημεῖον οὐ δοθήσεται, and so on, Matt. 12:39; οὕτως ἔσται καὶ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου τῇ γενεᾷ ταύτῃ, Luke 11:30), and that the interpretation of these futures, if one will find it grounded in this, that when Jesus spoke these words his appearance was not yet completed, but many moments of it still lay in the future, is one that is not very natural, inasmuch as in this case one should far sooner expect the present, then one has only the choice of assuming either that the original words of Jesus contained nothing further at all than the refusal of the sign, as it originally read in Luke, merely: σημεῖον οὐ δοθήσεται, Luke 11:29, or, if those words did not remain restricted to this alone, but received a further addition concerning the sign of Jonah, nothing else can be understood by it than precisely what the passage in Matthew contains. What, after all, is more natural than that, as soon as an alleged saying of Jesus once spoke of the sign of the prophet Jonah in relation to his person, nothing else was thought of in this than the likeness which the death and the resurrection of Jesus had to the fate of the prophet Jonah? Once Jesus, through his death and his resurrection, had received so close a relation to the prophet Jonah, how could the Gospel tradition have taken the sign of the prophet Jonah otherwise than in that concrete sense? If, accordingly, the interpolator believed he might not leave the passage of the original Gospel as he found it, Luke 11:29: ἡ γενεὰ αὕτη πονηρά ἐστι· σημεῖον ἐπιζητεῖ, καὶ σημεῖον οὐ δοθήσεται, and wanted, in doing so, also to mention the sign of Jonah, he certainly does not here give us the original form of the

[p. 515]

discourse of Jesus. He only completes his Gospel from that of Matthew, by now giving the words of Jesus, as they originally read in Luke, the turn of their own which they had received in Matthew through the transformation of the absolute negation into the conditioned one of εἰ μὴ τὸ σημεῖον τοῦ Ἰωνᾶ. That he did not also take up the explanation which Matthew adds to it is already explained by the abbreviating manner which he follows elsewhere as well, but still more by this, that he must have held such an explication for quite superfluous if he in himself connected with the sign of Jonah no other conception than precisely the one which, according to Matthew, one had to have of it. One is accordingly in no way justified in presupposing, for the discourse piece on the sign of Jonah, any other source in our evangelist than the same one from which he has otherwise drawn in so many other passages. Just as little is this the case with the other passage on which Ritschl relies. In the history of the entry into Jerusalem as well, the advantage is supposed to be on the side of the presentation of Luke (19:29f.), since he does not narrate the notice, to which Matthew (21:7) lets himself be seduced by too verbal an application of the prophetic passage, that Jesus rode upon two asses. If it is an advantage to narrate a thing in itself unthinkable in a thinkable way, then this advantage undoubtedly belongs here to Luke over against Matthew. An entirely different question, however, is whether for that reason the advantage of priority is also to be granted to his presentation. What the first reporter narrates in ingenuous naïveté, the second can so often not accept so unhesitatingly. It looks altogether like a correction made only along the path of reflection, that Luke has Jesus hold his entry into Jerusalem not upon two asses, as Matthew does, but upon one only. He can, of course, by the nature of the case, have held the entry only upon one ass; but a third case is still possible as well, that the entry did not take place in this way at all, neither as Matthew nor as Luke narrates it. If the one report presents the matter in a way that is in itself unthinkable, while the second, in which the same unthinkability does not obtain, looks like a correction made only afterward, it follows from this only that we do not know at all how the two presentations stand, on this point, to the reality of the matter itself. That, finally, the interpolator, if he borrowed the parable Luke 20:9–18 from Matthew 21:33–44, did not take over from it the verse favorable to the Gentiles, verse 43, διὰ τοῦτο λέγω ὑμῖν, ὅτι ἀρθήσεται ἀφ’ ὑμῶν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ δοθήσεται ἔθνει ποιοῦντι

[p. 516]

τοὺς καρποὺς αὐτῆς, one can, with Ritschl, find striking. Who, however, will want to assert that he could pass over this verse, which is by no means necessary to the connection, and the omission of which rather makes the image of the stone more concise, only on the authority of another source which did not have it? It could also already have seemed to him to sound too strong for the irenic purpose which he had.

From the comparison of all the passages which the Gospel of Luke has received only through the hand of its reviser, there accordingly results for us only this: that he did indeed, in the infancy narrative and in some other sections, such as in particular the parable of the prodigal son and the narrative 13:1–9, draw upon sources of his own, but otherwise kept to the Gospel of Matthew. Even if one believes one must distinguish various layers of revisions of the Gospel of Matthew, there is yet no ground for the assumption that he did not already have it before him in its present form.

There now remains to us only the proem of the Gospel, which, as goes without saying, can have been added only by the last hand that worked on our Gospel. What is said in the proem about the intention and the idea of the presentation of the Gospel history that follows it can therefore also be taken only as an explanation given from the standpoint of the reviser. It is, however, rightly to be expected that, if our investigation thus far, through the critical separation of the various constituent parts into which the Gospel falls, has looked into the history of its origin more exactly and more correctly than has hitherto been done, the content and purpose of the proem too must be set in a clearer light. Nothing else should really be expressed in it than what critical consideration shows as the history of the origin and formation of the Gospel in the form in which it has come down to us from the hand of its last reviser.

If, as we have seen, various periods of the history of the origin and formation of the Gospel are to be distinguished, the author of the proem, through whose revision the Gospel received its present form, can have lived only at a fairly late time, only after Marcion, who still made use of the Gospel in its original form, and thus only after the middle of the second century. This agrees with the position which the author, in his preface, gives himself toward his predecessors

[p. 517]

agrees entirely well. He distinguishes himself not only from the ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς αὐτόπται καὶ ὑπηρέται γενόμενοι τῷ λόγῳ, but also from the πολλοί, who ἐπεχείρησαν ἀνατάξασθαι διήγησιν περὶ τῶν πεπληροφορημένων ἐν ἡμῖν πραγμάτων, and thus sets himself only in the third rank over against those who belong to these two classes. The ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς αὐτόπται καὶ ὑπηρέται γενόμενοι τῷ λόγῳ can only be the apostles, and companions and helpers of the apostles, such as Luke and Mark, who, even if they were not αὐτόπται, at least heard from the mouth of the apostles what they handed on further. The expression παρέδοσαν, used of the αὐτόπται καὶ ὑπηρέται, does not exclude the possibility that written records of the Gospel history already existed from some of them; only, since the πολλοί, who ἐπεχείρησαν, and so on, are distinguished from the αὐτόπται καὶ ὑπηρέται, who παρέδοσαν, the πολλοί must have had a wider compass than the αὐτόπται. The manner in which the author of the preface speaks of his predecessors plainly compels the assumption that the literature of the Gospel history already then comprised a considerable series of writings. Whom, however, are we to think of under the πολλοί? If they were so many, the knowledge of them cannot have vanished entirely; but even if we now also envisage the Gospel of the Hebrews, our Matthew, and, according to the statement of Papias, a Gospel of Mark other than our present one, as already existing at that time, these few still stand in far too great a disproportion to the πολλοί, and everything that can give further information about these πολλοί must therefore be very welcome. This is the case, in a twofold way, with the view of the origin of our Gospel that results from the critical investigations before us. If it consists of the various constituent parts into which it must be critically resolved, then there belongs to the πολλοί quite especially the author of the Gospel that forms the original stock; and since the reviser, for the sections that first came in through him, such as in particular the infancy narrative, without doubt likewise made use of written sources that already existed earlier, the πολλοί already widen in what concerns the Gospel. There is added to this that, if two different authors of the Gospel are to be distinguished, and the second, as reviser, gave the Gospel its present form fairly late, only after Marcion, we have all the less cause to restrict the πεπληροφορημένα ἐν ἡμῖν πράγματα, which already so many

[p. 518]

have made the object of a written presentation, merely to the life of Jesus. A writer who already had the apostolic age so far behind him, who, as is to be assumed according to all probability, intended from the beginning to make the Gospel history the first part, and the Acts of the Apostles the second part, of a more comprehensive historical presentation, and, as regards the Gospel history, laid at the foundation a Gospel whose author confessed so decidedly the principles of Pauline Christianity, could in any case see the close of the πράγματα ἐν ἡμῖν πεπληροφορημένα only in the apostolic age. Pauline Christianity belonged essentially to it, if the original idea of Christianity was to have been realized, according to its full content, and to have come to its outward appearance, in the way the author seems to want to say with that expression. If the circle of those πολλοί is thus to be extended to the Acts of the Apostles as well, then it is all the more to be assumed, after the analogy of the Gospel, what the whole character of the Acts of the Apostles, critically considered, makes in any case highly probable, that our writer had written sources of various kinds before him. There really were, then, already at that time many who had composed a diegesis of greater or lesser extent concerning the πράγματα ἐν ἡμῖν πεπληροφορημένα. Only on this presupposition can his relation to the predecessors to whom he attached himself be conceived entirely as he himself states it in the further words of his proem. In the ἄνωθεν παρακολουθεῖν πᾶσιν, in the καθεξῆς γράψαι, and in the ἀκριβῶς, which in its middle, indeterminate position is to be referred both to the one and to the other, he determines his task as a threefold one. His chief purpose is to give a history of primitive Christianity that is as complete and connected as possible, narrating everything from the beginning in its order. Such a history he has given in the two writings that belong together, in that not only do these two themselves attach themselves exactly to one another, but in them themselves nowhere does a gap appear that interrupts the connection of the history. To be sure, if he only took up into his historical presentation a writing of so considerable an extent, which itself already had the unity of a literary whole, such as the original Gospel of Luke, and incorporated it into that presentation as the work of another, he could count as author only in a limited sense; but for that very reason we have all the more weight to lay on the marks

[p. 519]

by which he himself characterizes his own work, when he sets its peculiar excellence in the assembling and ordering in sequence of everything that was already at hand concerning the history of primitive Christianity. He wanted, after all, only to follow up everything from the beginning in its whole connection. But in this respect too it is of importance to refer the proem not only to the Gospel, but also to the Acts of the Apostles. The greater the extent of the work that thus arose, the greater the number of the writings assembled in it, even if not worked up into the unity of a whole, the more a writing such as the original Gospel of Luke also became only a part of a greater whole, and the writer, in taking it up, proceeded only according to the same method by which he united so many other smaller writings into the unity of a whole. Besides, one at that time by no means made of a historian of the Gospel history the demand that he give an entirely new treatment of it; how could one have made such a demand? The content, the historical material, was regarded as something given, and one therefore had no hesitation, as we already see in the relation of the original Gospel of Luke to the Gospel of Matthew, in giving the same narratives again almost unchanged. Even at the verbal identity of the content one took no offense, as the relation of the three Synoptics to one another proves. What determined a new treatment was some particular purpose which one connected with it, either the merely formal one of a more complete assembling, or, what of course encroached more or less on the material, the carrying through of a definite tendency, by which a different stamp was impressed on the whole, even if the historical material remained the same. All this can serve us as an explanation of how our writer, notwithstanding that he is not the real author of the third Gospel, could yet appropriate it to himself, insofar as it had become his work through the παρακολουθεῖν ἄνωθεν πᾶσιν and the καθεξῆς γράψαι. That he now designates this παρακολουθεῖν πᾶσιν still more particularly as a παρακολουθεῖν ἄνωθεν—how aptly this agrees with the result of our critical investigation, that the infancy narrative, which itself goes back even beyond the ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς, first came in through the author of the proem, as the necessary completion of the Gospel which he had found before him in so incomplete a form! From this alone it is explained why he could say of himself

[p. 520]

that he had written ἀκριβῶς, and in such a way that from his presentation one could recognize the ἀσφάλεια of the λόγοι that relate to Christian instruction. A writing of history in the critical sense is certainly not to be thought of. Such a thing lay as far from our writer, as the whole character of his two writings shows, as from that age in general. The advantage of exactness and reliability he sought to procure for his presentation above all by striving after completeness. Yet the concept of the ἀσφάλεια which he so earnestly claims for his history would not thereby be exhausted. Might perhaps, Ritschl asks, the ἀσφάλεια of the history consist precisely in its anti-Marcionite formulation, namely in this, that the points of attachment for Marcion’s interpretations were cleared away? If we might assume this, Ritschl thinks, it would be explained why the ecclesiastical reviser laid at the foundation of his writing precisely that Gospel used by Marcion, which in his eyes lacked the ἀσφάλεια which he conferred on it by rendering it unfit for Marcion’s use. This, he says, is to be held for the chief purpose of the ecclesiastical redaction, to which the striving after completeness is only subordinate. For if this were the chief matter, it would not be explicable that, amid the abundance of evangelical material of tradition, the enrichments of the original writing amount, in relation to the whole, to little more than the fourth part, and that the Gospel of Matthew still has ahead of the third a series of important narratives and discourses.¹ The quantitative difference between our Gospel and that of Matthew is not very considerable, and since we do not know how much material otherwise stood at his disposal, there would, as regards completeness, not be much to be missed. If, however, the ἀσφάλεια is nevertheless to have another reference as well, the assumption of an anti-Marcionite redaction would likewise not suffice. How few are the passages of which it can be asserted that they were altered in an anti-Marcionite interest? The original Gospel was, after all, not a Marcionite one, but a Pauline one. But from his Pauline standpoint the author had already, by the elimination of Jewish elements, given it a form in which it could not recommend itself very much to Jewish Christians. The reviser did indeed hold fast the Pauline character of the Gospel, but in order to secure it against the appearance of a Pauline one-sidedness, and to give it also a form suited to Jewish Christians,

[p. 521]

he took up the Judaizing pieces that it still lacked, such as the infancy narrative, the entry scene, the passage on the eternal duration of the law, which in any case is not directed only against Marcion. Undoubtedly the reviser had in this not only the purpose of completeness, but he wanted thereby at the same time to give his Gospel a form that satisfied both parties as far as possible. But we have, besides, to think not only of the Gospel, but also of the Acts of the Apostles. Both writings, notwithstanding their Pauline tendency, were to remove the offense which the Jewish Christians could take at Pauline Christianity, and to meet them as far as possible. This, then, was the ἀσφάλεια at which he aimed: that his whole presentation of primitive Christianity sought, so far as it could be done in this way, to become serviceable to the irenic, conciliatory interest, as it belonged in general to the character of that age, and kept this purpose always in view.¹