[p. 522]
Only from an interest partly polemical and partly irenic, whose elements and motives lie in the party relations of the second century,
[p. 523]
the origin of the Gospel of Luke would accordingly be explained. But, we must still ask here at the close of the investigation before us, does the one hang together with the other so closely that the special tendency of the Gospel, if it lies so openly before one’s eyes, has as its presupposition precisely the position of the two chief Christian parties, as we know it from the history of the second century? The occasion for this question is given by the anonymous writing on the Gospels, already mentioned several times, whose author, as with the Gospels in general, so quite especially with the Gospel of Luke, asserts in the most decided way no other than a polemical tendency, but just as decidedly underlies it with only individual, personal, purely subjective motives. Not into the grand opposition of Judaism and Paulinism, reaching so deeply into all the relations of the primitive Christian age, do we see the Gospels here so placed, in their difference from one another, that they themselves are only the living, concrete expression of the general interests that move the time of their origin; rather, only person stands against person, Paul steps forward over against Peter as a personal opponent, and there is no antithesis whose key to their understanding
[p. 524]
would not lie in a purely personal relation. In order to illustrate this at once here by a very telling example, one need only take what the author says about the mountain or valley sermon of Luke as the counterpart to the Sermon on the Mount of Matthew (p. 47f.). Hardly has he remarked, very correctly, that in the case of this opponent of the law we may expect no assurance of the eternal validity of the law, and of the determination of Peter and those who are his to be the salt of the earth and the lights of men, as is understood from the outset; that the δικαιοσύνη, as it is here explained as perfect fulfillment of the law, will likewise not occur; hence all the citations concerning words of the law are missing (Matthew 5:21–43); he now goes on as follows: “Likewise, in the beatitudes, gentleness will not be pronounced blessed by a man whose character has anything but the germs of gentleness, and who by his own confession easily becomes fire and flame (2 Corinthians 11:29; Romans 12:11); peacemaking will not be pronounced blessed by one whose element of life is conflict and whose favorite cry is στήκετε and ἀντιστῆτε (1 Corinthians 16:13; Galatians 5:1; and so on), and who precisely in his valley sermon carries out a bitter attack on his fellow apostles; further, that he who knows that nothing good dwells in him (Romans 7:18) cannot pronounce blessed those of a pure heart; that by one who does not want his δικαιοσύνη from the law, but counts a righteousness of that kind as refuse (Philippians 3:6f.), the hungering and thirsting after righteousness, as it is meant here, will not be recommended, but the word, ‘Be perfect, as God is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48), will be transformed into ‘Be merciful, as God is rich in mercy’ (Luke 6:36); that finally he for whom Christ is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:17), and for whom the Spirit is the chief antithesis to the law as γράμμα (Romans 7:6), who for that reason also admonishes to be full of the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18), will not have the poor in spirit, as the members of the kingdom of God who stand before all the others, pronounced blessed first of all—all this, everyone who knows even superficially the doctrinal conception of Paul understands without further discussion.” From the personality of the apostle Paul, as the author conceives it in the traits brought forward here, to which, however, traits of an entirely different kind could very easily be opposed, we are thus to explain to ourselves that Luke has given the Sermon on the Mount of Matthew with such alterations. Here everything takes a personal turn, and the deeper one looks into the organism of the Gospels, the more there is uncovered only a web in which tension and jealousy,
[p. 525]
irritability and passion, bitter scorn and mockery, satire and irony are the chief threads that run through the whole. There is no harsh and bitter word in the whole Gospel of Luke that would not have its direct polemical reference to the twelve apostles. The οὐαί of the sermon on the mount in Luke 6:25f. apply to them. Because they, the blinded Twelve, will not understand the true commission of Jesus, to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles (v. 27f.), they are set right by the Lord in v. 37f. One need only think, under those addressed with the parable in v. 39, of Peter and his Jewish fellow apostles, and one will recognize clearly and easily the biting yet sharp connection of the whole section, which otherwise would have to crumble apart without connection. From the lights of the world they become blind men, and so on. That all this is really to be applied to the Twelve in this way is, on this reading, put quite beyond doubt by the address in v. 46: “But why do you call me Lord, Lord?” For the “you” are supposed to be the disciples who are addressed, who in Luke really address him twice as “Lord, Lord” (13:25; 8:24). In no Gospel do the Twelve, and precisely these alone, address him so unceasingly and so servilely with the servant’s word ἐπιστάτα, or with their κύριε (p. 51f.). How can they, or the Jews, whose genuine representative Peter with those who are his always counts as, imagine themselves to be the light of the world? 11:33. They are the νομικοί, to whom the οὐαί is called out in 11:46, the Pharisees, of whose hypocrisy (Galatians 2:13) one is to beware, 12:1 (in general almost every word of this section is supposed to be bitter irony). They are the ten lepers, the ten blind men, and so on. It is only bitter irony when, while Peter is otherwise always addressed in all the Gospels with “Simon,” precisely only there, where the name becomes an ironic name of mockery (22:34), the address is Πέτρε, that is, man of rock (p. 175); and only in order to give the scene of the dispute about rank the place, certainly chosen as the most unfavorable possible, for the Twelve, it is set by Luke in the middle of the celebration of the Supper, 22:24f. (p. 19). The whole artfully constructed genealogy of Luke is only a persiflage of the genealogy of Matthew and of all such myths and petty inquiries, which effect only discord and no edification (p. 246). Everywhere, as these few traits, selected from so many, already prove, there is thus only opposition and contradiction, enmity and hatred; and it is therefore only openly expressed what in fact displays itself, when Luke in the superscription sets himself in a conscious, intentional opposition to the Gospel of the original eyewitnesses of the Logos, in the interest of another Gospel,
[p. 526]
which therefore cannot come from such an eyewitness (p. 250). The anonymous critic does indeed want to assert nothing which he does not think he can demonstrate irrefutably from the words of the Gospels themselves. Of what kind his proofs are, however, already lies clearly before one’s eyes. It is always again the same personal opposition which he sees before him, out of whose sphere he never comes, the same unchangeable thought of which he can never rid himself. As if, for him, the unnamed one, names were of no concern at all, all the persons who appear in the Gospel history, whatever names they may have, always have for him only the one or the other significance; all the figures always resolve themselves for him again into the same opposition. If a Simon is spoken of, in whatever connection it may be, provided only that he is depicted unfavorably enough and bears a genuinely Jewish, Pharisaic, particularistic stamp, there is for our critic only one Simon (cf. pp. 58, 131); in all those, by contrast, in whom some trait of Pauline universalism comes to light, whatever they may be called, he always again beholds the same subject, never named, to be sure, but for him not even needing to be named by name. Without hesitation he recognizes his apostle Paul in the purified chief tax collector Zacchaeus, who formerly was rich in all the wealth of Jewish legalism. But he seeks to see Jesus, who he is, and cannot, in the first instance, recognize him before the Jewish crowd that stands in his light, because he is small, τῇ ἡλικίᾳ. This ἡλικία is, namely, the imperfect, the childlike, of his first knowledge of Christ. He recognizes him as yet only κατὰ σάρκα; he is still pressed down in the sinful and fleshly Jewish way of being. Then, in order to be able to see Jesus, he must still go up onto the fig tree with the inedible fruits, in which we behold the συκῆ of 13:6, or Peter. With him he confers (Galatians 1:18). From him, then, he seeks to come to the full beholding of Jesus, after his initial principal blindness had already been removed by the Lord himself. Very comprehensible it is that this conversion story of the chief of the tax collectors is placed in the Benjaminite city of Jericho, since Paul was a Benjaminite and Jericho was therefore his tribal and civic home. In the same place, therefore, the healing of the blind man also occurs (Luke 18:35). For this blind man too is Paul. Instead of the two blind men in Matthew, there is in Luke only one, since Paul, according to a deeper trait of mind, wants to present himself alone as a healed blind man, without his companion Luke. The
[p. 527]
blind man in Luke is also a beggar, in remembrance of the fact that only the pure mercy of God and of Christ helps, for the sake of faith. The one among the ten lepers who returns to Jesus (Luke 17:11) is likewise Paul: when he sees himself healed of his unclean being through faith in the one who bids him go, he does not return again to his priests. We already see from this what new light all at once rises upon the Gospel history. It is as if only now, through the author’s interpretation, the scales fall from the eyes of all interpreters of Scripture. One need only open one’s eyes further. The vinedresser of 13:7 is Paul. He is, after all, the real worker, who works more than all the others. The idle fig tree, however, which stands in the vineyard and seeks only to draw to itself, as an inactive parasite, the sour sweat of others’ labors, is his chief opponent, whom he charges with such a procedure (2 Corinthians 12:13f.). The three years in which the Lord seeks fruit on the fig tree are surely the three years before the appearance of Paul, and the conference with Peter is the first attempt to incite him to the bringing of better fruit than the fruits of the law borne hitherto (p. 124f.). The word to Herod, so hard to understand (13:31), is to be understood thus: For the present I shall still remain in the Jewish land and there practice the driving out of demons and the healing of the sick, the only thing which Matthew knows how to report of the redeemer of the world, and which his apostles too, after his death, continue in the Jewish land. For after three years this conjuring and the bodily healing will come to an end. Then, namely, Paul will come to Jerusalem, and show again to the world, in his spiritual truth, him whom one no longer saw, because the disciples loved the work of the law and Sabbath rest, in defiance of the tetrarch Herod, this Jewish chief, and all his helpers (p. 130). Quite especially, one also owes only to our critic the disclosure concerning the peculiar numerical statements that occur in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew, which are of importance for the unveiling of their polemical relation throughout. Of the five combatants who contend with one another in 12:52 in the house of the Christian church, three are expressly set on the one side, and two combatants on the opposite side, and we do not even need to look about long for the decipherment of their names. The three men of the one party stand, after all, written out large and plain enough in Galatians 2:9. They are the three στῦλοι τῆς περιτομῆς, James, Peter, and John, and the two others are Paul and Luke.
[p. 528]
It is thus of itself explained how Matthew, the opponent of the Two who stands in the service of the Three, has so often brought forward two blind men (9:27; 20:30), or in the land of the Gerasenes two demoniacs (8:28f.), whose longing it is to go into the swine (Gentile beasts), or why he brings double healings (22:22). Even the number two of the false witnesses (Matthew 26:60) is at least again peculiar to Matthew exclusively, and what they testify is in fact very much anti-Jewish and Pauline. If, further, in Luke 12:6 one buys five sparrows for two assaria [Roman copper coins], while Matthew 10:29 has two sparrows sold for one assarion [a Roman copper coin], this cannot have happened unintentionally; and that the market price, at the time when Luke wrote, had become somewhat dearer for the commodity in question is at least not demonstrable. Why, then, should the five στρουθία in Luke not designate the five foolish virgins with the blind lamps, as the one Jewish-Christian half of the apostleship as a whole, who are for sale for the two Gentile apostles? Matthew, by contrast, values these at one penny. In short, all the numbers of the Gospel history now receive their perfectly clear significance: the five brothers of the rich man, the five husbands of the Samaritan woman, the ten virgins of Matthew, the ten lepers and ten servants of Luke (19:13), up to his two swords, with which the zealous champions of the law have enough, since they have only two swords, or chief opponents, against them, Luke and Paul (pp. 117f., 176). Here the critical task seems to transform itself entirely into an allegorical one. As, once one has the key of allegory, one sees through and understands everything, and can only wonder how one could hitherto look at everything with such blunt and dull eyes, so it is here too. Our critic only draws away the allegorical veil which until now still lay on the Gospel history and made impossible for us the understanding of its still veiled sense. But are we then to let the Gospel history be transformed into a mere allegory, an allegorical phantasmagoria? This criticism has its point in this, that it takes everything in a purely personal way; but in this point it so outdoes itself that it turns into its opposite, and becomes an uncritical criticism. For him everything heightens itself to a point at which it loses its hold and cancels itself in itself. It is not Judaistic Christianity that gives the Gospel of Matthew, not Pauline Christianity that gives the Gospel of Luke, its definite color and direction,
[p. 529]
but it is the two apostles, Peter and Paul, who in these two Gospels stand over against one another in an immediate personal relation; and everything in which the characteristic tendency of the one or the other of these two Gospels gives itself to be recognized has in it the sting of a personal relation. But even with this our critic has not yet enough. It is not only Luke who has written his Gospel with the tendency of a Paulinist and in the interest of his apostle Paul; rather, from every word of it Paul addresses us ever more distinctly, and the fruit that at last ripens out of everything so far is the certainty that the Gospel, if not wholly, yet in essential parts, was composed by Paul. The Paulinism of the Gospel becomes real authorship, and in the same proportion the antithetical character of the Gospel now also becomes an immediate personal enmity and attack. The same apostle who in his letters calls his adversary Peter his σκόλοψ τῇ σαρκὶ, designates him as ἄγγελος σατᾶν, and speaks of him as a ὑπάρχων πανοῦργος (2 Corinthians 12:7), has in the same tone of bitter passionateness directed his Gospel against his opponent. So individually, so personally, so subjectively, then, does everything here shape itself in the Gospel history. Precisely this is what is harsh, what is one-sided, what is merely subjective, in the standpoint on which this critic stands. As for him the Gospel history is the field of play of purely subjective interests, motives, and tendencies, and he can find his critical satisfaction always only there where everything runs out into the point of a subjectivity which stands over against another subjectivity, just as sharply marked and strictly closed in upon itself, with all the sharpness of a personal opposition, so his whole criticism bears the stamp of his own subjectivity. Who, then, after all the traits assembled here, could see in it anything other than an artificial web of arbitrary subjective views and combinations? But at this point of subjectivity the one-sided and arbitrary character of such a criticism separates of itself from the true and correct element on which it rests. Its fault is not that it placed itself on this standpoint at all, but that on it, instead of letting the critical process complete itself in its whole course, it set in it an arbitrary barrier, which, the more arbitrary it is, and the greater the contradiction into which it came with its own presuppositions, all the more could have as its consequence only so peculiar an appearance.
[p. 530]
The two propositions that contain the chief moments of the investigation—the Gospel of Luke is Pauline, and in its essential content it was composed by the apostle Paul himself—so little come together into a natural unity that they even contradict one another, and flatly exclude one another. What, then, justifies one in ascribing to the Gospel of Luke a Pauline tendency in the sense in which such a tendency is asserted of it? Plainly only the conviction, gained from the whole character of the Gospel of Luke, of the impossibility of taking it as a purely historical presentation. The more considerable the differences between this Gospel and that of Matthew are, the more definitely they can be traced back to a general tendency explicable only from the Pauline standpoint of the author, the less can one assume that we have before us in it only a simple historical narrative. Even if one grants that the oppositions from whose point of view the Gospels in question are to be considered had formed themselves so early as must here be presupposed, that they became great party oppositions right at the beginning, it now comes down entirely to the question with what probability it is to be assumed that already then, already in the time of the apostle Paul, a historian of the Gospel history gave of it a presentation so little in accord with the objective state of the facts. This is certainly against all analogy. The nearer a writer still stands to the events that are the object of his presentation, the less can he, if one does not want to make him outright into an intentional liar and deceiver, remove himself so far from the objectivity of the matter as must here be presupposed. The chief argument for the later origin of our Gospels remains always this, that they, each for itself, and still more all together, present so much from the life of Jesus in a way in which it cannot have been in reality. Only when one already stands further from historical reality, has already lived oneself more deeply into certain given directions and oppositions, the whole consciousness of the age is disposed to it, and certain points have already involuntarily come forward, to which a reshaping of what was originally fact, going further in the same direction, can of itself attach itself, is the possibility present for the origin of such presentations as our Gospels are. And as they, already considered in general, can have arisen only later, so in detail too so many criteria point irrefutably to a later origin. All
[p. 531]
this our critic has left entirely unattended to. The question of the authorship of Luke is for him still subject to no critical doubt, just as in regard to the Pauline letters too he proceeds in a very uncritical way. However free, then, he may be in one respect, so unfree is he in another, in that his critical consciousness has not freed itself from presuppositions which one must likewise let fall if one does not want to restrict for oneself the possibility of thinking oneself into the pure objectivity of the matter. This is the same rationalistic narrowness which, as it meets us here in criticism, is familiar enough in other fields of theology. It is the perfect parallel to the exegesis of Dr. Paulus. As the latter no longer wants to know anything of the wonders of the Gospel history, but holds fast unmoved the literal credibility of the Gospels, so this criticism lets fall the historical character of the Gospel of Luke, while at the same time the authorship of Luke remains entirely uncontested. The one thing is as arbitrary and one-sided as the other, because the barrier which is here set to the critical procedure exists not in the nature of the matter itself, but only in the subjective consciousness of the critic. One need only, then, remove that barrier which has still remained standing merely in the subjectivity of the critic, and at once that unnatural tension of the oppositions loses itself in the free play of the waves of the self-moving stream of history; everything harsh, abrupt, offensive disappears; it is no longer the two apostles Paul and Peter who contradict each other to the face and are, as it were, pulling each other’s hair; it is only the Christian parties that arose on the foundation of these two forms of Christianity, in whose interest the two Gospels are more or less written, without one’s being compelled for that reason to assume, in everything and anything, so definite a polemical reference; and the writer himself now first appears in such a position toward his object as makes it easily comprehensible how the Gospel history, already mediated for him by so considerable and content-rich an intervening period, could present itself, precisely in this form, to his consciousness, which stood in the oppositions of the present.