The original Gospel of Luke: its Pauline character

II. The Original Gospel of Luke

On the ground of the foregoing investigation of the Marcionite Gospel, the tendency and the character of the third Gospel can now for the first time be asked after more definitely. If, as has been shown, it consists of two elements essentially different from one another, of an original stock, to which only later, by another hand, several

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not inconsiderable pieces have been added, it is to be assumed in advance that each of these two constituents will have its peculiar character, and the chief object of the investigation must therefore be the question how the two constituents of the Gospel are distinguished from one another by their whole character. Everything that one rightly regards as the Pauline stamp of the Gospel of Luke can, as soon as the distinction is made in the manner indicated, at first be placed only in the original Gospel; but in this Gospel it will be possible to demonstrate it all the more purely as what is characteristic of it, the more strictly everything foreign is separated from it.

The peculiar character of the original Gospel of Luke displays itself above all, in a negative way, in its difference from the Gospel of Matthew. Everything that designates the latter so specifically as a Judaizing Gospel, such as in particular the affirmation of the law and the repeatedly expressed exclusive determination of the Gospel for the Jews, it not only does not have, but rather, instead of the sayings of Jesus that refer to this, has sayings that sound the opposite,¹ in which the Pauline standpoint of its author already announces itself very definitely. To the same place belongs the inclusion of several pieces of teaching that are missing in Matthew, in which the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins and of the free grace and mercy of God is given a significance wholly corresponding to the Pauline doctrinal conception.² The character of the Gospel opens itself to us more deeply, however, only when we seek to grasp, at its center, the total conception of the person and activity of Jesus that underlies it. In this respect it is certainly very characteristic that, by its fragmentary, abrupt beginning, it means, as if on purpose, to keep at a distance from itself every closer attachment to Judaism, in that it does not even set Jesus before our eyes as one γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός and γενόμενον ὑπὸ νόμον, as the apostle Paul himself nevertheless designates him in Gal. 4:4. By contrast, it has Jesus appear immediately as

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a teacher in Capernaum, and the first act by which he here at once makes known and legitimates himself in his higher dignity and determination is the expulsion of a demon. By the twofold moment that is to be distinguished in this, in that Jesus not only in fact, by his word, gives a proof of his power that subdues the demons, but the demoniac also expressly bears a testimony to the power and dignity of Jesus, this first public act of Jesus is marked in a way from which one rightly concludes that the author here means at the same time to bring into view the general significance which Jesus is to have in his presentation of the Gospel history. Ritschl remarks aptly (p. 196) that, however strange it may appear, the demon here serves, just as John the Baptist does in the other Gospels, to proclaim Jesus as the one he is and to introduce him into his activity. As the latter is capable of his testimony only as a divine prophet, and besides that the miracle at the baptism is added as authentication, so here it is the superhuman nature of the demon which makes it possible for him to recognize the one who is stronger than he. What importance the power exercised over the demons, and the testimony borne by them to Jesus, had for the author of the Gospel is to be seen not only from the statement in verse 41, but still more from the fact that this very feature, the power of Jesus over the demons, is repeatedly brought forward by him with special emphasis (cf. 6:18; 9:1; 10:17f.). Jesus, Ritschl remarks (p. 198), counts for the original Luke as the representative and revealer of God, clothed with the whole divine power, who by his conquest of all satanic power effects the redemption of men from outward and inward evil. The conception of so high a dignity of Christ, over against which the Jewish Messiah has sunk to a subordinate significance, can be explained only from the Pauline standpoint of the author. The conception of the opposition of sin and grace, about which Pauline theology turns, is evidently also what is reflected, according to the evangelist’s presentation, in the relation of Christ to the devil and his kingdom. Christ is beheld as the possessor of the divine power because his business is to overcome and destroy Satan and evil. These remarks are certainly very correct, only they would seem not to be entirely exhaustive, and may be permitted to be extended still further in the sense of Pauline universalism. The word of the demoniac, 4:34, ἦλθες ἀπολέσαι ἡμᾶς, is to be taken in the same sense

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in which Jesus, in opposition to Jewish particularism, says that he has come to seek and to save what is lost (19:10). As soon, however, as the activity of Jesus extends beyond Judaism, it can only be heathenism in which the widest field opens to it. Since, now, according to the Jewish view, heathenism is also the kingdom of the demons, the relation which the saving and redeeming activity of Jesus has to the Gentile world at once presents itself also in the power of Jesus that subdues and destroys the demons. The power of the demonic, so closely bound up with heathenism, had above all to be broken and overthrown if the redemption from all evil, and the equal enjoyment of the blessings of messianic salvation, were to be imparted to heathen humanity. Even if, then, the demonic is the evil in general that is to be abolished by Jesus as redeemer, it is yet quite especially the power of evil that lies upon the heathen world, which the demons exercise over men in the heathen religion, the heathen idolatry, which everywhere had first to yield before Christianity if the Gentiles were to be received into the fellowship of its salvation. It is therefore probably also not without a significance referring to this when the seventy disciples, who represent in themselves the conversion of the whole Gentile world, on returning from their first sending, express the success of their activity with the words κύριε, καὶ τὰ δαιμόνια ὑποτάσσεται ἡμῖν ἐν τῷ ὀνόματί σου, and Jesus himself, in consideration of the great importance of the consequences attaching to this beginning, makes the emphatic utterance ἐθεώρουν τὸν σατανᾶν ὡς ἀστραπὴν ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ πεσόντα, 10:17–18. This is a moment in the life of Jesus which in our Gospel is no less full of significance than, in the Johannine Gospel, the scene in which Jesus, by the appearance of the Greeks, is moved to the utterance ἐλήλυθεν ἡ ὥρα, ἵνα δοξασθῇ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου (John 12:20–24).¹ Here as there, before the inspired gaze

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of Jesus a future opened up in which the most blessed fruits were to come forth, in the heathen world, from his messianic activity.

Under the same point of view I place everything that Ritschl reckons to the pragmatic arrangement of the Gospel writing of the original Luke (p. 202f.); only there is here a point at which I can be less in agreement with the view he has set forth. I readily grant that it is very difficult to discover in the Gospel a definite order, whether a temporal or a material one; that, even if at some places in the Gospel we meet with a grouping according to material principles, it is nevertheless impossible to demonstrate a historical connection running through the whole. What is in question here, however, is especially the understanding of the passage 9:51f. Ritschl contradicts the usual view, held, as he himself says, up to now by all interpreters and critics, as though in the writer’s sense the report of the journey to Jerusalem began with chapter 9:51, and the author accordingly wished everything that follows to be understood as though it had happened in Samaria on the way to the capital. Undeniably many

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difficulties stand in the way of this view, and it is easy to show that the section 9:51 to 18:14 contains a quantity of events which cannot possibly have occurred on the way through Samaria, so that in this part of the Gospel also we have before us only a loose aggregate of individual narratives and discourses. Only, it seems to me that too little account has been taken of the fact that both are possible at once. The author of the Gospel may here have gathered together several things which originally were certainly not part of such a travel report, and yet it may at the same time have been his intention to place all this under the principal point of view of the journey of Jesus, now already directed upon the capital as its final goal, and passing through Samaria. One need only consider how much it matters to the evangelist himself to designate as an epoch-making moment that moment in the life of Jesus in which he arrives from Galilee at the borders of Samaria and is now about to enter its territory. The second period of the teaching activity and of the life of Jesus now begins, distinguished from the first in that its sphere is no longer Galilee but Samaria, and in it Jesus already has more nearly and more immediately before his eyes the catastrophe with which his activity in general was to end. The evangelist calls this second period, whose end is not merely the death of Jesus but his being taken up into heaven, in its course now beginning, the συμπληροῦσθαι τὰς ἡμέρας τῆς ἀναλήψεως αὐτοῦ. His face was therefore now fixed and unswerving toward Jerusalem, where everything was at last to come to its fulfillment; but this expression too, αὐτὸς τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ἐστήριξε τοῦ πορεύεσθαι εἰς Ἱερουσαλήμ, is chosen by the evangelist with particular deliberation. By this he does not say that Jesus now traveled immediately and by a straight road to Jerusalem, but only that he had given his face the direction toward the journey to Jerusalem, that is, that in all the journeys he still made now he never lost their final goal from sight, and made them with the constant, unswerving consciousness that, wherever they might go, they were properly the πορεύεσθαι εἰς Ἱερουσαλήμ. The evangelist himself thereby forestalls the presupposition that his following narrative is the report of a journey going to Jerusalem in a straight, uninterrupted course, and the assumption is thus not excluded by his own words that, even if the principal sphere of his activity is Samaria, there yet falls within the same circle of his working much that lies at a greater or lesser

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distance off to the side, and has probably also been brought into this connection only arbitrarily. That the form of the following presentation, as the report of a journey going through Samaria to Jerusalem, is as it were the wide frame by which everything that follows, up to Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem, is to be comprehended, is evident both from the fact that there is now at once talk of an event that occurred in Samaria, and from the repeated reference to the journey to Jerusalem continuing in the same direction. Cf. 10:38, ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν τῷ πορεύεσθαι αὐτοὺς; 13:22, καὶ διεπορεύετο κατὰ πόλεις καὶ κώμας, διδάσκων, καὶ πορείαν ποιούμενος εἰς Ἱερουσαλήμ; 17:11, καὶ ἐγένετο ἐν τῷ πορεύεσθαι αὐτὸν εἰς Ἱερουσαλήμ, καὶ αὐτὸς διήρχετο διὰ μέσου Σαμαρείας καὶ Γαλιλαίας. That here not only Samaria but also Galilee again is named indicates only that the evangelist does not wish the journey to be regarded as one continuing in a straight direction to Jerusalem. He therefore lets it bend back toward Galilee again and again, partly expressly, as here, partly tacitly, insofar as the locality of many narratives cannot well be in Samaria, without, however, thereby coming into contradiction with his earlier statement, since he means to have the journey go through Samaria only according to its principal movement. The mention of Samaria here is meant to recall precisely that, and only in this sense are Samaria and Galilee named together here; but by no means is Samaria, alongside Galilee, mentioned only for the purpose of explaining how a Samaritan could also have been among the lepers. Only from Jericho on (18:35) does the journey then go in a straight course directed immediately upon its goal, to Jerusalem. There can accordingly hardly be any doubt that it belongs to the peculiar arrangement of our Gospel to distribute the historical material of the Gospel history upon these two circles of Jesus’ teaching activity in such a way that in the one he is presented as traveling about in Galilee, in the other as engaged on a journey through Samaria to Jerusalem. That now, however, while Matthew not only says nothing of such a traveling through Samaria, but even seems to exclude it from his presentation, our evangelist gives Samaria so great a significance that, alongside Galilee, it is the special scene of Jesus’ public activity, and so great a part of the traditional material is assigned to it, can have happened only in the same tendency in which he has the seventy disciples appear so significantly over against the apostles. For Samaria was regarded as a heathen

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land. As, therefore, the strict Jew and Jewish Christian shunned contact with the unclean land, so, by contrast, the author of Pauline mind saw himself drawn only the more strongly to the territory already lying beyond the borders of Judea, opening the wide view into the heathen countries. In the extension of Jesus’ circle of activity to Samaria, in the length of time he is supposed to have stayed here, in the preference with which, in the narratives belonging there, the features of a disposition pleasing to God and of itself coming to meet reception into the kingdom of God are presented in Samaritans, we see before us that side of the life of Jesus which Pauline universalism had to have as its presupposition, in order to be able to support itself on the authority of Jesus. Indeed, with the same intention, in order to behold already in Jesus the prototype of an apostle to the Gentiles traveling restlessly from land to land, his teaching activity in general seems to be conceived quite especially as a continual traveling about, describing a circle as wide as possible. Jesus does indeed wander about everywhere in Matthew also; our evangelist, however, not only makes this continual traveling onward noticeable more often than otherwise happens, but also has Jesus, right at the beginning, after he had already appeared on the first day in rapid succession in Capernaum and Nazareth, and the people wanted to hold him back (τοῦ μὴ πορεύεσθαι ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν), expressly pronounce the principle ὅτι καὶ ταῖς ἑτέραις πόλεσιν εὐαγγελίσασθαί με δεῖ τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ· ὅτι εἰς τοῦτο ἀπέσταλμαι, 4:43. If we may reckon this too to the peculiarity of our Gospel, a passage which is usually held to be very enigmatic (13:31–34), the utterance which Jesus is supposed to have made against Herod the fox, might also receive light from it. When Jesus says here, “Behold, I cast out demons and perform healings today and tomorrow, and on the third day I shall be finished; only I must travel today and tomorrow and the following day, because it will not do for a prophet to perish outside Jerusalem,” it is clear that he states exorcisms and healings of the sick as the nearest vocation by which the time appointed for his public activity is filled, but, as far more important, as his real task,¹ declares the continual traveling onward that is never to be interrupted, whose final goal could only be Jerusalem.

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This latter passage does indeed belong to a section that is not original; it can, however, hardly be subject to any doubt that the reviser has taken the πορεύεσθαι of Jesus, which he brings forward so significantly, wholly in the sense of the original Gospel.

Already in the features discussed so far, our Gospel displays a character which distinguishes it essentially from the Gospel of Matthew, and which can be explained only from the Pauline standpoint of its author. Still more definitely, however, it expresses its divergent direction in this, that it even sets itself in an antithetical relation to the presentation of the Gospel history contained in the Gospel of Matthew. The most striking feature of this kind is the relation, already touched upon, in which we see the seventy disciples stand to the twelve apostles in our Gospel. The unnamed author of the work on the Gospels has drawn attention to this in particular.¹ Ritschl too is of the opinion that the narrative of the seventy disciples has at the same time the intention of putting the twelve original apostles in the shade. In fact, if one compares the two chapters 9:1f. and 10:1, one can hardly fail to recognize upon what opposition and contrast the evangelist has here quite deliberately laid things out. Above all, the brevity and meagerness of the discourse with which Jesus, in Luke 9:3–5, appoints and instructs the Twelve for their office stands out very sharply against the emphasis and richness of the same discourse in Matthew 10:7f. One sees that in that passage almost every word is one too many for the evangelist, and the comparison with Luke 11:2f. shows that he meant to reserve for the Seventy what had been withheld from the Twelve. While in particular the honoring words that express the full significance and dignity of the apostles, Matt. 10:40, are wholly missing in Luke 9:3f., they are applied, in the parallel passage Luke 10:16, to the seventy disciples. Still more, once one looks at the whole section 9:1f.–10:24 with an eye to this, one is surprised at the systematic purpose with which everything here aims at depreciating and setting back the Twelve in the same proportion in which, by contrast, the Seventy are elevated and put in front. When it is said of the three most distinguished of the number of the Twelve, of Peter, John, and James, that at the transfiguration of Jesus they were full of sleep (9:32), and of Peter in particular that he did not know what he was saying (verse 33), this, as especially the parallel passage in Matthew also shows, in which nothing of it is said, can serve only to let them in an unfavorable light

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appear.