Its antithesis to Matthew and to Jewish Christianity

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Immediately afterward there follows a narrative which is indeed found in the same way in Matthew also, but in Luke’s connection receives another significance. It is narrated of the disciples that they had not been able to cast the demon out of a demoniac who had been brought to them. The disciples thus appear here in their impotence; and even if it should now perhaps be doubtful in Matthew whether the disciples are to be understood by the γενεὰ ἄπιστος καὶ διεστραμμένη so sharply censured by Jesus, yet in the sense of our evangelist hardly anything else can be assumed. Why, then, should he not have held the disciples themselves to be this γενεὰ ἄπιστος καὶ διεστραμμένη, since before and after he depicts them with features which can make such an expression of dissatisfaction with them on Jesus’ part not at all improbable? As at the transfiguration scene he lets a heavy sleep, darkening their sense, fall upon them, so in verse 45 he cannot emphasize strongly enough how little they, still quite struck by the miracle that had scarcely happened, had been in a position to grasp Jesus’ explanation of the fate awaiting him. While in Matthew 17:23 it says simply that they were very grieved at it, our evangelist by contrast says, with a visibly heightened expression, οἱ δὲ ἠγνόουν τὸ ῥῆμα τοῦτο, καὶ ἦν παρακεκαλυμμένον ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν, ἵνα μὴ αἴσθωνται αὐτό, καὶ ἐφοβοῦντο ἐρωτῆσαι αὐτὸν περὶ τοῦ ῥήματος τούτου. So dense a veil, then, still lay upon them and veiled from them everything that referred to the deeper significance of his person and of his work. So little did they have the right insight, and so far did they stand from him even in respect of the personal relation, that out of fear of him they did not even venture to ask him. What follows further, too, verse 46, the disciples’ dispute about rank, and the humiliating reference to the child set before them, as well as the reminder given to John, lets them appear anew from a side which can awaken only a very unfavorable conception of their capacity to work as apostles for the kingdom of God. Indeed, if from this connection one looks back at the two narratives which the evangelist, alongside the insignificant intervening narrative 9:7–9, has likewise brought into connection with the history of their call (9:10–17 and 18–27), one cannot, even in the case of these pieces of the same section, hold it to be accidental that their place has been given them precisely here. At the miraculous feeding, the speech of the disciples in verse 12 shows clearly enough how little they

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had any inkling that precisely in such a case the power of Jesus could only glorify itself all the more in its whole greatness. The section that follows does indeed let Peter also confess that Jesus is the Christ of God; but what a weak expression is given here to his confession, and how flat and insignificant the whole scene has become if we compare it with its presentation in Matthew! Neither the honoring recognition of the sense from which Peter’s confession proceeded, nor the great trust which Jesus placed in him as the rock of his church, is here indicated even with a single word; as in general, in Luke, with the exception of the ambiguous passage which says little enough (22:31–32), everything is missing that could be understood of a vocation specially entrusted to Peter, or that seems to give all the Twelve a claim to the exclusive possession of the apostolic office (passages such as Matt. 18:18, 19, and 28 are not found in the original Luke). The whole of the features with which the twelve disciples are depicted in the entire section that follows the history of their call thus unite into a picture of them which cannot make a very favorable impression, and according to the evangelist’s sense is also not meant to make one. And now let one also note what position the evangelist has given this characterization of the Twelve in his presentation of the Gospel history. With it he closes that part of it which still refers wholly to the activity of Jesus in Galilee, and thus presents the side of it still turned toward Judaism; and if now, as soon as Jesus, with his entry into Samaria, has also entered into his wider and freer circle of activity, opening to him in the heathen world, he has him call new disciples, specially distinguished by him and acquiring his satisfaction in a far higher degree, is it not clear from this that he means to leave the Twelve behind, as it were, in this territory, as appointed only for Judaism, with their Jewish particularism, their sense still so limited and still so little awakened to what is higher and spiritual? How incapable of crossing the narrow limits of that territory, they remain standing here, and therefore, right at the transition into the larger circle now opening up, give only a new proof of their limited spirit. When the inhabitants of the first village in Samaria, into which the messengers sent ahead to prepare the place came, did not receive Jesus, but only because, regarding him as one traveling to Jerusalem, any dispositions favorable to them

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they believed they could not promise themselves, the two disciples, James and John, wanted, with the punishing zeal of Elijah, to let fire fall from heaven upon them and destroy them. Jesus, however, rebuked them with the words, “Do you not know of what spirit you are, by what wholly different spirit you ought to be animated? For the Son of Man has not come to destroy the souls of men, but to save them.” Can it be said more clearly than here how little the Twelve in general, with their particularistic sense, excluding from themselves everything non-Jewish and conducting itself toward it only negatively, had in themselves the genuine spirit of Christ and the right capacity for their apostolic vocation? In this narrow-hearted particularism, bound only to the interests of Judaism, they also could not have the force and decisiveness which the following section, verses 57–62, demands of the disciple of Jesus, in order, in following him, to leave everything behind and, without looking backward, to make himself fit only for service to the kingdom of God. In view of its whole surroundings, this section too, which in Matthew 8:18f. stands in a wholly different connection, cannot have been assigned its place precisely here by our evangelist without reference to the apostles. Just as the Twelve have so far been depicted according to their whole sense and character, they do not appear as the εὔθετοι εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ; a εὔθετος εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ is only one of whom there holds what Jesus says of the seventy disciples, whose call now attaches itself immediately. Therefore the solemn opening words with which Matthew 9:35–38 introduces the choice of the Twelve are at once transferred to the Seventy: “The harvest is great, but the laborers are few; ask therefore the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into his harvest.” They are thus designated by this as the real laborers in the field of the divine kingdom; and how they correspond to the high trust placed in them by Jesus, the evangelist lets Jesus himself depict, with the expression of the most elevating enthusiasm, in the words with which he receives them after their return from the first sending, 10:17–24. It has already been remarked what significant sense lies in the utterance of Jesus in verse 18, analogous to John 12:23; but one is also reminded of Matt. 16:16f. As there, so here Jesus takes up with enthusiastic joy what he has heard from the mouth of the disciples, in order, by the confirmation he gives to their words, to bring into view everything great and exalted that attaches to it for the future, and thereby the indestructibility of his work

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and its determination for eternity. In everything he says here for the special distinction of the Seventy, their antithetical relation to the Twelve emerges fully at last. Not only is nothing similar said of them, but, after the highest that can be said of a disciple of the Lord has been claimed for the Seventy, nothing equal can any longer remain over for them as against these. “I give you,” he says to them, “power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and power over the whole might of the enemy, and nothing shall injure you.” They are thus not merely to be incapable of being injured by all the powers of evil, but are themselves to have absolute power over the principle of evil that stands over against the kingdom of God and is to be overcome by it; therefore they are also not to rejoice merely for the reason that the spirits are subject to them, but rather over this, that their names are written in heaven. If, to be sure, nothing further were said by these words than what de Wette wants to find in them, that one should rejoice, not vainly and with a lust for dominion in the activity that has been exercised, but in the consciousness of belonging, with one’s own inner life, to the kingdom of God, then only something corresponding very little to the lofty flight of Jesus’ discourse would have been said by this. It is clear, however, that, as before there was talk of the absolute power with which the disciples are called to work for the kingdom of God, so now here, with a view to the final goal, their absolute significance for the kingdom of God in general is to be expressed. What a further look, however, this passage seems to let us cast into the soul of the author of our Gospel! If one is already moved, by the scene narrated of John and his brother James in 9:54, to think of the fiery spirit of vengeance of the apocalyptist, the conjecture even forces itself upon one here that the author of our Gospel, in the names of his seventy disciples which he represents as written in heaven, had directly before his eyes the passage Revelation 21:14, where it is said of the δώδεκα ὀνόματα τῶν δώδεκα ἀποστόλων τοῦ ἀρνίου that they are written on the twelve foundation stones of the wall of the heavenly Jerusalem. One need only note in what sense and connection there is talk of the names written in heaven, both in the apocalyptist and in the evangelist. The same absolute significance which the apocalyptist, himself one of the Twelve, accords to the twelve apostles, corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel, for the kingdom of God, the evangelist accordingly means to claim for his own disciples, who represent in themselves the totality of the heathen peoples,

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the seventy; but in that he claims it for them alone, and lets the Twelve, already set back so greatly against them, stand in this respect most of all so deeply beneath them, how is it possible to fail to recognize the contrast that looks out so clearly from the evangelist’s whole presentation? The same holds also of the following words, in which Jesus, rejoicing in his heart, thanks the Father that he has hidden this from the wise and understanding and revealed it to the babes, that so it was his good pleasure, and then, in the elevating consciousness of the success of his activity thereby established, expresses the highest significance of his person in the words, “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; no one has known who the Father is except the Son, and who the Son is except the Father, and he to whom the Son wills to reveal it.” This passage is found in Matthew also, and precisely there where there is talk of the sending of the Twelve and of the instruction given them at that time, and thereupon of the first results of Jesus’ activity, of his recognition as well as of his rejection, chapter 11:1f., 25f.¹ We thus see here again how historical situations and utterances of Jesus which in the original connection of the Gospel history could refer only to the Twelve have been transferred by our evangelist to the Seventy, as clear proof that he means the latter to be regarded not merely as set equal to the former, but, in their place, alone as the true and genuine disciples of Jesus. It is therefore also easy to see that everything Jesus said here, in such high expressions, of his disciples and of himself is meant to hold not merely of the alleged success of the first sending of the Seventy, which yet in no case can already have been so significant, but the evangelist evidently means, in what is supposed first to have happened then, with so great success, through those disciples, to bring into view everything that attached to it for the future. If, now, the seventy disciples are indisputably appointed to their vocation, in precisely this number, according to the accepted number of the heathen peoples, just as the twelve apostles are with regard to the number twelve of the tribes of Israel, and if already their call and sending in Samaria, the heathen land, points to their determination

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for the heathen world, there can just as little be any doubt that it is only heathenism in whose sphere Jesus sees lying before him, in the future, all those great successes of his cause that move him to so high an enthusiasm. The author of the Gospel thus lives wholly in the consciousness of a Pauline universalism which has crossed everything Jewish-particularistic and left it behind, and beholds the most beautiful realization of the idea of Christianity, its highest triumph, not in Judaism but only in heathenism, in the totality of the peoples of the heathen world. In the same section, remarkable in so many ways, one is yet specially reminded, by a few incidental traits, of a writer living in the Pauline circle and acquainted with the principles and letters of the apostle. I will not lay any special weight on the claim that, as the Saxon anonymous author thinks,¹ the words πατεῖν ἐπάνω ὄφεων point specifically to an event that actually occurred in the life of Paul, Acts 28:3f. (in any case we see from this passage how, in particular also concerning the apostle Paul, such legends were in circulation as bore witness to the invulnerability of these men of God); what, however, deserves to be especially noted is how certain principles known from the Pauline letters are woven into the instruction given to the Seventy. If the disciples are directed, in the houses which they enter, to ἐσθίειν καὶ πίειν τὰ παρ᾽ αὐτῶν, ἄξιος γὰρ ὁ ἐργάτης τοῦ μισθοῦ αὐτοῦ ἐστι — ἐσθίειν τὰ παρατιθέμενα, this agrees not only so exactly with the procedure followed and justified by Paul in 1 Cor. 9:7f., but also so literally with 1 Cor. 10:27 itself, that one recognizes from this the decided Paulinist, and can hardly hold even this literal agreement to be accidental. Since the houses which the Seventy enter are, according to the connection of the passage, Gentile houses, they are accordingly instructed here that they must not hold eating together with Gentiles to be impermissible, but, without making a conscience of it, are to eat everything that is set before them.

After such proofs of a tendentious character of our Gospel so definitely expressed, one will also be able to have fewer hesitations, in the case of other sections, about assuming an antithetical relation to Jewish Christianity. In this category the two parables of the banquet, 14:16, and of the poor man and the rich man seem especially to belong.

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The latter is peculiar to the Gospel of Luke; the former is found also in Matthew 22:1f., yet with a modification that seems characteristic of the tendency of the two Gospels. In Luke, after those who scorn the invitation, the poor and the infirm from the streets and lanes of the city are invited first, and then those who are brought in from the highways and hedges with the most urgent compulsion. This latter distinction is not made in the form of the parable in Matthew. Rather, after those first invited had left the king’s invitation unheeded and had even mistreated and killed the servants, people of every kind were called in from the crossroads of the highways to the wedding feast that had been held ready. It is entirely natural to think, in the different classes of those invited, of the Jews and the Gentiles and of their relation to Christianity, inasmuch as the latter accepted it as readily as the former rejected it in unbelief (just as, in v. 7, one can see in the punishment visited on the city, which the king has burned in his wrath, only an allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem). It also lies very near to understand, by the poor and the infirm, who in Luke are still specially distinguished from those brought in only afterward from the highways, people of the lower class of the people, among whom alone there was receptivity for Christianity, in contrast to the noble. The parable would accordingly contain, in Matthew as in Luke, the teaching that the Gentiles are as much entitled to reception into the messianic kingdom as the Jews, and, given the unbelief of the latter, must be regarded as its real members. The Pauline universalism to which the parable confesses even in Matthew cannot well cause surprise, since this Gospel contains individual passages of this kind elsewhere also. The only question is how the trait peculiar to Matthew is to be taken: that it is made a condition for the guests, if they are to be admitted to the feast, that they be clothed in a wedding garment. Since the parable lets the historical difference of the various classes of the members of the Christian community play over into the moral contrast of worthiness and unworthiness, that trait is perhaps to be understood, according to its original sense, of the subjective receptivity for the kingdom of God. But it can equally well be said by it that the Gentiles are indeed to be equally entitled partakers of the messianic salvation, yet only on the condition that

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they obligate themselves to the observance of the law. Were we permitted to assume that the evangelist at least has connected this sense with the parable, it would accordingly have a genuinely Judaistic tendency, and the author of the Gospel of Luke would thus, simply by having left this trait out entirely, have betrayed the opposite tendency. In any case the parable in Luke takes a different turn in this: while in Matthew it restricts the true and real members of the divine kingdom to the small number of the elect, and has all who do not fulfill that condition cast into the outer darkness, here, by contrast, it will have people in whom, in the last resort, one can see only the contrast of the Gentiles to the Jews received into the kingdom of God unconditionally and absolutely, and regards the exclusion of those first invited, the Jews, only as the deserved consequence of their own guilt (v. 34). In fairly similar language the other parable, that of Lazarus and the rich man, closes. It therefore coincides in any case at the close with that former one, but perhaps also in its content altogether. It has most recently been interpreted of the relation of the two religious parties.¹ The rich man is supposed to be a symbol of those who are rich in spiritual things, in divine revelation; the poor man, held of no more account than the dogs, who gathers the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table (cf. Matthew 15:27 and Mark 7:28), is supposed to represent the relation of the Gentiles eager for salvation to the Israelites. On this construction, the most offensive trait of the parable would explain itself: that the rich man is condemned immediately for the sake of his riches, and the poor man is made blessed on account of his poverty. Transferred to what is spiritual, these traits lose what is offensive in them. The Jews, satisfied in their wealth of legal revelation, for that very reason forfeit salvation; the Gentiles, the spiritually poor, who desire to satisfy themselves from the wealth of the Jews, obtain it. As for that chief trait of the parable, however, it cannot well be surprising, since elsewhere also, especially in the Gospel of Luke, riches and poverty are set in such a relation to the kingdom of God, with no further mediation (cf. 6:21, 24). On the other hand, it would still not seem probable that, if riches and poverty were to be taken in this figurative, spiritual sense, these two conditions themselves have been painted in such detail, since this would rather have had to divert attention from the main idea. And how, then, is one to think the relation of the poor man and the rich man? If the poor man represents the

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Gentiles eager for salvation, his desire is for the salvation in the rich possession of which the rich man, as a Jew, stands. But is the legal revelation, which alone can be the wealth of the unbelieving Jew, the object of the Gentile’s desire for salvation? Does this desire not aim at something altogether different? The parable receives, through that interpretation, a somewhat skewed trait. The rich man who enjoys his wealth for himself and is stingy with it toward others would be an image of Jewish particularism, which, in possession of its legal revelation, looks down on the Gentiles as proudly as the noble rich man otherwise looks down on the poor. But how does the poor man’s desire for a wealth fit with that, a wealth which, considered from the Pauline standpoint, could appear only as the very opposite of wealth?¹ One would therefore have to abstract from this trait; from that, however, it is only to be concluded that the parable originally does not have the sense at all which that interpretation wants to give it. What is more natural than that its fundamental thought is the Ebionite view of the relation of wealth and poverty, and of the contrast, resting on that, between the present world and the world to come? If, therefore, one still wants to give the parable another reference, this can at least have been added to the original sense only afterward. This view receives its confirmation through the form of the parable itself, since in v. 26 (καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶσι τούτοις, and so on) it is clearly to be seen how a second formation has attached itself to the original one, which in part does not even agree entirely with the first. One sees, Schwegler says quite rightly,² how the parable from v. 27 on (properly already from v. 26) is spun out in an entirely different sense, under an anti-Jewish point of view. The rich man, who has Moses and the prophets but does not listen to them, and therefore suffers torment in the αἰὼν μέλλων, now becomes the symbol of the Jewish people, which, in the midst of the fullness of divine blessings, revelations, and prophecies, remains hardened and unbelieving toward the salvation that was prophesied; the poor man becomes the image of the Gentile world. Cf. the further exposition in Schwegler’s

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op. cit. It remains only to call attention to how vividly the close of the parable sets before one’s eyes the relation of the Jews to Christianity that actually existed after the death of Jesus. The case which the parable sets only hypothetically—εἰ Μωυσέως καὶ προφητῶν οὐκ ἀκούουσιν, οὐδὲ ἐὰν τις ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀναστῇ, πεισθήσονται, v. 31—had now really occurred. Jesus had indeed risen from the dead, and yet they did not believe in him as Messiah. The ground of this lies in their not listening to Moses and the prophets, not understanding them, not letting themselves be led by them to faith in the Messiah, and in general, in their worldly mind, having no receptivity for the messianic salvation destined only for the poor. As in these two parables Judaism and Gentile religion, or Judaistic and Pauline Christianity, confront one another with all the contrasts that belong to them, so too the small, meaningful narrative peculiar to Luke alone, of the two sisters, Mary and Martha, and of their so essentially different conduct toward Jesus, has a similar parabolic significance, 10:38f. In the one of the two sisters one can see only an image of the trustful surrender that belongs to the concept of the Pauline πίστις; in the other, only an image of the zeal for the law that toils in outward works, in the work-doing performance of the ἔργα νόμου, and in that turns away from the true salvation. In them too, then, the same fundamental view that determines the tendency and the character of the Gospel presents itself to us in a very pregnant image,¹ and just as in those two parables the reference lying in them to the party relations of the time is also spoken out in definite antithetical sentences (14:24; 16:31), so in this parabolic narrative as well, in the words of Jesus that blame Martha and in the praising testimony he gives to Mary, such a reference, intended by the evangelist himself, cannot be mistaken.

The more definitely the Pauline character of the Gospel is expressed in all these traits, the more characteristically it distinguishes itself from the Gospel of Matthew. How, then, is it to be regarded that, as is asserted, the Gospel also has a side turned toward Judaism, by which the sharpness of the Pauline fundamental impression of the Gospel is again taken away? Schwegler has set over against the series of Pauline pieces and elements of teaching another series of Jewish-Christian narratives and discourses,

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and has conceded, up to a certain degree, the striking appearance that through the passages of the latter kind the inner unity of the Gospel seems to be destroyed and its dogmatic posture made insecure: even if the Pauline ground tone and ground character of the Gospel is to be heard through everywhere, a Paulinism carried through strictly and consistently is not to be sought in our Gospel.¹