Studies in Matthew

Preface

THE present work may be taken as a substitute for Vol. II of the series of “‘Modern’”’ commentaries on the Gospels projected more than twenty years ago. Vol. I appeared from the Yale University Press in 1909 under the title Beginnings of Gospel Story: A Hzstorico-critical Enquiry into the Sources and Structure of Mk. Vol. II, entitled The Book of the Precepts of Jesus, a commentary on Mt prepared on the same plan as its predecessor on Mk, after completion in manuscript in 1917 was withdrawn from the Press because of complications arising from the greatly increased cost of printing. When circumstances again made publication feasible, lapse of time had made mere revision insufficient. The decision was taken to abandon the more costly form and embody the main conclusions in a series of “Studies” permitting a combination of various types of observations on the Gospel, notes introductory, exegetical, and biblico-theological.

Gospel criticism should logically issue in what is called for lack of better designation a Life of Christ. Real biography is of course out of the question where contemporary records do not exist and the career described covers little more than a single year. Nevertheless the title has been applied for a century and a half to works whose purpose was to inform the public of the results of historical study of the four Gospels and may serve broadly to define the ultimate aim of the present writer.

For such a work three principal lines of enquiry are dictated by the nature of the sources. Indeed these themselves give evidence of the hunger of Christians of the earliest generations to know: (1) The story of Jesus’ career as prophet and messianic leader up to his tragic fate in Jerusalem; (2) the nature and content of his message; (3) the permanent significance of his personality and work for the history and practice of religion.

The first of these lines of enquiry leads us directly to the earliest extant gospel, hereinafter designated Mk because of its traditional ascription to John, surnamed Mark,! an associate of the Apostle

1JIn the present volume the abbreviations Mt, Mk, Lk, Jn, are used to designate the canonical Gospels and their compilers, without reference to the correctness or incorrectness of the tradition which declares them to be ‘‘according to” the Apostles Matthew and John, and the ‘“‘companions of apostles” Mark and

Luke; also without reference to the sense in which ‘‘according to” should be taken. When mention is made of the individuals ‘‘ Mark,” ‘‘Matthew,”’ etc.,

Vil

Viii PREFACE

Peter, who is said to have gathered and translated surviving material from Peter’s accounts of the sayings and doings of the Lord.

The second conducts to a record of the teaching of Jesus no longer extant save as it may be reconstructed from extracts made by the canonical evangelists. Mt and Lk contain considerable sections not found in Mk which cannot have been derived by either from the other, but coincide even more closely in language than the sections which they independently derive from Mk. This “double-tradition”’ material, as it is still often called, has come to be known as Q (from the German Quelle=Source), although it is not itself the source, but only the most easily traceable factor of a lost work which we shall designate S, drawn upon independently by Mt and Lk to supplement Mk’s deficiencies of teaching material. S cannot, of course, be fully reconstructed from Q alone, though the Q material shows enough of inner consistency to prove it derived by Mt and Lk from a single Greek document. Nevertheless with Q as a nucleus, carefully restricted use of two other available factors may enable us to form a fairly adequate idea of the nature and contents of S.

The more important of these two additional factors for the reconstruction of S is the ‘‘single-tradition”’ material of Mt and Lk, that is, - material found in Mt only or Lk only. This material peculiar to Mt or Lk will be designated P, or, if need arise to distinguish that of Lk from that of Mt, P™ and P'*. Elements of P, both Matthean and Lukan, give evidence of derivation from the same document as Q. Parts of P are therefore included by many critics in their reconstructions of S, though too often the same designation Q is employed both for factors included under the definition and factors conjecturally added.

The other factor available for quarrying possible blocks of S is “‘triple-tradition”’ material, that is, elements which have passed from Mk into both Mt and Lk. For Mk may have also drawn from §, though for their narrative element Mt and Lk have usually preferred the source which in tradition bore the authority of Peter’s name. “‘Triple-tradition”’ material already has the designation Mk. It needs, therefore, no separate symbol for parts ascribed to S.

The distinction between Q and §S is obviously important. To speak of the “‘double-tradition’’ material Q as if this factor alone could give us the lost source is misleading. The introduction of larger or smaller amounts of P or Mk material without separate designation is no less so. Worst of all is that prejudgment of the nature and contents of §, a source totally unknown before the nineteenth century, involved in the names will be printed in full. In quoted passages the abbreviations will be used, but with the endeavor in all cases to conserve the exact meaning of the author quoted.

PREFACE ix references to it as ‘‘the Logia,” or even “the Logia spoken of by Papias.”’? The symbols above proposed are intended to do away with such question-begging, ambiguous, and misleading terms. Q will here be used only of ‘‘double-tradition”’ material in strict accord with its usual definition: ‘‘coincident material of Mt and Lk not found in Mk.”’ If Mk or P material is connected with Q in the attempt to form a true conception of the lost S it will come in under its own proper designation and for reasons stated. The nature and content of S will not be prejudged by any attempt to apply to it terms which in their original employment were meant to apply to another writing. Let it be repeated. In the present work the two main synoptic sources are designated Mk and §; the three classes of material encountered are designated P, Q, and R.

The third line of enquiry leads to a different goal by a different approach. The fourth Gospel was ascribed by second-century fathers _ to the Apostle John, whom they surnamed the ‘‘theologian”’ from the opening words of its Preamble. Only in this late product of the Hellenistic Church has the ultimate question of religious values been placed in the foreground. True, the earlier three gospels, called Synoptic from their dependence on a common outline, are also concerned to prove the authority of Jesus as a divine Redeemer; but they resort for proof to the apostolic record of the sayings and doings of the Lord. To this extent their motive is historical. Jn, contrariwise, subordinates history to doctrine. His version of the sayings and doings is a selected group of wondrous “‘signs’’ from the flood of less responsible report, for each of which he composes an appropriate doctrinal discourse, the whole work expounding the theory of a divine in- - carnation: Jesus a manifestation of the eternal redemptive Spirit of God.

The present writer has given his critical valuation and interpretation of the Petrine-Markan record of the public ministry of Jesus in three volumes antecedent to this. In Beginnings of Gospel Story (Yale Press, 1909), Is Mk a Roman Gospel? (Harvard University Studies VII, 1919), and The Gospel of Mk: its Sources, Structure and Date (Yale Press, 1926), a foundation has been laid.

As respects the teaching of Jesus also a beginning was made by the little volume entitled The Sermon on the Mount (Macmillan, 1902), now left far behind by Marriott’s work of the same title (1925).

The third line of approach is represented in a full treatment of the history of the fourth Gospel from compilation to canonization under the title The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate (Yale Press, 1910),

2 See the protest of J. A. Robinson, Study of the Gospels, 1919, p. 69, and compare Appended Notes I and II on “The Date of Papias” and ‘“‘The Meaning of the Term \dyia.”

Xx PREFACE though with too little attention to the historical valuation and interpretation of the Hellenistic form of the redemptive message.

All these publications, with others similar, have their place in preparing for a comprehensive Life of Christ; for all three forms of the tradition have contributed, each in its own way, to the development of the faith. Those in most frequent use will be referred to in the present volume under suitable abbreviations.?

But all the present writer’s contributions taken together fall short of constituting a proportioned series of preliminary studies. The series on Mk comes nearest to completeness, and has been summarized in the little volume The Story of Jesus: a Valuation of the Synoptic Record for. History and Religion (Century Co., 1926). But this, as the subtitle makes clear, tells the story of the story. It is only an approach to the story of Jesus. As respects the Lukan writings reference can be made to the article ‘‘Le témoignage de Luc sur luiméme” in Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, VIII, 3 (Mai- Juin, 1928), together with some others on Acts; but proportionate preliminary study looking to a Life of Christ would demand a volume on the Second Synoptic Source based on critical comparison of the teaching material of Mt and Lk. Its fruit might be an appreciation of the inner life of Jesus not unlike that of W. E. Bundy called The Religion of Jesus (1928). This might serve to bring into truer perspective the Lukan depiction of the great Teacher, far superior to the Matthean as it is, both historically and for sympathetic appreciation. But time and strength can hardly be expected for this task. A more indispensable preliminary is a rounding out of the work already done on the fourth Gospel, to demonstrate its contribution to the ultimate theme: The personality and work of Jesus in bridging the chasm between God and man. Were it possible to fill out these unfinished bits of construction one might feel better prepared to re-narrate the work and martyrdom of Jesus, suiting the story to an age as insistent upon historico-critical enquiry as determined upon religious revaluation.

Life is too short for preparation on such a scale. Such brief working time as still remains must be given to the two volumes most indispensable to the scheme of approach: (1) The present Studies in Mt, which aim to clear the way for such appreciation of the great religious Teacher as can only be gained by placing the witness of Mt in right relation to the richer resources and more sympathetic touch of Lk; (2) A historico-critical analysis and interpretation of the fourth Gospel, to be expected in 1930 under the title The Gospel of the Hellenists. This study of Jn will aim to show its true place in the development of the religion about Jesus.

3 See table, p. xxv.

PREFACE xi

For Christianity, as it issues from the maelstrom of oriental religions of personal immortality which contended for the adhesion of the Graeco-Roman world, is a blend of Jewish messianist apocalypse with Hellenistic doctrines of redemption by incarnation of a divine Messenger. In The Gospel of the Hellenists the present writer hopes to make up that which was lacking in The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate. Thereafter, if time and strength are still available, the larger task may be undertaken of bringing into convergence the three specified lines of approach. Studies preparatory to a Life of Christ interpreting Jesus’ brief career as Prophet and Healer, as messianic Teacher, Leader, and Martyr, as glorified Son of Man, as redemptive incarnation of the Spirit of God and eternal Lord, may well demand years of research. If after all the culminating task should be bequeathed unfinished to other hands, the preparation will not be regretted. Labor thus spent is its own richest reward.

But the occasion for Studies in Mt is made urgent by two widespread and harmful preconceptions. Both are ultimately due to illusions of scholars, but one has behind it the accumulated inertia of fifteen centuries of unquestioning acceptance, the other of scarcely one. The popular illusion of apostolic authorship, if not for the canonical first Gospel itself, at least for some Aramaic Mt of which the Greek writing might be taken as a translation, has dominated the Church’s belief for so long that even a unanimous verdict against it from all modern scholarship affects but few. Mt is still used and quoted by clergy and laity alike just as if it were a primary, or even an apostolic source, though known and (tacitly) acknowledged to be secondary. Mt continues today as in the second century to be the preferred source for all gospel quotations, even when the same passage is found in Mk or Lk in more original and authentic form. The effect as regards the particular passage may be of small moment, but the general result of this indolent acquiescence in a secondary, altered report when more reliable, unaltered witness is available, is deplorable. It commits to the public as the standard record of the life and teaching of Jesus a report which is known to be inferior, a form adapted to the special beliefs and needs of later times. This is a substitution which could not occur outside a Church which has inherited something of the disposition of the scribes rebuked by Jesus for making the Scripture of none effect that they might keep their own tradition.

The second prepossession which the present writer would do his part to dispel is more recent. It is an illusion of scholars which stands in the way of effective research for the most authentic record of the teaching of Jesus. We may call it the fallacy of the “ Matthean Logia.”” It had its origin less than a century ago in the theory of xii PREFACE

Schleiermacher which applied to Q the statement of Papias in which he referred to our own first canonical Gospel as a compilation (cWvragis) of the precepts of Jesus (7a Asya) to the exposition of which his own work (c. 140) + was dedicated. The Gospel, then as now, was in Greek and of course bore, as now, the title “‘ According to Matthew.” Papias met the objection that the Apostle’s language was “‘Hebrew”’ (that is, Aramaic) by affirming that the Gospel had originally been written in ‘‘Hebrew”’ but had been translated by some unknown Greek Christian. For, as he added, the custom had formerly been to give renderings of the precepts (not the Gospel) as they had been orally transmitted in the language of Jesus.

All scholars now admit the impossibility of Papias’ having reference to, or direct knowledge of, any other Mt than our own. Some followers of Schleiermacher’s view took refuge in the supposition that “the Elder,’’ from whom Papias derived the tradition, might have meant a Proto-Mt, equivalent to Q, and been misunderstood by Papias. The answer that Papias does not profess to derive his statement regarding Mt from the Elder, and could not well have had it on this authority, had small effect. The notion still prevails that the second century preserved somehow, somewhere, the remembrance of a Proto-Mt having certain characteristics other than mere language to distinguish it from our own. This illusion, like Jerome’s theory of similar origin in the fourth century of the “‘authentic Hebrew,” began as a bit of scholastic theorizing, but has not yet released its hold. On the contrary, persisted in by many critics, it already percolates downward till numbers of intelligent readers begin to talk of Q as a recovered document and to apply to it the names ‘‘The Logia,”’ ‘‘The Matthean Logia,’”’ and even ‘‘The Logia spoken of by Papias.”’

Q is not an illusion but a real discovery, and vitally important. But Q is not S. Q does represent a factor of common material by which Mt and Lk have independently supplemented the deficiencies of Mk on the side of teaching. It would be of much greater value to gospel critics and students of the Life of Christ if freed from the preconceptions of scholars eager to find ancient testimony to support their views. Unfortunately the temptation has proved in many cases too great. Papias was put upon the rack and a meaning he would not admit has been forced from his words. In reality nothing whatever is known of the authorship, character, or contents of S beyond what critics may derive, directly or indirectly, from Q. Reconstruction has now come to a temporary halt. Its results thus far are rightly characterized as ‘“‘a heap of interesting ruins.’”” What might have been known of § if the protests of Hilgenfeld, Zahn, Wernle, Loisy, and

4See Appended Note I, ‘‘The Date of Papias.”’

PREFACE xiii others against the perversion of Papias had not fallen on deaf ears only the future can tell. When gospel criticism is no longer dominated by the ghost of Schleiermacher’s dead theory it may be able to resume its progress toward the better understanding of the teaching of Jesus.

The present volume has therefore a two-fold purpose. It appeals to intelligent students of the Gospels, who if aware of the unanimous verdict of scholarship for the priority of Mk and § have not adjusted their practice to it. The verdict may justly be called unanimous, for even Zahn, greatest of the few surviving champions of the ancient doctrine of the priority of Mt, holds to it only in the roundabout form proposed by Grotius: a lost Hebrew Mt the common source of our Synoptic Gospels, the canonical Mt standing to this X in the relation of a translation whose language has been assimilated to Mk. This lost Mt naturally has all the qualities which pertained to the Princetonian lost inerrant Bible. It may not help the public, but it saves the face of mistaken apologists.

A forced and belated admission is perhaps all that should be expected when cherished illusions are dispelled. Yet the writer pleads for more. Tacit and reluctant assent has little beyond a negative value. It leaves new truth still an alien substance, an irritating foreign body, encysted only because it could not be extruded. New light can break forth with difficulty from the Scriptures to minds thus disposed. The present volume is addressed to readers of greater faith. To them it offers opportunity for more careful study of that process of recasting which the gospel record has undergone, with the aim of distinguishing the primary testimony from later adaptation. Not that either should be disparaged, but each lend its own aid to reverent research. For appreciation of Mk and S as prior witnesses to the public career and teaching of Jesus should not make valueless the added witness of later adaptations which adjusted the story to the needs and beliefs of a post-apostolic age, an age deserving of our study, rewarding to investigation by every resource at our command.

A further purpose concerns the scholar’s quest for sources. Again a double objective is in view. Study of method, means, and purpose of the redactor has a certain value for its reflection of his own age and environment, but its chief value is for the removal of obstacles to further research. Studies in Mt should tend to renew discouraged effort in the quest of Q. The P element in Mt as in Lk must be sifted for material of various value. In addition to editorial material (R), recognizable both from function and from well ascertained peculiarities of style and language, there are almost certainly considerable blocks of S which Lk failed to incorporate. Besides this we must allow for elements taken up from current oral tradition (O), and for a cerxiv PREFACE tain element which is responsible for much of the debate about Mt since Jerome’s time, and which might be derived either from oral or from written sources. It is an element very small in compass but highly distinctive in character. We shall give to it provisionally the designation N in the belief that its derivation, whether in oral or written form, is from that body of Nazarene Christians represented in the period of Apollinaris of Laodicea, Jerome, and Epiphanius by an Aramaic-speaking church in Beroea-Aleppo. Fragments transcribed by Jerome of a later Gospel of the Nazarenes are still extant, together with other readings in certain Mss. by scribes influenced by Jerome’s theory under the marginal note ‘‘the Jewish” (76 ‘Tovdacov).6 Our working hypothesis will be that just as these Mss. show contamination from the Aramaic source in the period after Jerome, so in the period before the final redaction of Mt a precanonical form of Aramaic gospel circulating in the same region had affected it by similar contamination. The theory must be tested in our introductory discussions. The designation N calls for explanation at this point.

The question of sources we confess to be our deepest interest in these Studies in Mt. For real advance toward the authentic teaching of Jesus it would be desirable, if time and strength allowed, to prepare such a volume on the basis of critical comparison of Mt and Lk as above proposed, this to be followed by a second volume applying to the resultant S the most approved methods of historical interpretation. The whole might then be summed up in a survey of the teaching of Jesus on the plan of our “biblical theologies.”

A more practicable course is suggested by the structure of Mt itself, a course which limits attention for the present to this Gospel only. A half-century ago it was recognized that its compiler has followed the plan of aggregating his teaching material from all sources into five great discourses corresponding to the oration codes of the Pentateuch, each introduced, like the Mosaic codes, by a narrative section, each closing with a transition formula as the reader passes from discourse to narrative. To these five bodies of discourse Sir John Hawkins ® would apply the Hebrew term pereg, meaning ‘‘chapter”’ or “‘section.” The lay reader will find it easier to think of them as “‘Sermons” in view of the first of the series, a discourse on the Righteousness of Sons, to which custom has applied the title “‘Sermon on the Mount.” Prefixed to the first narrative section we find two loosely connected chapters relating the birth and infancy of Jesus from sources elsewhere unknown. This section, Mt 1-2, may most conveniently be designated the Preamble. Correspondingly after the last of the five discourses the transition formula leads over to three chapters (26-28)

5 See Appended Note VI, ‘‘Jewish-Christian Gospels in Relation to Mt.”

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PREFACE XV of closing narrative relating the passion and resurrection. This envozt we may call the Epilogue.

The five-fold division of Mt is no recent discovery, as we shall see. At first, after its recognition by critics, there was a disposition to regard it as a survival from some earlier composition. The five discourses were regarded by the veteran Godet as representing the Proto-Mt supposed to have been attested by Papias. In his Introduction to the New Testament (Vol. II, ‘‘Gospel Collection and St. Matthew,” Engl. transl. 1899, p. 182) Godet describes them and their method of composition.

They have, he says, a historical basis, forming the beginning of the discourse and connected with a well defined situation, a situation signalized in the same way in Mk and Lk; then the addition to this primitive nucleus of other materials, heterogeneous as regards the situation, but homogeneous as regards the matter.

Godet further points out the “nearly identical formula of transition” whereby after each of the five at 7:28, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1, and 26:1 Mt resumes the thread of his story. He further quotes with deserved approval the five titles previously proposed by Réville: (1) Ilept tHs duxauoovvys, or Concerning Righteousness; (2) Tlepi tis dmootoAns, or Concerning the Apostolate; (8) Tepi r7s BacwAeas, or Concerning the Kingdom; (4) Tept rijs éxxAnoias, or Concerning the Church; (5) Ilept ris cvvreAcias Tod ai®vos, or Concerning the Consummation of the World.

Godet’s idea of “the method of composition’’ of the discourses really fits only the first, the so-called Sermon on the Mount, which contains no Markan material, but is made up as described from several SQ discourses. It has since been abundantly proved that the other four rest on a Markan nucleus. In the words of Streeter,’ ‘an analysis of every one of the Great Discourses yields evidence that it is an agglomeration put together by the editor of the Gospel.”

But the insight thus slowly gained into the structure of Mt, disappointing as it may be to those who hoped to obtain from it ‘the Logia spoken of by Papias,” is nevertheless a discovery of great value, a discovery which may even find corroboration from antiquity. A Greek fragment first published in 1917 is fully described by Dr. Rendel Harris in Part II of his Testimonies (1920, pp. 90-94, 109- 136), and applied in support of his theory that the Logia of Papias was a collection of messianic prophecies for the use of Christian apologists. The fragment consists of six iambic verses apparently designed as a prologue to Mt after the plan of the so-called Monarchian Prologues, or the iambic verses quoted by Irenaeus from “‘a certain elder”’ (Melito?) who had thus defended ‘‘both testaments” against the

Xvi PREFACE assaults of Marcion and Gnostic heretics. It describes ‘‘Matthew” as writing against the Jews, from whose “deicide” strife all the heresies are derived.®

To moderns, unacquainted with second-century polemics against the Jewish sects as authors of all heresy, it may seem strange to refer to Mt as written to ‘‘curb the rash error of the Jews.”’ To Zahn, a scholar well qualified to define the outstanding characteristics of the Gospel, its ‘‘sharp attack upon Judaism as governed and misled by Sadducaic high priests and Pharisaic rabbis”’ is so prominent a feature of Mt as to lead him to the following italicized definition of the work: “‘an historical apology of the Nazarene and His Church over against Judaism.”’® 'There seems to be, therefore, no obstacle to regarding the verses as coming from the age of the apologists, particularly those who defended both Old and New Testament scripture against the assaults of Marcion. But whatever the authorship or date of the argumentum its immediate interest for us lies in its description of the ‘‘bridle’”’ placed by ‘‘Matthew” on Jewish-born heresy as a work in ‘“‘five discourses”’ (zévre Adyos).

With or without corroboration from ancient sources the discovery of the ‘‘five discourses”’ or ‘‘Books”’ of Mt marks an epoch in the critical understanding and valuation of the work. It should be made correspondingly prominent in attempts such as the present Studies to give the Gospel its historical position and value. Several important commentaries have appeared since that of Allen in the ICC series, of which we need mention here only those of Plummer (1910) and MeNeile (1915). All of these take proper account of the structural feature of Mt which we have described. Needless to say, critical analyses and introductions use it as fundamental. But something more appears to be needed to convey to the public a realization that Mt is a compilation of gospel teaching in five ‘‘books”’ from material furnished mainly by Mk and §.

8 The verses in question are given in a revised text by R. Harris in Testimonies, Part II (1920), p. 110 as follows:

For transmission of text and critical discussion the reader is referred to Dr. Harris. The present writer adheres to the view expressed in his article, ‘The Five Books of Matthew against the Jews” in The Expositor for Jan., 1918 (VIII, 85). On Melito and his Key to the Scriptures, see Euseb. H. EH. IV, 26. The epithet ‘“‘deicide”’ (Gebxrovos) occurs in its earliest known use in a fragment of Melito.

PREFACE XVii

The arrangement of our Studies in Mt aims to meet this lack. To show the real structure of the work it will be divided into its seven parts: Preamble (chh. 1-2); Book I, subdivided into a Narrative A, introducing a Discourse B (chh. 3-4 and 5-7); Book II, similarly subdivided (A, chh. 8-9, B, ch. 10); Book III (A, chh. 11-12, B, ch. 13); Book IV (A, chh. 14-17, B, ch. 18); Book V (A, chh. 19-22, B, chh. 23-25); Epilogue (chh. 26-28).

With this subdivision, designed to reflect the evangelist’s structural plan, it will be convenient to employ a method of study which lays principal stress upon ‘‘introduction”’ as the most fruitful of modern lines of approach, but allows some room for others also. The line of exegesis will be represented by a new translation supplemented by marginal symbols and by spacing to differentiate sources from redaction. ‘Biblical’? theology will be represented by discussions of the teaching of Jesus on the five themes presented by the evangelist in his agglutinated discourses. To these will be brought the light of the evangelist’s tendencies as previously ascertained, as an aid to understanding the actual teaching of Jesus.

For the details of this plan we refer the reader to our Table of Contents as a desirable help in judging to what extent our aim has been achieved, the aim of winning from Studies in Mt a closer approximation toward a truly historical and adequate Life of Christ.

‘“‘Destructive criticism”’ is the unflattering term which men often apply to the effort to break away incrustations of traditional belief from the heroic figure of Jesus. But if the process be attended with some measure of historical knowledge and some sympathetic appreciation for the successive developments of religious faith it cannot fail to open some new vistas through the overgrowth of the centuries past. New light on that central figure is the tribute we desire to pay on this nineteen-hundredth return of “‘the acceptable year of the Lord.”