Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/825

Rh INTERNAL EVIDENCE] mainly on the former. These two considerations may ex- plain the deviation of Luke from Matthew in the denuncia- tion of the Pharisees. That the parables should diverge is natural. Their length and number would prevent them from being remem- bered, or passed from mouth to mouth, with the same ﬁdelity with which the shorter words of the Lord would be preserved ; and as they were probably often repeated by Jesus in varied shapes, no one particular shape of any parable would seem to claim a place in the written docu- ment of the words of the Lord, as being of the same import- ance as the “Voe to Jerusalem,” or the other strains of poetic prophecy. The parable of the sower, coming ﬁrst in order, and being typical of the rest of the parables, and having appended to it an explanation of the motive of the parabolic teaching, would naturally attract attention fron1 the earliest times, and consequently it found a place in the Triple Tradition; but this privilege was accorded to no other parable. There is therefore no ground whatever for infer- ring from the discrepancy of the language of a parable in _Iatthew and Luke (e.g., the parable of the lost sheep) that it was not actually uttered by Jesus. The exact similarity of thought and sequence of incident in that parable, as re- corded by Matthew and Luke, proves to demonstration that the two records are derived from one source. The following are our conclusions therefore aboutthe addi- tions to the Triple Tradition made jointly by Matthew and Luke. Their omission by Mark furnishes no argument for their rejection, inasmuch as Mark also omits the Lord’s Prayer, and obviously aims at narrating the acts rather than the sayings of the Lord. Of the additions, some appear to be based upon common tradition, or on documents modi- ﬁed by tradition,—-principally those short trenchant sayings (including the Lord’s Prayer) which are of a universal and private application. (3.) Others appear to be based upon a common document; and in these documentary additions (as perhaps to some extent in the rest) Luke seems to have modiﬁed the original tradition, in words and phrases, with a view to purity of style and intelligibility, or to re- move difﬁculties. In chronological order and arrange- ment Matthew and Luke pursue divergent paths; Matthew’s object being to group and mass the teaching of the Lord, while Luke aims at supplying motive, occasion, place, and time for each utterance. It is scarcely possible to doubt that the arrangement of neither is to be implicitly adopted. There is much reason to doubt whether what is called the Sermon on the Mount was actually delivered at one time in the shape in which Matthew presents it; anditis equally questionable whether the lamentation over Jerusalem was delivered in a village of Galilee, and whether the denuncia- tion of the Scribes and Pharisees (as murderers, on whom should be avenged all the innocent blood shed from the beginning of the world) was uttered at the table of a Pharisee. As regards the parables, we have to de- pend——in our conjecture as to the degree to which the thoughts of Jesus have been preserved—mainly upon the presence in them of the same spiritual power and insight which are perceptible in His other recognized genuine say- ings. But the dissimilarity of the language of the parables in Matthew and Luke (where the thought is the same) gives no ground for denying that parables on the same subjects, and to the same effect, were actually delivered by Him. (7.) Since the hypothesis that Luke borrowed from Matthew is untenable, and since therefore we must suppose that Matthew and Luke borrowed these additions independently from some early document, we may infer that, before the times of Matthew and Luke, a document containing words of the Lord had existed long enough, and had acquired authority enough, to induce two editors or writers of Gospels, apparently representing different schools of thought GOSPELS 801 and writing for different churches, to borrow from it inde- pendently. This last conclusion is of the greatest importance; for though the document may be, and almost certainly was, later than the Triple Tradition, yet it would have the advan- tage of preserving the original utterances of the Lord com- paratively unimpaired by traditional transmutations. When to this consideration is added the authoritative nature of the words of the Lord in this document, their direct refer- ence to events, and the extreme improbability that any dis- ciple would have, or could have, invented them,—for which of the apostles or subordinate disciples could have invented the discourse on “the lilies of the ﬁeld,” or the lamentation over Jerusalem, or the speech which likens John to “ a reed shaken by the wind,” and pronounces him the greatest of the prophets, yet less than the least in the kingdom of God'!—— we are led to infer that in all probability we have in these additions of Matthew and Luke a very close approximation to some of the noblest and most impressive utterances of Jesus Himself. With the exception of the healing of the son of the centurion, and the narrative of the temptation, the additions common to Matthew and Luke introduce no new supernatural element. T/ce Aclditiovzs and I’ec2tlia)'ities of .il1a-rIc.——It might be expected that when we come to the additions peculiar to each of the three synoptists we should ﬁnd some increase to the accounts of supernatural events. N ow it seems to be a striking proof of the antiquity of the Second Gospel that we ﬁnd in it no additions of this kind. Not that Mark does not lay stress on what appears to be super- natural; on the contrary, he records acts of instantaneous healing with greater minuteness of detail than any other evangelist (vii. 31-37; viii. 22-26; ix. 14-27); but we ﬁnd in Mark no mention of our Lord’s birth or child- hood, and only the barest prediction of His resurrection. As an explanation of the deﬁciency of information on the resurrection, it has been frequently suggested that the latter part of the Gospel may have been lost ; and, less frequently (Weiss, Jlarcusevangclium, p. 511), that the Gospel was deliberately closed with the prediction of the resurrection by the mouth of an angel, because “ the mani- festations of the risen Saviour belong (according to the earliest notions) no longer to the earthly sphere of the action of Jesus, and therefore do not fall within the province of the Gospel.” Few Greek scholars, however, will be induced to believe that the author of the Second Gospel deliberately chose to end a book on the good news of Christ with the words égbo,8of'v-ro -ydp. From a literary point of view the -ydp, and from -a moral point of view the ill—omened égbo/Roi-v-ro, make it almost incredible that these words represent a deliberate termination assigned by an author to a composition of his own. Others have suggested that the last page of the MS. may have been accidentally de. stroyed. But this suggestion seems to overlook the con- sideration that the MS. was in all probability written not for a private library but for use in the church, and that it- would immediately be multiplied by copies. Again, we know, from reference to Mat. xxviii. 8 and Lu. xxiv. 9, that the common tradition ceases with the return of the women from the Lord’s tomb. But it is precisely at this point that the genuine Mark (xvi. 8) also terminates. Now, that a page should have been torn out containing just that part of Mark which followed after the close of the common tradition would be a most remarkable and unlikely coincidence. It seems far more probable that Mark ends his Gospel here because the common tradition ended here, and because he scrupled to add anything to the notes and traditions which he knew to rest upon a higher authority than his own. If this be the true explanation, it stamps with the seal of a higher authority such traditions X. — IOI Additions‘ peculiar to Mark.