Undeception

It’s common to come across the well-founded observation that Luke’s Gospel is particularly interested in highlighting the universality of the Kingdom of God. References to the outcast of society abound, including Gentiles, women, the poor, and the sick. So when I heard someone casually mention that in one of the Gospel accounts Jesus’ given rationale for the temple cleansing was, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations,” I assumed with great confidence that it must have been Luke’s version.

I was very wrong! The quotation from Isaiah 56.7 occurs in all three of the Synoptics, and the only one in which Isaiah’s phrase “for all the nations” is included is the one that seemed to me the least likely.

Matthew 21.13: He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.”

Luke 19.46: and he said, “It is written,
‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.”

Mark 11.17: He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

It certainly would have made sense with Matthew’s replacement-theology-esque emphasis to include the phrase from Isaiah; ditto with Luke, for reasons cited above. Why is it, then, that both Matthew and Luke omitted this statement of high significance from Jesus’ words in this act of seminal importance, diverging from their (widely assumed) source in Mark?

Turns out, the universality of the gospel is not as rare in Mark as I had thought. Via Google Books, I found R.T. France commenting on 13.10, “And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations”:

Jesus’ excursions into Gentile territory (5:1-20; 7:24-8:10) and his Gentile following in 3:8 have begun to prepare us for this vision, and we have seen in 7:24-8:10 a deliberate extension of the blessings of Israel’s Messiah to the surrounding peoples. It is possible that the specific inclusion of πάντα τὰ ἔθνη in the Isaiah quotation in 11:17 is a further pointer in this direction, even if that is not the main thrust in context. Later the confession of Jesus as Son of God by a Gentile officer will be a foretaste of the universal church (15:39). But this verse (and by implication 14:9) is the most explicit indication in Mark’s gospel of the universal scope of the good news and therefore of the Christian mission, as it will be spelled out in Matthew’s final commission (28:19-20) and in the whole narrative of Luke’s second volume.[1. R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: a commentary on the Greek text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 516]

So the universality of the gospel of the Kingdom seems like an obvious recurring theme in Mark that Matthew and Luke expand upon in different ways. Mark’s interest in that idea is coincident with and even necessary for his vision of the Kingdom of God as rival to the power of Rome (as Joel discusses here et passim), for how could the kingdom over which Jesus is ruler be of smaller geographic scope than that of Rome? France goes on to argue that the eschatological gathering “from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” in 13.27 is reflective of this universal vision of God’s dominion, which also makes sense and could only be made to refer to Diaspora Jews if 1) Mark was written later than 70 or 2) the phrase or passage is a post-Diaspora interpolation.

This doesn’t answer why this key phrase was omitted in Matthew and especially Luke, where much theological hay could have been made from it. Any guesses?
_____________________

Take the test as a closed book exam. No open Bibles. This is a test of your retention of gospel stories and sayings (not a test of your ability to look things up!!).

This great 50-question test from Yeshua in Context is really something worth looking at. It ranges from fairly easy and innocuous questions:

2. Which gospel has a birth story that begins in Bethlehem, moves to Egypt, and then to Nazareth?

4. Which gospel tells the only childhood story about Yeshua we know of (post-infancy)?

19. What two figures from the Hebrew Bible appeared with Yeshua at the Transfiguration?

…to not-so-easy, potentially unsettling ones:

9. If we had only Matthew, Mark, and Luke to go on, how long would we guess Yeshua’s career was?

42. How do the gospels disagree about which day Yeshua died on?

46. T or F: The gospels say that Levi is the same person as Matthew and that Levi is one of the Twelve.

via A Gospel Proficiency Test | Yeshua in Context.

I won’t reveal exactly how much I struggled (*sigh*).

This simple test does a lot to illustrate how little we understand the texts when we refuse to take them seriously — that is, by when we assume harmony on all points and inst on coming up with clever ways of obliterating distinctions and discrepancies between the books of the Bible.

Recently I ran across an old article¹ in the journal Language and had to smile at its similarity to a recent topic in the redaction criticism of the Gospels for which I previously noted a parallel in the translations I am studying in my dissertation.

In the Gothic translation of the Bible, at i Cor. xiii 2, we find swaswe fairgunja miþsatjau translating the Greek ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάμεν (in the English version ‘so that I could remove mountains’). I wish to call attention to the word miþsatjau of the Gothic. One is struck by the inexactitude of the translation. Μεθ-ιστάμεν means ‘to move from one place to another’, or at least ‘to remove’, ‘to move away’. Μiþ-satjau should mean ‘to place with’ or ‘beside’, almost the reverse of the meaning of the Greek word.

Of course the difference is between two closely related semantic fields. Even in Old English, the word wið, which is the source modern English with, meant more commonly ‘against’ than ‘accompanying’. One at first wonders how “with” and “against” could be so closely related. It’s actually quite simple: it comes down to spatial considerations. Spatially speaking, friends who “see eye to eye” and competitors “standing nose to nose” are virtually indistinguishable. One who leans “against the wall” is very much “with the wall”. Many of us (at least in America) will talk of “fighting with” opponents rather than “fighting against” them. This is no isolated incident: it’s decidedly cross-linguistic because of the way the human brain most typically categorizes relationships in a fundamentally spatial sense. For instance, most prepositions in Indo-European seem to have started out as spatial adverbs, most of which have gotten metaphorically used to the effect that I can in a certain sense be with a friend who actually lives across the country in the sense that we figuratively “see eye to eye”. The Greek preposition/preverb μετα(-) sometimes denotes a transfer or change of location,² analagous to Latin trans- In the verb μεθιστάμεν³ here, we have at root something like ‘stand away from’ to the effect of ‘move away’, which the Gothic translator appears to have misconstrued to mean ‘stand with‘. But this is odd: while μετα can indeed mean ‘with’, it does so much more rarely in preverbs, and this is the only instance in the Gothic Bible in which miþ ‘with’ is prefixed to a verb in such a mistranslation of Greek μετα-. Here is Rice’s assessment:

As an explanation of the passage I offer the following: The translator was the victim of a momentary lapse, and, betrayed by the sound of the Greek prefix in the form μεθα- which stood in the original text, he erroneously supplied miþ- in his translation in place of the more or less accurate af- of Luke 16.4. The respective sounds represented by miþ- and μεθα- are closer than might at first seem, for the Greek e was close, the Gothic i was open, and by this time (4th century A.D.) θ was a spirant and equal to þ.

So there you have it: translator’s fatigue. It appears Wulfila should have called it a day before beginning chapter 8! _____________________________________

¹ Rice, Allan Lake. 1933. A Note on the Gothic Bible, i Cor. xiii 2. Language, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 87-88.

² As an illustration of my earlier point about the spatial roots of prepositions, one of μετα‘s most common meanings, ‘after’, resulted when ‘a change of physical space’ got metaphorically applied to time. Thus μετα typically covered both the spatial ’change to a place hence’ and the temporal ‘change to a time hence’.

³ In this verb, underlying meta-(histami) ‘I stand’ underwent a phonologically conditioned change to meth-(istami) before the aspirated consonant h of histami.

The so-called Synoptic Problem in biblical studies results from the search for an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that even in a cursory analysis essentially necessitates that there was borrowing between them. In many cases there are entire sentences that are reproduced verbatim in two or even all three of the Synoptics. Although the first to formulate the problem, Johann Jakob Griesbach, posited that Matthew and Luke were the source of Mark, the reverse order is the dominant theory today: the “priority of Mark” is the leading theory that posits Mark as the first written Gospel, which Matthew and Luke then used as a source.

Lately I’ve been interested to learn of Mark Goodacre’s special contribution to the argument for Markan priority. In essence, Dr. Goodacre has demonstrated that in parallel pericopes, while the different Gospels may differ significantly near the beginning of the passage, by the end they tend to conform to much more similar wording. After Goodacre goes on to show that the wording that corresponds more closely toward the end of each passage is more consistent with the wording of Mark throughout the rest of the passage, this amounts to a strong argument for Markan priority. This suggests that Mark was being used as the source, and the redactors of the other two Gospels, after starting off strong in their objective to make the story their own, had a tendency to undergo the effects of what Goodacre calls ”editorial fatigue”, i.e. they lapse into less creative, more verbatim borrowing from Mark.

I’ve got an idea related to all this rattling around in my head. Please stay with me.

As the earliest attested Germanic language by close to two hundred years, and a remarkably archaic language besides, the language of the Goths is extremely valuable for reconstructing Proto-Germanic. Unfortunately, virtually the only texts we have in the Gothic language are manuscripts of Wulfila’s translation of the NT, only about half of which have survived. This is doubly unfortunate because, as the translator burdened with the sacred responsibility of translating a sacred text, Wulfila was extremely slavish to the source text, aping the Greek syntax wherever it was at all intelligible in Gothic. This means that we have very little that we can be confident is authentic Gothic syntax.

What this also means is that where we observe significant variation between the Greek text and Gothic, we may then rightly suspect that we are looking at an instance of native Gothic syntax overriding that of Greek. Studying the deviation of Gothic from the Vorlage (source text) is thus potentially instructive. Here again, an unfortunate limitation is that we only have a very small corpus, so it’s hard to tell how much stock to put into each treatment of Greek.

However, my long-standing interest in the Synoptics suggested to me that for each of the more verbatim parallel passages that survive in the Gothic texts, we actually have two or three shots at seeing how Wulfila might represent a single Greek text: one for each Gospel that translates the identical parallel texts. From what I’ve seen so far, there is indeed usually a difference in the Gothic translation from Gospel to Gospel, even when the underlying Vorlage is identical.

Now back to Dr. Goodacre: I think there may be an analogue of editorial fatigue in the “Gothic Problem” I just laid out. Whereas Matthew’s and Luke’s intents to add distinctiveness to their source material dwindled as the passages drew on, I suspect that Wulfila’s apparent intent to maintain as faithful a translation as possible regardless of how wooden it sounded would have resulted in progressively more latitude in his treatment of the Greek as he grew more confident and/or “fatigued”. This progressive latitude in translation would thus work in reverse of editorial fatigue in a way, since the latter resulted in less variation whilst Wulfila’s fatigue would ostensibly work in the opposite direction. I am unaware of what the literature says about translators’ habits, but anecdotally I have certainly noticed that when I am translating Greek, Old English, or whatever, my initial intent to translate as literally as possible certainly degrades as I progress through the piece I am translating, with gradually increasing inclusion of dynamic equivalents as I progress.

What can be learned from this? Well, because ancient biblical translators were unlikely to carefully sculpt each pericope separately as a redactor would, the points of laxity/fatigue would likely come in less systematic spurts. When comparing Synoptical parallels, we could at best hypothesize that the less slavish treatment of identical Greek passages would probably be a translation further down into that translation session. From where I sit, the most it could do for someone interested in recovering native Gothic syntax is to suggest a reason why one Gospel’s translation may more closely resemble the source: it was translated closer to the beginning of a session than the same passage in another Gospel. It’s an interesting idea nonetheless, and one I’ll be keeping one eye on as I continue my dissertation research in this area.

Any thoughts?

Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned…

I need to find the best references for textual variants in the Gospels. I’m not as much interested in the critically identified “best readings” of the text themselves, but good apparati that show the variants. Right now I’m finding that Aland’s invaluable Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum has a cracking good apparatus, but I need at least one more good source to try to fill in gaps. My goal is to identify variations between the Vorlage and each of the early translations I’ll be working with, so while I don’t have time to become a textual critic, I do have to avail myself of the best available critical work in order to get an idea of what each translation’s Vorlage might have looked like so that I’ll be able to distinguish a stylistic/synctactically significant divergent rendering from a calque of an obscure MS variant.

Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels may have originated/developed based upon dialectal considerations. As I run across patterns such as Matthew’s preference for plural nouns and lexical issues such as synonym substitution that by all appearances don’t significantly influence thematic or other conscious stylistic differences, I automatically think dialect, although of course idiolect variation occurs within a single dialect. This is contingent, of course, on being able to identify the place of origin for other texts with which they may be compared, so I recognize it’s a tall order. I assume there are plenty of guesses about where certain Gospels (John, for instance) originated based upon other considerations.

I imagine that narrowing down geographical areas in which the texts (or their authors) might have originated and developed has the potential to influence our understanding of the issues related to the transmission and composition of the traditions/texts of the Gospels.

I’d like to ask anyone who reads this blog and is informed about these issues: how have they been treated in the literature? And if you aren’t personally aware, do you think you could refer me to someone who might be? I’d certainly appreciate it!

Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will doubtless seem somewhat stream-of-consciousness, so I apologize in advance for any seasickness that results from an attempt on your part to read through the meandering thoughts of this Synoptic explorer.

(Please bear in mind that although I had a good class on the Synoptics over ten years ago, I’m not really conversant in the literature. My subject is primarily linguistic and related to early translations of the Synoptics from Greek, so I’m having to approach these biblical studies questions as a rank amateur.)

It strikes me once again that explaining the parallels between the Synoptics isn’t as difficult as explaining the differences. These are so perplexing because it appears at times that whole swaths of shared material are meticulously reworded so as not to be verbatim; tenses in verbs, number in nouns, virtually interchangeable lexical items, etc. are switched seemingly to avoid being word-for-word the same. Yet these will frequently occur amid whole phrases and sentences that are virtually identical between two or more of the Gospels, above and beyond the obvious identity of the general narrative enclosing them. The question arises, why is there this fluctuation between trivial differences in wording that don’t seem to play into authorial thematic emphases and entire sentences showing verbatim agreement?

Here and there in reading words attributed to Jesus I wish I knew something of Aramaic, because I wonder if we may be seeing differences attributable to independent translations from a uniform Aramaic original passed down orally. Then when you take into account the fact that they were almost certainly sharing sources, trivial stylistic variation starts to look more like intentional creation of uniqueness, or perhaps even dialect preferences. That in turn makes me muse, has there been anything done on the dialectology underlying these Gospels based upon consistent differences notable in extra-biblical texts?

Other times I wonder if mere oral transmission could account for these close-but-not-identical, almost thought-for-thought parallels. And of course the likelihood of the interplay of all these options makes the Synoptic Problem seemingly intractable — but endlessly interesting, nonetheless!