SBL/EGL 2014 Wisdom in Luke 7:35 E Bruce Brooks University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Transcription

1 SBL/EGL 2014 Wisdom in Luke 7:35 E Bruce Brooks University of Massachusetts at Amherst I should mention at the outset that this paper involves parallel passages in Luke and Matthew, and that it deals with them as examples of interchange between those texts, of which Luke is thought to have two stages, Luke A and Luke B, and not in terms of any outside text, such as Q. That apparently new treatment of the Luke problem will be explored in some detail tomorrow at the Alpha Christianity Seminar session. All are invited. My subject comes, in a way, from a conversation with William Baird, whose recently completed three volumes give a most helpful survey of New Testament Research from the English Deists to Hans Dieter Betz. Trying to come up with a topic for a short paper to fill a gap in the next volume of our journal, I had asked Bill, Arethere any nice compact unsolved questions in New Testament? He answered: The Synoptic Problem. I was blown away. If centuries of research have not resolved this key issue, then something is seriously wrong with the research. Perhaps we should give up on it, and start over with the texts. This paper is a specimen of that approach. Going along in the Gospel of Luke, looking for a loose thread to pull at, I come to Luke 7:35, and I read thus: But Wisdom is justified of all her children. What children? Evidently Jesus and John the Baptist, who are contrasted in the immediately preceding text, Lk 7:33-34 (see Handout #1). This goes against the prevailing view that John s only function was to announce the coming of Jesus. Luke 7:35, instead, makes them equally valid preachers of the Word. Which is interesting. What might we do next? I suggest three things: look at the parallel saying in Matthew, check out contemporary Wisdom traditions, and consider the place of John the Baptist in Luke. 1. Matthew The parallel to Lk 7:35 is Mt 11:19b? Which is primary? The latter says, But Wisdom is justified by her works. What works, in the preceding text of Matthew, are referred to by this word works? None at all (see Handout #1). In Matthew, Jesus finishes instructing his disciples, and then we have at 11:2, Now, when John heard in the prison the works of the Christ, he sent by his disciples. Those works are not themselves recounted in Matthew. In Luke 7:2-17, on the other hand, Jesus heals the Centurion s boy (7:1-10), he raises a widow s dead son (7:11-17), and then we get Lk 7:18, And the disciples of John told him of these things. In Luke, we know what things. Matthew here is less narratively coherent, and if one of these is borrowed from the other, it is likelier that the more coherent Luke is the original. For this passage, then, we have a Lk > Mt directionality.

2 E Bruce Brooks. Wisdom in Luke 7:35 (EGL March 2014) Page 2 The other reference brings up Lk 11:49, part of a long denunciation of the Pharisees (Handout #2). Luke has two lengthy Pharisee passages, which is one more than any self-respecting Gospel requires. Both of them, in Luke, feature Jesus as the dinner guest of a Pharisee. One, Lk 11:37-52, is harsh in tone. The other, Lk 14:1-24, is much more cordial. The former has a close parallel in Matthew, while the latter consists mostly of unique Lukan material. It ends with the Parable of the Feast, which does have a Matthean parallel, but whereas the Lukan version of that parable makes narrative sense, the Matthean one is complicated by a King who in his anger destroys the town in which the feast is taking place. The large probability is that this Lk 14 banquet section is original in Luke. Then the harsh Matthean Lk 11 banquet may derive from Matthew, and the directionality here is Mt > Lk. The Matthean version of Lk 11:59, namely Mt 23:34, does not mention Wisdom at all. It speaks of sending prophets to Israel, but as though Jesus himself, operating in past time, did the sending. This astonishing claim of a panhistorical Jesus is in fact seen elsewhere in Matthew, as in Mt 23:37, the Lament Over Jerusalem. This has a close parallel in Luke 13:34 (Handout #3), and again we should ask, Which of these is primary? In Matthew this lament is uttered when Jesus is in Jerusalem, which makes better rhetorical sense, whereas in Luke, Jesus is still on the road to Jerusalem. The Matthean versions s parting curse on Jerusalem, which will not see Jesus again until he comes to judge the world, in Luke is trivial: Jerusalem will not see Jesus until a couple days later,when he enters the city to the acclaim of the crowds (Lk 19:38, near-identical in Mt 21:9). Since the fit in context is better in Matthew, we should conclude that Matthew is primary, and Matthew is confirmed as the locus of the idea of the universal Jesus, what Beare called Christus Pantocrator: Christ All-Powerful, in past, present, and future. In Luke, we may now say, this panhistorical power is represented instead by Wisdom. In all this we have found that Luke s personified Wisdom has no counterpart in Matthew, not even in passages probably derived by Matthew from Luke. It is then Luke, not Matthew, that is the Wisdom Gospel. Luke envisions something between God and Man, that does God s will among men, and specifically, sends prophets to Israel. 2. Wisdom If we go backward in time and Scripture, looking for a personified Wisdom, we will find one in the Book of Proverbs, where such personification occursi repeatedly. But a closer match for the Wisdom material in Luke, and for other material in Luke, is in the Wisdom of Ben Sira (Gk Sirach). Some of these Ben Sira passages might even be considered as core inspiration for some of Luke s more extended parables or sayings. See Handout #4.

3 E Bruce Brooks. Wisdom in Luke 7:35 (EGL March 2014) Page 3 Not only is our Wisdom passage, Lk 7:35, on this list, but so is the very striking metaphor of what in Luke is the children in the marketplace, which probably many first readers of Luke find remarkably fresh and unexpected. Let me emphasize: Luke is not here quoting Ben Sira as an authority, or even alluding to it as tacit reinforcement. That is the way the Gospels treat the Law and the Prophets, and for that matter the Psalms, which are also considered to be inspired prophecy. It is not the way the Gospels treat the wisdom literature. That literature seems to function instead as familiar territory, the common air breathed by all, but available to some as inspiration for a remark, or a story, when speaking to others. The wisdom tradition of our time functions in much the same way. It does not require learned access; it is not gained by study. It is gained simply by contact with one s own group. Those who read through Ben Sira will thus be frequently be put in mind of something they remember from Luke, or for that matter from Mark, or from the Epistle of James, the other major text in the Alpha Christianity tradition whose route through the Gospel texts is from Mark to Luke. As we acquire that receptivity and accustom ourselves to the wisdom stratum of 1st century tradition, we notice at the same time how different Matthew is from the Mark/Luke line. Luke is pre-eminently the Gospel of the Poor; James contains several passages damning the rich for their treatment of the poor. And of course Ben Sira constantly stresses humility. It also condemns those who practice fraud. Thus Sira 42:26-27, He slays his neighbor who deprives him of his living; he sheds blook who denies the worker his wages. It is exactly this social concern which the Markan Jesus addresses in Mk 10:19, when he adds a commandment against fraud to the five commandments which he preserves from the Mosaic Decalogue. This rule against fraud, this insistence on economic justice, runs like a river through all the Alpha texts (the Didache, James, the parables of Luke, and even the witness of the two deaconesses whom Pliny tortured in Sinope in the year 110, to determine the beliefs and practices of the old Alpha Christian communities still surviving in that extreme eastern end of the Empire. It is not only Luke which gives voice to the substrate Wisdom tradition, it is the whole of the earliest Christianity. As a footnote to the Wisdom question, which cannot be explored here, I note that Wisdom (Sophia) is not far from the concept of Knowledge (Gnosis), which underlies the thinking of several contemporary Christianities, including the one whose text is the Gospel of Thomas. Lk 11:52 is the only Gospel passage in which that word occurs in that sense knowledge as the key to the otherwise closed door of the Kingdom.

4 E Bruce Brooks. Wisdom in Luke 7:35 (EGL March 2014) Page 4 As for the Lukan concern for the poor, Matthew is not having any of it. Matthew likes large sums of money. He likes power, he likes the Law, he likes judging, and he obviously relishes listening to the screams of the damned (this is a virtual leitmotif in Matthew; see 8:12, 13:42, 13:50, 22:13, 24:51, 25:20). Matthew and Luke are often assigned to Antioch, and to roughly the same period of time. If so, Matthew s church must have been in a more affluent part of town than Luke s. But we can slowly learn to distinguish between them, and to work free of the orthodox view, that they preach the same doctrine in the same language. They don t. 3. John the Baptist We have seen that Luke s Wisdom references find no place in Matthew. We have also seen that the comparison between Jesus and John is attenuated in Matthew. Luke, not Matthew, is the Gospel of Wisdom, and of the two, it is also Luke which has a closer awareness of John the Baptist. It will I think be widely agreed that the Jesus movement somehow came out of the John movement, and that John is somehow senior to Jesus. Mark s first account of Jesus message (Mk 1:15, the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel ) is indistinguishable from what Mark has earlier said to be John s message (Mk 1:4, a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins ). The prominence given to John s baptism of Jesus is steadily reduced in the successive Gospels, probably because of the implication that Jesus had sins to be forgiven, which was not acceptable to the later Jesus movement. But is not true of the reports of John tradition, which are not only continued from Mark, but grow more frequent. 1. Mark 2:18-20 records, and Luke 5:33-35 and Matthew 9:14-15 in their different ways preserve, the idea that John s disciples fast, and that Jesus disciples, though they do not now do so, will adopt that practice at a later time, specifically, after Jesus death. 2. The validity of John s baptism, as truly signifying divine forgiveness, is assumed by Jesus in Mk 11:30 (so also Lk 20:4 and Mt 21:25). As John 4:2 still remembers, Jesus himself did not baptize, but the later Jesus followers adopted this practice, not only as a symbol of forgiveness, but as a rite of entry into the movement. 3. Now we come to a difference. The Lord s Prayer is not mentioned in Mark (though it can be said to be anticipated by various sayings of Jesus in Mark). It occurs for the first time in Luke 11:1-4, as Jesus response to a disciple request to be taught to pray as John taught his disciples. This prayer is taken up into Matthew s composite Sermon on the Mount at Mt 6:9-13, but this time as a saying of Jesus and without mention of John.

5 E Bruce Brooks. Wisdom in Luke 7:35 (EGL March 2014) Page 5 It would thus seem to be acknowledged by the Gospels, in varying degrees, that the Jesus movement took some of its key practices and rituals from its older contemporary, the John movement. We may add that Luke seems to acknowledge this relationship more fully than does Matthew. So much for John practices. Were there also John texts, and did the Jesus movement have access to them? One possibility is Mark s account of John s death at Mk 6: This is an atypically long story, not at all in Mark s usual style, It is an apologia for John: it tells us that Herod wanted to hear John, and was only tricked into killing him by the wiles of the palace women. This strongly resembles the speeches of Paul before Felix and his wife Drusilla (Acts 24:24-25) and before Agrippa and his wife Bernice (Acts 26:2-32), where rulers are interested to hear Paul s preaching. I suspect that the death of John in Mark was the model for these passages, and it may have been itself a piece of John apologetic, drawn from the John writings of the time. But were there such writings? Luke s Birth Narrative suggests that there were. It is clearly a remake of Matthew s moremodest account, and one thing it adds is the birth of John, who is said to be Jesus cousin. These claims cause trouble with Luke s later story, and Fitzmyer for one has identified Lk 1-2 as a later addition to a Gospel which originally began at Lk 3:1. I think this is right. But my concern here is for the sources of this John story. Again, it is not in Luke s style, but in a different style which is probably best called Septuagintal: an imitation of the sonorous language of the Scriptures as they were known, in Greek, to all the NT writers. Mary s hymn anticipating Jesus, the Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55), is well known. I turn instead to the angel s hymn anticipating John, Lk 1:14-17, which has received somewhat less attention (Handout #6). Does this hymn envision a forerunner to another, such as Jesus? It does not. It anticipates a role for John as himself the Messiah, the forerunner not of Jesus but of God, returning to his people Israel. In this scenario, John s role is to prepare Israel for that coming, and this he does, even in the Jesus texts, by preaching a Gospel of repentance and forgiveness. It is to this repentant Israel that God might be expected to return. I would like to end my examples by suggesting, not for the first time, that this is a piece of incorporated John text, and that it contains, undiluted, the hope that John s followers had for him, a hope which in this passage they attributed to the time of his birth. His birth to an aged mother, Elisabeth, of course mimics the birth of Isaac to the aged Abraham and Sarah, Abraham being widely regarded as the first recipient of the promise of God to his people Israel. John, according to this literary parallel, would then have been the one in whom that promise would finally be realized.

6 E Bruce Brooks. Wisdom in Luke 7:35 (EGL March 2014) Page 6 Here, I suggest, are vestiges and remnants of Messiah-like claims made for John, claims later taken over for itself by the Jesus movement, but not entirely forgotten or suppressed by that movement. A tradition still current. Conclusion I have pulled on the loose thread of Luke 7:35, and have come up with these odds and ends. Some of them may perhaps serve as places for others to pull at in their turn. Few of them are new. What is perhaps new is putting them together. In that form, I think they indicate a moral a moral about how we should read Luke or any other text of the time. The moral is roughly this: We cannot understandingly read one passage in Luke, such as 7:35, without considering other passages in Luke, and indeed, all of Luke. We cannot successfully read Luke without keeping in mind Luke s neighbor Matthew, and of course also their joint precursor, Mark. And we cannot read these texts without being aware of the cultural matrix in which they took shape, the historical currents on which they floated. We too readily see Luke the historian as someone like us, trying to study out Christianity like an anthropologist, a visitor with a microscope. We too readily see Luke the author as someone like us, trying to compile Christianity in the reading room of the British Museum, copying passages out of one manuscript after another, as they are brought by the Museum attendants to his table. We forget that Luke was a lifelong Christian, that all he had to do to find out about Christianity was to remember it, including the intangible forces that bore on it, and also on him, every day of his life. That he wrote his book by simply putting all that down on paper does not follow. On the contrary, it can be shown that, like every other author since the sun first rose, he had his own purpose and message. Butifwewouldunderstand him, or any other ancient author, we need to know what he knew. My point in this paper is that the 1st century Jewish Wisdom tradition is one thing he knew. One part of the air he breathed. In trying to recover the ambience in which Luke lived and wrote, we need, in effect, to read everything we can get our hands on. That is a hopelessly difficult principle. It is more than any one person can accomplish in the longest of lives. That is why history, here as elsewhere, must be a collaborative exercise, where many come together periodically to share what they have, and to learn what others have found; where all grow in wisdom from the little wisdoms gained by each. I would thus like to end with a word of commendation, to those who have come together on this occasion, and to this Society, which has provided the means for them to do so, and which hopefully will continue to fill that crucial function, in the years that lie before us. I give them my salute.