dishevelled hair being an Oriental sign of grief and abasement, cf, 28 1220, Ts 613, Dn 103, 1 Mac 347; that this is what is meant is seen in v.17f, where Jesus bids them give no external sign of their fasting.
* No one would seriously attempt to put these commands of Jesus into practice as precepts to be literally obeyed, so that all charity should be unorganized, and all prayers be absolutely private. Here, again, as in ch. 5, Jesus is dealing with prin- ciples only, and His illustrations are to be considered as illuminating the principles rather than as fixing statutes for literal observance.
t+ So Calvin, Strauss, Neander, Schleiermacher, Bleek, de Wette, Olshausen, Ewald, Ebrard, Meyer, Hanne, Godet, Kamp- hausen, Page, Feine, Sieffert, Bruce, Chase, Kiibel, Weizsiicker, Wendt, H. Holtzmann, Bartlet, Heinrici, B. Weiss, Baljon, Nestle, Bacon. The Matthzean position of the Prayer is regarded as historical by Tholuck, Keil, Morison, Broadus, Achelis, Stein- meyer, H. Weiss, Noésgen, Plummer, Grawert, it being the opinion of most of them that the Lukan position is also his- torical, and therefore that the Prayer was given on two separate occasions by Jesus. Tholuck is undecided whether to prefer Matthew’s position for the Prayer, or to hold that it was repeated.
example of John the Baptist’s disciples which led Jesus’ disciples to ask Him for a prayer; but this influence of John’s upon Jesus’ disciples is more likely to have been exercised before John’s death, which came during Jesus’ work in Galilee (Mk 6°). If, then, the Lord’s Prayer was given earlier than the Sermon, it would not have been given again as new teaching in that discourse ; and if later, then it can stand in the Sermon only as a result of sub- sequent compilation. Whatseems to have happened is, that the original occasion of the giving of the Prayer was remembered (Lk 11), but the exact time at which it was given was forgotten; con- sequently each Evangelist, or his source, intro- duced the Prayer into his narrative where it was deemed suitable. (c) The Prayer, where it stands in the Sermon, clearly interrupts the movement of the discourse, and destroys the unity of the section into which it has been inserted. This is true not only of the Prayer, vv.*!8, but also of the two verses preceding, vv.” 8, and of the two verses following, vv.*%. The whole passage, vv.7, does not pertain directly to the subject which Jesus is presenting in vv.1® 1618 namely, the sin of ostenta- tion and hypocrisy in acts of religious worship ; and it mars the symmetry of Jesus’ three illustra- tions about almsgiving, vv.2-4; prayer, vv.°-®; and fasting, vv.1%18, Nevertheless, it is quite intel- ligible how these verses 7 were brought into this connexion by the compiling process. The Sermon was one of Jesus’ most important discourses, and during the Apostolic age it was everywhere in use as a practical digest of His teaching. As the Sermon already contained some instruction about prayer, and the teaching on the same subject in vv.“ was separated from its historical position, it came easily into association with vv.*°, where— although it was an extraneous element—it added to the completeness of the prayer instruction.
(2) It is in the highest degree improbable that the Lord’s Prayer was given on two separate occasions—once in the Sermon in the form which Matthew reports, and again under other circum- stances and in a different form as reported by Luke.* This would have been unnecessary ; but still more, each of the two Gospels supposes that it reports the one and only giving of the Prayer. On the theory of repetition, why did Jesus present the Prayer in two forms so very different from each other? Having once given it in the fuller, smoother form of Mt 6°°, why should He sub- sequently repeat it in the shorter, cruder form of Lk 1174? The reason for the postulation of two deliveries of the Lord’s Prayer is the unwilling- ness of certain scholars to admit that Jesus’ words could be so variantly transmitted (see the two Greek forms of the Prayer quoted in parallel columns on p. 5). Certainly it is not to be thought that Luke, with the Matthzan form of the Prayer before him, deliberately cut it down and changed it to the form contained in his Gospel; or that Matthew, with the Lukan form of the Prayer before him, deliberately enlarged and altered it into the form which the First Gospel presents. But the two forms may well be the respective results of two independent lines and processes of trans- mission. The Prayer as given by Jesus in Aramaic was briefly worded, as we may assume from the nature of the language and the Jewish custom, as well as from the original Hebrew ‘Ten Words’ and the Beatitudes. It is therefore not unlikely that the form of the Prayer given by Matthew is somewhat longer than the historical Aramaic form, for the purpose of producing a more perfect Greek
*Yet this is maintained by Achelis, Bergpredigt, p. 297; Chase, Lord’s Prayer in the Early Church (1891), p. 11, and by some others. Against this view, see Page, Expositor, 3rd ser, vol. vii. p. 433 ff.
SERMON ON THE MOUNT
translation. But in the main the differences which appear in the accounts of Matthew and Luke are due to the influences of independent translaticn from the Aramaic, and of handing down in prac- tical Church use through fifty years of time. Neither account can be supposed to furnish a literal equivalent of the Prayer precisely as worded by Christ for His disciples.* Consequently it becomes a matter of importance to discover which of the two Gospel reports contains the more exact reproduction of the historical Prayer. The Church, with striking unanimity, from the 1st cent. to the present, has testified to the greater fidelity, dig- nity, and usableness of the recension in Mt 6°; and this choice, as respects both quantity and quality, has been confirmed by the great majority of scholars.*}