as < )rigen and Jerome. 2s or is it conceivable, as some maintain, that St. Mark entrusted his first ; edition to St. Luke, who incorporated it into his I (insp. 1, but allowed no one else to make u.se of it. No wonder that with men who have an historical : sense such hyporlie.ses are unpalatable. But the I oral hypothesis readily admits of, nay requires, j these gradual growths in St. Mark." L'nder it ; there is no difficult}- whatever in believing that St. Luke's (oral) St. Mark was much shorter than ' St. Matthew's, and that St. Matthew's had not : received the final touches. In fact, the oral hypo- thesis solves the Synoptic Problem. The docu- mentary hypothesis fails to do so. Both are equally hyix>thetical. And those who declare the oral hypothesis to be incredible have never, as yet. fairly tackled the arguments on which it rests, or ' sufficiently taken into account the habits of the I East and of that age. This, however, is not the i place to plead for the oral hypothesis, nor has the i present writer any wish to do more than demand I for it a dispassionate consideration. In the ex- amination which follows he will not asstime its truth.
ii. Analysis of St. Luke's Gospel accori>- ixG TO THE soiRCES USED. — 1. First Soupce — St. Mark. — St. Mark's Gospel (oral or written) was not merely used by St. Luke, it forms the back- bone of his Gospel. It is hardly too^much to say that without St. Mark there would nave been neither a St. Luke nor a St. Matthew. But. as we have already intimated, there is strong reason for concluding that St. Luke used a much shorter work, not merely than our St. Mark, but than the St. Mark which lay before the redactor of St. Matthew. In short, he used an Urmarkus or an (oral) proto-Mark. By adopting this view we account at once {a) for his omissions, (b) for his variations from St. ilark's order. He omitted nothing which his St. Mark contained: he ad- hered to St. Mark's order in every section which he took directly from St. Mark. The marselloiLS simplification of the Synoptic Problem which this view oft'ers can be appreciated only by those who have seriously endeavoured to explain to them- selves and justify to others St. Luke's omissions and his order.
But St. Luke's omissions are so imponaut that we must consider them at some length. In the Synopsis St. Mark's Gospel is divided into 223 sections, of which St. Luke omits 54. A group of sections is omitted between iMk o— and" i^. A much larger grouj) — amounting to more than two out of St. Mark's 16 chapters — is omitted between Mk 6^' and S'^. The remaining omissions consist of single sections scattered over the rest of St. Mark's Gosi)el. Only from Mk 2 and 5 are no sections omitted. It is manifestly the duty of the critic to accotmt for these omissions, and attempts have been made by harmonists to do so. Thtis they have suggested (1) that St. Luke omitted what his readers would not value : being a Gentile himself, and writing for Gentiles, he naturally omitted sections which dealt with questions of Jewish interest : (2) that he objected to repetition, and left out what he regarded as dittographies ; e.g. having given the feeding of 5000. he thotight it unnecessary to narrate the feeding of 4000 ; having described the anointing of our Lord's feet, he deemed it superfluous to record the anointing of His head. These reasons, however, are quite in- adequate. St. Luke is particularly fond of allud- ing to Jewish customs, and Gentile Christians have always taken a deep interest in them. Further- more, the great majority of his omissions cannot be accounted for under either of the above heads. Thus he omits 25 out of St. Mark's 86 proper names. He does so in defiance of his instincts as an
86 LUKE, GOSPEL ACCORDING TO
LUKE, GOSPEL ACCORDING TO
historian (Wright, XT Prnhh-ms 56-90). Again, he omits the healing of the Syrophoenician's daughter (Mk T-'*-^") — the only case in which our Lord is recorded to have healed a Gentile. He oinits the onl}^ journey which our Lord is said to have taken through Gentile lands (T-'^-Si*'). He omits our Lord's teaching about the inferiority of he moral precepts of the Old Testament to those of the New (Mt 5^^- si- 33. .38. 43) . aU these topics were of overwhelming interest to Gentile readers, and we find it impossible to believe that St. Luke deliber- ately rejected them. The only satisfactory hypo- thesis is that he was not acquainted with them, as he would not be if he used a shorter recension of St. Mark and of the Logia.
(a) Now, if St. Luke used an earlier recension of St. Mark, whether oral or written, it is reasonable to suspect that in several places he has preserved for us the primitive Petrine wording. He will occasionally be nearer to St. Peter's teaching than is either St. Matthew or St. Mark. For, if the trito-Mark has made many additions to the primi- tive records, so also has he sometimes altered the tradition. In the index to the Synopsis nine passages are pointed out in which St. Luke's account is held to be the oldest, but there are probably many more. At any rate it is of the greatest advantage to the critic to feel that he is not always bound to vindicate the priority of St. Mark in details, however highly he may value it on the whole. And although subjective reasoning must always be received with caution, it ought not to be altogether discarded.