6. Editorial Notes. — The editorial element in all the Gospels is very great, for ancient authors took immense pains to reduce the crude chronicles which they used into literary form. In Hero- dotus, Thucydides, Li\y, and Tacitus the charm of style is all their own, and it mitst have been gained by unsparing labour. Nor did inspired authors deem it unnecessary to take pains. Nay, the Divine treasure which they held in earthen vessels demanded and received all the skill which they possessed. Both St. Luke and the redactor of St. Matthew are artists of a high order.
Editorial changes, however, though they often improve upon the original, do so at some sacrifice. The substitution of a more elegant word alters the precise meaning of the original. The critic's en- deavour must always be to recover the primitive wording. And in the triple tradition he can gener- ally feel sure of his ground; in the double tradi- tion there is more room for subjective preferences ; while in the single tradition he has little else to guide him. Just where the records are most likely to be obscured, the means of verifying them disappear. We cannot attain to greater certainty than God has given.
St. Luke's weditorial contributions are manifold and important. He had somces of information which are closed to us. 'Even his own opinion is of high value. But, nevertheless, he worked under limitations, and an exact scrutiny throws some doubt upon many of his assertions.
Let us first consider the general arrangement of his Gospel, which, as we have said, depends almost entirely on St. Mark. The first thing which strikes us is the extraordinary fact, that whereas St. Mark describes our Lord's last journey to Jerusalem in 52 verses, which St. Matthew ex- pands to 64, St. Luke devotes to it no fewer than 408 : more than one-third part of his whole Gospel. How are we to understand this amazing dispro- portion ? First, let us look at the ' Travel Narra- tive ' in itself. It contains a very few and slight Markan 'scraps': so few, that we are entitled to call the whole of it non-Markan. There is a good deal of matter which has been taken from the second Source ; this, of course, is arranged by St. Matthew in an entirely different way. But much of the material is peculiar to St. Luke. For ex- ample, sixteen out of the nineteen sections of the third Source are embedded here.
Harmonists say that St. Luke is giving us a Peraean ministry, in which our Lord repeated much of what He had taught in Galilee. But who were these Perjeans, that the wealth of the third Source should have been reserved for them ? St. Luke gives us no help in answering that necessary question. Not a single town or village is named
iitil we reach the Markan Jericho. If there was
'door open to our Lord at all in Penea. it would 'seem to have been among those Galilsean pilgrims who passed through Pei-aea on their way to keep Feast. But there are other difficulties. We distinctly taught that our Lord gradually
ithdrew from public teaching, first speaking only
parables, and finally confining Himself to the
<ing of the Twelve. But here within a fort-
of His death (though harmonists try to
'f
90 LUKE, GOSPEL ACCORDING- TO
LUKE, GOSPEL ACCORDING TO
lengthen the journey, and, indeed, change it into several journeys, with visits to Jerusalem and retirements into Galilee of which St. Luke says nothing) some of the simplest and plainest of His teaching is set forth. Again, why does St. Matthew put so many of these sayings into ,the Sermon on the Mount or the Charge to the Twelve ? The theory of repetition is entirely unsatisfactory (N'T Problems, 30-;]9).
We have little doubt that a different explana- tion must be found. If St. Luke's sole guide to chronology was St. Mark, what was he to do with non-Markan matter ? The difficulty confronted him continually. New materials reached him, while he taught at Philippi, by every ship which arrived. Seldom did the new fragments contain any clue to their date or occasion. If they were not worked into his oral teaching they would soon be forgotten. Some niche must be found for them. And he began, it would seem, by placing them into this last journey. Slowly they accumulated until they reached their present proportions. The famous ' Travel Narrative ' is therefore really a collection of imdated material. The extraordinary vagueness which characterizes this Division favours that view. It is discourse matter, but quite inde- terminate. Some of the most striking parables have no further preface than ' He said,' and there are no indications of locality except that Pie was still on the journey. St. Luke's idea was that our Lord brought forth the best of His treasures as the time of His departure drew nigh : it is a noble conception, but not in agreement with what we learn from the other Gospels. The matter (we believe) is scarcely arranged at all, and always wrongly.
If this be so, it is no wonder that we attach low historical value to those editorial prefaces with which St. Luke introduces so many sections in this ' Travel Narrative,' and, indeed, outside it also. Such prefaces appear usually to be inferences from the contents of the passage or transferences from other occasions. Thus the parable of the Marriage Feast according to St. Matthew (22i-'^) was .spoken in the courts of the Temple. But the parable of the Great Dinner, which we identify with it, was, according to St. Luke (141^24)^ part of a long discourse at a Pharisee's dinner table : the machinery of the dinner table is made much of by St. Luke in binding the conflation together. St. Luke stands alone in telling us that our Lord on three occasions (7-^^ 11^'^ 14i) accepted hospitality from Pharisees. There is reason to think that the last two of these occasions are due to transference or assimilation.