efl'ect in the selection, and arrangement, and in- terpretation of such of His sayings as lent them- selves to the impression which it was desired to produce.
The most obvious instance of this process may be found in Mt.'s treatiiietit of Mk 10112 That narrative is perfectly clear, colierent, and decisive. The Pharisees, who knew well that Christ taujrht a doctrine about the sanctity of mairiag^e which seemed to set aside the sanction of divorce by the Law (Dt 241--') came to test Him, J.c. to get from Him a direct statement which would enable them to say tliat He was attacking the Mosaic ordinance. He met their challenge with the expected answer. The permission of divorce by the Law was a concession to human weakness. From an ideal standpoint, the marriage tie was indissoluble. The man or woman * w-ho i)ut aw ay their partner committed adultery. Nothing can be clearer than this, and it is in accordance with the tradition of Christ's leaching, preserved by St. Luke (16i^) and by St. Paiil (1 Co "i"- H). But the editor of the First Gospel has introduced hojieless confusion into the narrative. He represents the J'harisees as asking for an interpretation of Dt 241--'. The Jewish theologians were divided upon the point. Some — the school of Shammai — argued that by ^3^ nny some act of iinchastity w-as intended. Cf. Glttiii, 90a : ' No one shall divorce his w ife unless there be found in her something unchaste' (^iiV 131). They thus placed the emphasis upon the word nny. But others — the school of Hillel — allowed divorce for any idle pretext, emphasizing the word "im. Accordingly, the Pharisees in Mt. ask, 'Is it lawful to put away a wife for every cause?' Christ answers, as in Mk., that from an ideal standpoint marriage is iiidissoluble.- The Phari- sees appeal to Dt 24. Now clearly Christ should be represented as reattirming and supporting wiiat He has said by declaring (as In Mk.) that the permission of Dt 24 was a concession to human weakness, and that a higher principle was to be found in the purpose of God as declared in Gn l'^^". But, instead, He is represented as saying that vopvaa, constituted an exception to the ideal principle. 'Thus He is made to reaffirm the Law of Dt 24, interpreted in the sense of the school of Shanunai, and to acknowledge the permanent obligation of a sanction which He had just criticised.
It seems clear that the editor of Mt. has confused Mk.'s con- sistent narrative by introducing into it a clause which entirely confuses the point at issue. Now, if we ask why he has done this, we remember that earlier in his Gospel (5''-') he has inserted a saying (probably from the Matthiean Logia) in which this same exception to the general rule occurs. The words are not identical. In 5-'- thev are rrapixTi; '/.iym -ropmx;, but in 19* (eO ,ur, irr'i ■jopviiu. (but BDS'^ 33 latt have TaptxTo; kcyou Topaia.i here also). The two clauses look like alternative renderings of the phrase nilj; im, which the school of Shammai declared to be the ground of divorce. That is to say, in 199 the editor has blended with Mk.'s narrative another tradition of the Lord's words, which was furnished to him by his Palestinian source ; and we have a clear case of a saying of Christ altered in process of transmission to bring it into accordance with the Mosaic Law. Of course the saying of 5^- may be as genuine and original as Mk lOH- 12. It is quite possible that Christ should have on one occasion taught as Mk. represents Him, and on another have sanctioned the necessity of divorce for ■ropiua.. But there is a good deal of probability in the supposition that, as a matter of fact. He appealed to the ideal view of marriage as a principle which should guide men, leaving it to the com- mon sense of His disciples to realize that when the sin of men makes a breach in the ideal law, such sin drags with it the necessity of divorce. In this case the clause which allows an exception will be an accretion to His words, added in the early Palestinian Church to His simple statement that no man must divorce his wife and no woman her husband, in order to har- monize it with the supposed teaching of the OT, and then transferred by Mt. into Mk.'s narrative.
Another somewhat similar case may be found in Mk 71^-23 = Mt 1510 '20. The reading and interpretation of Mk 719 are obscure. According to one reading, xix.tix.p'i'C,!-iv vocvto. to. fipuu,a.-rix. may be a connnent of the Evangelist, to the effect that Christ's teaching on this occasion 'purged all meats,' i.e. cancelled the Mosaic distinctions between clean and unclean meats. But however this may be, the narrative leaves on the mind of the reader the impression that the inevitable effect of such teaching as is here recorded would be to make null these dis- tinctions of the Mosaic Law. Now the editor of Mt. clearly wished to avoid this inference. He omits the clause y,x.i)«.piZ,u\i TccvTa. TO. jipuu-ocTcc, and at the end of the discourse turns the mind of the reader from the inevitable inference by adding the clause, ' But to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man,' as though the whole discourse had been dealing with the Phari- saic regulations about ceremonial hand-washing. Thus he carries the reader back at once to the previous question, and, so far as possible, prevents him from drawing the natural and inevitable conclusion from the discourse as recorded by Mk.