that the whole group of incidents contained in Mark vi. 45 to viii. 26 is omitted in Luke. Then at ix. 51 begins another longer digression, extending from that point to xviii. 14, consisting mainly of didactic matter, and containing the larger number of Luke’s peculiar con- tributions to the evangelic tradition. Thereafter our author joins the company of Mark once more, and keeps beside him to the end of the Passion history.?
3. This lengthy insertion destroys the sense of progress in the story. The stream widens out into a lake, within which any move- ment perceptible is rather circular than rectilinear. It is a dog- matic section, and any indications of time and place it contains are of little value for determining sequence or pointing out the suc- cessive stages of the journey towards Jerusalem mentioned in ix. 51. It may be affirmed, indeed, that throughout this Gospel the interest in historic sequence or in the causal connection of events is weak. Sometimes, as in the incident of Christ’s appearance in the syna- gogue of Nazareth, the author, consciously and apparently with deliberate intention, departs from the chronological order. What- ever, therefore, he meant by καθεξῆς in his preface, he cannot have intended to say that he had made it a leading aim to arrange his material as far as possible in. the true order of events. Still less can it have been his purpose so to set forth his story that it should - appear a historic drama in which all events prepare for and steadily lead up to tne final catastrophe. When at ix. 22 we find Jesus announcing for the first «πε that “the Son of Man must suffer many things,” it takes us by surprise. No reason has appeared in the previous narrative why it should come to that. It has indeed been made clear by sundry indications—at chapter v. 21; v. 30, 33; vi. 7-11; vii. 34, 50—that there was not a good understanding be- tween Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees; but from Luke’s narrative by itself we could not have gathered that matters were so serious. Two important omissions and one transposition are largely responsible for this. Luke leaves out the collision between Jesus and the Pharisees in reference to the washing of hands (Mark vii. 1-23. Matt. xv. 1-20), and the demand for a sign (Mark viii. 11. Matt. xvi. 1); and he throws the blasphemous insinuation of a league with Beelzebub into chapter xi., beyond the point at which he introduces the first announcement of the Passion. Therefore, the
1 In the main, that is to say; for Luke’s Passion history contains a number of peculiar elements. 2 Chap. iv. 16-30; vide v, 23.