Who Made the “Omission,” Luke or Mark?

The question: Did Luke see and omit Mark 6:45-8:21 (in which the “Defilement” pericope is located), or did Mark see and omit Luke 9:51-18:14 (in which the anti-Pharisaic discourse is located)? The present article explores the possibility that the Markan pericope “What Makes a Person Impure” in Mark 7:1-23 is dependent upon the Lukan pericope “Discourse against the Pharisees” in Luke 11:37-41 (part of the longer pericope “Discourses against the Pharisees and Lawyers” [Luke 11:37-54]). This specific investigation is intended as a contribution toward the larger issue of the validity of the theory of Markan Priority as a solution to the Synoptic Problem.

Markan Priority?

Adherents to the theory of Markan Priority must argue that Luke is the secondary author who made the omission. Markan priorists argue that the pericope in question (Mark 7:1-23) is a segment of some two chapters in Mark that Luke decided to omit. Following the pericope of the “Feeding of the Five Thousand”—which all three Synoptic Gospels give in parallel order—Luke theoretically dropped nine Markan pericopae (Mark 6:45-8:21—some 70 verses) and continued with the pericope of “Peter’s Confession,” which all three Synoptic Gospels again present in parallel order. Markan priorists reject the notion that Mark saw the Lukan “Discourse against Pharisees” because this Lukan pericope is found within the central ten chapters of Luke (Luke 9:51-18:14, which comprise some 351 verses of Luke’s text) that are not found as such in Mark. Markan priorists do not find it tenable that Mark could have seen so much material and dropped it. They find it more likely that Luke dropped 70 verses from Mark than that Mark dropped 351 verses from Luke.

This article, in contrast, will attempt to sustain the claim that Mark, not Luke, is the more sophisticated secondary editor and author. This article claims that secondary authorship is not a simple principle of relative length of what is dropped or what is retained, but that Mark is acting like a normal Jewish storyteller of the first century A.D.

• ^[1] Martin McNamara, Targum and Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 68-78, on "Characteristics of Targumic Renderings"; H. L. Strack, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Philadelphia: JPS, 1963), 201-202, on the character of Midrash; Adin Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud (New York: Bantam, 1976), 223f., on Midrash (Halakhic Exegesis). ↩
• ^[2] For more on Mark's treatment of his sources, see David N. Bivin and Joshua N. Tilton, "LOY Excursus: Mark's Editorial Style." ↩
• ^[3] Avigdor Shinan, The World of Aggadah (Tel Aviv: Mod, 1990), 51. ↩
• ^[4] Louis Feldman, “Josephus’ Interpretation of Jonah,” The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies 17.1 (1992): 5. ↩
• ^[5] Ibid., 6. Feldman’s articles on Josephus, including this one on Jonah, have now been collected and published in a single volume: Louis Feldman, Studies in Josephus’ Rewritten Bible (Leiden, Boston, Koeln: Brill, 1998). ↩
• ^[6] This is not a hard and fast rule because a secondary author could have some special reason for abbreviating the source text, e.g., Matt.'s parallel texts tend to be shorter than Mark's even though Matt. is dependent on Mark. But, in the light of the tendency of first-century retellers to expand, the burden of proof lies on the interpreter who argues that a shorter text is secondary. ↩
• ^[7] See especially Martin's Syntax Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1987), as well as his earlier foundational Syntactical Evidence of Semitic Sources in Greek Documents (Cambridge, Mass.: SBL, 1974). ↩
• ^[8] Raymond A. Martin, Studies in the Life and Ministry of the Historical Jesus (New York: University Press of America, 1995), 3-5. ↩
• ^[9] Mark 7:1-23 has been chosen for analysis because of the great number of "innovations" it exhibits, that is, the number of words appearing in this chapter that cannot be found anywhere in Luke. The rationale for choosing this chapter is as follows: the chapter of Mark containing the most innovations vis-à-vis Luke will be the best place to watch Mark at work; since Mark is operating there with his maximum degree of freedom as over and against his chief source, Luke, it should be possible just there to most easily observe Mark's own personal method or style of arranging his materials. ↩
• ^[10] William Lockton, “The Origin of the Gospels,” Church Quarterly Review 94 (July 1922): 216-239. ↩
• ^[11] See references to De Solages in Morgenthaler, Statistische Synopse (Zurich: Gotthelf, 1971), 18-24, esp. 21. ↩
• ^[12] Basil C. Butler, The Originality of St. Matthew: A Critique of the Two-Document Hypothesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 66. ↩
• ^[13] Corban is a transliterated word in the Greek text of Mark. On transliterated words in the Synoptic Gospels, see Joshua N. Tilton and David N. Bivin, “LOY Excursus: Greek Transliterations of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Hebrew/Aramaic Words in the Synoptic Gospels.” ↩
• ^[14] Translation in italics amended to reflect the Greek text. Jesus is correct: human digestion can turn impure kosher food into a pure substance, since excrement is not impure. ↩
• ^[15] The issue at stake in this article is not whether Mark and Luke are discussing the same event or not. On the face of the matter, Luke and Mark describe two different events. The question we are pursuing is whether or not one author is aware of the story of the other. If either Mark or Luke knew the story of the other, then the question is whether the presence of the story in one Gospel influenced the telling of the story in the other.

  In any case, it is interesting that one author, Luke, chooses to tell a story about a friendly Pharisee who invites Jesus to breakfast as over against the other author, Mark, who chooses to tell about unfriendly Pharisees. This choice in and of itself points to an authorship historically later than Luke, since it can be taken as reflecting the opposition of the Pharisees, present in the time of Jesus, but radically stronger after his departure—as is evident from the stoning of Stephen and the activities of Paul in persecuting the church. ↩

• ^[16] See the Liddell-Scott lexicon definition of ἄριστον as “breakfast, taken at sunrise,” i.e., not just any meal. BDAG also lists "breakfast" as the primary meaning of ἄριστον. ↩
• ^[17] See Menachem Mansoor, "Sects, Minor—Hemerobaptists," in Encyclopedia Judaica (ed. Cecil Roth and Geoffrey Wigoder; Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), 14:1087; who cites t. Yad. 2:20: “The morning bathers (tovelei shacharit) said to the Pharisees: ‘We charge you with doing wrong in pronouncing the [Divine] Name without having taken a ritual bath.’” Posner suggests that these “morning bathers” may be perhaps identified with the Hemerobaptists, “but were more likely an extreme group within the general Pharisaic tradition (Ber. 22a: Rashi, ad loc.)” (Raphael Posner, "Ablutions," in Encyclopedia Judaica [1971], 2:82). It was Professor David Flusser, in his seminar on the Synoptic Gospels at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who first noticed the question of the Pharisee’s reaction to Jesus; Jesus had failed to immerse himself before breakfast when he would be pronouncing the Divine Name of God in the blessing before the meal. ↩
• ^[18] See Robert L. Lindsey, "Introduction to A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark," on the question of these explanatory passages inserted by Mark. ↩
• ^[19] On "synonymic exchange," see Lindsey, "Introduction to A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark," under the subheading "Mark's Midrashic Technique." ↩
• ^[20] All three synoptists have the word "hypocrisy" once each, but never in parallel contexts. ↩
• ^[21] See Eliezer Ben Yehuda, מלון הלשון העברית [English title: A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1910–1959; 17 vols.) under קַבָּלָת and מָסֹרֶת. ↩
• ^[22] Such an identification by Jesus himself could fit the fact that the elders were furious enough to agree with the high priest to hand him over to the Romans, but note that the reason for their anger in Luke 22:66 is Jesus' identification of himself as the "Son of Man," which in Jewish tradition is a significantly more divine title than “Messiah." ↩
• ^[23] Flusser felt that in the expression "traditions of men" the Septuagint's reading of Isaiah 29:13 emphasizes the word "men" more strongly than does the Masoretic text. He suspects that this may be the consequence of a conflict in how one reads the spelling of a word in the previous phrase. Does the word in question end in “י” (yod) or in “ו”(vav)? Should the spelling be וַתְּהִי (vat^ehi, "and become")—with the Masoretes? Or should it be וְתֹהוּ (v^etohū, "and confusion"), expressed by the Septuagint μάτην δέ (matēn de, "futile")?

  The Masoretes wrote: "Their worship of me has ‘become' a learned commandment of men." The Septuagint translator wrote: "Their worship of me is ‘confusion,' they teach the commandment of men and instructions." To choose the reading "confusion" leaves the remainder dangling (מִצְוַת אֲנָשִׁים מְלֻמָּדָה), so Flusser suggested that this may be why the Septuagint translates it as if it too had been written differently, מִצְווֹת בְּנֵי אָדָם וְתוֹרֹת (mitsvōt benē ’ādām v^etōrot), or rather, if not written differently, the Septuagint gets this different nuance of meaning from the remainder, that is, a greater emphasis on men as acting on their own as over and against God, a greater antagonism. Cf. Vincent Taylor, Mark (New York: St. Martin's, 1976), 337-338.

  The Dead Sea Scrolls add “כ,” i.e., כמצות ("become like a learned commandment of men"), and Flusser suspected that this addition may have been a deliberate correction of the Septuagint version. ↩

• ^[24] There are four instances where these words occur not only in this parallel pericope, but in parallel sentences—which accounts for four of the five times in Mark and likewise in Matt., and that leaves only two occurrences of "defile" that are not so precisely parallel though still in the same parallel pericope. ↩
• ^[25] See apparatus for insertion of word πᾶν, which the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament omitted from the text. ↩
• ^[26] Possibly Mark also remembered such lists of vices as in Rom. 1:29ff. or Didache 5:1ff. Note that ten out of Mark's twelve vices are found in the Didache list—which is, however, twice as long; so maybe these similarities are coincidental except for the fact that both lists begin in the plural and later switch to the singular. ↩
• ^[27] Mark's “novel” organization is derived in part from the difference of the two events and in part from his own editorial choices concerning how to present the significance of the event, that is, the report of Jesus’ ability to exploit an event as an opportunity for teaching. ↩
• ^[28] In Kuhn's book on scientific revolutions (which, he says, take decades to occur), he indicates that a faulty and troublesome theory will not be rejected until a new and viable alternative theory is proposed. But such a new theory, he adds, must be not only more consistent and comprehensive, but also more "aesthetic" (Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962]). Instead of having to conjecture the reasons for Luke's supposed changes of Mark, the reversal of this direction of dependence now enables us to get a clear, consistent and comprehensive picture of Mark at work (using Luke). ↩
• ^[29] In fact, out of the total word count of the entire Markan text of 11,078 words, Mark's parallels with Luke contain 8,242 words, whereas the word count of the parallels in Luke is only 6,779. (See the indispensable word statistical charts in Robert Morgenthaler's Statistische Synopse [Zurich: Gotthelf, 1971], 66-68; and in his Statistik des Neutestamentlichen Wortschatzes [Zurich: Gotthelf, 1958], 67-157.) ↩
• ^[30] Markan priority was suggested only in the 1830s by Wilke and Weisse in Germany. ↩
• ^[31] Markan posteriority was suggested already in the 1760s by Griesbach in Germany. Greisbach’s treatise, Commentatio qua Marci Evangelium totum e Matthaei et Lucae commentariis decerptum esse monstratur, has been reprinted in J. J. Griesbach: Synoptic and Text-Critical Studies 1776-1976 (ed. Bernard Orchard and Thomas R. W. Longstaff; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 68-102. It is accompanied by an English translation by Bernard Orchard entitled, “A Demonstration that Mark was Written After Matthew and Luke,” 103-135. ↩