Evidence of an Editor’s Hand in Two Instances of Mark’s Account of Jesus’ Last Week?

Revised: 21-May-2013^[23]

In 1922, William Lockton proposed a theory of the priority of Luke. According to Lockton’s hypothesis, Luke was written first, copied by Mark, who was in turn copied by Matthew who also copied from Luke.^[24]

Forty years later Robert L. Lindsey independently reached a similar solution to the Synoptic Problem suggesting that Luke was written first and was used by Mark, who in turn was used by Matthew (according to Lindsey, Matthew did not know Luke).^[25] In Lindsey’s proposal, Mark, as in the more popular Two-document (or Two-source) Hypothesis, is the middle term between Matthew and Luke.

Lindsey arrived at his theory unintentionally. Attempting to replace Franz Delitzsch’s outdated Hebrew translation of the New Testament, Lindsey began by translating the Gospel of Mark, assuming it was the earliest of the Synoptic Gospels. Although Mark’s text is relatively Semitic, it contains hundreds of non-Semitisms that are not present in Lukan parallels. This suggested to Lindsey the possibility that Mark was copying Luke and not vice versa. With further research Lindsey came to his solution to the Synoptic Problem.^[26]

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• ^[1] M. H. Segal, “Mishnaic Hebrew and Its Relation to Biblical Hebrew and to Aramaic,” JQR 20 (1908-1909): 647-737. See also Segal’s, A Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew (Oxford, 1927). ↩
• ^[2] In the Triple Tradition there may be as many as 1,500 Matthean-Lukan minor agreements, and a similar number of Matthean-Lukan agreements in omission (where Matthew and Luke agreed in omitting words found in Mark’s account). ↩
• ^[3] Obviously, for these examples to be compelling, it would be necessary to integrate them into a fuller treatment of the Synoptic Gospels. ↩
• ^[4] The word περιβλέπειν has a profile that Robert Lindsey classified as “a Markan stereotype”; see his, A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark (2nd ed.; Jerusalem: Dugith Publishers, 1973), 57-63. The word appears six times in Mark (Mark 3:5, 34; 5:32; 9:8; 10:23; 11:11), but only once in the rest of the New Testament (Luke 6:10, parallel to Mark 3:5). ↩
• ^[5] David Flusser, Jesus (3d. ed.; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 237-250. ↩
• ^[6] Ibid.; see also Flusser’s article in the present volume. ↩
• ^[7] Philo, Prob. 75; Josephus, Ant. 18.19 (see Louis H. Feldman’s note [Note a] to 18:19 in Josephus [LCL; London: William Heinemann Ltd., and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927-1965]); CD 4.15-18; 5.6-7; 6.11-13: “For the desert sectaries of Qumran, the Temple of Jerusalem was a place of abomination; its precincts were considered polluted, its priests wicked, and the liturgical calendar prevailing there, unlawful,” E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ [175 B.C.–A.D. 135] (ed. G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Black; 4 vols.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1979), 2:582. (See also 2:535, 570, 588-589). ↩
• ^[8] V. Taylor, The Gospel According to St. Mark (London: Macmillan, 1955), 459; F. W. Beare, The Earliest Records of Jesus (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 206; and R. Steven Notley, “Anti-Jewish Tendencies in the Synoptic Gospels, ” Jerusalem Perspective 51 (Apr.-Jun. 1996): 25. ↩
• ^[9] R. Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 218. ↩
• ^[10] Ibid., 230-231. A. Robin also suggested Micah 7:1, “The Cursing of the Fig Tree in Mark XI. A Hypothesis,” NTS 8 (1961/62): 276-281. ↩
• ^[11] Lindsey, in a personal communication. See Taylor, The Gospel According to St. Mark, 460. According to the Babylonian Talmud (b. Ta‘an. 24^a), R. Yose’s son commanded a fig tree “להוציא פירותיה שלא בזמנה” (to put forth fruit out of season). ↩
• ^[12] “One theory is that Mark was the first to link this with the entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the temple, there being no original connection with these events. If this is so, it is superfluous to ask whether Jesus could expect to find edible fruits on the tree in spring-time at the Passover,” Claus-Hunno Hunzinger, “συκῆ,” in TDNT (vol. 7; ed. G. Friedrich; trans. G. W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1971), 756. ↩
• ^[13] J. A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke (AB 28a; Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981-1985), 1264. For a discussion of the historicity of Jesus’ dramatic action in the Temple, see Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 164-169. Evans comments, “Recent research in the historical Jesus has by and large come to accept the historicity of the temple demonstration” (166). ↩
• ^[14] Flusser, Jesus, 138, especially note 8. ↩
• ^[15] Cf. W. Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (4th ed.; trans. W. F. Arndt and F. W. Gingrich; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 236-237. ↩
• ^[16] An allusion to Jeremiah 7:34: “Then I will make to cease…from the streets of Jerusalem the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride; for the land will become a ruin.” ↩
• ^[17] Joseph Frankovic, “Remember Shiloh!,” Jerusalem Perspective 46/47 (1994): 25-29. ↩
• ^[18] Ibid. ↩
• ^[19] Personal communication. ↩
• ^[20] While Mark’s version of this episode does not necessarily suggest a confrontation, the placement of Jesus’ question on the Temple mount where he had already been in conflict with the religious authorities, as well as Jesus’ question directed toward the scribes, could suggest to a subsequent reader that the encounter was part of a dispute. Possibly, Matthew’s altering of the nature of this event grew from such a reading of Mark. Nevertheless, Luke’s version lacks any sense of conflict; rather, its nature is that of a teaching session between a sage and his disciples—an acceptable reading of the Markan version, as well. ↩
• ^[21] The Greek text of Luke 20:41 can easily be reconstructed into idiomatic Hebrew: וַיֹּאמֶר לָהֶם כֵּיצַד אוֹמְרִים שֶׁהַמָּשִׁיחַ בֶּן דָּוִד. ↩
• ^[22] See C. H. Dodd, “The Fall of Jerusalem and the ‘Abomination of Desolation,’” in More New Testament Studies (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1968), 83; Taylor, The Gospel According to St. Mark, see, e.g., p. 511; idem, Behind the Third Gospel: A Study of the Proto-Luke Hypothesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926); idem, The Passion Narrative of Luke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); J. Jeremias, New Testament Theology (London: SCM, 1987), 40; Flusser, “The Crucified One and the Jews,” Judaism and the Origins of Christianity, 575-587; idem, “A Literary Approach to the Trial of Jesus,” Judaism and the Origins of Christianity, 588-592; idem, “Who is it that struck you?,” Judaism and the Origins of Christianity, 604-609. ↩
• ^[23] This article appeared in Jesus’ Last Week: Jerusalem Studies in the Synoptic Gospels (Volume 1) (ed. R. S. Notley, M. Turnage and B. Becker; Leiden: E. J. Brill, ISBN 9789004147904, 2006), 211-224. Jerusalem Perspective wishes to thank Koninklijke Brill NV for permission to publish the article in electronic format. A longer form of the article was published in 2004 as Selected Examples of Rewriting in Mark’s Account of Jesus’ Last Week. ↩
• ^[24] William Lockton, “The Origin of the Gospels,” Church Quarterly Review 94 (1922): 216-239 [Click here to read a reissue of this article on JerusalemPerspective.com]. Lockton subsequently wrote three books to substantiate his theory: The Resurrection and Other Gospel Narratives and The Narratives of the Virgin Birth (London: Green and Co., 1924); The Three Traditions in the Gospels (London: Green and Co., 1926); and Certain Alleged Gospel Sources: A Study of Q, Proto-Luke and M (London: Green and Co., 1927). ↩
• ^[25] Robert L. Lindsey, “A Modified Two-Document Theory of the Synoptic Dependence and Interdependence,” Novum Testamentum 6 (1963): 239-263; now reissued as A New Two-source Solution to the Synoptic Problem. Lindsey’s theory postulates four non-canonical documents, all of which preceded the Synoptic Gospels in time, two that were unknown to the Evangelists—the original Hebrew biography of Jesus and its literal Greek translation—and two other non-canonical sources known to one or more of the Gospel writers; see Lindsey, “Conjectured Process of Gospel Transmission,” Jerusalem Perspective 38 & 39 (May-Aug. 1993): 6. ↩
• ^[26] Priority of composition order does not necessarily imply originality. Although he suggested that the order of the writing of the Synoptic Gospels was Luke-Mark-Matthew, Lindsey observed that on various occasions Matthew and Mark (although Mark less frequently) preserved the earliest form of the Gospel account. ↩