Luke's great omission

by peacefulpete 8 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  peacefulpete

  In looking at a Harmony of the Synoptic Gospels it becomes quite visible that Luke generally follows Mark's Gospel as his primary source yet tweeking and adjusting when he felt necessary and supplimenting Mark with Q material. However Luke seems to have deliberately omitted the whole section from mark 6:45 - 8:10. It has been argued that this section of Mark was not in the copy that Luke used as his source. There are other resons to believe that in fact it is true that this section was by a later hand than the bulk of the text. The gross geographical errors are within this section. Jesus' personality seems more aggressive than in the rest of the Markan story. Here only does the writer feel the need to explain Jewish terms and practices. There are other reasons.

  Is is argued by others that in fact Luke did have these verses at his disposal but chose for reasons of his own to ignore them. To support this they call attention to Luke's setting the city of Bethsaida as the scene for the miraculous feeding (luke 9:10) whereas Mark had the story take place in a desert location to explain the lack of available food.(Mark 6:32,35) Luke must have, in this argument, gotten the name Bethsaida from Mark 6:45 and ,again for reasons of his own used the city as the setting for the earlier pericope. This has created an odd reading in Luke, as he retains the rest of the feeding story wherein the disciples declare that there is no food to be had so the crowd should go off and travel to a city to get provisions dispite they're being in a city at the time. Perhaps then the Markan omission should be reckoned as starting after 6:47.

  Matthew also used Mark as well as a primary source, he however used the Mark 6-8 section in question.

  Does this suggest then that Matthew's copy of Mark had the additional material whereas Luke's did not?
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  eljefe

  There was a great Frontline about this (here). It was about 3 hours long and I watched it 4 or 5 times. There is no doubt in my that the gospels are a lot fabrication.
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  Navigator

  What is even more curious is that the writers regard the "feeding of the 5000" as miraculous. Those familiar with aramaic customs and culture have pointed out the propensity of eastern peoples to carry a good deal of food on their person. That custom persists today as anyone who has worked in Agriculture at U.S. Ports of Entry can tell you. Ones ability to stay at a seminar (as Jesus was conducting) depended in large part on how long you could make your food last. You could make it last a lot longer if you could share your neighbor's food while preserving your own. Jesus understood full well that there was plenty of food in that crowd. He did two things to bring it forth into manifestation. He announced that the seminar was over and he used the small boy who was willing to share his food as an example. The miracle was in the sharing and not any "hocus pocus" conducted under a sheet as the movie producers would have us believe. The unfamiliarity with customs and culture of the Jews living in Palestine suggest that all of the gospels were written by greeks working with Q material that they didn't fully understand. The wedding at Cana as recounted in the Gospel of John is another example of writing by someone who didn't have an intimate familiarity with the customs and culture of the area.
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  Leolaia

  PP....Koester concurs that the absence of the "Bethsaida section" in Luke is strong evidence of an early edition of Mark that preceded the version that Matthew used. He also notes lexical and stylistic differences in this section:

  "Luke may have used a copy of Mark that had accidentally lost a few pages. However, there are some special features which differentiate this particular section from the rest of Mark's Gospel. It begins with the report of Jesus' going to Bethsaida (Mark 5:45) and ends with the story of the healing of a blind man from Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26). Thereafter Jesus goes to the town of Caesarea Philippi and the town of Bethsaida never occurs again in the Gospel. This section of Mark is also characterized by the appearance of a number of doublets of other Markan pericopes: 6:45-54, the walking on water, is a variant of the stilling of the tempest (Mark 4:35-41); 8:1-10, the feeding of the four thousand, is evidently a secondary elaboration of the story of the feeding of five thousand (Mark 6:30-44); 8:22-26 is one of two stories reporting the healing of a blind man in this Gospel (cf. Mark 10:46-52). Two of the healing stories in this section, Mark 7:32-36 and 8:22-26 (both also missing in Matthew), are the only two narratives in the Synoptic Gospels in which the healing is accomplished through elaborate manipulations; all the other healings are accomplished through Jesus' word, simple gesture, or touching with or taking by the hand. Mark 6:45-8:26 exhibits some peculiar features also in its general vocabulary. E.g., the term "to understand" (suniemi) occurs four times (6:52; 7:14; 8:17, 21), but elsewhere in Mark only once in an allusion to Isa 6:9-10 (Mark 4:12). The synonymous verb noein is found twice here (7:18; 8:17), elsewhere in Mark only in 13:14. The adjective "without insight" (asunetos) is used in Mark only in this section (8:17). The cumulative evidence of these peculiarities may allow the conclusion that an earlier version of Mark, which was used by Luke, did not yet contain the "Bethsaida section" (Mark 6:45-8:26), whereas Matthew knew the expanded version which, therefore, must have come into existence very soon after the original composition of the original gospel" (Koester, Early Christian Gospels, p. 285).

  Within the Bethsaida section, there is a pericope which also has a very complex history, which Koester does not discuss. This is the episode about eating with defiled hands (Mark 7:1-13). While Matthew generally follows the narrative of Mark in the Bethsaida section, within this pericope we find several significant deviations. There is a parenthetical gloss in Mark 7:3-4 which is missing in Matthew, and Matthew also lacks the entire concluding logion of Mark 7:9-12. Thus Matthew has either heavily abridged this pericope or it had been expanded subsequent to its use by the First Gospel. Furthermore, the gloss itself in Mark 7:3-4 has at least four serious textual problems: (1) the word pugme "with fist" in v. 3 is nonsensical and generally left untranslated, (2) instead of rhantisontai "they cleanse" in v. 4, some versions such as A D K L W X etc. have the word for "baptize", (3) instead of "when they come from the market they do not eat unless they cleanse themselves", D W and Miniscule 1009 read "and they do not eat anything from the market unless they purify it", and (4) in v. 4 after khalkion "bronze vessels", A D K L W X etc. add "and beds". So there appears to be some corruption within this gloss as well. Another curious thing about this pericope is that it is paralleled in two fragmentary noncanonical gospels: POxy 840 and the Egerton Gospel, the latter even including the quotation from Isaiah 29:13. Each is telling a different story but there are points of contact. Finally, even though Matthew omits the material from Mark 7:9-12, the Gospel of the Nazoreans which is purportedly an expanded version of Matthew apparently includes the missing material since fr. 12 in the "Zion Gospel" makes reference to the "corban" of Mark 7:13.
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  Leolaia

  Navigator....Yes it might be diverging from contemporary customs, but the purpose of the author is to evoke Elisha's feeding of the multitude in 2 Kings 4:42-44. The author wanted to portray Jesus as a prophet and miracle worker in the same vein, but so much greater (as Elisha fed only a hundred men, while Jesus feeds 4,000). Whatever the realities of itinerant preachers were in the day, even if the author were aware of them, mattered little compared to the symbolic meaning.
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  peacefulpete

  Great stuff Leolaia. Any thoughts on Luke's use of Bethsaida for a setting of the feeding despite it's ruining the story's premise? I wonder if the mention of Bethsaida in Luke was some later attempt at harmonizing with Mark. It would seem a rather glaring editorial fatigue as Luke continues to relate the story as if it occurs in a remote deserted area.
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  peacefulpete

  I also noticed that the secondary feeding story in Mark uses 4000 rather than the 5,000 as in chapt 6. The 5,000 version makes sense as gemetria, as David Fideler has shown in his book The Sun of God. The doublet may be a corruption and recognized by Luke. He may also have just seen redudancy in the other miracles in the Bethsaida section and opted to ignore it.
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  Leolaia

  PP....One should be careful to note that the location of Bethsaida is stated not in the feeding narrative (Luke 9:12-17) but in a transition statement in Luke 9:10-11. In favor of "Bethsaida" being a later gloss in Luke 9:10, we may note that the transition statement in Luke 9:10-11 is otherwise dependent on the language in Mark 6:30-34 and the language found in Matthew 14:13-14, and not on Mark 6:45-46. Thus in Luke 9:10-11, we encounter the apostoloi and not the mathetas "disciples" (cf. Mark 6:45), they hupekhoresen kat' idian "withdrew apart" (cf. Matthew 14:13) instead of embenai "embarking" and proagein "going before" (cf. Mark 6:45). These two expressions from Mark 6:45, as well as euthus "immediately" and eis to ploion "into the boat" occur elsewhere in the Bethsaida section in Mark 8:1-10 but not in the parallel passages in Luke or Matthew. Moreover, Luke 9:10-11 is otherwise dependent on language in Mark 6:30-34 (e.g. the apostles "returning", them "telling him all that they had done", etc.) and Matthew 14:13-14 (e.g. "when the crowds heard it," "they followed him", the reference to healing, etc.).
  

  Luke 9:10-11: "On their return the apostles told him what they had done. And he took them and withdrew apart to a city called Bethsaida. When the crowds learned it, they followed him; and he welcomed them and spoke to them of the kingdom of God, and cured those who had need of healing," pericope of the feeding of 5,000 follows at v. 12.

  Mark 6:30-34: "The apostles returned to Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. And he said to them, 'Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while.' For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a lonely place by themselves. Now many saw them going, and knew them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns, and got there ahead of them. As he went ashore he saw a great throng, and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things," pericope of the feeding of 5,000 follows at v. 35

  Mark 6:45-46: "Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray". (This transition follows the feeding of 5,000)

  Mark 8:1-10: "And he sent them away and immediately he got into the boat with his disciples, and went to the district of Dalmanutha". (This transition follows the feeding of the 4,000)

  Matthew 14:13-14: "Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a lonely place apart. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. As he went ashore he saw a great throng, and he had compassion for them, and healed their sick," pericope of the feeding of 5,000 follows at v. 15.

  So maybe it is indeed a gloss. Interesting puzzle. But what does this tell us about the original transition statement in Mark that preceded the feeding story? The passage in Mark 6:30-34 looks much more elaborate than the briefer notices in Luke 9:10-11 and Matthew 14:13-14. Maybe one clue is that Matthew departs from Mark and Luke by including the reference to the disciples return and telling Jesus what happened with John the Baptist in the preceding pericope itself (Matthew 14:1-12), while in the other gospels the return itself marks the beginning of the transition statement -- which in Mark is so elaborate it almost stands on its own as a pericope. If the simpler version is more original, then we might reconstruct an original along the lines of Matthew (representing early Mark), which was then elaborated into a longer version which is represented in Luke, and then it was elaborated further into our present version of Mark. The transition from "disciples" to "apostles" would then mark the seam between pericopes.

  To wit:--

  Early Mark
  "And his disciples came and took the body and buried it; and they went and told Jesus. Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a lonely place apart. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. As he went ashore he saw a great throng; and he had compassion for them, and healed their sick."

  Middle Mark
  "When his disciples heard of it, they came and took his body and buried it. The apostles returned to Jesus and told him all that they had done. And they withdrew from there in the boat to a lonely place apart. Now many saw them going, and ran there on foot from all the towns, and got there ahead of them. As he went ashore he saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them, and he began to teach them many things and healed their sick."

  Late Mark "When his disciples heard of it, they came and took his body and buried it in a tomb. The apostles returned to Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. And he said to them, 'Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while.' For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a lonely place by themselves. Now many saw them going, and knew them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns, and got there ahead of them. As he went ashore he saw a great throng, and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things."

  Matthew (derived from Early Mark)
  "His disciples came and took the body and buried it; and they went and told Jesus. Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a lonely place apart. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. As he went ashore he saw a great throng, and he had compassion for them, and healed their sick."

  Luke (derived from Middle Mark)
  "On their return the apostles told him what they had done. And he took them and withdrew apart to a city called Bethsaida. When the crowds learned it, they followed him; and he welcomed them and spoke to them of the kingdom of God, and cured those who had need of healing.

  Viewed this way, we see that the inclusion of "Bethsaida" isn't the only deviation from Mark found in this passage in Luke. Luke also omits the whole statement about their burial of John the Baptist (and even mentions the execution of John as an afterthought in a statement attributed to Herod), which destroys the significance of the allusion to things the apostles did in Luke 9:10. This statement of the apostles "telling him what they had done" is thus a vestige of a more fuller account that related what they had done. Similarly, Luke mentions Jesus "taking them" which is not found in any of the other parallel passages, paraphrases what the crowds did, mentioned that Jesus "welcomed them", describes the message of the "kingdom of God" instead of merely saying generally that he "taught" them, and finally uses the word iato "cured" to describe the healings. In almost every respect the Markan narrative has been reshaped. So perhaps the change of "lonely place" to "Bethsaida" was also part of the Lukan overhawl of the Markan passage.
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  peacefulpete

  Nicely broken down. So we might then say that the evidence suggests that the entire Mark 6:45- 8:12 section was not in Luke's version of Mark but it was apparently in Matt's. Secondly the Bethsaida inclusion in Luke 9 is a later gloss perhaps to crudely harmonize with Mark, altho this breaks with the premise of the feeding story taking place in a lonely desolate place. Thirdly that Mark in this pericope was later embellished for emphasis.