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From the Parable of the Vineyard to a Pre-Synoptic Source

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Malcolm Lowe
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Extract

In the following it will be suggested that the original reference of the Parable of the Vineyard and the Wicked Husbandmen was to John the Baptist, and argued that in Matthew's Gospel it belongs to what was once a sequence of stories and sayings about him. This ‘Baptist-sequence’ derives from a common source anterior to all the Synoptic gospels in their received forms, which may have been a Proto-Matthew.

Type
Articles
Information
New Testament Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , April 1982 , pp. 257 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

Notes

[1] See especially Robinson, J. A. T., ‘The Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen: A Test of Synoptic Relationships’, N.T.S. 21 (1974–1975), 443–61. Robinson's conslusions on the Synoptic interrelations are somewhat similar to those of the present article (but reached by a different path); his article is not concerned with establishing the original intention of the parable.Google Scholar

[2] J. E., and Newell, R. E., ‘The Parable of the Wicked Tenants’, N.T. 14 (1972), 226–37.Google Scholar

[3] As Robinson concludes (op. cit., p. 447), the original spoke, as in Matthew, only of the ‘son’. In Ljuke it is the ‘beloved son’, seemingly under the influence of the voices heard at Jesus' baptism and transfiguration. Yet precisely in these two passages (Lk. 3. 22 and 9. 35) there is manuscript evidence that the word άλαπητός did not originally occur in Luke. In any case, the phrase need not mean Jesus, but rather simply ‘only son’. In the Septuagint, for instance, υίός άλαπητός occurs repeatedly as the translation of ℸ∼Π∼ ⌉ℶ note esp. τόμ μίόν σον τόν άγαπητόν, δν ήγάπησας (!) for Πℶ|ℸℵ ℸωℵ ⌉ℸ∼Π∼ Πℵ ⌉ℶℶ Πℵ in Gn. 22. 2. See also note 7 below.

[4] In Jesus' words, earlier in Luke' Gospel: ‘The Law and the prophets were until John’ (thus Lk. 16. 16; ‘prophesied until John; and … he is Elijah who is to come’ in Mt. 11. 13–14). See further Mt. 11. 7–14, 17. 9–13 (‘He replied, “…I tell you that Elijah has already come … but they did to him whatever they pleased … ” Then the disciples understood that he was speaking of John the Baptist.’); Lk. 7. 24–28. Some people even surmised that John might be the Messiah (Lk. 3. 15; Jn. 1. 19–23).

[5] In 1 Pe. 2. 4–8 and Ac. 4. 11 (where similar stone-sayings occur) it is already Jesus who is the stone, but this does not prevent the saying in Jesus' mouth from having originally meant John. Even, indeed, if this was not Jesus' intention, certainly many who heard him recount the Parable of the Vineyard would have supposed him to be speaking about the recently killed John and not about the still very alive and active Jesus. (The remainder of this article will argue that this, at any rate, was the understanding of an early author on whom the Synoptic accounts depend.)

[6] The continuation of the argument is much indebted to Professor David Flusser, who had already concluded, in preparing his current book on the parables of Jesus, that none apart from that of the Vineyard was autobiographical (in the original form).

[7] This parable shows that the concept ‘son of God’ can appear in Jesus' parables without signifying Jesus himself, since the father of the two sons represents God.

[8] Possibly the point of the Parable of the Vineyard is also the same, if the ‘others’ who were going to supplant the ruling castes were simply those people who had repented at John's call.

[9] This touch turns the parable into one more plausibly about Jesus than about John.

[10] Or possibly (see previous footnote) because the parable was now to be about Jesus and thus had to be placed after the sequence about the Baptist. One cannot be sure, however, whether or not the author of the extant Matthew still understood the Parable of the Vineyard to be about John (see the last section of this paper).

[11] This is especially a theme of John's Gospel, but it occurs also in Mk. 9. 30–32 and Lk. 9. 43–45, 18. 31–34. It is equally John's Gospel which most insistently subordinates the Baptist to Jesus (Jn. 3. 27–30, etc.), but note also Mt. 3. 14.

[12] Even so, the fulfilment in A.D. 36 of the prophecy about John (see above) would have delayed the process in this case, perhaps until after the much greater disaster of A.D. 70. The downfall of Nero in A.D. 68, shortly after his vicious massive persecution of the Christians (and, if the reports of Eusebius and Jerome are actually correct, only months after the martyrdom of Peter and Paul), would also have encouraged a more generalized Christian understanding of the stone-saying from about that same time.

[13] Of course, this does not presuppose that Jesus indeed uttered all these parables on that occasion, or at all. For example, the issue of whether the Synoptic or the Johannine dating of the Cleansing of the Temple is correct remains basically unaffected; the present paper argues merely that the Synoptic dating (or at any rate a date after the Baptist's death) was present in the pre-Synoptic source. Nonetheless, one imagines that Jesus - whatever conception he held about himself - would have needed to state very specifically how he saw John and the significance of John's death. On the relations between Jesus and John, see Enslin, Morton S., ‘John and Jesus’, Z.N.W. 66 (1975), 1–18 (and the earlier studies listed there). Enslin sets out the evidence indicating that the movement started by John was at first a strong competitor to that started by Jesus, although the NT accounts play this down; he concludes that Jesus was originally simply one of John's followers and was stimulated into starting his own mission precisely by deep outrage at the liquidation of John by Antipas. While the findings of the present paper are independent of Enslin's analysis, they obviously go quite well with it (at least the author of the Baptist-sequence, if not Jesus himself, may have seen Jesus' development as does Enslin).Google Scholar

[14] Unless Thomas represents a still earlier stage, in which these prables had not been put in a narrative setting. Yet it is precisely Thomas's version of the Great Banquet which recalls the Cleansing of the Temple.

[15] One may recall that Stephen's statement of Ac. 7. 60 is parallely by the dominical logion preserved in Lk. 23. 34.

[16] Mark's version of the Baptist-sequence (not discussed above) is like Luke's, except that part of the Fig Tree episode intervenes between the Cleansing and the Questioning (obscuring their connexion) and that instead of the second couplet of the stone-saying there occurs a second OT couplet (with the result that the point of the stone-saying becomes unrecognizable). The extant Matthew has united the Fig Tree story in that intervening position (apparently a development upon Mark, since the miracle now takes place immediately - i.e. a heightening of its miraculous character); this gospel's version of the stone-saying combines those of Mark and Luke. The conflated Matthean version of the stone-saying would thus not be the result of an early scribal interpolation (as is widely held), but the work of a Matthean reviser. As for the Fig Tree incident, it is conceivable that Luke's Parable of the Fig Tree (Lk. 13. 6–9) was originaly part of the Baptist-sequence, if it was told against the authorites in such a way as to recall the Baptist's remark that ‘every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire’ (Mt. 3. 10, Lk. 3. 9). In this case Mark would not have introduced this element, but rather distorted it in such a way as to eliminate its whole point (as he did with the stone-saying).

[17] See esp. the English introductions to the 2nd ed. of his A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark (Jerusalem, 1973)Google Scholar, as well as his earlier ‘A Mdified Two-Document Theory of the Synoptic Dependence and Interdependence’, N.T. VI (1963), 239–63.Google Scholar The English introductions are particularly interesting for their detailed theory of Mark's literary method.

[18] ‘The Two Source Theory at an Impasse’, N.T.S. XXVI (1979–1980), 1–17Google Scholar, and his earlier Synopse des quatre évangiles (in collaboration with P. Benoit), vol. II (Lerusalem, 1972).Google Scholar

[19] ‘Who Wrote Matthew?’, N.T.S. XVII (1970–1971), 132–52.Google Scholar

[20] ‘Two Anti-Jewish Montages in Matthew’, Immanuel V (Summer 1975), 37–45.Google Scholar

[21] Lindsey in his book (p. XVII) assumes that an original ‘Hebrew saga’ was split in Greek into a ‘Proto-Narrative’ (the main source of Mark) and Q. Boismard's article speaks only of two editions of Matthew, but his book embeds this supposition in a complicated scheme of documents among which an evanescent Q appears. Aberl simply assumes that the original Matthew was based on Mark and Q. Flusser was still prepared to talk of Q at least when he published the paper mentioned. The work of each of these authors, however, implicitly casts doubt upon the whole Q-hypothesis.

[22] While Robinson also concluded that the various Synoptic accounts of the Parable of the Vineyard must have a common source perior to the extant gospels, he added that he saw no reason for calling the source an ‘Ur-Marcus’ or an ‘Ur-Matthaeus’ or anything else (op. cit., p. 457). But his article was a detailed study of that parable alone; the broader structure of the source begins to become clear only from the Baptist-sequence as a whole. I am grateful to Bishop Robinson for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.

[23] The scheme sketched above supposes only a Proto-Matthew employed by Mark and Luke, whose gospels were respectively sources for the M-revisions and AJ-revisions in the extant Matthew. If one further assumes that Mark knew and employed Luke (rather than the converse), the result is a variation of the Griesbach hypothesis in which the Proto-Matthew takes the place of Matthew. In this sense, much of the evidence adduced in favour of the Griesbach hypothesis will also support the theory outlined above.