THE QUESTION ABOUT FASTING
(Mk ii, 18-22; Mt ix, 14-17; Lk v, 33-39)
Matthew and Luke avoid Mark’s verb ἐπιράπτει, a word found nowhere but in this verse of Mark’s (ix, 21). At the end they avoid Mark’s clumsy expression, “The wine and the bottles will be destroyed,” and say, “The wine will be spilled and the bottles destroyed.”[25] They both omit the last part of Mark’s vs. 19, an obvious pleonasm and possibly a later insertion. Luke’s addition in his vs. 39 does not fit well, but is bracketed by Westcott and Hort and is probably an insertion. More difficult (and so far as I see impossible) to explain is Luke’s suggestion that the patch to be put on the old garment is cut out of a new one—an unusual procedure, certainly. He may possibly have been misled into this statement by his desire to heighten the contrast between old and new.
THE WALK THRU THE CORN
(Mk ii, 23-28; Mt xii, 1-8; Lk vi, 1-5)
Matthew and Luke avoid Mark’s expression ὁδὸν ποιεῖν, which sounds as if Mark meant to say that Jesus made a new path thru the corn. They add, what Mark forgets to say, that he and his disciples ate the grain. Luke adds that they rubbed it in their hands. They are led to these corrections by the fact that the justification of Jesus by the example of David has to do, not with making a road thru the grain, but with eating on the Sabbath and, perhaps, eating something which it would not ordinarily have been proper for him to eat. Matthew and Luke omit Mark’s colorless and unnecessary “when he had need,” and his historically difficult reference to Abiathar.[26] All three have the clause, “and to those that were with him,” but each in a different place. Luke improves the order of the clauses in Mark’s 26th verse. Matthew adds to the words of Jesus the reference to the priests profaning the temple and yet being guiltless. The addition is suggested by David’s eating the shewbread, but does not fit the case so closely, since Jesus was not defending himself against the charge of profaning a holy place. Both Matthew and Luke omit Mark’s saying that “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Sir John Hawkins suggests that the saying may have been offensive to Jewish ears. This may account for Matthew’s omission of it; and Luke may have omitted it because he and his readers had not much interest in discussions about the Sabbath. But it is perhaps still more likely that the sentence is a later addition to Mark.
THE MAN WITH THE WITHERED HAND
(Mk iii, 1-6; Mt xii, 9-14; Lk vi, 6-11)
Luke changes Mark’s σάββασιν to σαββάτῳ, perhaps because he is not acquainted with the Hebrew (Aramaic) usage of the plural of this word in the sense of the singular. Both Matthew and Luke avoid the direct statement of Mark in his 5th verse that Jesus was angry.
THE CROWD AND THE HEALINGS