Luke has likewise distributed his peculiar material thruout his gospel, and also begins and ends with it. But after his stories of the birth and childhood, he has, up to his chap. ix, five insertions of peculiar matter. Four of these are incidents, one is a speech of John the Baptist. With ix, 51, begins his great interpolation. In the less than ten chapters covered by this he has grouped twenty-five sections of his peculiar material. This matter has a prevailing character of its own. There are four narratives in it, three of them being healings. The other twenty-one sections consist of sayings and parables. If we consider the relative length of the sayings, the narratives, and parables of this section, we shall see that the whole is practically a parable section. With the coming of Jesus to Jerusalem, this material stops. From here on Luke has two brief sayings and one longer one, five sections of narrative, and no parable, in his single tradition.
Whether the source of Matthew’s peculiar material was one or more than one, it suggests itself at once that the birth and infancy stories may have come from a place by themselves. They have, to a considerable extent, a vocabulary of their own. Constituting about one twenty-second of the total matter of Matthew’s Gospel, they contain almost one-tenth of the occurrences of the characteristic words of that Gospel.[118] Even if the constantly recurring γεννάω of the genealogy be removed, the peculiar words occur with much more frequency in this birth and infancy section than in the rest of the Gospel. The force of this fact, however, is considerably weakened by the peculiar subject-matter of these chapters.
More decisive upon this matter is the general character of the birth and infancy sections, which is sharply distinguished from that of the body of the Gospel. This is not due to the presence of the marvelous in these early chapters, since that is found to some degree throughout, but to the presence of what may be more distinctly called the legendary element. In this characteristic it is like some of the material at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. Let one compare the general character of the stories of the star and the magi, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt with the story of the opening of the graves and the awakening of the departed dead, and the angel rolling away the stone from the grave, and the question will suggest itself, whether Matthew may not have obtained all these stories from one source.
This suggestion might appear to be seconded by the fact that this material, which has such a striking family resemblance, is not scattered thru the body of Matthew’s work, but occurs, part of it before he has reached his junction with Mark and Luke, and the rest of it after he has parted from them. He not only begins and ends alone, but he begins and ends with material of a remarkably similar character. This is not enough, of course, to prove the unity of Matthew’s source for the first and last parts of his single tradition; but it is enough to suggest it.
As to the source of the rest of Matthew’s peculiar material, we cannot get beyond guesswork. Some of it has an extremely genuine sound; for example, the sayings appended to the Sabbath discussion, “The priests break the sabbath in the temple and are blameless,” etc. (xii, 5-6); the saying about the angels of the little ones (xviii, 10); the parable of the Fish-Net, preserving so well the eschatological features of the preaching of Jesus (xiii, 47-50); the parable of the Two Sons (xxi, 28-31). The incident of the temple tax (xvii, 24-27) seems to go back for its origin to a time when the temple was still in existence, and, when it is relieved of the item of the coin in the fish’s mouth (which may easily be a later addition to the story), seems to bear traces of undoubted genuineness.
The parable of the Laborers who received every man a penny (Mt xx, 1-16) seems likewise to indicate a time considerably later than that of Jesus; a time, namely, when those who had long waited for the parousia were asking whether those who had come in at the eleventh hour were to receive the rewards of the coming kingdom exactly as those who had “borne the burden and the heat of the day.” That it was in such a time as this that Matthew wrote his Gospel may suggest the hypothesis that he has here worked over some genuine saying of Jesus, or received such a saying as it had been worked over by the waiting community, to suit the need of the times.
In much the same manner the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (XXV, 1-13) seems to come from a period when the church was commonly spoken of as the bride of Christ, or when Christ was awaited as the coming bridegroom of the church; this is not necessarily later than the times of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and so may be much earlier than Matthew, but is certainly later than the time of Jesus.
The saying about eunuchs who have made themselves such for the kingdom of heaven has a harsh sound in the mouth of Jesus; and we wonder whether the circumstances of the expectation of the kingdom warranted such a statement at the time Jesus is said to have made it. We cannot but notice also, as Wernle has remarked, that the saying seems to be displaced in Matthew, coming in with extreme inappropriateness between Jesus’ insistence upon the sacredness of marriage and his blessing of the children. It may bespeak the period of developing asceticism within the church. If it is not to be assigned to Jesus we cannot fix very closely the date of its origin.
On the whole, we must probably say that some parts of Matthew’s tradition, outside of his infancy section and the stories of the wonders at the crucifixion, show indications of antiquity and genuineness, while others arouse our suspicions as to their coming from Jesus, or even from Matthew.
MATTER PECULIAR TO LUKE