Synoptica II - Hebrew Matthew and the Formation of Canonical Matthew

Now comes the tricky part.

Mt. 5:13  "At that time Jesus said to his disciples"

Mt. 5:17  "At that time Jesus said to his disciples"

These introductory phrases, inappropriate in a single, continuous Sermon on the Mount, were clearly edited out of the final, canonical, Greek version of the Gospel of Matthew (which I have called Matthew III). But they are still in the text at the level of Matthew IIb (reflected in the Shem Tob Hebrew Gospel of Matthew). This is extremely revealing of "Matthew's" methods in forming the First Gospel.

George Howard (see his Page 200) found sixteen of these unnecessary and disruptive introductory phrases in the Hebrew text of the Sermon on the Mount. He did an interesting analysis, presented in a table on pp. 200-201, in which he shows that every time one of these unnecessary introductory phrases occurs, Luke jumps to another place in his Gospel, or has a void.

What is going on here? Is Matthew copying from Luke to form his Sermon on the Mount? No. He is rewriting his own earlier edition (my Matthew IIa), reflected in Luke, to form a later, but also intermediate edition (my Matthew IIb), which would later be further revised and translated into Greek to form canonical Matthew (my Matthew III).

A further, interesting point is that the verses in Mt. 5:13-17 are all connected by catchwords, some of which can only be seen in the Hebrew. Catchwords are a memory aid usually associated with the oral-transmission stage. As we shall see, there are many more of them.

There is no need to posit a hypothetical "Q Document." Matthew collected the logia of Jesus from oral transmission. Then he wrote them down in Hebrew, just as Papias told us in the early second century. There is close, but not exact, agreement between Matthew and Luke in this Sayings material because Luke got it from an early, intermediate version of Matthew (my Matthew IIa).

The (mostly Sayings) material that some scholars refer to as "Q," which stands for the German "Quelle," meaning "source," was evidently unknown to Mark. This may be because Mark wrote his Gospel before Matthew began his ("Markan priority"), or it may be because Mark took most of his content from an early version of the Gospel of Matthew (my Mt. I), one that still lacked the Sayings material shared by Matthew and Luke. I still don't know which of these scenarios is correct, so I don't yet know whether Markan priority can be dispensed with.

(to be continued)

Text and graphic © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.