For a long time I wondered why Streeter had swept some of the main evidence against his theory under the carpet. The evidence to which I refer is the close agreement in language, within the Triple Tradition, between Matthew and Luke against Mark. Streeter dismissively called these "Minor Agreements." To be sure, many of them (there are hundreds) are minor, involving choices of prepositions, conjunctions, and verb forms. There are, however, some thirty or forty that are so important, and inexplicable within the terms of Streeter's hypothesis, that they must be considered "Major Agreements."
I think I may have discovered, today, the reason for Streeter's strange action in denying and dismissing an obvious problem. When I accessed Wikipedia to double-check the original publication date of Streeter's book, I discovered a strange fact: Streeter had been present at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally. The Nuremberg Rallies were gatherings of Nazis, held in Nuremberg from 1933, when Hitler came to power, to 1938, when the War was about to start. Streeter was killed in a plane crash in 1937, so he never lived to hear about Kristallnacht or the horrors of the Holocaust. He was British, so had no reason to attend that Nuremberg Rally unless he was a Nazi sympathizer. In other words, an anti-Semite.
My intention here is not to construct an ad hominem argument. I rejected Streeterism for quite other reasons. But what Streeter did was this: He denied and dismissed compelling evidence that Mark's Gospel, clearly written for non-Jews, was not the first; evidence that would, in fact, take us back to the traditional view of the Church since at least the second century, that The Gospel of Matthew, long recognized as the "most Jewish" of the Gospels, was also the first of the Gospels.
Why do I say that Mark was clearly written for non-Jews? For one thing, Mark found it necessary to explain Jewish customs; Matthew did not. (e.g. Mt. 15:1-20 || Mk. 7:1-22)
I have already dealt (in Synoptica VIII) with the Pearls Before Swine saying, which makes it clear that Rabbi Yeshua's audience was composed of Jews. Another example is Mt. 10:5-6, which reads, in the canonical version: These twelve Jesus sent out, charging them, "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."
In Hebrew Matthew it reads:
These twelve Jesus sent; he commanded them saying: to the lands of the Gentiles do not go and into the cities of the Samaritans do not enter. Go to the sheep who have strayed from the house of Israel.
These are the words of Rabbi Yeshua, which Paul and his followers chose to ignore.
Here is a list of some of the "Minor Agreements" that Ben C, Smith considers "Major Agreements." I found it at www.textexcavation.com.
Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
