"The crowds asked him: if so, what shall we do? John answered them: He who has two shirts let him give one to him who has none. So the people came to be baptized. Many asked him: What shall we do? And he answered them: Be anxious for (no) man and do not chastise them, and be pleased with your lot. And all the people were thinking and reckoning in their circumcised heart: John is Jesus."
These words were familiar to me, or something very like them. In fact, I had just read them, but at first I couldn't remember where. As it turned out, I had just read them, in Greek, in Albert Huck's Synopsis of the First Three Gospels, on Page 11. But they do not appear in canonical, Greek Matthew: they are in Luke 3:10-15! Here is the Lukan version:
"And the multitudes were questioning him, saying 'Then what shall we do?' And he would answer and say to them, 'Let the man who has two tunics share with him who has none; and let him who has food do likewise.' And some tax-gatherers also came to be baptized, and they said to him, 'Teacher, what shall we do?' And he said to them, 'Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.' And some soldiers were questioning him, saying, 'And what about us, what shall we do?' And he said to them, 'Do not take money from anyone by force, or accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages.'
"Now while the people were in a state of expectation and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he might be the Christ, . . . "
This part, which now appears only in the Gospel of Luke, comes right after a very amazing section in which the accounts of Matthew and Luke are verbatim the same, while Mark barely even touches upon the subject. This material definitely did not come from Mark. Either Matthew got it from Luke, or Luke got it from Matthew.
What we are seeing here is another example of what we saw in some previous blog posts, especially The Beatitudes: A Trajectory through Time, published in this blog on May 31, 2019.
According to my Layered Matthew Hypothesis for solution of the Synoptic Problem, Mark used a very early version of Matthew (Matthew I) that did not yet include the material that we call "Q." Luke also used Matthew, the first of the Gospels, but in an intermediate version (Matthew IIa), which had only some of the Beatitudes, and a shorter version of the Lord's Prayer. The Hebrew Matthew that has survived, thanks to the Jewish community, also represents an intermediate version (Matthew IIb), which has similarities both to canonical Luke and to canonical Matthew (Matthew III), but is chronologically intermediate between them.
Luke's version, above, is more elaborate than that in Hebrew Matthew, but it reflects the presence of these words, or something like them, at an earlier stage of the Gospel of Matthew. For some reason, by the time of canonical, Greek Matthew (Matthew III), they had been removed.
(to be continued)
Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
