The Beatitudes: A Trajectory through Time

Luke 6:20-23 (reflects "Matthew I"):

1) Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

2) Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.

3) Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude and insult you and reject your name as evil because of the Son of Man,

4) Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their fathers treated the prophets.


Matthew 5:3-11, in the Shaprut version (reflects "Matthew II"):

1) Blessed are the humble of spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

2) Blessed are those who wait, for they shall be comforted.

3) Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

4) Blessed are the innocent of heart, for they shall see God.

5) Blessed are those who PURSUE peace for they shall be called sons of God.

6) Blessed are those who are PERSECUTED for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

7) Blessed are you when they persecute and revile you and say against you all kinds of evil for my sake, but speak falsely.

8) Rejoice and be glad for your reward is very great in heaven, for thus they persecuted the prophets.


Matthew 5:3-11, in the canonical version ("Matthew III"):

1) Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

2) Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

3) Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

4) Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

5) Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

6) Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

7) Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

8) Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

9) Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.


To review a bit: My Layered Matthew Hypothesis was presented in this blog in the series The Layers of Matthew I-X, posted in October and November 2018. It is diagrammed and explained most succinctly in The Layers of Matthew VI, posted on 17 November 2018. Here is the diagram that was given there:

What we notice here, first of all, is the increasing fullness of the list of Beatitudes from Matthew I (Luke is our witness) to Matthew II (the Shem Tob Ibn Isaac Ibn Shaprut Hebrew Matthew is our witness for at least one of the intermediate forms of Matthew to which I have given this designation) and finally to Matthew III (canonical Matthew). We also notice a play on words that only works in Hebrew, based on the Hebrew root רדף, which means both "to pursue" and "to persecute," and forms a "catchword" or "linking word" between the thoughts in the fifth and sixth Beatitudes in the Shaprut Hebrew Matthew. What we call "peacemakers" are "peace-doers" in Greek, but idiomatic Hebrew is "those who pursue peace." Thus, the play on words is lost when one takes Matthew out of its original Hebrew.

Text and image © 2018-2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

The earlier forms of the Pater Noster

As George Howard points out on p. 202 of Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, the Shaprut Hebrew Matthew and the oldest and best manuscripts of Luke agree that "who art in heaven" was not originally part of the prayer, According to my hypothesis, Luke used an early form of Matthew (Matthew I), which was probably written in Hebrew, for the sayings portion of his Gospel. Thus, although Matthew I has not survived, it is reflected in Luke. The Shaprut Hebrew Matthew reflects Matthew II, an intermediate form of Matthew. So, if we want to see the original form of the Lord's Prayer, or Avinu, the best that we can do is to go to Luke XI:2. In the RSV, it goes like this:

Father, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread;

and forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone

who is indebted to us.

and lead us not into temptation.

Here is how it sounds in Hebrew, in the Salkinson translation:

avinu yitkadash shmecha

tavo malchutecha

ten-lanu lechem chukenu yom b'yomo.

us'lach lanu et-ashmoteynu 

ki gam-anachnu solchim l'kol-asher

asham lanu

v'al-t'viyenu liy'dey nisayon.

And here's how it looks in Hebrew, in the form given in the Shaprut Hebrew Matthew, reflecting Matthew II, which is still older than canonical Matthew (Matthew III): 

אבינו יתקדש שמך ויתברך מלכותך רצונך יהיה עשוי בשמיםובארץ ׃

ותתן לחמנו תמידית ׃

ומחול לנו חטאתינו כאשר אנחנו מוחלים לחוטאים לנו

ואל תביאנו לידי נסיון ושמרינו מכל רע אמן ׃

The best texts of Luke just say "Father," but here we are back to "Our Father," which is also how Salkinson translated the Luke. Other than that, the main difference between this and Luke is that it says "may your name be sanctified; may your kingdom be blessed." This makes for a more beautiful parallelism. I prefer it for this reason, and also because, as we are told in the Gospel of Thomas, the kingdom of heaven is already among us. I believe, therefore, that if we just change the אבינו of the Shaprut version to אבא, we'll be close enough to the original ("Matthew I") version of the prayer.

Next, we will try to reconstruct the original, "Matthew I" form of the Beatitudes.

(to be continued)

Text © 2018-2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

The Lost Sheep of the House of Israel / Can We Reconstruct Matthew I?

The title of this post is based on a text that is not even found in the Tanakh: it is in Matthew 10.5-6:

"Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel..."

These are the words of Rabbi Yeshua, but of course Paul and his gang went there anyway.

In previous posts and Facebook Notes, I've written at some length about the Hebrew/Aramaic substratum in the New Testament. I have also written (in this blog) about the so-called Synoptic Problem (which is a puzzle rather than a problem), and solved it to my own satisfaction. The result of this study was my conclusion that an early form of the Gospel of Matthew was the first gospel to be written, and it was originally written in Hebrew. It has occurred to me to wonder whether that Hebrew can be reconstructed.

Let's take a closer look.

Delitzsch:

אֶל־דֶּרֵךְ הַגּוֹיִם אַל־תֵּלֵכוּ וְאֶל־עִיר הַשֹׁמְוֹנִים אַל־תָּבֹאוּ ׃

כִּי אִם־לְכוּ אֶל־הַצֹּאן הָאֹבְדוֹת לבֵית יִשְׂרָאֵל ׃

Salkinson:

אַל־תָּשִׂימוּ לְדֶרֶךְ הַגּוֹיִם פַּעֲמֵיכֶם וְאֶל־עָרֵי הַשֹׁמְרֹנִים אַל־תָּבֹאוּ ׃

כִּי אִם־לְצֹאן אֹבְדוֹת מִבֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל תֵּלֵכוּ ׃‎

Shaprut:

בארצות הגוים אל תלכו ובערי השמרונים אל תבואו ׃

לכו לצעאן אשר נדחו מבית ישראל ׃

Modern Hebrew (approximately):

לא ללכת לשום מקום בין הגויים, ולא להיכנס לעיר השומרונים, אלא ללכת אל הכבש האבוד של בית ישראל

Delitzsch is a nineteenth-century translation of the whole New Testament into excellent (though anachronistic) Biblical Hebrew.

Salkinson is a slightly later nineteenth-century translation, intentionally more periphrastic and idiomatic. Salkinson was, however a great admirer of Delitzsch's translation, and no doubt benefitted from it.

Shaprut is from the medieval polemical work Even Bohan, by Shem-Tob Ibn Shaprut, but it appears to be much earlier than that, and is textually closest to the oldest textual traditions, the Old Latin and the Old Syriac, but is not identical to either of them.

According to my Layered-Matthew Hypothesis, which can be diagrammed thus:

the Shaprut text is a text of the Matthew II intermediate text type. Luke used Matthew I and never saw Matthew II. Matthew III corresponds to canonical Matthew. For Matthew I we have Luke's borrowings (e.g. the Beatitudes and his version of the Pater Noster); Matthew II is reflected in Shaprut; the existence of Matthew III is self-evident. Thus, no hypothetical texts are required. All of this is dealt with in the series The Layers of Matthew, published in this blog in late 2018. It is explained most succinctly in The Layers of Matthew VI, published here on November 17 2018.

The first thing we notice in those Hebrew samples above is that the Shaprut text is unpointed, as any first-century Hebrew text would be. That makes it look, at first glance, a bit like Modern Hebrew.

Modern Hebrew is an expanded descendant of Mishnaic Hebrew, used by the rabbis in the early centuries CE. Let's see if we can spot some of the differences between the Shaprut version and the modern version.

One need not be an expert to see that what at first seemed similar is actually the most unlike the Shaprut text. We see the Modern Hebrew prohibitive לא where Biblical Hebrew (and Shaprut) have אל. We see the characteristic Modern Hebrew של for "of," where Biblical Hebrew and Shaprut use other constructions. In fact, the differences are too numerous to mention. The Shaprut text is not Medieval Hebrew, or even Mishnaic Hebrew. It is late Biblical Hebrew, with an occasional Mishnaic word or expression thrown in, which is exactly what we would expect of a first-century text of this type.

According to my Layered Mathew Hypothesis, what we are looking at in the (Shem-Tob Ibn) Shaprut text is an early, intermediate stage of the Gospel of Matthew, which I have called Matthew II. Can we use Luke to recover the Matthew I form? No, in this case we can't, because the citation we are considering is an indictment of Paul's mission to the Gentiles, and would never have been included in the Gospel of Luke, which was written for the Gentiles. The Gospel of Matthew, on the other hand, the first to be written, was written for the Jews.

As we will see, though, the earliest stage of the Gospel of  Matthew, Matthew I, can be recovered by translating key passages of Luke, such as the Beatitudes and the Avinu (Pater Noster) into Biblical Hebrew.

Text © 2018-2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

A Voice from No Man's Land (revised and re-posted)

The events of recent weeks [This was originally published on July 21 2014, as a Facebook Note.] have caused me to do some soul searching. Many things from the past have been dredged up and re-examined. I was particularly struck today by my first encounter with Hasidism, fifty years ago, in 1964. I read Martin Buber's HASIDISM AND MODERN MAN, I read about the Baal Shem Tov, I read the TALES OF THE HASIDIM, Part I and Part II. What it really was, for me, was pure mysticism. In my youthful enthusiasm I wrote a small paper (in Esperanto, the language of those who are ever-hopeful) about the similarities between Hasidism and Transcendentalism. I was entranced by the idea of the Shekhina, the Divine Spirit, and how it becomes entrapped in the "shells," or kellipot (qliphot). It then becomes our duty and our mission to liberate them. One can best do this, it seems, by being a heretic, or at least a mystic.

I was struck today by how formative that time was. It was much more important than I could have foreseen. I met a real, live Hasid (of the Lubavitcher variety), and was duly influenced. He introduced me to the music of Shlomo Carlebach.

I eventually met Rabbi Carlebach in person. In fact, at a concert in the Berkeley Community Theater, I went up, with many others, to receive "The Rebbe's Kiss" from him. After the concert was over, he said, "Come to the shul (the synagogue), we'll dance and sing 'til the sun comes up. We followed this mad rabbi through the streets of Berkeley, dancing and singing. People came to their windows, and we shouted, "Come to the shul!" Some of them did. At one point, Carlebach stopped, and turning to us, said "I want to sing a song called Samchem. It means, "make them happy, let them be joyful." Not this silly thing that we are doing tonight, but real, true happiness and joy." Entering the shul, I grabbed a kipá that I had no real right to wear (though many politicians have done the same). Shlomo Carlebach danced and sang. We danced the hora. Rabbi Carlebach broke a string, and asked me if I had another. (I wonder if, somehow, he knew that I was a guitar player.) He was the most charismatic person I had ever met.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP-0XPpk9yU

That was in the middle '60s. In 1967 I was a hippie in the San Francisco "Summer of Love." That was another peak experience. A lot of other things happened, as the years rolled on. In the mid-seventies I consciously became a feminist. I studied and absorbed a great deal of Hinduism, over quite a few years.  At some point, perhaps in the '80s, I learned that Shlomo Carlebach's wife had left him, perhaps because of infidelitiies. [I later learned that it was because of inappropriate conduct with his female students, which is even worse.] I was crushed. One of my idols had feet of clay. Now, at the age of 71 [That was then--I am now 76.], I realize that life is not so simple, not that that excuses anything.

Please understand that I was raised as a Catholic. At some point in the dim, pre-America past, there had been some Jews in my family, and there is still the trace in my DNA [I now know that I have Jewish "DNA cousins" in the Ukraine, northwest Russia, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as in the US.]. At some point in the 1980s I started to convert, but I never found the right fit. I heard about other, somewhat wilder flavors of Judaism, such as the Aquarian Minyan in Berkeley, but I questioned whether they were really Judaism. Now, of course, I wouldn't care. It's the spiritual content that counts.

Now, after many twists and turns of life's path, I have to recognize that, in a strange way, the Jews are my people. I was converted by Martin Buber, by the Baal Shem Tov, by Rabbi Nachman, by Dov Baer, by Shneur Zalman, by Isaac Luria, and, yes, by Shlomo Carlebach. Their work cannot be undone, not even by me. And that is why what is happening now [This was written in 2014.] in Gaza pains me so very, very much. Samchem, make them happy and joyful. That is my prayer now. Instead of death, let them experience the joy that is the birthright of all of us. Too many dark years have already passed. Shalom. Salaam. Peace. Peace. Peace.

Text © 2014-2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

El Gemelo / The Twin / Le Jumeau / התאום / ᏗᏂᎳᏫ

El gemelo te acompaña,
con más memoria
y conocimientos.
Escúchalo,
es tu ayudante.

The twin accompanies you,
with more memory
and knowledge.
Listen to him,
he is your helper.

Le jumeau t'accompagne,
avec plus de mémoire
et de la connaissance.
Ecoute le,
il est ton aide.

,התאום מלווה אותך
עם יותר זיכרון
.וידע
,תקשיב לו
.הוא העוזר שלך

ᏗᏂᎳᏫ ᎠᎵᎪᏁᏓᏎ ᏂᎯᏁ,
ᎤᎪᏕᏍᏗ ᎠᏅᏓᏗᏍᏗ ᎬᏙᏗ
ᎠᎴ ᎥᎦᏔᎲᎢ.
ᎭᏛᏓᏍᏚ ᎠᏨᏴ,
ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᏂᎯ ᎠᎵᏍᏕᎸᏗᏍᏙ.

Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.

Luz / Lumière / Light / ᎤᎸᏌᏓ / אור

En este mundo
hay luz
y sombra
y el otro está,
siempre está.

Dans ce monde
il y a de la lumière
et de l'ombre
et l'autre est là,
c'est toujours là.

In this world
there is light
and shadow
and the other is there,
it is always there.

ᎯᎠ ᎡᏆ-ᎡᎶᎯ ᎭᏫᎾ
ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎤᎸᏌᏓ
ᎠᎴ ᎤᏓᏴᎳᏛ
ᎠᎴ ᏐᎢ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ,
ᏂᎪᎯᎸᎢ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ.

בעולם הזה
יש אור
וצל
,והשני שם
.זה תמיד שם

Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.

The Light / ᎤᎸᏌᏓ

The light is all around us,
we only have
to let it in.

ᎤᎸᏌᏓ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᏂᎬᎾᏛ ᎢᏧᎸ ᎾᎥᏂᎨ,
ᎢᏧᎳ ᎤᏩᏌ ᎤᏚᎳᏓᏎ
ᎠᎵᏍᎪᎸᏙᏗ ᎾᏍᎩᏁ ᎠᏴᏍᏗ.

Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.