Why?

The day is very hot.
Neither I, nor my dog,
nor the trees in the forest,
nor the scurrying geckos
need clothes.
And if you
think I do,
then it is you
who need me
to wear them.
Why?

Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

Naked in Nature / ᎤᏰᎸᎭ ᎬᏩᎣ ᎭᏫᎾ

Trees are the guardians
of the planet.
They have wisdom,
and stories to tell.
We feel their communication best
when our skin
is bare.

ᏡᎬᏗ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎠᎦᏘᏯᏗ
ᎡᏆ-ᎡᎶᎯ ᎥᎿᎢ.
ᎾᏍᎩᏛ ᎤᎭᏎ ᎠᎦᏙᎲᏍᏗᏁ,
ᎠᎴ ᎧᏃᎮᎸᏍᎩᏗᏁ
ᎧᏃᎮᏗ.
ᎢᏧᎳ ᎠᏒᎾᏍᏓᏎ ᎣᎯᏗ ᎤᎾᏤᎵ ᏗᏛᎪᏔᏅᏁ
ᎢᏳᏃ ᎠᏆᏤᎵ ᎦᏁᎦ
ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎤᏰᎸᎭ.

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

Renewal / ᎠᏤᎯᏐᏗᏱ / חידוש

We reach back into the past
and pull out what is good.
We pull out wisdom,
renewal of spirit,
sister- and brotherhood,
and the white path
of peace.

ᎢᏧᎳ ᎠᏙᏯᏅᎯᏓᏎ ᏧᏩᎫᏔᏅᏒ ᎾᎿᎢ
ᎠᎴ ᎠᏎᏏᎭᏎ Ꮎ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎣᏍᏛ.
ᎢᏧᎳ ᎠᏎᏏᎭᏎ ᎠᎦᏙᎲᏍᏗᏁ,
ᎠᏤᎯᏐᏗᏱᏁ ᎠᏓᏅᏙ ᎥᎿᎢ,
ᎤᎸ-ᏗᎾᏓᏅᏞᏦᏁ,
ᎠᎴ ᎤᏁᎬ ᏅᏃᎯᏁ
ᏙᎯᏱ ᎥᎿᎢ.

אנחנו חוזרים אל העבר
ולשלוף מה טוב.
אנו שולפים חוכמה,
חידוש רוח,
אחות ואחווה,
ואת השביל הלבן
של שלום.

Text © 2019 by Donald C. Jacobson בן נח Traxler (ꮨᏺꭽꮅ). Image may be freely used.

Spirit, Renewal, Peace

Shabbat Shalom!


Image by Donald C. Traxler, may be used freely.

Synoptica IX - "Minor" or "Major" Agreements?

B. H. Streeter, in his 1924 book The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, was one of the major proponents of the theory of "Markan Priority." I read his book decades ago, liked it, and for a long time I accepted its premise, which became dominant in New Testament studies. The influence of his book began to wane around 1960, as many researchers saw its weaknesses.

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.

Synoptica VIII - Further Thoughts on the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7)

A friend of ours told the following story: Virginia Woolf was leaving a house after a dinner party, and a boorish fellow held the door for her and facetiously said, "Age before beauty." Without missing a beat, Woolf said, "Pearls before swine."

That little anecdote shows how well the New Testament saying is known. It is, in fact, proverbial. And yet, it appears only in the Gospel of Matthew (Mt. 7:6). It goes back at least to the Matthew IIb layer, because it is found in Hebrew Matthew. Why did Luke not pick it up? If we look more closely at the saying, we'll see some of the reasons.

"Do not give dogs what is holy." In Rabbi Yeshua's time, the Jews often referred to the Gentiles as "dogs." We see this, for example, in the story of the Syro-Phoenician Woman (Mt. 15:21-28), where we also see that the Gentiles understood this derogatory term as referring to them. So Luke, whose Gospel was written for the Gentiles, would obviously not have included it.

But there is more to see. Instead of "that which is holy," Hebrew Matthew has "holy flesh." This is a "translation variant." {See Howard, op. cit., p. 226.] The Hebrew phrase בשר קדש (holy flesh) looks very similar to אשר קדש (that which is holy). But the similarity only exists in Hebrew, not in Greek. So the person translating Matthew from Hebrew to Greek took it to be "that which" instead of "flesh." This is good evidence for the "Semitic Substratum" in Matthew. Now, there is a principle in textual criticism by which the "more difficult" reading is probably the correct one. Certainly "flesh," being much more specific than "that which," is the more difficult reading. But what could it mean? To me, it sounds like a prohibition of mixed marriage. The reading in Hebrew Matthew is probably the correct one, while canonical, Greek Matthew has preserved a translation error.

As to the rest of the saying, "Do not throw your pearls before swine," the meaning seems clear to me. It is a warning against proselytizing. Hebrew Matthew says, "Do not give holy flesh to dogs, nor place your pearls before swine, lest (they) chew (them) and turn to rend you." Isn't this exactly what happened? But the whole saying would have been offensive to Luke's Gentile audience.

So we know why Luke didn't pick up this saying. That could also explain its absence in Mark, who was probably writing for the Romans But why, then did he omit essentially all of the material that we, without any real proof, call "Q?" This is still an unresolved question in my mind, but the most likely answer is that he never saw it.

I am struck by the very high quality of the "Q" content, especially in the "Sermon on the Mount/Plain." Ethically, it is defining for Christianity. No writer of a Gospel could afford to leave this material out,unless they were unaware of it. The "Q" material is full of catchwords, a feature of the oral transmission stage, so it probably came directly from the orally-transmitted traditions of the earliest "Christians," who were also Jews. As Papias and other ancient writers tell us, Matthew collected these sayings, or "logia," and wrote them down in Hebrew. This collecting would have taken some time, and Mark may have benefited from an early version of Matthew (which I call Matthew I), still lacking most of  this logia material. This, it seems to me, is the most likely answer. Mark, who needed to explain Jewish customs to his audience, as Matthew did not, may have himself been a Gentile. Robert Lisle Lindsey, who translated the Gospel of Mark into Hebrew, said that it was the most difficult of all the Greek Gospels to so translate. He even suggested that it may have originally been written in Latin.

The writers of the other Synoptic Gospels did not need Mark. Only three percent of Mark's content is unique to him. The easiest answer is that he used an early version of the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew I), still lacking much of the most important material. By the time of the formation of the New Testament Canon, Mark's product was obsolete. Mark's gospel was almost not admitted into the Canon, but finally was accepted because of his association with Peter, an eyewitness. All I can say at this time is that the case for "Markan Priority" is far from convincing.

(to be continued)

Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

We Are Enigmas / ᎢᏧᎳ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎤᏍᏆᏂᎪᏗᏗ

We are enigmas
to ourselves and others.
Our memories
are very short.

ᎢᏧᎳ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎤᏍᏆᏂᎪᏗᏗ
ᎣᎬᏌ ᎠᎴ ᏐᎢ ᏗᏜ.
ᎠᏆᏤᎵ ᎠᏅᏓᏗᏍᏗᏗ
ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎤᏙᎯᏳ ᏍᏆᎳᎯ.

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