its value must be appraised by the estimate which is formed of
the writer’s general trustworthiness as a narrator, and by the
extent to which the incidents receive confirmation from other
quarters. The central fact of the Virgin-birth, as we shall
presently see, has high attestation from another early writer.
The next addition which St Matthew’s Gospel makes to our knowledge is of a different kind. It consists of various important sayings of our Lord, which are combined with discourses found in the second document and are worked up into the great utterance which we call the Sermon Discourses and Parables. on the Mount. Such grouping of materials is a feature of this Gospel, and was possibly designed for purposes of public instruction; so that continuous passages might be read aloud in the services of the Church, just as passages from the Old Testament were read in the Jewish synagogues. This motive would account not only for the arrangement of the material, but also for certain changes in the language which seem intended to remove difficulties, and to interpret what is ambiguous or obscure. An example of such interpretation meets us at the outset. The startling saying, “Blessed are ye poor,” followed by the woe pronounced upon the rich, might seem like a condemnation of the very principle of property; and when the Christian Church had come to be organized as a society containing rich and poor, the heart of the saying was felt to be more truly and clearly expressed in the words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” This interpretative process may be traced again and again in this Gospel, which frequently seems to reflect the definite tradition of a settled Church.
Apart from the important parables of the tares, the pearl and the net, the writer adds little to his sources until we come to the remarkable passage in ch. xvi., in which Peter the Rock is declared to be the foundation of the future Church, and is entrusted with the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The function of “binding and loosing,” here assigned to him, is in identical terms assigned to the disciples generally in a passage in ch. xviii. in which for the second time we meet with the word “Church”—a word not found elsewhere in the Gospels. There is no sufficient ground for denying that these sayings were uttered by our Lord, but the fact that they were now first placed upon record harmonizes with what has been said already as to the more settled condition of the Christian society which this Gospel appears to reflect.
The parables of the two debtors, the labourers in the vineyard, the two sons, the ten virgins, the sheep and goats, are recorded only by this evangelist. But by way of incident he has almost nothing to add till we come to the closing scenes. The earthquake at the moment of our Lord’s death and the subsequent appearance of departed saints are strange traditions unattested by other writers. The same is to be said of the soldiers placed to guard the tomb, and of the story that they had been bribed to say that the sacred body had been stolen while they slept. On the other hand, the appearance of the risen Christ to the women may have been taken from the lost pages of St Mark, being the sequel to the narrative which is broken off abruptly in this Gospel: and it is not improbable that St Mark’s Gospel was the source of the great commission to preach and baptize with which St Matthew closes, though the wording of it has probably been modified in accordance with a settled tradition.
The work which the writer of this Gospel thus performed received the immediate sanction of a wide acceptance. It met a definite spiritual need. It presented the Gospel in a suitable form for the edification of the Church; and it confirmed its truth by constant appeals to the Old Testament scriptures, thus manifesting its intimate relation with the past as the outcome of a long preparation and as the fulfilment of a Divine purpose. No Gospel is so frequently quoted by the early post-apostolic writers: none has exercised a greater influence upon Christianity, and consequently upon the history of the world.
Yet from the purely historical point of view its evidential value is not the same as that of St Mark. Its facts for the most part are simply taken over from the earlier evangelist, and the historian must obviously prefer the primary source. Its true importance lies in its attestation of the genuineness of the earlier portraits to which it has so little to add, in its recognition of the relation of Christ to the whole purpose of God as revealed in the Old Testament, and in its interpretation of the Gospel message in its bearing on the living Church of the primitive days.
5. Additions by St Luke.—While the needs of Jewish believers were amply met by St Matthew’s Gospel, a like service was rendered to Gentile converts by a very different writer. St Luke was a physician who had accompanied St Paul on his missionary journeys. He undertook a history of the beginnings of Christianity, two volumes of which have come down to us, entitled the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. His Gospel, like St Matthew’s, is founded on St Mark, with the incorporation of large portions of the second document of which we have spoken above. But the way in which the two writers have used the same materials is strikingly different. In St Matthew’s Gospel the original sources are frequently blended: the incidents of St Mark are rearranged and often grouped afresh according to subject matter: harsh and ambiguous sentences of both documents are toned down or interpreted. St Luke, on the contrary, chooses between parallel stories of his two sources, preferring neither to duplicate nor to combine: he incorporates St Mark in continuous sections, following him alone for a time, then leaving him entirely, and then returning to introduce a new block of his narrative. He modifies St Mark’s style very freely, but he makes less change in the recorded words of our Lord, and he adheres more closely to the original language of the second document.
In his first two chapters he gives an account of the birth and childhood of St John the Baptist and of our Lord Himself, gathered perhaps directly from the traditions of the Holy Family, and written in close imitation of the sacred stories of the Old Testament which were familiar to him in their Greek translation. The whole series of incidents differ from that which we find in St Matthew’s Gospel, but there is no direct variance between them. The two narratives are in agreement as to the central fact of the Virgin-birth. St Luke gives a table of genealogy which is irreconcilable with the artificial table of St Matthew’s Gospel, and which traces our Lord’s ancestry up to Adam, “which was the son of God.”
The opening scene of the Galilean ministry is the discourse at Nazareth, in which our Lord claims to fulfil Isaiah’s prophecy of the proclamation of good tidings to the poor. The same prophecy is alluded to in His reply to the Baptist’s messengers which is incorporated subsequently from the second document. The scene ends with the rejection of Christ by His own townsfolk, as in the parallel story of St Mark which St Luke does not give. It is probable that St Luke found this narrative in the second document, and chose it after his manner in preference to the less instructive story in St Mark. He similarly omits the Marcan account of the call of the fishermen, substituting the story of the miraculous draught. After that he follows St Mark alone, until he introduces after the call of the twelve apostles the sermon which begins with the beatitudes and woes. This is from the second document, which he continues to use, and that without interruption (if we may venture to assign to it the raising of the widow’s son at Nain and the anointing by the sinful woman in the Pharisee’s house), until he returns to incorporate another section from St Mark.
This in turn is followed by the most characteristic section of his Gospel (ix. 51–xviii. 14), a long series of incidents wholly independent of St Mark, and introduced as belonging to the period of the final journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. Much of this material is demonstrably Characteristic Section of St. Luke’s Gospel. derived from the second document; and it is quite possible that the whole of it may come from that source. There are special reasons for thinking so in regard to certain passages, as for example the mission of the seventy disciples and the parable of the good Samaritan, although they are not contained in St Matthew’s Gospel.
For the closing scenes at Jerusalem St Luke makes considerable additions to St Mark’s narrative: he gives a different account of the Last Supper, and he adds the trial before Herod and the
