Introduction
How should one read the Gospels if one shares Rosenstock-Huessy’s conviction that they knew one another and respond to one another? This question occupies me as not only a very fascinating but also a very important question. This contribution goes into it. The Gospels, so Rosenstock-Huessy establishes, are the first writings in antiquity to be in dialogue with one another, in a respectful conversation with one another. They do not wish to replace one another – that was the usual state of affairs in antiquity. Every philosophical school taught only its own truth. Every religious cult likewise. The Gospels, on the other hand, do not reject one another. They do not say to each other “no, because,” but instead “yes, but.” Admittedly, like any true dialogue, this yields abrasive truths. But precisely in this they complement one another and – that is Rosenstock-Huessy’s specific insight: in this way they bring the cross of reality to fulfillment. After all, the cross of reality means that truths that do not simply fit together still find alignment, albeit at the price of self-denial. The truths that do not fit together must make room for their opposite voice timely, because otherwise they cling to their own rightness for too long. Timing is everything. Timing is alignment, knowing when to stop. This only succeeds if you are called to order by a higher truth. That is the truth of the cross: you make the Righteous One a victim if you cling to your rightness for too long.
The four Gospels each focus on one of the four cultural currents in antiquity, but those four cultural currents also each represent one of the four poles of the cross of reality that is known and familiar to those acquainted with Rosenstock-Huessy as: legacy of the past, mandate of the future, dialogue within, effective action outside. That is always an uncomfortable tension. Those four poles of reality rub against each other and yet must find a certain alignment. They must be lifted from their joints to make room for the other poles. That is only possible if they overcome themselves and manage to stop, lifted from their own specific foundations by the Spirit of Christ. Thus, if the Gospels consistently focus on one of the four poles of the cross of reality, it is simultaneously their intention to translate that one pole upon which they focus into one or more of the other poles, and thus lead it back to the center of the cross of reality, from which they all spring.
Why the order is so important
Whoever wishes to understand this mutual dialogue that the Gospels represent, and allow it to sink in, cannot escape the question of the order of the Gospels’ origins, for you want to know who is responding to whom? Who looked over whose shoulder? Who felt compelled to say something that had already been said in a different way? You also want to know: why did this evangelist feel compelled to do so? Why did he need it, for his situation, target audience, or historical context, to say and formulate what was said yet in a different way? Where can one notice that modulation is taking place, so that what was said earlier sounds in a slightly different key?
It seems like nitpicking to ask such questions. That is why I would like to clarify this by using an example. For this, we will take Mark, because with Mark we immediately get to the important question of whether he is the first of the three synoptic Gospels or the last. Mark has no birth narratives and no resurrection narratives either. Is he familiar with them and did he omit them nonetheless? Or is his Gospel merely a first attempt, and did Matthew and Luke improve upon it? Let’s take a look.
Beginning and ending of Marcus
Mark immediately begins with the sentence “This is the beginning (or reign, arché in Greek) of the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” He also goes directly to John the Baptist and to the words “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased,” at the baptism of Jesus (Mark 1: 10). He ends his Gospel with the women fleeing from the empty tomb “seized by fear and terror.” They were so frightened that they said nothing to anyone (Mark 16:8). This is followed by an account of the appearances of Jesus, but that is a short summary, perhaps by Mark himself, of what can be read in Matthew and Luke. Half of the surviving manuscripts end with the women running away in fear and fright.
So the beginning of Mark emphasizes the Sonship of Christ. There is no teaching of Christ, except the call for the disciples to imitate him. Throughout Mark, the disciples do not understand what Jesus means, and this is actually because they are not yet ready to follow him. The women at the empty grave also do not actually realize what is going on. Or better yet, they realize it, they understand that they now also have to follow Jesus and put aside the fear of death and persecution, but they flee from it.
The beginning and end of the gospel and also the entire intermediate gospel can only be properly understood from the point of view of the persecuted church in Rome. Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Nowhere more than in Rome is it questionable whether the emperor is really in charge or not. In Rome it is a revolutionary act to state right at the beginning of your writing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God – and therefore not the emperor, who, after all, demands himself to be called the Son of God by everyone. It has often been neglected that the imperial cult in the Roman Empire began immediately from the moment Octavian took power after the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC. It also became increasingly common in the empire to put an adoptive son on the throne. When Mark writes in Rome during the persecutions under Nero, the omission of the birth stories becomes understandable. Adoption comes before birth. Moreover, the adoption of a successor as a son takes place exactly in the formula with which Jesus is addressed when he comes up from the water of baptism. The heavens then tear open (!) and the Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove and the words sound: “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased.” In Luke and Mark, Jesus is addressed directly in the second person – as did the Roman emperors with their adoptive sons. For comparison: Matthew tells the event in the third person: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” Matthew 3: 17.
Then Marks ending: it is a remarkable ending and perhaps he thinks so himself too. Perhaps that is the reason that there is also a second ending, but he still wants to leave these words hanging for a while: “They went out and fled from the tomb, for they were terrified and shaken, and they were so frightened that they said nothing to anyone” (Mark 16:8). Thus the gospel ends with a cliffhanger. Hereby the question is posed to the reader: and now you! That question was certainly on the agenda in Rome during the persecutions under Nero: do you dare to speak out for the truth and stand for the Christian faith or do you say “I run away from it?”
There is more that points in this direction. I will mention one more thing: only Mark has the parable of the seed growing up to the harvest: “26And He said, ‘The kingdom of God is like a man who sows seed on the soil: 27he sleeps and rises day by day, while the seed sprouts and grows, although he does not know how. 28The soil of itself brings forth fruit, first the blade, then the ear, and then the ripe grain in the ear 29But as soon as the grain permits, he thrusts in the sickle, because it is time for the harvest’” (Mark 4: 26 – 29). This also ties in with the experiences in Rome. Discipleship means imitation and that means persecution. Even the teaching of Jesus only includes this one fact of the imitation and the exposure to persecution that is about to come, as in this parable.
There is constant fear and misunderstanding among the disciples of what is at stake. They still do not understand the secret of the Messiahship of Jesus nor of their own discipleship. Peter in particular is always wrong. One reason some give is that Peter instructed Mark to write it down this way, especially regarding his own failure. But Mark may also have had another consideration: in this way, the followers of Jesus can recognize themselves in the disciples/apostles. They face the same dilemma. They must pass the same test. It hasn’t been easy for anyone. That’s encouraging.
These findings fit well with Rosenstock-Huessy’s view of Mark. He also believes that Mark was the secretary of Peter and wrote his version of the Gospel in Rome. The Gospel of Mark is about overcoming the imperial cultures, where the stars are in power and the emperor is the executor of these divine powers. That is the worldview of Egypt that was adopted by the Roman Empire after the Senate was put aside.
Even if it is agreed that Mark was written in Rome and tailored to the Roman situation, there remains another debate among biblical scholars about whether Matthew and Luke were written after 70 or before 70, after Mark or before Mark. The year 70, with the destruction of the temple, plays an important role in this. According to many, Mark was also written shortly after the destruction of the temple in the year 70. In the Gospels, Jesus announces that destruction, and, so the reasoning goes, this could only have been thought of in retrospect. But there are also other arguments. Those who regard Mark as a first attempt, rather imperfectly and sloppily written, and who have a greater appreciation for the poetic parallelisms of Matthew and the beautiful Greek sentences of Luke and therefore believe that Mark needs improvement, also have reasons to place the work of Matthew and Luke after Mark.
There were also important crises before the year 70
I personally see two important arguments, in addition to a large number of less important ones, for not sharing this view that Mark is a first attempt. After all, the Gospels are not an office activity but arose from crises. The Gospels provide an answer to a crisis situation. They provide orientation. After all, the cross and resurrection of Christ are themselves the answer to a crisis. The new Christian faith is often implicitly attributed to the intellect, as if it were an invention of the mind. Or it is attributed to a revelation falling from the sky, which is equally beyond the sense of crisis. In both cases a new belief enters the scene and it still has to crystallize somewhat, just as thoughts crystallize. According to many, Mark was written like this because the first generation of Christians was dying out. Matthew would then have been written later, around the year 80, and would be the product of a Jewish-Christian rabbi who gave a more Jewish interpretation and addition to the Gospel of Mark. And finally, Luke would have written his version after Matthew in order to provide the Pauline churches, which were now in the majority, with a suitable version of the gospel. That is not adequate to the real events and not adequate to the experiential dimension of the revelation of Christ. Revelation always takes place in crises. A way must be opened where there is no way. A door opens. Something happens and only then do we think. That’s what happens.
What’s going on? It is true that the law of Moses was intended to bring justice, but in the hands of Pharisees and scribes the law has become rigid and has lost all inspiration. With Christ an impossible road is paved, namely to realize justice and goodness at the expense of and with the sacrifice of one’s own life and property. Anyone who accepts death as the outcome of his commitment to justice is free. That freedom is the resurrection. Christ has gone that road, the truth and the life, so in John. In John, especially and most importantly, the cross is also the resurrection itself. Jesus Christ and the martyrs who followed him recreated the world. That is not an intellectual pursuit. It is exposure to a death that is at the same time surrender to a supratemporal life. Eternal life (aionios, according to John) can best be translated as “surpassing life”. One surpasses one’s own life-time and exceeds one’s own life-time by living for a time beyond one’s own life-time. That is the true life and the true way forward. To write something down about it that can then be studied is even suspect. Because look how the Bible scholars and scribes of our days once again turn this into an intellectual object of study behind their desk and their laptop. From that position they also reconstruct the work of the Gospel writers, who are expected to be just like themselves. They put texts together.
The second important reason why Matthew and Luke should not be placed after Mark lies in the fact that even before the year 70 crisis and persecution were already part of the reality of the believers. Why would there only be a need to write something down when the first generation of Christian believers is dying out? After the murder of Stephen, Matthew and the other apostles were confronted with the fact that the small Christian community was persecuted, murdered and dispersed. Wouldn’t they need the written word, which gives them a backbone? After all, until then, a new experience had crystallized into language in Jerusalem for about ten years. Now only the apostles were left in Jerusalem. Isn’t there a need at that moment for a concise collection of sermons and teachings? The persecuted believers themselves need this to keep their motivation alive in a dire situation, and they also need to give an account of the new way and the new truth and the new life to suspicious outsiders. Matthew originated from that necessity and crisis. In other words, because Rosenstock-Huessy himself always sees historical crises as the birthplace of a new inspiration and a new way out, he also looks at the birth hour of the Gospels in this way. And anyone who looks this way cannot avoid noticing that Matthew is inexorably the first.
Matthew fulfills the first task that followers of Christ are confronted with: to give account to rigid Jewish legalism and to take a position against it. Against rigid legalism, Matthew contrasts the Torah with the Sermon on the Mount and the path of the Son of David to the cross, where he emerges as the Son of God. For Matthew this has nothing to do with a two-nature doctrine, but with authority and status: Christ reigns over the nations sitting at the right hand of the Father. Not only for John, but also for Matthew, “the Lord” and the Father are one.
Luke’s gospel was also necessary long before the year 90, the year many believe that Luke should have been written around that time. Here too, it is about more than an intellectual development. What is the situation? Paul found wide access among the Greek-speaking proselytes, the fellow Jews, people who were attracted to the faith of Israel’s prophets because they offered a moral alternative to the immoral swamp of the Roman Empire with its violent cynicism. The Greek cities were deprived of their political autonomy. The best people who could have made a difference through moral responsibility were therefore sidelined. However, they were also sidelined within the Jewish synagogue. Due to the dietary laws and circumcision they remained outsiders. The Greek word ecclesia, popular assembly, is not by accident the word that was also used for the “parliaments” of the Greek cities. By following Jewish inspiration, as it took shape in the way of Christ, those of the leading class who meant well could take their social responsibility. They took the many poor into their homes and provided them with meals as members of the house churches founded by Paul and his associates. Thus they formed an alternative political body within the Roman Empire. They did not need to be liberated from Jewish legalism like the churches in Palestine, because they had never participated in it. They were won over by the Jewish inspiration in the Jewish-Christian communities, which gave shape to this through practical social work. But Jewish legalism was also a persistent problem that continued to haunt them, just as it haunted Paul. Actually, they were not really Jews, even though they mirrored the life of the synagogue. Are they participating just for bacon and beans as an alternative half-Jewish movement, or do they represent a serious alternative? Paul, especially in the letter to the Galatians (Galatians 2:11-14), opposes legalistic Judaism, even if Peter and others still compromise with it, and he stands up for a new community as the way of Christ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as the body of Christ. It is important that they overcome their second-class status. That is the challenge Luke faces. In the Gospel of Luke and in the Acts of the Apostles he shows the formation of the many Christian communities from the people as a logical and self-evident path. Long before the year 70, these Christian communities, with many Jewish participants, were by far the majority over the specifically Jewish-Christian communities. But if these Christian communities want to be able to maintain themselves, even under the pressure and under the coming oppression of Rome – Paul sees this coming early on – they must find recognition.
Counterbalance to Jewish legalism
Just as Paul strongly and uncompromisingly opposes even Peter and Barnabas when they give in to the legalistic Judaism of the many Pharisees and the priests who have become members of the Christian congregations in Palestine, he undoubtedly also stimulated Luke to write an adaptation of Matthew. Tensions in the young church between the Pauline course and the course of “conservative” Jerusalem have risen high. Luke and Paul wanted the Christians from the nations to participate fully. After the murder of James, one of the sons of Zebedee, by Herod (Acts 12:2), and after the departure of Peter from Jerusalem, James, the brother of Jesus, took over the leadership of the church in Jerusalem. In the debate that follows, he plays a decisive role and says, according to Acts 15: 23: “For in almost every city the law of Moses has been proclaimed from time immemorial and read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” Although he uses that insight to persuade the church in Jerusalem to approve the course of Paul and Barnabas, and not to ask for circumcision from the nations and to maintain the dietary laws, he is actually also saying: it will never become mainstream anyway! So let it go. Paul and Luke must therefore seek opposition with the Gospel of Luke and with Acts precisely in order to break open such a narrow insight. Luke traveled to Rome with Paul and undoubtedly he would have brought his version of the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles with him.
Here is the existential need from which the Gospel of Luke and the Acts emerged. They thus complete the next task that the young Christian congregations face, namely to translate the inspiration of Israel to the situation and problems of the wealthy leaders of the new Christian congregations. For them, the Christian way has become attractive as an alternative ecclesia in the midst of the moral degradation of the Roman Empire. It makes it possible to work on change without turning to rebellion.
The Gospels evoke each other
In Rome, during the few years that Paul was able to walk freely there and that Peter joined him or was perhaps already there, Mark wrote a gospel that accomplishes three things at the same time:
1. In his gospel he bridges the contradictions between Luke and Matthew. In doing so he makes Luke and Matthew not mutually exclusive gospels, but merely divergent versions of the one gospel.
2. He allows the voice of Peter to be heard in his gospel. We don’t know how literally to take it that Peter had Mark as a secretary. How independently did Mark work? But there are many texts and short interjections that reveal the presence of an eyewitness.
3. Mark responds with his Gospel to a new need, the existential need of the persecuted Christian community in Rome who, like Christ in the desert, must be protected by the angels from the wild beasts, and who, like the women from the grave, have the tendency to run away with fear in their legs because of the discovery that their exposure to persecution and death is true life, the resurrection itself. This is your hour, the hour of truth.
In “The Fruit of our Lips,” Rosenstock-Huessy argues that the Gospels do not merely provide four juxtaposed points of view. More than that: they evoke each other. Because they answer to the “shortcomings” of each other. The word shortcomings should be in quotation marks, because perhaps I should say one-sidedness and that is not the right word either. They are, as it were, always involved in a different problem, which means they have to answer on a different front within the cross of reality.
1. Matthew stands up for the rejected Righteous One against the Jewish legalism that has ossified into a we-group. He stands up against the tribalism in Israel, according to Rosenstock-Huessy.
2. Luke distills the Spirit from Jewish legalism and the associated temple service. Zacharias in the temple can no longer speak. Such is the telling start of Luke’s gospel. The Spirit of Israel is now being translated into the new reality of the dangerous path that the Christian communities founded by Paul follow in the decadent Roman Empire. Luke and Acts should be read as connected. In this way Luke doses the Spirit of Israel into the lives of the nations like a doctor his medicine.
3. Mark bridges the contradictions between Matthew and Luke by providing the Christian community in Rome, consisting of Christians and Jews, with a backbone in the persecutions under Nero and afterwards. Opposed to the Empire ideology of the Son of the Star Powers is the belief in the martyred Christ as the adoptive Son of the God who is exalted above the stars and who expels the demons of the petrified Roman Empire through the church that is now a replacement temple, made of living building blocks. Mark turns against the Empire’s ideology in the name of the suffering Christ.
4. John turns these experiences into a universally valid insight. He writes a poem about Jesus Christ as the Word from the beginning, a word told until the end of time and containing more stories than all books can contain. Every human story is included. So Rosenstock-Huessy. But I will not discuss John further here. That will come.
In this way the Gospels evoke each other. The changing historical context makes a translation of the earlier Gospel to a new pole of the cross of reality inevitable.
Just an opinion? Or supported by text analysis.
But is that also justified from the texts? Can we say with any certainty that Mark comes after Matthew and even Luke, or does that remain a matter of arbitrary interpretation? What does New Testament science say about this? I thought I should dig into that, as best as a non-professional New Testament scholar can do. That results in quite a large number of pages and that is why in this blog I only provide a first introduction with references to the various chapters in German, Dutch and English on my own website: https://temporavitae.nl/gospel-studies/
The reader will find the following 8 chapters there:
1. The four Gospels at the crossroads in history
2. Butler on the priority of Matthew
3. Farrer on the redundancy of a source “Q” for Matthew and Luke
4. Goulder’s view on Luke
5. Farmer: Mark after Luke
6. One gospel out of two
7. Robinson on the dating of the Gospels, all before 70
8. The message of Mark – for whom and why?
Actually, the last chapter is the most important, the most central and the longest, twenty-five A4 pages. The above is more or less a summary of that. It addresses the question of what Mark’s message is. Even people who are willing to admit that on the basis of mere textual analysis Mark could be of a later date, and that this is even likely, are often of the opinion that it is not plausible on substantive grounds: a short gospel, omission of important parts, colloquialism, sloppy style. But the pieces that precede this longer piece of 25 A4 pages, usually no more than 10 A4 pages, focus on text analysis. The question is: what grounds are there for placing Mark later or earlier? And was Luke written before Mark or later, after Mark? Most probably all four Gospels were written before the year 70, as Robinson suggests.
I briefly indicate the contents:
1. The four Gospels at the crossroads in history
A short introductory part as an introduction to the whole.
2. Butler on the priority of Matthew
As early as 1951, Butler wrote a book about the priority of Matthew. According to him, Matthew was written earlier than Mark and Luke and he argues this on the basis of comparative textual analysis of these Gospels. It is also an introduction for the reader to a certain way of arguing, as is common among New Testament scholars. It is never about conclusive or indisputable evidence, but about a network of meanings and an accumulation of clues.
3. Farrer on the redundancy of a source “Q” for Matthew and Luke
Farrer has become known because, although he continues to see Mark as the first gospel, he also believes that Luke is an adaptation of Matthew. Luke therefore had Mark and Matthew in front of him, but not a separate source from which Matthew and Luke would draw together, especially for the words of Jesus.
Goulder is on Farrer’s trail and has continued in that trail. He thus maintains Mark’s priority and has especially examined the relationship between Matthew and Luke. Moreover, his thesis is that the Gospels have been used from the very beginning for the liturgical gatherings of the church. Luke and Matthew should be read in parallel with the Jewish reading schedules.
Farmer’s 1964 book made an impression on many. The Rosenstock-Huessy Society also held a conference on it in 1965 for a select group. According to Farmer, Mark drew from two sources, Matthew and Luke, and it can also be established with a degree of certainty that this is indeed the case. The reader must take into account that irrefutable logical proof cannot be provided. It always involves a network of and an accumulation of arguments and clues. Farmer, with a team and a worldwide network of New Testament scholars, convened many conferences in the 1970s and 1980s on the so-called synoptic question. All the different hypotheses and theories about the origins of the Gospels and their interrelationships were discussed in those conferences, where Farmer and his team always brought their research into the discussion. This has seriously undermined the self-evidence with which Mark was for a long time seen as the first Gospel. Many theologians and also New Testament scholars who have delved less deeply into the issue continue to carry these old self-evident facts with them in their spiritual baggage (and worse, in their sermons).
The team around Farmer published a book in 2002 about the way in which Mark used Matthew and Luke. The book provides a very detailed analysis, text by text, and on that basis attempts to reconstruct what Mark did with Luke’s and Matthew’s texts and how that relates to other interpretations. The title of the book is “One Gospel from Two” and of course it encompasses more than can be briefly stated. An important argument they put forward is that of the “Marcan overlay”. By this they mean that Mark has a network of words and expressions and accents that can only be found in Mark. Partly on this they base their statement that Mark is the third gospel, as Farmer also does. After all, if Matthew and Luke had used Mark, you would expect that some of this network of typical Mark expressions would also be found in those Gospels. Quod nun.
7. Robinson on the dating of the Gospels, all before 70
Robinson had already planned to write a commentary on John, in which he wanted to argue that the Gospel of John originated before the year 70. It would have been written by… John, the brother of James, the sons of Zebedee. According to Robinson, it is possible that John did not complete his Gospel until the end of his life, but his tradition and story is that of an eyewitness. However, to reinforce that view, he also wrote a book on the dating of all New Testament writings. In it he argues and substantiates that all Gospels originated before the year 70, before the fall of Jerusalem.
8. The message of Mark – for whom and why?
Here I weave the analyzes presented in 1 to 7 into a whole. This helps to provide a historical-theological view of Mark, but actually of all three Synoptic Gospels. But I don’t need to go into that further, because the present text itself already provides a summary of it. However, I thought it necessary to also go into text analysis to see how far one can get when one looks for traces of historical events like a kind of detective. Speaking of “detectives”, it is striking that the English New Testament scholars started this type of meticulous research and have always taken the lead in it.
To be continued
I have not yet sufficiently discussed the Gospel of John. I hope to be able to do that on another occasion. There is also more to be said about the treatment of Matthew by Luke and of both of them by Mark than I have been able to say here. The next task is to bring these insights into a more strict relationship with Rosenstock-Huessy’s view of the four cultural streams of antiquity. After all, he sees the Gospels at the intersection of those four: imperial culture, tribal culture, Israel and Greece. So, to be continued.
