MacQuarrie: Principles of Christian Theology

Principles of Christian Theology, Second Edition
John MacQuarrie
Paperback, 544 pages
SCM Press, 2003

A very readable existentialist, panenthieistic theology. MacQuarrie discusses as lucidly as anyone the concepts of authentic existence, being, transcendence, and the rest of the language of existentialism and dialectical theology. The author’s thinking draws evenly from tradition and continental philosophy, particularly Heidegger. In the first part of the book, really a prolegomena to a systematic theology, he charts a middle way between Bultmann and Barth, interacting with Tillich, Buber, Pannenberg, Niebuhr, and other theologians. The last two parts are a systematic discussion of classic doctrines read symbolically and existentially.

Though revised in 1977, Principles of Christian Theology is still dated and limited to a particular phase of theological discourse. MacQuarrie seems haunted by the specter of positivism, though that tension has long receded to background noise. He is given to considering Freud and Marx over the insights of cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy of mind. He engages in philosophical theology while devaluing analytical philosophy and natural theology, a conceding of ground quite typical of his contemporaries.

Abraham Malherbe on Anti-Intellectualism in the Church

[Following are portions of a talk Dr. Malherbe gave at Pepperdine University, as published in Declaring God's Good News, 1964.]

…It reveals a certain uneasiness, and more seriously, a sense of insecurity which is the real basis for the uneasiness. Surely our faith and our appeal are deserving of more confidence. We cannot afford to allow the fact that this enterprise is strange to some of us and therefore makes us uneasy, deny its legitimacy to others, to whom it is natural, and, indeed, necessary. If we do so, we shall only appear to be placing a premium on ignorance, and this is a disservice to the Christian faith.

Just as it is the intellectual’s responsibility to correct his view of the intellectual life, so certainly it is the duty of his opponent to learn to understand, if he cannot appreciate, that life properly….The response frequently offered, that when the Gospel is represented on a level a twelve-year old can understand it will answer all needs of all men, and can be understood by all men is both unrealistic and untrue. Such a response, besides leaving the questioner unsatisfied, also leaves the suspicion that anti-intellectualism is as much a kind of snobbery as intellectualism.

…If we are to take the Great Commission seriously, we must grant that “every creature” has a significance other than contributing to a geographical distribution of preachers. Surely “every creature” includes the intellectual. Or are we Calvinistic enough in this respect to damn him before we speak to him? If we do deign to speak to him about Christ, do we become all things to him, and speak to him in terms that are real to him, or do we insist on speaking to him as to a twelve-year old? Whose example shall we be following if we do this? Certainly not that of Paul. Paul was familiar with the intellectual currents of his own day. He knew that they revealed the needs of man, and he knew how to approach men in those terms.

…Let us put away recrimination and suspicion. Let us put into practice Paul’s conviction that the body consists of many members who have many different functions. Let us be concerned to develop the part God has given us, and have a care for one another. Let us all show our knowledge of the more excellent way as together we strive to build up the body of our Lord who died for us all.

Are All Things Permitted?

Given my previous discussions, in what sense can it be said that the Bible is inspired? I want to articulate the beginnings of a theory of inspiration, one I will call via media (VM) for the time being. VM inspiration, as I conceive it, allows for a high view of the Scriptures while not positing an over-riding form of God’s control. I will try to juxtapose it to a nebulous ‘conservative’ view and even more nebulous ‘liberal’ view. I will avoid talking about inerrancy, not because I don’t think it applies, but simply because I don’t want to parse the word.

On my VM view, Yahweh provided ‘epiphanies’ and set the boundaries for the writing but left the rest to the human authors. He constrained the writers’ personal freedom rather than overran it (via negativa?). It might be thought of as akin to the divine intervention in Acts 16 that kept Paul from preaching in certain areas: God did not need to direct Paul to a certain place in this case (no doubt preaching in any number of areas would have been very good), but it was his will that certain areas be avoided. The particular type of ephiphany is not specified, but it is clear that there was a conscious interaction with Paul rather than a psychological over-ride. My illustration is, admittedly, quite terrible, but let me explain why I take this route.

The stand-by liberal option is that the Bible contains the inspired message of God, infallible in leading to salvation but allowing for all sorts of non-inspired flotsam and jetsam. This is just too convenient. Rather than simply saying that the message of the Bible is inspired but the words are not, VM keeps Scripture as a normative, authoritative text; Scripture itself, not tradition and ethics that may be culturally and historically rooted in it, but otherwise removed from its intent. It also affirms that what the Bible says happened really happend, within the limits of responsible exegesis. At the same time, VM allows the Bible to speak authentically. By this I mean that the different literatures are read by the rules of their particular genre, not to mention by the rules of regular human communication. A thinned-out plenary verbal inspiration doesn’t account for the diversity of the Scriptures, at least not as easily. To digress, this is the kind of thing that makes me prefer the designation Scriptures against Bible, because the former admits its plurality whereas the latter is an artificial monolith.

The variety among the books of Scripture is more easily explained as the product of men and communities of people first, and secondarily as the handiwork of God. The material is too occasional, or incidental; too lacunal to have fallen from heaven into the minds of human writers. Such a top-down, heavy-handed inspiration makes, for example, dialogues between the patriarchs and Yahweh nonsensical, because the opportunity for real interaction and reciprocity is lost if God is the one speaking on both sides of the conversation. VM lets the dialogue, the poem, the lament, and the epistle be what they are. It also makes sense of the Bible’s own tacit descriptions of inspiration. For instance, no further divine intervention is needed to explain John’s Revelation. If God’s modus operandi is to impel the writer on some psychological level, why bother with visions? Similarly, the motivation and source behind Luke-Acts and other historiographic books are clear: the writers/editors/compilers consulted other records to meet the needs of their community.

There is no reason pretheoretically to think that accepting VM inspiration would change conservative Christian worship and practice. Whereas the liberal view can ignore biblical ethics, VM takes them seriously. I would almost say that conservative judgments on orthopraxy (role of women, leadership, marriage…) would not change at all, but this is somewhat misleading. A re-examination of the cultural centeredness of the texts becomes warranted. However, this is nothing new even with the most fundamentalist hermeneutics. Jesus’ command not to take provisions in the evangelizing work, for example, is understood to be situation-specific.

Applied to Paul’s theologizing in 1 Corinthians 10.1-6, we could accept both that it is a product of Paul’s own imagination and that it is of God. From the Christian perspective everything points to Christ in some way and he was the rock in some sense, the specifics of which remain for modern theologians. Yahweh’s protective spirit allowed this interpretation because it expressed an appropriate way to think about the centrality of Christ and drew a legitimate lesson from the sojourn story.

Paul Ad Hoc: The Rock was Christ

Earlier I began to explore a view of the inspiration of the Bible that would allow biblical writers greater room for personal creativity and would explain certain phenomena in the biblical texts as human literary activity rather than Divinely-communicated truths. Later I wish to say a few more things about the implications of this, but presently I will discuss a better example of what I consider to be theological creativity, one less threatening and easier to see. In 1 Corinthians Paul identifies Jesus as “the rock” of the Israelites’ desert journey. Was Paul moved by God to say this? Were these events in the Torah meant to prefigure Christ in a way that was only understood by Christians in retrospect?

For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they were all drinking from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. But God was not pleased with most of them, for they were cut down in the wilderness. These things happened as examples for us, so that we will not crave evil things as they did. —1 Corinthians 10.1-6, NET Bible

Contextually the issue is Christian conduct. Paul warns that they are in a position similar to the Israelites and that, as the latter failed, so could they. There are a few issues in this passage I’d like to deal with briefly. I think that Paul was using a classic interpretive method to draw in the Scriptures for his immediate needs, but not allegorizing deeply. I find his use of typoi (τύποι/τύπος) to be non-technical. However, it isn’t currently important to decide if Paul meant this as mere example or strict typology. Though, if the view of inspiration I’ve been articulating is correct, then the understanding of New Testament typologies would be affected; many would be ‘reduced’ in some sense to an intertextuality. Further, whether or not the apostle was influenced by Philonic Wisdom theology¹ or by a rabbinic interpretation of Numbers 21.17² are interesting questions but are not decisive, and I think more conservative views of inspiration could account for them. I must nonetheless point out that both of these issues are more easily accounted for by a more liberal bibliology.

That Paul was composing by the seat of his pants becomes clear as he reads Christian theology back onto the Torah, “baptized into Moses.” Here at least it’s quite clear that Paul is speaking poetically: the Israelites most certainly were not baptized in any recognizable way. Paul intertwines the Christian sacrament with Tanakhic imagery. Spiritualizing the food, the drink, and the rock, he uses these as metaphors for the spiritual life of his audience. In saying that the rock followed the Israelites he may be drawing from rabbinic tradition helpful to his aims or even conflating the rock-spring with the ‘YHWH the rock’ trope. This is perfectly consistent with his interpretive methodology. In fact, it is his purpose and audience that should be studied here, not his hermeneutics. In verse seven he does ‘work’ with the Scriptural text, but here he only uses it to paint a picture.

The clause “the rock was Christ” is especially ad hoc. Depending on how Paul came up with the “rock that followed them,” it seems to be an odd bit of theologizing, unconnected to the context and unnecessary. I don’t think there is much weight behind it. It could easily have been a rhetorical flourish, just Paul getting caught up in his own metaphor. If it was more than an off-hand remark the connection might be with 1 Corinthians 1.10-17, meant for unifying them around Christ in light of their schisms, or rooting his ethical appeal to the believing community on solid ground. Either way, to insist that the apostle was giving new revelation about the rock-spring is to miss what Paul was after. Better, I think, to accept that he was not looking to make historical identifications for them, but to identify current realities.³ Paul was doing theology broadly, not exegeting or conveying special knowledge.

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[1] Philo, Legum Allegariae 2.86, ‘the flinty rock is the Wisdom of God.’

[2] The rabbinic texts behind this, and whether the Rabbis combined this with Exodus 17 or Paul meshed his text with this tradition, are unknown to me.

[3] James Dunn doesn’t even see this a good proof-text for Jesus’ preexistence, much less a literal identification of the rock. See Christology in the Making, 183.

Cogito, Ergo Summus?

The philosophy that came after “the cogito” is very debatable, but you have to love how Descartes gets there, his deep skepticism, and the foundation of one’s thinking self. Philosophy at its best, before it got utterly unreadable. But in Persons and Bodies, Lynne Baker includes an argument that would modify Descartes’ ergo sum.

Baker’s Constitution View is thoroughly materialist and maintains that the mind is a product of higher brain functions.[1] Although the mind would not have to be constituted by an organic body, and thus her view would leave room for something of an immaterial soul (being, really), Descartes’ soul-body dichotomy and his epistemological conclusions are destroyed. In articulating her conception of what makes a mere human organism a person, Baker shows that not only could Descartes know that he himself exists, but that other things exist too. This because of the relational character of robust first-person perspective.

With one bit of simplified notation, here is her argument:

(1) x has a first-person perspective if and only if x can think of herself as herself.[2]

(2) x can think of herself as herself only if x has concepts that can apply to things different from x.

(3) x has concepts that can apply to things different from x only if x has had interactions with things different from x. [3]

Though Descartes questioned empirical knowledge, he did not question empirical categories. To have a sense of oneself as oneself, one must have interacted with other things. Therefore other things exist. Baker’s metaphysic is exceptionally elegant—it is so intuitive you can anticipate nearly every step. This argument is an unexpected and fascinating consequence of it.

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[1] Strictly speaking, Baker argues in terms of persons and mental properties. I’m re-centering the terms and concepts for this context.

[2] Following Hector-Neri Castaneda, the second personal pronoun is himself* (“himself star”), which marks an attributive first-person reference to oneself. In establishing strong first-person phenomena as the basis for personhood, Baker takes great care to explain this ‘reflexive’ notion as beyond simple perspective. But this is not needed here.

[3] Lynne Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72

Barr on Natural Theology

The relevance of chapter 27, “Natural Theology within Biblical Theology,” in the 600-page (not including endnotes) The Concept of Biblical Theology eluded me until the conclusion. The author writes:

Biblical theology—not only in its ‘canonical’ forms—has tended to be a very closed, inward-looking discipline. […] The main attraction has lain in gaining the maximum concentration of all the possible biblical aspects, for the Bible’s theology is right there, inside the Bible. The witness of the elements close to natural theology is that this is not so: the Bible itself points to things that come from outside and—at least sometimes—welcomes these resources. There is therefore no closed organism of biblical theology: it is not self-contained, it is open, perhaps in various directions. This makes a great difference to the whole way in which the subject is approached. (494-495)

Part of Barr’s enterprise has been to show that biblical theology is not easily separated either from dogmatic theology (‘pan-biblical theologians want and need the developed christology and trinitarianism of the fourth century,’ 584) or historical criticism (see …Pure Biblical Theology). In this chapter he shows that the biblical theologian must account for the Bible’s appropriation of “certain realities lying outside the ‘special’ zone of revelation” (495). This includes things such as Paul’s natural theology apologetic at the Areopagus and in Romans 1-2, and Egyptian Wisdom influence on Proverbs 22.17-23.

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James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective. London: SCM Press, 1999

Barr on History in Biblical Theology

James Barr seems at his most trenchant when clarifying concepts normally taken for granted. Though we move easily between the various meanings of “history” in biblical study, Barr helpfully delineates its functions, though, as he himself points out, his categories are by no means mutually exclusive. I hope to make my paraphrase of Barr in The Concept of Biblical Theology (347 ff.) faithful yet more lucid.

1. The compositional paradigm, seen in the establishment of authorship, dates, and literary relationships.

2. The positivistic paradigm, which has the interest of tying biblical characters, places, and events to external history. Barr points out that this is clearly related to the above in that compositional data are helpful toward this goal.

3. The archaeological paradigm, more broad in scope, which uses the Bible as only one data point in its reconstruction of the history of Israel. It not only draws on native material culture but on any foreign sources that can illuminate the subject.

4. The history-as-revelation paradigm, namely that God acted in history and is know in that way. Barr: “It distinguishes biblical religion from (all?) other religion.”

5. The “historical reading” paradigm, which has the same interests as any historical criticism but without the concomitant skepticism and source analysis.

To this could be added a sixth, James Barr’s own “story.” Rather than getting caught up in the details of historical criticism or the systematization of a more doctrinal/dogmatic approach, this model seeks to do justice to the narrative of the Hebrew Scriptures, drawing from the above in differing proportions. Barr spends this chapter, “Story and Biblical Theology”, elaborating on it.

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James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective. London: SCM Press, 1999

The Finger of God and the Kingdom, 3

[Part 1]  [Part 2]

In Luke 11.14-21 the evangelist has demonstrated great fidelity in his work. His text is in close agreement with the independent Matthean tradition. Additionally, he has preserved an obscure word, a redundant clause, and a difficult Hebraism.

These last two things also tell us that Luke has gotten us very close to the actual words of Jesus. The causal clause in Luke 11.19 may not look good on paper, but it’s entirely natural speech: oral communication is full of redundancy. The finger of God saying is so infrequently attested and so otherwise inexplicable that it must be original. Combining this with the setting of Jesus’ saying and the well-known authenticity of his Kingdom of God theme, we have a sure data point from which to sketch out some implications for the character and activity of Jesus of Nazareth.

First let me first expound a bit on the key phrase. Turner, as quoted before, is right to connect finger of God to hand of God. This phrase, in turn, is part of the arm of God trope, which stands for God’s power.

The symbol of the arm outstretched, or made bare (much the same idea in view of E dress), is used especially of the Lord to portray his mighty acts, referring often to the deliverance of Israel from Egypt (Ex. 6:6, etc.), also to other acts of judgment or salvation evidenced or sought (Is. 51:9; Ezk. 20:33).…The powerful arm of the Lord is contrasted with the puny arm of man, ‘an arm of flesh’ (2 Ch. 32:8).[1]

But the idea of strength does not exhaust the metaphor of hand of God which can have the sense of ‘manipulation,’ of activity and work. For example, Abel’s blood, or life, was ‘taken’ by the hand of Cain (Genesis 4.11). The finger of God goes further in this direction. It isn’t simply metonymic for hand but synecdochic, and therefore does something more. With this more specific metonym we are at an expression once removed from hand as a figure of speech related to God’s power. We can say this because of the nature of this kind of idiomatic expression. Wheels works better for car than most other parts of an automobile because the wheels are critical for what it does (compared to the doors at least). Wheels doesn’t indicate the heaviness of the machine or its size, but its locomotion, its ability to transport. A finger’s association to the hand is not in the strength of the hand, but rather its manipulation, its discrete action. The finger is an instrument of creative work, of a more specialized use than an arm or a hand; an action on a narrower, more specific scale.

Returning, then, to the primary texts alluded to in the climax of the Beelzebul controversy, we can see the nuance of finger of God. The Jews would not have missed Jesus’ clear allusion to the Torah. At Exodus 8.19 the Egyptians confess that the gnats are brought on by God’s finger. To be sure, this does point to God’s power, the strength in God’s hand to act.[2] But the Egyptian magicians weren’t awed merely by the power of the act, but by their inability to reproduce it. This was beyond their magic and revealed that a true deity was at work. This could be overlooked were it not for the other occurrences of this idiom. In Exodus 31.18, the sheer power of inscribing the tablets of the Decalogue was not at issue. What made them special was the very touch of God upon them. Deuteronomy 9.9-10 makes the point even more starkly:

When I went up the mountain to receive the stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord made with you, I remained on the mountain for forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water. And the Lord gave me the two stone tablets written with the finger of God; on them were all the words that the Lord had spoken to you at the mountain out of the fire on the day of the assembly. (NRSV)

The covenant had been made by Yahweh, and so had the tablets. The emphasis is on God’s own action and interaction with his people.

This puts us in a position to synthesize the preceding. When Jesus said that he expelled the demons not by Beelzebul but by the finger of God, he was saying that God’s direct touch was involved. Yahweh, the redeemer of Israel, was working through Jesus in an intimate and immanent way. The Kingdom of God was truly upon them.[3]

A number of things are thus revealed about Jesus, and it’s worth highlighting at least two. First, his locus in Judaism and the Tanakh. He was not a moral philosopher, but a Jewish prophet who operated within that ambit. Second, Jesus saw himself as inaugurating God’s kingdom in a real and physical way. It was no abstraction to him. This kingdom was not simply working in the hearts and minds of men—it was working in the world around them.

While I don’t care for the ‘liar, lunatic, or Lord’ apologetic, it does at least get one thing right: Jesus’ claims were not at all ordinary.

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[1] New Bible Dictionary, Second Edition, 83

[2] There is certainly a connection to Exodus 7.5 where Yahweh promises this kind of recognition from the Egyptians. He would use his hand to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. This, however, was a general statement and was clearly not meant to predict the response of specific Egyptians, much less the magicians. The finger of God in 8.19, then, does not stand for the hand of God of 7.5.

[3] It’s clear why the Matthew and Mark follow with the culpability of Jesus’ opposers in failing to recognize the source of his actions. The pagan magicians recognized God’s ‘handiwork’ when they saw it, and so should have the scribes and Pharisees. To attribute such an expression of Yahweh’s own hand to a demon is a most severe blasphemy.

James Barr on Pure Biblical Theology

In The Concept of Biblical Theology, Barr writes on approaches to this enterprise and how it is conceived of as different from and located between biblical studies and doctrinal theology (biblical theology/biblical theology). In chapter eight Barr quotes Brevard Childs on how he perceives the difference between what he does and the History of Religion approach:

The approach is that of tracing traditio-historical trajectories from within the tradition, rather than approaching the material from a history-of-religions perspective which strives for an allegedly objective description of religious phenomena. (108)

Barr then writes:

How does a ‘tradito-historical trajectory’ really differ from a proposal within the history of religion? Why should we suppose that the history of religion ‘falsely compartmentalizes the material’, and if this is true then why is it not also true of the traditio-historical categories which Childs himself embraces on the same page? How does Childs know that ‘religion in general’, i.e. all religion, is a ‘human response seeking to merit God’s favour’? Unless he has studied all religions, which would be a history-of-religion undertaking, he cannot know whether this is the case or not. Is not the idea that religions seek to ‘merit God’s favour’ a mere reflection from one current of Christianity, based on no real study of other religions? Above all, are the ‘trajectories’ really ‘historical’, in the sense that they can be established, verified and falsified through historical methods, or are they really purely theological connections expressed as if they were historical ‘trajectories’? The weakness in these arguments is not untypical of many attempts to dissociate biblical theology from the history of religion. (108, 109)

This is quite typical of what he does in other chapters on, for example, “non-theological study.” There, in showing that biblical theology cannot stand apart from exegesis with its philology and historical criticism, Barr says, “The references to cultural and geographical realia are part of the meaning: without them the text becomes, at relevant points, empty words.” (79)

The point he’s making is that biblical theology cannot theologize out of its own entrails—a purely theological approach only works with philosophical theology. Biblical theology must interact with the text and in so doing cannot avoid these other approaches. He specifically draws on the influence of dialectical theology and its desire to avoid ‘apologetics.’ Barr says it isn’t avoidable. Once you start to exegete, it’s impossible to avoid the question of veracity.

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James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective. London: SCM Press, 1999

The Finger of God and the Kingdom, 2

[Part 1]

Having examined Mt 12.25,26 and Lk 11.17,18 it is readily apparent that Matthew and Luke preserve the same story of Jesus’ confrontation with his opposers. Close analysis reveals both the earlier, underlying form of the story and the proclivities of the individual evangelists. In this portion of the narrative Matthew leans toward editing his source for literary or theological reasons. Conversely, Luke follows Q very closely and has resisted making changes to the tradition even when his literary sensibilities would seem to make him likely to do so. The gospels continue (NRSV):

Mt 12.27,28

If I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own exorcists cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.

Lk 11.19,20

Now if I cast out the demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your exorcists cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.

The agreement here is striking in its exactness, with a single, pivotal exception to be considered shortly. The minor differences in how they begin (If/Now if) should be ignored, as the conjunctions are essentially equivalent.[1] There are, however a few other minor exceptions not visible in translation and I will discuss them presently.

Mt 12.27,28

καὶ εἰ ἐγὼ ἐν ‹Βεελζεβοὺλ ἐκβάλλω τὰ δαιμόνια, οἱ υἱοὶ ὑμῶν ἐν τίνι ἐκβάλλουσιν; διὰ τοῦτο ˜αὐτοὶ κριταὶ ἔσονται ὑμῶν˜. εἰ δὲ ἐν πνεύματι θεοῦ ἐγὼ ἐκβάλλω τὰ δαιμόνια, ἄρα ἔφθασεν ἐφ’ ὑμᾶς ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ.

Lk 11.19,20

εἰ δὲ ἐγὼ ἐν ‹Βεελζεβοὺλ ἐκβάλλω τὰ δαιμόνια, οἱ υἱοὶ ὑμῶν ἐν τίνι ἐκβάλλουσιν; διὰ τοῦτο ˜αὐτοὶ ὑμῶν κριταὶ ἔσονται˜. εἰ δὲ ἐν δακτύλῳ θεοῦ °[ἐγὼ] ἐκβάλλω τὰ δαιμόνια, ἄρα ἔφθασεν ἐφ’ ὑμᾶς ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ.[2]

One first notices the high degree of agreement even in word order with relatively few textual variants. It is true that corruption due to scribal harmonization of the two accounts could produce this indistinguishable similarity, but that kind of unwarranted skepticism would throw out the synoptic gospels altogether.  What mitigates against this possibility—besides general text-critical principles—is that this is not the kind of devotional or confessional passage that is likely to be so memorable as to be conflated.

The variants on Beelzebul are inconsequential spelling differences, indicative perhaps of the provenance of the archetypal manuscripts. The variance within the phrase “they will be your judges” is to be expected given the flexibility the language. The words themselves are the same and so the NRSV translators took Matthew and Luke to be identical, the difference in their final forms in the Nestle-Aland 26th being a function of their individual transmission.[3]

The explanation for the omission of Luke’s ego in some manuscripts is self-evident: since the subject of the verb is clear from its inflection the first-person pronoun is unnecessary, and was therefore easily overlooked by scribes at various points in the transmission process. For this reason the weight of the manuscripts that omit it have no bearing. Consider that while ego serves a purpose in the first verse (of both accounts), stressing Jesus’ exorcism over others’, it does not do so in the second verse making accidental omission more likely.

My purpose in dragging this out is to underscore that textual corruption has not obscured what the evangelists wrote and that Matthew and Luke must both be following the tradition perfectly to get this kind of agreement.[4] Now we come to where they diverge. Matthew has “the Spirit of God” as the means of exorcism, Luke has “the finger of God.”

In determining the more primitive version, Matthew’s narrative leading into the pericope and his conclusion to it weigh heavily. In 12.15-18 Matthew has Jesus fulfilling the words of Isaiah 42, the servant upon whom is active God’s spirit. Concomitant with this, and even more telling, is Matthew’s arranging of dominical sayings to condemn the Pharisees. He has inserted two paragraphs of denunciation between the pericope under consideration and the ‘wandering spirit’ (Mt 12.43-45/Lk 11.24-26), with which Luke follows immediately. Matthew ends the Beelzebul encounter, not with the rather soft Lukan “Whoever is not with me is against me…” (11.26), but with the severest of strictures: “Whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come” (Mt 12.32).

For this condemnation to stick, it must be clear to Matthew’s audience that the Pharisees have indeed spoken against the Spirit (κατὰ τοῦ πνεύματος τοῦ ἁγίου). For Matthew the finger of God would not do as the means of exorcism.[5] He must have the Spirit there and must therefore emend the tradition if it is not so. This, together with Matthew’s redactional activity thus far, makes his text suspect.

Luke might well have an agenda also. Since he has just concluded relating Jesus’ teaching on prayer with “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” in 11.8—immediately preceding the Beelzebul encounter—he would be predisposed to have Jesus’ exorcism accomplished by means of this spirit. So it is exceptionally hard to explain why Luke would write this odd anthropomorphic saying if he had a much easier reading in front of him, one that so suited him. Attempts to make sense of this fail utterly. Turner, after discounting one unsatisfactory hypothesis, says:

The shift in terminology (a clear reference to Ex 8:19 [LXX Ex 8:15]) is probably in the interest of Luke’s prophet like Moses christology but still refers to the Spirit; cf. the parallel term “the hand of the Lord,” which was interpreted to refer to the Spirit.[6]

This doesn’t satisfy. Luke, despite his facility with the Scriptures, would not have changed the text to such an arcane phrase; certainly not for Theophilus. It is Matthew who makes the change avoiding a difficult reading, just as he did with “—for you say that I cast out the demons by Beelzebul.” Luke, then, has the earlier expression.

[Part three forthcoming]

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[1] Perhaps Luke (δὲ) saw more contrast than did Matthew (καὶ), or Matthew saw δὲ in Q a simple conjunction.

[2] I have attempted to reproduce the sigla from the NA26 in a way that I hope will be obvious.

[3] Apparently no difference was found even in emphasis. I’m making more of this than I should, especially given the equivocation in the manuscripts, but note that they did find a difference in emphasis in the καὶ and δὲ, so they were not insensitive to it.

[4] Though I’m persuaded that the relationship between Luke and Matthew is literary, an ‘oral Q’ could also account for this. It would necessitate a very early, widespread, and exact Greek oral tradition.

[5] “Finger of God” is a reference to God’s spirit, but it is oblique and lacks the directness of Matthew’s πνεύματι θεοῦ, Jewish audience or not. As I will argue, the finger of God is a much more nuanced allusion to God’s involvement.

[6] M.M.B. Turner, IVP Dictionary of the New Testament, 485. I will deal with the background of the expression in the final part of this essay. For now it suffices to say that these connections cannot so easily be made, especially on the basis of a Moses christology.