The following question arose in a Facebook forum a couple of weeks ago:
In comparing Matthew and Luke, we find that Matthew has a wider array of moral sayings (essentially a superset of the material in Luke). Also, Matthew has a more advanced rendering of the Lord’s Prayer, the Beattitudes, the Great Sermon and the Great Commission. It has a wider array of kingdom of God sayings, and a more evolved and expansive treatment of eschatalogical issues. From just about every perspective Matthew looks more ideologically evolved than Luke. On what grounds would anyone argue that Luke post-dates Matthew?
So why do many biblical scholars (most, I believe) say that Luke post-dates Matthew? Take the Lord’s Prayer. It certainly does appear to be “more advanced”, so why would Luke write a “cruder” form of it he was writing after the Matthean version was surely known?
From my earlier post “Jesus Did Not Compose the Lord’s Prayer”:
| Matthew 6:9-13 | Luke 11:2-4 |
| 9 “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, |
2 “‘Father, hallowed be your name, |
| 10 your kingdom come, | your kingdom come. |
| your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. |
|
| 11 Give us today our daily bread. | 3 Give us each day our daily bread. |
| 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. |
4 Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. |
| 13 And lead us not into temptation, | And lead us not into temptation.’” |
| but deliver us from the evil one.’ |
I won’t repeat points from Michael Goulder’s article. Here I’ll set out how three other scholars subsequent to Goulder have made a case for Luke’s Lord’s Prayer being a revision of Matthew’s.
Luke’s Different View of Eschatology and the Church
Franklin earlier gave reasons for viewing Luke’s apparently “more primitive/less spiritual” beatitudes being a response to Matthew’s “more elegant and spiritual” list:
We have seen that even the beatitudes make good sense as vehicles of Lukan theology adapted from Matthew as their source and that they fit into a sermon which is itself an adequate expression of the Lukan purpose at this point. Again, the Lukan form of the Lord’s Prayer expresses Luke’s own beliefs and fits comfortably into its context of eschatologically motivated prayer (11.2-4). (Franklin, 350)
I posted my own take (probably inspired by Franklin or others with a similar view) on Luke’s beatitudes in The poor and Q — literary vs historical paradigms (2007).
Eric Franklin in a study comparing the Gospels of Matthew and Luke discerned the following thematic difference between them:
- Matthew wrote of and for the Church, the assembly governed by rules and ordinances under Peter, and that Church was a form of the Kingdom of God already here on earth even though at the same time it was waiting for the time when the Kingdom would come with the return of Jesus to extend it world-wide as foretold by the prophets. For Matthew, the Kingdom of God was already here in the church, and that meant the church was being judged now according to its adherence to the rule of Jesus. The final coming of the Judge would bring judgement on how those in “the kingdom” now treated one another.
. - Luke did not think of the church in that way. For Luke (of course I am using shorthand when I speak of Luke and Matthew as the authors since we don’t know who those authors were, and other times I use the names to refer to the gospels themselves) the kingdom was not here on earth now in any form, not even partly, as in the church. No, for Luke the church consisted of people who were called upon to wait patiently and endure trials until the kingdom arrived with the coming of Jesus. What those Christians had until then was the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit from Jesus and that spirit gave them power and strength to endure and hold fast, but it did not make the church a small advance part of the kingdom of God here and now. That was entirely future.
Again, all this means that Luke sees eschatology as being less realized in the present than does Matthew and he therefore accepts the parousia as having a positive role. It retains the aspect of hope in a way that Matthew’s emphasis upon its judgmental role does not. Luke is more ambivalent and thus more realistic about the realities of discipleship in the present. It is ‘through many tribulations’ that we enter the kingdom of God (Acts 14.22). His Jesus does not therefore indwell the church as he does in Matthew and the church is less directly related to the kingdom. (Franklin, p. 312)
See how that difference is reflected in the two prayers. Continue reading “On What Grounds Would Anyone Argue That Luke’s Lord’s Prayer Post-Dates Matthew’s?”