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A Possible Case of Lukan Authorship (John 7 53–8 11)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Henry J. Cadbury
Henry J. Cadbury
Affiliation:
Haverford College
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Extract

In his Philology of the Gospels Professor Blass referred somewhat casually to the Lukan style of the pericope adulterae. His theory of a Roman edition of Luke's works issued by the author himself, in connection with which his reference was made, has not received very wide acceptance, and so the linguistic phenomena to which he called attention were not made generally known. The motives of the present writer in bringing the subject forward again are not merely that the Lukan style of this passage impressed itself independently upon him, as it might upon any one familiar with Luke's style, but because von Soden's careful study of the text of the passage, and Harnack's recent use of the style of the Lukan writings make it desirable to give a fresh presentation of the evidence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 1917 , pp. 237 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1917

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References

1 P. 159 (1898) with a reference to his edition of Luke, (1897) p. xlviii.

2 Die Schriften des N. T. I, pp. 486–524.

3 Especially Luke the Physician and The Date of the Acts.

4 All readings that are not found in all groups of MSS. will be marked below with von Soden's symbols for the groups that contain them, e.g., μ1, μ2, etc. The numbers represent very nearly the order of preference given the groups by von Soden.

5 See Plummer, Luke, passim.

6 Plummer, Luke, p. 252: “Lk. is fond of compounds with διά.” There are over 50 words compounded with κατά which occur in Luke or Acts but not in Mt., Mk., or Jn.

7 The word occurs also in Mt. 4 7 (= Lk. 4 12) in a quotation from Dt. 6 16.

8 According to Bruder only Lk. 4 7, 22 70; Ac. 23 21.

9 Horae Synopticae, Second Edition, pp. 15–29.

10 See Date of the Acts, pp. 5, 6, 9, 15; Luke the Physician, pp. 40, 50 f.

11 Also Evangelistarium 435.

12 Of course its historicity is not dependent on its canonicity. Its internal character, agreeing as it does with the synoptic stories, bespeaks its genuineness as a tradition.

13 I omit as unlikely a third alternative—that it was part of a third (lost) work of the third evangelist. Blass's view that it was from a second edition of the third gospel issued by the author himself combines the difficulties of this view with those of (1) above.

14 The motive would probably be the fear that the section would be abused to condone looseness in sexual relations.

15 The decision between these alternatives and concerning the actual origin of the section if not from Luke forms a most interesting problem, but does not affect the implications of the main dilemma. Eus. H. E. III. 39, 16 suggests two possible second-century sources. He says: “(Papias) relates another story of a woman, who was accused of many sins before the Lord, which is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.” The evidence of the story's western circulation and the variety of its readings may suggest that it was translated into Greek from the Latin. That the later scribes wrote a style like Luke's is not improbable. Blass, Evangelium secundum Lucam, 1897, pp. lvii ff., has given some interesting cases from variants in Mark, and unless one accepts his hypothesis of two editions by Luke, his evidence for the Lukan style of the “Western” text of Luke and Acts (cf. his Professor Harnack und die Schriften des Lukas, 1907) will point in the same direction. That this “Lukanizing” is intentional is improbable. Perhaps the style of Luke was the most familiar to the scribes and probably it was the most congenial to them on account of its literary quality. Many of Luke's minor changes in Mark are made independently by scribes of Mark, e.g., in D. ἄγω for φέρω.

16 The argument that the “we” passages are so distinctly Lukan in style that the author cannot be using a source is presented most fully by Harnack, Luke the Physician (1906), pp. 40–120; Date of the Acts (1911), pp. 1–28; cf. also Hawkins, Horae Synopticae, Second Edition, pp. 182 ff. The inference of these scholars is that therefore Luke and Acts were written by a companion of Paul, presumably Luke.

17 Since the foregoing article was written there has come to hand H. McLachlan's St. Luke Evangelist and Historian (1912), with its full and independent argument for the Lukan authorship of the pericope adulterae (pp. 94–126).