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Some Observations on the Language in the Birth and Infancy Stories of the Third Gospel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Paul Winter
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Extract

The close affinity in diction and style, and also in the association of ideas, between the first two chapters of the Gospel according to Luke and the great mass of ancient Hebrew literature—even occasionally actual verbal agreements with passages from the thirteenth chapter of Judges or from the story of Samuel's birth—might indicate, yet does not incontrovertibly prove, that the Greek record of Luke i, ii is ultimately derived from a Hebrew literary source. There is nothing inherently impossible in the idea that a Greek writer, thoroughly familiar with the literary character of the O.T. translation and desirous of proceeding with his own narration of the Birth and Boyhood of Jesus, could have intentionally and successfully imitated the style of the Greek Old Testament. He might have adopted Septuagintal mannerisms of phraseology in the belief that a Hebraizing style would be the appropriate means to evoke a congenial atmosphere for the setting of his story. We know from literary competitions in our own time that Englishmen of the twentieth century are capable of imitating convincingly the styles of Ronsard or Rabelais. What is possible for them today would not have been impossible, in his day, for the editor of Luke, who was a man of great literary accomplishment.

Type
Articles
Information
New Testament Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , November 1954 , pp. 111 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1954

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References

1 Acts i. 14 has

1 Compare Ps.-Philo xlii. 7, where the angel's name is and the message which he brings runs as follows: Ipse liberabit Israel e manu allophilorum.Google Scholar

2 E.g. Matt. xxiv; 22.

3 Compare Mark x. 27:

1 The association of , ό βραχίων with or , κράτος ίσχύς δύναμις is frequent in the O.T.; see, e.g., Isa. li. 9.Google Scholar

2 Compare Targum Ps.-Jonathan ad Gen. xxxv. 21, Walton's Polyglott, vol. IV, Divisio Triplex Targum, p. 69;Google Scholar further the Hebrew Apocalypsis of Elijah, Moses Buttenwieser: Die hebräische Elias Apokalypse (Leipzig, 1897),.p. 18, lines 2 and 3.Google Scholar

1 The dates when Greek translations were made of various Hebrew literary works are too uncertain to allow definite deductions to be drawn from the term which respective translators used, in different ages, for a certain Hebrew phrase. Nevertheless, the following comparison is not without interest: (Compare Matt. xxvi. 53 and Heb. xii. 22 μνριάδεις άγγέλων); in Luke xxi. 26 αί δυνάμεις τών points to a Semitic source that could, in this place, have had the words ; δύναμιςs; in Luke xix. 37 and xxiv. 49 probably also goes back to Semitic sources, but here the word would not have been ).Google Scholar

1 In Acts vii. 42ff. occurs a direct quotation from the O. T., and here, significantly, the term is ύ στρατιά , corresponding exactly to the LXX usage. It seems that the writer (or translator?) looked up his O.T. before he quoted. He apparently did not look it up when he wrote Luke ii 13.Google Scholar

1 Even if the Greek text of Isa. viii. 14 had been tampered with by an eager believer from a later age, there still would be some verbal differences: Luke ii. 34 has ή Isa. viii. 14 Greek reads τό .Google Scholar

2 After the publication of Harnack's books on the author of the Third Gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles, Kirsopp Lake spoke of Harnack as ‘having fallen a victim to linguistic arguments of which it is safe to prophesy that few of them are likely to stand investigation in the light of a wider research into the custom of Greek writers’ (‘The Theology of the Acts of the Apostles’, J.A. T. XIX (Chicago, 1915), pp. 489–508, on p. 507).Google Scholar

1 For the Hebrew custom of giving names derived from a certain situation and appropriate to certain occasions (or rather, to explain given names by factual or imaginary situations supposed to have been the cause of bestowing a particular name) see Gen. i. 6–10, iv. 1, 25, v. 29, xvi. 1 1, xvii. 19, xxi. 3, 6, xxv. 25, 26, xxix. 32, 33, 34, 35, xxx. 6, 8, 11, 13, 18, 20, 24, xxxii. 28 (xxv. 10), xxxv. 18, xli. 51, 52 and the O.T. throughout. Compare also Philo, De mutatione, nominum 21: σωτηρία κυρίου.Google Scholar

2 The bearing of this fact on the question of Lucan sources has not been fully recognized. If the Third Gospel was not known amongst Judaeo-Christians yet we find in their scriptures traces of distinctly ‘Lucan matter’, the necessary inference is that this matter goes back to sources of which the Third Evangelist made use in his own book and which independently of the Third Gospel was kept in jewish-Christian circles. A religious book treasured by Ebionites of the fourth or fifth century would not be identical with the sources of which the Third Evangelist availed himself in the first century; yet it could contain elements that were derived from those sources. Our information of Jewish-Christian literature is admittedly scanty. The fact that no patristic author mentions the possession, by Nazarenes or Ebionites, of the Gospels according to Mark and to Luke may not suflice for positive deductions. Yet the fact that quite early tradition connected the Third Evangelist with Paul would of itself have led the Ebionites to reject his book. Compare: Ebionaei … solo autam eo quod cit secundum Matthaeum euangelio utuntur, et apostolum Paulum recusant apostatam eum legis dicentes, Irenaeus, Contra haer. i, xxvi, 2 (M.P.G. vu, 686/7); . Eusebius, H.E. III XXVII, 4 (M.P.G. xx, 273): , Pan. xxx, ii. 8 and xvi. 8 (M.P.G. XLI, 409, 432). Compare also the eloquent lament in the Epistola Petri ad Jacobum, 11, 3: (M.P.G. 11, 28.)Google Scholar