HKB
the fact that it has become the framework into which the old-time syntagma has been set, marks a great and fundamental change of view as to what constitutes "the gospel."
No mere syntagma of the Precepts of Jesus has ever come down to us, though the papyrus leaves of "Sayings of Jesus" discovered in 1897 at Behneseh in Egypt by Grenfell and Hunt had something of this character.[1] It was impossible that any community outside the most primitive one, where personal "witnesses of the Lord" still survived "until the times of Trajan," could be satisfied with a "gospel" which gave only the precepts of Jesus without so much as an account of his crucifixion and resurrection. And, strange as it may seem, the evidence of Q (i. e. the coincident material in Matthew and Luke not derived from Mark), as judged by nearly all critics, is that no narrative of the kind was given in the early compilation of discourses from which this element was mainly derived. After the "witnesses," apostolic and other, had begun to disappear, a mere syntagma of Jesus' sayings could not suffice. It became inevitable that the precepts should be embodied in the story. And yet we have at least two significant facts to corroborate the intimations of ancient tradition that this combination was long postponed. (18) When it is at last effected, and certainly in the regions of southern Syria,[19] there is even there practically nothing left of authentic narrative material but the Petrine tradition as compiled by Mark at Rome. Our Matthew, a Palestinian Jew, the only writer of the New Testament who consistently uses the Hebrew Bible, makes a theoretical reconstruction of the order of events in the Galilean ministry, but otherwise he just incorporates Mark substantially as it was. What he adds in the way of narrative is so meagre in amount, and so manifestly inferior and apocryphal in character, as to prove the extreme poverty of his resources of oral tradition of this type. Luke has somewhat larger, and (as literary products) better, narrative additions than Matthew's; but the amount is still extremely meagre, and often historically of slight value. Some of it reappears in the surviving fragments of the Preaching of Peter. To sum up, there is outside of Mark no considerable amount of historical material, canonical or uncanonical, for the story of Jesus. This fact would be hard to account for if in the regions where witnesses survived, the first generation really took an interest in perpetuating narrative tradition. (2) The order of even such events as secured perpetuation was already hopelessly lost at a time more remote than the writing of our earliest gospel. This is true not only for Mark, as 'the Elder' frankly confesses, but for Matthew, Luke and every one else. Unchronological as Mark's order often is (and the tradition as to the 'casual anecdotes' agrees with the critical phenomena of the text), it is vastly more historical than Matthew's reconstruction. On the other hand Luke, while expressly undertaking to improve in this special respect upon his predecessors, almost never ventures to depart from the order of Mark, and when he does has never the support of Matthew, and usually not that of real probability. In short, incorrect as they knew the order of Mark to be, it was the best that could be had in the days when evangelists began to go beyond the mere syntagmas, and to write "gospels" as we understand them, or, in their own language, "the things which Jesus began both to do and to teach" (Acts i. 1). From these two great outstanding phenomena of gospel criticism alone it would be apparent that the distinction dimly perceived in the tradition of the Jerusalem elders reported by Papias, and indeed by many later writers, is no illusion, but an important and vital fact.