forms, was punishable in the time of Jesus by judicial committment of the criminal to the opprobrium of desecration through assignment of the body after death to the valley of Hinnom. Whatever the choice of the individual, it is here the body only that is involved by the words of Jesus; he raises the question as to the wisdom of the sacrifice of "the whole body" when ruthless and immediate dealing with "one of the members" will save the whole from desecration. But there is a strong movement away from this forceful, clear, simple, and searching thought in that report of these sayings which has found a place in document MK as below, a movement like that seen in the Matthaean account of the document P §20 saying previously examined, that is, an eschatological recasting of the sayings so that the original sense is wholly obscured: A B DOCUMENT MK 9:42-48 And whosoever shall cause one of these little ones that believe on me to stumble, it were better for him if a great millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. And if thine eye cause C And if thy hand cause thee The portion A under document MK will recall the setting given these sayings in that document; and when compared with portion A under document M will give weighty reasons for the conviction that document M, not document MK, has reported these words about eye and hand in their historical context. The evangelist Matthew had both documents, and therefore had the sayings before him in two very different connections. He retained them in both, reducing the statement in portion C of document MK by combining "thy hand" with "thy foot." No doubt the attentive reader will be able to trace some possible minor influences of the document M report in the gospel MT transcription of document MK. It ought to be observed that, for purposes of comparison, the document MK and gospel MT order has been conformed above to that of document M, their actual sequence of sayings being A, C, B, D. Except for a single instance, the uniform phrase of document MK and gospel MT is "enter into life;" no doubt the "enter into the kingdom of God" of portion B in document MK was originally "enter into life;" that seems established by the testimony of the Matthaean copy of it in portion B of gospel MT. The document MK contrast, followed by gospel MT, is set forth in the opposed fates, "to enter into life" and "to be cast into Gehenna." Gehenna is defined further as "the unquenchable fire" or "the eternal fire," and is described as a place "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." That is to say, it is an eschatological fate of endless duration; against it there stands by contrast the blessedness of the righteous, to "enter into life." Thus the contrast as set forth in document M has been lost; it is no longer an alternative between "thy right eye" and "thy whole body," but between "enter into life" and "be cast into Gehenna." Instead of two possible fates for the part or the whole of the body in the present life, there has been substituted two possible states of the body, mutilated or unmutilated, in the future life. By some simple and probably unconscious changes in transmission, the saying as preserved in document MK has departed widely from the original thought of Jesus as recorded in document M. And it is not alone by the transfer of the whole to the future life that the mind of Jesus as expressed in these sayings has been obscured. There is given to the term Gehenna a new content; it becomes "the Gehenna of fire," "the unquenchable fire," "the eternal fire," the place "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." None of these things are said of it in the document M report; there it is simply Gehenna, that is, the valley of Hinnom. It is important to recall at this point the fact that Gehenna is nowhere used in the Old Testament except either in the topographical sense strictly speaking, or in reference to the valley of Hinnom as the region of idolatrous practices and inhuman sacrifices. Nor does it occur in the biblical apocryphal literature. It emerges first, in the above document MK sense, in apocalytic literature, the date of which must be conjectured. The portion D of document MK seems to be a transcription from Isa. 66:24, which reads in full: "And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhoring unto all flesh." Since these additions about "fire" have been so freely placed here, Matthew having gone beyond even document MK in the portion B by the change of "into Gehenna" so that his phrase reads "into the Gehenna of fire," the question naturally arises whether in document M §4, previously considered, the saying of Jesus has received an addition in the words, "of fire." There remain for consideration the two appearances of the word Gehenna in document M §27, the report of the discourse against the Pharisees. Of the second of these, that at the close of the discourse, a study has already been made at other points. It has been seen that this eschatological close to the discourse is unsupported by the document P report of the final words of Jesus on this occasion. Instead of consigning the Pharisees to a drastic eschatological fate, as here represented, Jesus seems to have forecast their downfall with the ruin of the nation, document PS18B. In the former of the instances in this discourse, Matt. 23:15, the phrase, “a son of Gehenna," in the saying, "Ye make him twofold more a son of Gehenna than yourselves," seems to be a term of opprobrium, which takes its content of contempt from the fact that one condemned to the valley of Hinnom was a social outcast, made one by the nature of the crimes punished by such disposal of the body. In view of the uses to which the valley of Hinnom was put, especially because it was the depository of the bodies of criminals, it is natural to believe that scathing condemnation found one of its most penetrating thrusts in the application to the Pharisees of the opprobrious title, "son of Gehenna," a term probably current in Jesus' day for precisely such a personal rebuke. Unless the evidence has been wrongly interpreted, the necessary conclusion from the foregoing results is that Jesus never used Gehenna I See pp. 32-35, 225, 226. in any other sense than the valley of Hinnom, that is, the valley of Hinnom as the depository of the offal of Jerusalem, the carcasses of animals, and the bodies of criminals who by the special nature of their crimes were refused the rites of burial so sacred to the Jews. Wherever Gehenna appears in any other sense in the gospels, most especially where it is conceived of as the place of future and eternal punishment, the comparative study of documents seems to show with clearness that this sense is derived by subsequent modification of the original words of Jesus. §4. TORMENT AND FIRE All passages in the Synoptic Gospels in which there appears the notion of Torment and Fire as the portion of the wicked, in the future aeon, have come under examination at one point or another in previous studies. For review, they may be set down together, with references to the places where the full discussions of their original source are to be found. of fire: there shall be the weeping and gnashing of teeth. DOCUMENT M §18 So shall it be in the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from VI. among the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be the weeping and gnashing of teeth. DOCUMENT M §26 Depart from me, ye cursed, VII. into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels. It will be observed that all references to "fire" in the Synoptic Gospels are derived from the single document M, except passage II above. The one mention of "Torment," passage I, in which torment is treated as future, through the phrase "before the time," is likewise Matthaean. It is significant that the only passage outside of document M in which the future is treated in terms of "fire" is shown, by the external evidence, to have been added to document MK after the exemplar used by Luke had been copied. Thus the document MK form of these sayings stands with the various sayings above from document M as the product of times subsequent to Jesus. Fortunately, in this single instance where the tendency manifests itself in document MK, we are able to correct it by the use of another document, M §5, which apparently has not suffered modification in this body of sayings. I. We are not dealing here with words attributed to Jesus, but with those reputed to have come from a demon. Their significance for the present study, therefore, lies in the fact that they exhibit the Matthaean eschatological conception by the addition "before the time." He believes in a future for demons, in which they will suffer torment, and reports the demon as asking for release from torment until that aeon of torment has come." II. The method of Matthew in his use of this passage from document MK, and the departures of the MK report from the original form in document M 85, by which the element "fire" has been given so large a place, have been considered.3 The origin of the last sentence under document MK, "For every one shall be salted with fire," was suggested in the study of this problem chapter of document MK.4 |