DISCUSSION OF MATTHEW 12 AND TJ 13
In this blog section comments involving these parallel chapters that may have been placed under a different section heading can be continued, as well as fresh comments contributed.
posted by Jim Deardorff @ 3:33 PM
1 Comments:
At 4:21 PM ,
Jim Deardorff said...
Under another section of the blog, Deardorff had commented:
“So from Mark one does not know how long after the grainfield event (Mk 2:23-28) that Mk 3:1-6 occurred, since any appropriate previous entry into a synagogue (to tie in with “Again”) was omitted.”
Ben’s Response was:
I cannot understand how one can say that the “again” ties into an omitted entry into a synagogue. In Mark 1: 21, it reads, “And they went into Capernaum; and straightway on the sabbath day he entered into the synagogue, and taught.” Thus, the synagogue that Jesus entered was already described as the synagogue which was in Capernaum. When Mark writes that “again” he entered the synagogue, the “again” shows that the synagogue which Jesus entered in Mark 3:1 must have already been specifically mentioned before in Mark’s account. This mentioning, then, was given in Mark 1:21. Two events do not have to occur within the same day for a writer to correctly use the word “again.” The word simply shows a repetition and a connection to something. One could properly write “I traveled to Florida when I was a child and visited Disneyland…. I again traveled to Florida after I got married to visit my in-laws.” The time indicators reveal that much time passed with the “again;” nevertheless, they are not necessary for the account to read properly. “I traveled to Florida and visited Disneyland…. I again traveled to Florida to visit my in-laws.” The “again” in both cases shows that the trip was to the same place, Florida, and is not affected by the passage of time in between.
Deardorff responds:
Regarding Mk 3:1 (paralleled by Mt 12:1), I had temporarily overlooked the fact that where the RSV and other bibles read “Again he entered the synagogue,” in the Greek it is “And he entered again into a synagogue.” This makes the “again” in Mark even more anomalous, as it need not at all refer back to the synagogue of Mk 1:21. So neither is there good reason in Mark to believe it refers back to the previous pericope of going through the grain fields on a sabbath. The writer of Mark fails to connect the two events, so there is no viable reason from Mark to insist that the Pharisees in Mk 2:24 were even in the synagogue of Mk 3:1. In Mt 12:9, however, there is a connection back to the Pharisees of Mt 12:2 that implies some of the people in the synagogue (their synagogue) were the same Pharisees. But again, in Mark, “Jesus” looked around in anger at all those in the synagogue within hearing distance, not just at any Pharisees who may have been present.
I regard it as more plausible that the writer of Mark, through careless editing of Hebraic Matthew, caused these problems in Mark than that the writer of Matthew noticed these problems in Mark and so proficiently fixed them up.
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