Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Daniel Wallace on Matthew 24:36


In Mark 13:32, we read:

But of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone (οὐδὲ ὁ υἱός, εἰ μὴ ὁ πατήρ). (NASB)

The parallel in Matt 24:36 reads, in certain manuscripts, a bit differently:

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only (εἰ μὴ ὁ πατὴρ μόνος). (KJV)

Some (e.g., Bart Ehrman) have argued that the change in Matthew was made by proto-Orthodox scribes to answer early Christological heresies which downplayed the deity of Jesus due to his not knowing something (i.e., the time of his coming in glory [Parousia]). Daniel Wallace has challenged this, arguing that this is original to Matthew himself. Notwithstanding , even accepting for the evidence he presents, such a text proves to be problematic to Trinitarian Christologies, as Matthew has the person of the Father alone (μονος) knowing, at the time of Jesus’ mortal ministry, of knowing this. As Wallace writes:

It is well known that where Mark’s Christology raises questions, Matthew’s gives answers. The reason for such revisions are often assumed to be out of concern that Mark’s Christology was defective and not in keeping with the church’s high view of Christ in the late first century. But, as Moule has pointed out, “it still seems a plausible assumption that successive redactors should tend (however dangerously docetic it may be) to show Christ as in full control of circumstances and without weakness or ignorance (Moule, “Review of Peter Head, Christology and the Synoptic Problem,” 741) . . . An examination of all the parallels between Matthew and Mark reveals that Matthew never seems to display a lower Christology when it comes to Jesus’s holiness, volition, power, knowledge, emotions, the disciples’ derived authority from Jesus or worship of Jesus—unless Matthew 24:36 is the lone exception.

How would it be the lone exception? By adding “not the son,” this verse is almost verbatim what Jesus says in Mark 13:32 except in one significant point: Matthew adds μονος to “except the Father,” thus doubly underscoring the Father’s exclusive knowledge of the time of these eschatological events. Without the μονος, Matthew’s Christology would be identical to Mark’s in this place. By omitting ουδε ο υιος but adding μονος to his revision of Mark, Matthew’s Jesus is implicitly stating what Mark’s Jesus explicitly says. The μονος preserves Matthew’s high Christology without altering the basic point that Markan Jesus is making. Only the omission of “nor the Son” in Matthew 24:36 reflects Matthew’s editorial strategy, while adding it is contrary to all that we know of his Christological redactions . . .Although most exegetes today would argue that early copyists excised “nor the Son” from Matthew 24:36, an examination of the internal evidence and redactional motifs paints a different picture. It is Matthew rather than the scribes who eliminates the phrase while adding μονος to the Father’s knowledge. (Daniel B. Wallace, “Textual Criticism and the Criterion of Embarrassment” in Darrell L. Bock and J. Ed Komoszewski, eds. Jesus, Skepticism and the Problem of History: Criteria and Context in the Study of Christian Origins [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Academic, 2019], 93-124, here, pp. 114-15, emphasis in bold added; see pp. 112-15 for Wallace’s summary of the evidence supporting his thesis. See his longer article on this issue, “The Son’s Ignorance in Matthew 24:36: An Exercise in Textual and Redaction Criticism” in Studies on the Text of the New Testament and Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Michael W. Holmes, eds. Daniel Gurtner, Paul Foster, and Juan Hernández [Leiden: Brill, 2015])

On the problem this poses to Trinitarian Christology, see the discussion of the Hypostatic Union at: