Luke
18.31-34. The assertion of this text that
Jesus will be turned over to the Gentiles (παραδοθησεται γαρ τοις εθνεσιν,
v. 32) is striking. This phrase is traditional, buts inclusion in a context in
which Jewish involvement is omitted (cf. Mt. 20.18-19//Mk. 10.33) suggests that
it cannot be dismissed as an incongruent element of the traditional unconsciously
transmitted by Luke. Indeed, because of the omission of the Jerusalem
leadership in this text, greater stress falls on the involvement of the only
remaining agents, the Gentiles.
J.
T. Sanders has recently argued that Luke does not assert any Gentile responsibility
for the death of Jesus anywhere in his narrative. Concerning this text he says
that Luke has rendered Mark’s active verbs into passives and then shifted back
to active to obscure the reference to the agent. Thus, when the pericope closes
with the reference, not found in the parallels, to the disciples’ inability to
understand, Sanders finds here an indication that Luke has deliberately rendered
the saying impossible for the reader to understand. In this way, the passage
does assert Gentile complicity; it in fact asserts nothing (Jews in
Luke-Acts, p. 13).
Sanders’s
analysis of this text has a number of weaknesses. They can be enumerated
briefly.
1.
Luke has passive verbs where the other Synoptics have actives not only in the
case of the verbs of which τοις εθνεσιν might be construed
as the subject or agent but also with παραδοθησεται (Mark and Matthew have παραδωσουσιν), of which τοις εθνεσιν
is an indirect object. This passive verb does nothing to obscure Gentile
involvement and suggests that the others are rendered in the passive for
another purpose as well. In fact, they all put ‘the Son of Man’ in the center
of the syntactical stage by making him the subject of a series of polysyllabic future
passive verbs. In his shift back to active, furthermore, Luke renders μαστιγοω as a particle before αποκτενουσιν, focusing attention on the latter verb in
climactic fashion. Stylistic motives are more clearly at work in the syntax
here than the motives that Sanders proposes.
2.
The reference to the disciples’ ignorance, although absent in the immediate
parallels, is present in a different form in the second passion prediction in
Mark and Luke. If Sanders is correct about the significance of the disciples’
ignorance in the third passion prediction, then we must ask if it has been the
same meaning in the second. But the second prediction includes no note of
Gentile involvement. If the disciples’ ignorance had the same meaning in the
second prediction as in the third, it could well be concluded that something
other than obscuring Gentile involvement in the crucifixion was Luke’s intention.
But if it does not, then one wonders why Luke employs the motif of ignorance in
such strikingly different ways.
3.
Sanders fails to observe that among the differences between Luke and other Synoptics
in his third passion prediction is the one noted above: his omission of a clear
assertion of Jewish involvement. If elsewhere in the passage Luke was
attempting to obscure Gentile involvement without omitting τοις εθνεσιν,
his reason for omitting Jewish involvement altogether is a mystery. Even if
Jewish involvement was not in Luke’s source at this point his assertion of it
in the first passion prediction (9.22) could easily have been reproduced here. (Jon
A. Weatherly, Jewish Responsibility from the Death of Jesus in Luke-Acts [Journal
for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 106; Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1994], 90-92)
