Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Jon A. Weatherly on Luke 18:31-34 and Gentile Responsibility for the Death of Jesus

  

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)