Telling it like it was?

Peter Hebblethwaite

THE EVOLUTION OF THE GOSPEL by Enoch Powell Yale, £16.95, pp. 224 One of the great sources of comedy, from Moliere's malade imaginaire to Graham Greene's dentist, is obsession. The principle is admirably illustrated by Enoch Powell's translation and commentary on St Matthew's Gospel. He has been studying it, with fierce intensity, since 1975 when he claims to have 'retired from politics'. His conclusion is that Matthew is the first of the four Gospels.

This challenges the conventional wisdom of scripture scholars who assume the prior- ity of Mark and posit a lost source, Q, on which the synoptics depend. Yet to assert the priority of Matthew is not totally absurd: the thesis has been defended by Benedictine scholars like Dom Bernard Orchard.

Powell bases his case for Matthew's priority on the way Luke, in particular, `solves problems' left in suspense by Matthew. For example in vv. 26, 51, Peter cuts off the ear of Malchus, servant of the high priest, one of the band sent to arrest Jesus. Matthew does not answer the ques- tion: what happened next? In Luke, 22, 51, Jesus puts Malchus' ear back. This is Luke `improving on Matthew,' says Powell. If the miracle had 'really happened,' then surely Matthew would have recorded it. There- fore Luke has 'produced' — by which Powell really means 'invented' — a miracle to solve a problem.

Other explanations are possible. Matthew was more concerned with Peter who is warned that 'those who take up the sword perish by it'. Or he may simply not have known what happened to the severed ear. Luke anyway presents a compassionate Jesus who does this sort of thing. But sup- pose we accept, as a hypothesis, Powell's view of the priority of Matthew. It is his next step which is more dodgy.

Assuming Matthew established as the foundation of the other Gospels, Powell proceeds to discover within it 'the underly- ing Gospel.' There was a pre-Matthean Matthew. It is disclosed thanks to Matthew's clumsy editing and the presence of doublets. So, for example, Matthew has two accounts couched in similar terms of the feeding the multitude, one of four thousand and another of five thousand, Powell thinks that only one can be genuine. The other is therefore derived.

In some ways a more telling doublet involves the use of the word oligopistos, weak in faith. Addressed to Peter trying to walk on water in Matthew 8, 23-27, the term is justified. Spoken to the alarmed passengers aboard Jesus' boat in Matthew 14, 23-33 it is unfair. Therefore the second story is invented.

But the most crucial application of the doublet-principle takes us to Powell's most controversial assertion. According to all four Gospels Jesus had two trials, one before Caiphas and the Sanhedrin, the Jewish authorities, and another before Pilate, the local Roman proconsul. Powell dismisses the trial before Pilate as 'a second-rate duplicate, re-using material from the high priests' trial, out of which it was manufactured' (p. XIX). The Jewish trial was enough to encompass Jesus' death.

The 'underlying Gospel' he has detected ends with the judgment of Caiphas (Matthew, 27, 2.): 'He has spoken blasphe- my.' So Jesus was stoned to death, the Jew- ish punishment for blasphemy. Judas had no doubt that this was what their verdict meant, for he went off and hanged himself. (20, 7). The burial place Matthew mentions in 27, 7 was prepared for him, not for Jesus. This is much more subversive of the Christian message than anything David Jenkins, the sometime Bishop of Durham, has hinted at with his remarks about 'a conjuring trick with old bones'.

Powell exploits the emotive language of the politician rather than the dry analysis of the exegete to make his points. He devotes only two pages to his thesis that Jesus had only one trial before the San- hedrin and sums up the literary-critical evidence thus: 'In short, literary material has been appropriated from where it was purposefully and exquisitely used and re- employed crudely to create an alternative.' The two adverbs tell you what to think. There is little real evidence for them.

On the contrary, everything conspires to suggest that the Passion account as it has come down to us was the foundation of Christian faith. It was at the very heart of the kerygma, the proclamation of the good news. 'We announce the death and resur- rection of the Lord until he comes,' says Paul.

That does not dispose of Powell's intriguingly novel thesis. But it makes one wonder about his method. He tells us early on that he will consider Matthew's Gospel `in isolation' (p. XI). In isolation from what? Twentieth-century scripture scholar- ship has been concerned to establish the various 'contexts' in which these texts emerge. The Germans call this the Sitz im Leben. How were these texts employed in Christian preaching? How were they recycled to make homiletic points for those who came after?

By focussing so intensely on Matthew's Gospel itself, Powell ignores such consider- ations. Yet he needs them at the most decisive point of his argument. Why should Matthew or Ur-Matthew have been re- edited in the way he suggests? This is the only time he evokes a 'context'. He men- tions vaguely the clash between the `Judaiz- ers' (Jewish Christians) and the gentile churches. (p. 207).

But which of them had an interest in shifting the blame for Jesus' death from the Jews to the Romans? Powell's answer is obscure and unsatisfying. 'Pilate and the Romans,' he suggests, 'must be exonerated and the blood-guilt accepted by the Jewish people.' (p. 207).

It is hard to see why either the gentiles or the Judaizers should want to invent the Pilate story only to exonerate him. If the aim was to incriminate 'the Jews,' either party would have done better to stick with the stoning to death tale. But it would have anti-Jewish implications which the Pilate story helps to mitigate.

This discussion occupies only four pages of Powell's commentary. He has other more plausible insights. He believes that in Matthew 'children' (along with 'little ones' and 'least') is code for 'gentiles'. He catch- es a reference to the Eucharist each time artos (loaf) occurs. He thinks that the sea of Galilee is the Mediterranean in minia- ture.

Sometimes, his use of 'code' seems all too convenient. 'Rich' and 'poor,' he tells us, 'denote those who respectively claim, or do not claim, merit accumulated by the observance of the law.' Hence, writing from what the blurb describes as 'a book-lined Georgian house in London's Belgravia,' he claims that the failure to decode 'poor' has `given rise to the mistaken assumption that Jesus enjoined poverty on his followers.' (p. XXV) I wonder what his vicar thinks about that.