May I also express a minor degree of anxiety over the latest long
message that has come through from Jeffrey Gibson. I am delighted to
have this, and I am thrilled to see such good scholarship on the list
- such can only be good for us all, and for the list. It is good to
have the gobbledygook (spelling?) bits changed to transliterated
Greek too. However, this is substantially the identical message, a
message I had already received twice, and on each occasion it is so
long that it has used up my limited mail-box space, preventing any
other mail to come through to me. I would not want to see this as
being a precedent in length of message, or I would certainly have to
unsubscribe and I would be most reluctant to do that - as much as
anything because I would miss out on good scholarship like Jeffrey
Gibson's! Please forgive me this minor complaint.
-------
Forwarded Message Follows:
David Perk wrote in response to me (some omitted):
> You also said,
> <<Ben Crick commented on the meaning of PEIRASMOS in context in
> Luke. I am much in favour of this kind of exegesis - I think that
> it is always advisable first to look for the meaning of the word
> elsewhere in the book(s) in which the passage occurs.>>
>
> That technique, sound as it is, would reflect the Lukan redaction in
> the Lord's Prayer more than the original referent in Jesus'
> teaching.
>
Exactly. This is what my next paragraph (which you did not
quote) went on to say - i.e. while in general I am in favour of this
kind of exegesis, it is difficult here because of the presence of the
word PEIRASMOS in Matt. It is one of the hazards of the Email
conference forum that sometimes the views that one is (gently)
criticising inadvertently become associated with one's own views! The
only thing I would want to add to the sentence above is that I would
be less happy about talking about 'the original referent in Jesus'
teaching' - but that is not a b-greek topic.
Like everyone else, I have found the current string on PEIRASMOS
enormously interesting and rewarding - and I am most grateful to
Jeffrey Gibson for the time he has taken to post his views and
interact with others. The only difficulty for me was that the recent
message came twice and used up virtually all the remaining space in my
mail-box. But it was worth it - it is far better to clog up the
system with valuable material than with general rubbish!
Perhaps I could put a little more flesh on my own earlier slight
contribution that there is a clear link between the Lord's Prayer and
the Gethsemane stories. Those familiar with my contributions to this
and other lists will know that my doctoral research was on the work of
Michael Goulder. One of Goulder's many radical claims is that the
Lord's Prayer was 'a prayer composed by the evangelist [Matthew] from
the traditions of the prayers of Jesus in Mark and the teaching on
prayer by Jesus in Mark, amplified from the Exodus context of the
Sermon, and couched in Matthean language.' (*Midrash and Lection in
Matthew* (London: SPCK, 1974), p. 298, cf. 'The Composition of the
Lord's Prayer', *JTS* 14 (1964), pp. 32-45.
The relevance of this to our current discussion is that Goulder
claims that Matthew takes the Gethsemane charge to pray hINA MH
EISELQHTE EIS PEIRASMON and converts it to MH EISENEGKHiS EIS
PEIRASMON in the Lord's Prayer.
But Goulder's claim that the Lord's Prayer is 'couched in Matthean
language' is compromised by my test in *Goulder and the Gospels: An
Examination of a New Paradigm* (JSNTSup, 133; Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1996), pp. 53-55 which analyses the words in common to
Matthew and Luke in the Lord's Prayer, two of which, EISFERW and
PEIRASMOS, are more characteristic of Luke than they are of Matthew
(EISFERW 1 Mt / 0 Mk / 4 Lk + 1Acts, introduced redactionally in Luke
5.18 and 5.19; PEIRASMOS 2 Mt / 1 Mk / 6 Lk + 1 Acts, introduced
redactionally Luke 4.13 & 8.13). Furthermore, these are the only two
words common to the two evangelists in the Lord's Prayer that are
strongly characteristic of either evangelist. All the really
characteristic Matthean expressions in the Lord's Prayer are unique to
his version of it (our father in heaven etc.).
But whatever one thinks of Goulder's view, what does help us is the
attention it draws to the sheer similarity between the Lord's Prayer
and the Gethsemane prayer material. I would have thought that the
near identity of the clause under discussion concerning PEIRASMOS
would lend support to (what I perceive as) Jeffrey Gibson's view, viz.
that PEIRASMOS is not a matter of enticement to evil etc.
Good wishes to all
Mark
------------------------
Dr Mark Goodacre
Department of Theology
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2TT
Tel.: 0121 414 7512 Email: M.S.Goodacre@Bham.ac.uk
Fax.: 0121 414 6866