The miracle source was not Bethsaida's only source; the themes of the rest of Bethsaida appear in independent contexts in other Christian literature.
In 7:6b-7 of the Bethsaida Section, Jesus quotes from Isaiah 29:13. This quote also appears in the second-century Egerton Papyrus 2, fragment 2 recto; verse 3:6 by the Jesus Seminar reckoning. There it occurs in the story of giving unto Caesar.
In Egerton and Bethsaida, as Crossan has noted (p. 55), the quote begins with variants of the formula "well did Isaiah prophesy < of > you < when he said (Egerton) / as it is written (Bethsaida) >". The two also agreed to leave out "this people draws near to me with their mouth". Similarly, Luke's Acts 28:25b-28 attributes Mark 4:12 to Paul but not as a saying of Jesus (as in Acts 20:35) against the "leaders of the Jews". Luke introduced it with "the Holy Spirit was right in saying to your ancestors through the prophet Isaiah".
I agree with Crossan that Luke is dependent on an earlier Christian source. Crossan goes further, though; he thinks that Luke's source is "Mark" - that is, a Mark with the Bethsaida section. Crossan quoted Barnabas Lindars (New Testament Apologetic: The Doctrinal Significance of the Old Testament Quotations, Philadelphia: Westminster 1961): "the similarity between Acts 28:25b and Mark 7:6a is ... not accidental. Luke omitted a large slice of Mark (6:45-8:26)... dominated by the hardened blindness both of the scribes and Pharisees and of the disciples themselves... Luke saves this up for the end of Acts."
I already gave reasons why Luke would not have consciously omitted the entire section without trace. More importantly, this cannot be considered one of said traces. First off, Luke is reusing Luke 8:10 (from Mark 4:12) and not any part of Bethsaida. Second, Luke 28:25b more closely agrees with Egerton than with "Mark". Egerton had Isaiah "say" a prophecy, where Bethsaida commenced with the scriptural formula "it is written". Luke had Isaiah serve as the vessel for the Holy Spirit, which did the actual speaking. The relationship between the three, if there is one, is best explained by parallel developments of an earlier source which began, "the prophet Isaiah said", which is theologically more neutral than "it is written" and "the Spirit said" (which essentially mean the same thing: "God said it"). Taking the hypothesis further, from what little we can make out, it would have been most likely a collection of "Sayings of the Prophets".
In this case, Egerton would be closest to the original reading. Since Bethsaida and Egerton share a saying, might Bethsaida be dependent on Egerton? Crossan thinks that Egerton's version is more original than is "Mark"'s for other (stronger) reasons, noting that the rest of Isaiah 29:13 is mirrored in Egerton 3:5 - "why call ye me with your mouth master" (his emphasis) and not in Bethsaida. The work of contraction was therefore performed for the sake of a narrative now best preserved in Egerton. It is least complex to conclude (with Crossan) that this narrative was Egerton's creation.
That means that not only can Egerton claim priority over John, but also over the current recension of Mark and all recensions of Matthew! It also leads to other questions - like, how much else of Egerton may be found in the current version of Mark? Egerton shares with Bethsaida an interest in conflict against the leaders of the Jews. Egerton also shares with Bethsaida's miracle stories a belief that Jesus and his true followers belong to Judaism (and of course that Judaism belongs to them). Whatever Egerton thought of gentiles, the Bethsaida miracle compiler viewed them as dogs under the table at best.
As for the quote itself: Egerton and Luke dipped into the pre-Gospel pool of miracle and controversy stories, as had original Mark. This quote was associated with the movement's more confrontational teachings from the start.
Mark 7:15 reads "what goes into you cannot defile you; what comes out of you can". This saying is elsewhere attested in the Coptic gospel of Thomas, verse 14:5 by the Jesus Seminar's system. Thomas 14:5 reads: "what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but what comes out of your mouth will". Both versions of this saying have been worked into longer homilies.
While Mark 7:15 is a scatological witticism, Thomas 14:5 links a lack of dietary scruples with a warning about honesty. In context, Thomas 14 declares that traditional views of Godly activities (fasting, prayer, and charity) are hypocritical and should be replaced with politely eating the food of one's hosts, if asked; and with helping the poor directly (prayer is not touched upon here). While these are (in my opinion) very commendable sentiments, 14:5 is only tangentially related to 14:1-4, and really only touches on eating one's host's food. It is possible that Thomas changed "you" into "your mouth", which would have turned it into a saying on honesty.
Mark 7:14-23 knows none of this; it attempts to explain 7:15 alone. The sermon of Mark 7:14-23 exists for the sake of 7:15; whereas Thom 14:5 exists for the sake of the sermon of Thom 14. It is unlikely that Bethsaida and Thomas knew of each other; it is more likely that both had a similar source of oral(?) tradition, but that Mark 7:15 preserves the more original form.
Mark 8:15 reads, blepete apo thV zumhV twn Farisaiwn kai thV zumhV Hrwdou. Matthew 16:6 relays it as prosecete apo thV zumhV twn Farisaiwn kai Saddoukaiwn. "Herod" is an almost Gospel- of-Peter construct, which Matthew felt was anachronous for Jesus's time; so it is easy to see why he changed "and of the leaven of Herod" into "and of Sadducees". It is less obvious why he changed blepete into prosecete. Luke certainly liked to add the word prosecete, as in 17:3, 20:46, and 21:34; but Matthew did not (c.f. Heinz Schuermann 1968: Traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen. 123-24).
As Schuermann (and, possibly independently, Bernard Muller) had noted, Luke 12:1 contains a saying parallel to Matthew's - prosecete eautoiV apo thV zumhV ... twn Farisaiwn. This saying occurs following a long diatribe of woes against the Pharisees, Luke 11:39b-44, 46-52, commonly assigned to the Q source. Luke ended this diatribe at 11:52, and (following a brief hiatus for the Pharisees to leave) understood the following 12:1 to be (the start of) a de-briefing of this speech for the disciples. Matthew, on the other hand, had a different order. Matthew's Q/Luke 11:52 occurs near the beginning, in Matt 23:13, which leaves his Q/Luke 11:47-51 at the end, in 23:29-36. Matthew did not use any variant of Luke 12:1 here.
As mentioned above, it is likely Luke did not know the Bethsaida section. As a result, most scholars think that Luke 12:1 belongs to some other source of Luke, possibly an oral one shared with Bethsaida (Kloppenborg p. 118). They don't see enough evidence to link Luke 12:1 with Q. I need to find out if there is room for Luke 12:1 within Q; and for that, I need to find out how Q was structured. Wilhelm Bussmann in 1929 (Synoptische Studien. 2. Heft. Zur Redenquelle. 76-77), has noted that Luke 12:1 fits well within two blocks of solid Q. Luke and Matthew both deliberately reorganized their Q material elsewhere; they seem to have done so here too.
First, I would like to reemphasise that Matthew's "penultimatum" of the Q-derived speech was the same as Luke's: Q/Luke 11:51==Matt 23:35-36 - "from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah ... who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Amen, I tell you, this shall be required of/come upon this generation". The two part ways after this.
In Matthew the "penultimatum" is directly succeeded (and concluded) by Q/Luke 13:34-35, the Q lament over Jerusalem. In Luke, that lament appears in a different context, two chapters away. Matthew and Luke concur that the lament followed the woe-speech in Q; they do not concur on whether this lament was to be understood as part of the woe-speech. In Matthew, the lament breaks the "to hell with our enemies" pattern of the woes, replacing it with a link between the propheticides of Matt 23:31 and 23:37. In Luke, the lament proudly appears on its own in no context at all. Their proximity and order in both might mirror a catchword association in Q, as seen in Thomas.
Luke's public ending for the speech was Q/Luke 11:52 - "woe to you... for you take away the key... you yourselves do not enter, and prevent those who try to enter". Luke interpreted it to be the key of gnwsiV (which Matthew did not), and the following private discussion makes it clear that "everything that is now covered will be uncovered" (12:2). Luke 12:1 is subordinated to a "gnostic" topic. In Mark 8:15 == Matt 16:6 the "leaven of the Pharisees" refers to the miracle of the loaves.
Schuermann also noted that Matthew often designated the Pharisees as "hypocrites" in the woes section where Luke 11 did not; this is an echo of Luke 12:1's htiV estin upokrisiV. Likewise, Matt 16:6's prosecete was changed into a form more typical of Luke 12:1 than of Matthew in general. Matt 16:6 can be explained as a harmony of Mark 8:15 and Q/Luke 12:1.
I would add that the Bethsaida Section could have been a Caesarea Philippi section, or a Capernaum section, or a Decapolis section. At least one woe of Q is set in the Bethsaida region (Luke 10:13); if a Bethsaida Section saying appears in the midst and context of a section of woes from Q, it is more likely to belong to Q than not.
I vote with Luke against Matthew - in part - that Q did not intend to connect the woes to the lament, except by catchword. The catchwords would be even closer together if Q/Luke 11:52 actually belonged further up, as in Matt 23:13.
I suggest that Luke 12:1 actually belonged to Q, and formed Q's ending for the speech against the Pharisees. It was a fictional dialogue; it was really designed for Q's anti-Pharisaic congregation. Obviously Jesus did not tell the Pharisees to beware against their own leaven! Since Luke was historicizing this memory, Luke had to insert a mention that the Pharisees had gone home (11:53-54) before Jesus could give out the saying. Matthew opted to save it for later, where he had a context in Mark 8:15 - c.f. BH Streeter 1924: The Four Gospels 279 - which Luke did not. Matthew did, however, sprinkle references to Luke 12:1's language in Q's speech as his Gospel quoted it.
After all this work, the conclusion is anticlimactic - the version in Mark 8:15 is shorter and mentioned Herod, and is probably the more original form than Q anyway.
It is no surprise to find parallels between the miracle sources of the Bethsaida Section and of the Gospel of John. Both are Signs Gospels which imply that their opponents are enemies of God and the Hebrew nation, and, by way of contrast, that Jesus is the Elect of God.
Mark, John, and Bethsaida all share a story where the disciples are in a boat and face a tempest without Jesus's aid. Mark has Jesus still the tempest (4:35-42), and John has Jesus walk on the water (John 6:16-21), but Bethsaida has Jesus walk on water (Mark 6:48b-50 == Matt 14:25-31) and still the tempest (Mark 6:51 == Matt 14:32). The Bethsaida miracle source (or Bethsaida redactor) has taken the miracle source for John 6:16-21 and harmonized it with the source for Mark 4:35-42.
John 6:1-15 also has an account of the Feeding of the Thousands, but it concerns the Five Thousands, five loaves, two fish, and twelve baskets of leftover loaves. It is closer to Mark than to Bethsaida, albeit still independent of Mark.
John and Bethsaida also share a healing from a distance: Mark 7:24-30 and John 4:45-54. In both, the person approaches Jesus and begs him to heal his/her son/daughter, Jesus argues, and then Jesus cures the son/daughter at a distance. This particular story was also known to Q (Luke 7:1-10 == Matt 7:28, 8:5-10, 13), where the person was a gentile (like Bethsaida, but not John) and his charge was a servant boy (somewhat like John, but not Bethsaida). As a contrast to the Tyrian woman, the centurion said that he did not deserve to have Jesus visit.
Q could be merging Bethsaida's tale with John's source, but I suspect that those stories are too far apart for harmonization; it is more likely that all three - four, counting Mark 5:22-24, 35-43 - are separate, independent developments from a common source. This source is probably a story about how Jesus met a gentile official with a sick daughter. Jesus retorted that the gentiles were not worthy of healing. The gentile agreed but made a show of his faith; as a result Jesus declared that the daughter was healed. The gentile returned and found his daughter well.
Bethsaida preserves the closest account to this tradition, only changing the gentile official to a Tyrian woman. John is not very different: he left the ancestry of the official indeterminate. Jesus's attack on gentiles became an attack on asking for a sign. Q made sure that Jesus looked good; it was the gentile who believed he was unworthy, and under no prompting from Jesus. (Q did, however, preserve Jesus's approval for such self-abasement.) And finally, Mark only borrowed elements from this story (the official pleads; the daughter is sick; the daughter is healed before Jesus meets her) in what amounted to a different story altogether. It was probably informed by contemporary tales about Apollonius of Tyana.
In John 4:48, Jesus complains that people will only believe if they see "portents and miracles" (Ex 11:10 LXX). Q (Luke 11:16, 29-32 == Matt 12:38-42) and Bethsaida (Mark 8:11-13) contain separate controversy stories about how the Pharisees (in Bethsaida and Matthew) demand a sign, to which Jesus retorts that this generation will not receive one. Bethsaida and Q shared a version of this controversy story; Bethsaida's is the shortest and probably the closest to the original.
First, the true Bethsaida insertion runs from Mark 6:45 to 8:21, not 8:26. The healing of the blind man in Mark 8:22-26 is in fact Markan. It just proved too superstitious for Matthew and Luke to do more than allude to it.
The Bethsaida Section used a couple of sayings-discourses of Mark 4:1-9 type, of which one logion ended up in Thomas 14 and another into Luke 12:1 (probably via Q). The author may have written the discourses himself based on his understanding of Mark's temperamental Jesus. These passages were not directly accessible to John; but, as Koester states, it is likely that they developed into discourses which were.
Bethsaida also used controversy stories, in which Jesus attacked both Pharisaic korban and their demand to see a sign. Some of these sources were probably already merged before Bethsaida. Bethsaida's Healing from a Distance may have shared a scroll with the controversy over Signs for this Generation, because the twain both appear in Q, and are merged in John.
The miracle stories show dependence both on the rest of Mark and on John, although interestingly not on the parts of John that one would consider "Johannine". This by way of contrast with the letters of John and even Ignatius.
Finally, Luke, Egerton, and original Mark used collections of Isaiah quotations probably not originally attributed to Jesus. One of these found its way through the Egerton gospel into Bethsaida.
The Bethsaida Section refers to Syro-Phoenicia and has the sea very much in mind. In addition the first document to reference the Mark version with this section was the Gospel of Matthew, which in turn very probably arose in Antioch. The Didache and Ignatius came from this area and borrowed from Matthew before anyone else did, and "Justin, the son of Priscos, son of Baccheios, of Flavia Neapolis, in Palestinian Syria" (Apology) used a Matthew-based gospel harmony. In addition, when Matthew cites Mark 3:7-8's Galilee, Jerusalem, Judea, and trans-Jordan (a tad early) in his insertion to Mark 1:39 == Matt 4:23, he removes Arab Idumea and Mediterranean Tyre-and-Sidon; adds in their place the Decapolis of Mark 5:20 and 7:31; and subsumes them all within "Syria". In my view the Bethsaida section was most likely inserted in a coastal region of Syro-Phoenicia, that is, Lebanon or Galilee.
The Bethsaida section was never a self-contained document. Its author liked Mark and liked its style, but he felt that the earlier version was incomplete. Luke felt similarly: she informed her readers that she, too, found the first version of Mark to be substandard (1:1), and also altered the text, albeit more comprehensively.
Now that Bethsaida has been removed from Mark, it provides an additional witness to much of the Jesus material; in a more original form if anything.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^) zimriel@sbcglobal.net
27 Oct 2001: Time to review. Commented on the Section's provenance. 7 May 2002: Bethsaida Passion link. 10 Jan 2004: took into account John Dart's book.
22-25 Nov: Found another Bethsaida Section site! Bernard Muller wrote this one (although you have to look to find that out). The competition is good; plus it independently verifies much of this project. I just wish I'd seen it sooner. The changes: restructured "Delimiting Bethsaida" to add his arguments, added "Original or Abridgement?" section to answer Muller's proposal. 25 Nov-28 Dec, I added his arguments for Luke 12:1 in Q, before realising that this was just Schuermann's argument in English.
28 July: the big news today is that I bought "Bethsaida: A City by the North Shore of the Sea of Galilee", which pointed out that Luke 9 knew one of the Bethsaida miracles. D'OH!! What this DOES do is explain why Bethsaida's a literary circle. Anyway, sorry for goofing, but the project is much stronger now. New chapter on delimiting Bethsaida. And I had to split it in twain.
21 June 2000: Let's try this again... I'd made a mess of Matthew's possible knowledge of the "non-Matthean" Bethsaida miracles. 3, 5 July: added the Acts testimony to Egerton's. Also fixed Bernhard's link, again. 19-20 July: first the Egerton, then the Q and Mark sections needed cleaning.
30 April: I fixed A Bernhard's link and cleaned up the language. Hopefully what I was trying to say makes sense now.
26 Oct: noted parallel between 7:31-37 and Matt 15:29-31. 27-28 Oct: noted that "hardness of heart" was more probably proto-Bethsaida than post-. 30 Oct: decided that Bethsaida was an editor of Mark, not an independent evangelist. 1 Dec: Cleaned up the grammar.
First version 13 Oct - 19 Oct 1998; conceived to pick up a loose end or three left by my "First Mark" project
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