The Doctor and Companions travel to the Partition of India and reveal Yaz’s family secrets. Jimmy Akin, Dom Bettinelli, and Fr. Cory Sticha discuss the latest episode which addresses religious violence, unconditional love, and remembrance of the dead on Remembrance Day/Veteran’s Day.
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Isaiah 52 and 53 famously describe a mysterious figure that scholars have dubbed the “Suffering Servant.”
The parallels between the Servant and Jesus are striking, and the New Testament authors see Jesus as fulfilling the role of the Suffering Servant—as have Christians ever since.
The Suffering Servant passage is a case of genuine messianic prophecy. However, prophecy often works on more than one level.
As we covered in a previous post, various prophecies have a fulfillment in the Old Testament itself, and then a second, additional fulfillment in Jesus.
Often the first fulfillment is found in the original, literal sense of the text, and the fulfillment in Christ belongs to its greater, spiritual sense.
This raises a question: Did the Suffering Servant passage have a fulfillment in the Old Testament era? Was there an original Suffering Servant who foreshadowed Jesus? If so, who was this Servant?
Let’s take a look at Isaiah 52 and 53 and see what they might reveal . . .
The Suffering Servant in Context
Much of the book of Isaiah deals with the Babylonian Exile, and Isaiah 52 begins with a word of encouragement for the Jewish captives who are experiencing the Exile.
This word is initially addressed to Jerusalem itself, which is captive and filled with the uncircumcised and the unclean. God indicates that this situation will end (Isa. 52:1-2). He will turn again to his people and deliver them (Isa. 52:6).
We then read the famous statement, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings” (Isa. 52:7). In its original context, this statement has to do with the end of the Babylonian Exile.
The Lord is thus returning to Zion, and “the waste places of Jerusalem” are to rejoice “for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations” that have oppressed them (Isa. 52:7-10).
Consequently, the Jewish captives in Babylon are told, “Depart, depart, go out from there, touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of her, purify yourselves, you who bear the vessels of the Lord. . . . for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard” (Isa. 52:11-12).
“Behold, My Servant”
At this point the Servant enters the narrative, and we are told, “Behold, my servant shall prosper, he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high” (Isa. 52:13).
In our previous post, we looked at the different “servants” of the Lord identified in Isaiah.
In the present context, at the end of the Babylonian Exile, who is the Servant?
Various proposals have been made, including individuals such as:
These interpretations are possible, but a view that deserves special consideration is that the entire nation of Israel may be the Servant here:
This is also a common interpretation of the Servant in Jewish circles.
Therefore, let’s explore the text on the theory that its literal sense originally envisioned the Servant as Israel and then see what we can make of it.
God Testifies to the Suffering Servant
Isaiah 52:13-15, God himself speaks concerning the Servant. In v. 13, he states that the servant “shall prosper” and “be exalted and lifted up” and “shall be very high.” This would correspond to the much improved state of God’s people as he joyously restores them to their land to rebuild Jerusalem and its temple.
In verse 14, we have a description of the way in which the Servant formerly appeared: “many were astonished at him—his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the sons of men.” This would correspond to the disfigured state of God’s people in exile, after being conquered by their enemies.
But now in verse 15 the nation’s miraculous restoration will provoke a different kind of amazement, so the Servant shall “startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him.” The nations have not have had the benefit of Isaiah’s prophecies, so “that which has not been told them they shall see, and that which they have not heard they shall understand” as God’s people are brought back to their land.
Others Begin to Speak
In Isaiah 53:1, the speaker shifts from God to a group of people, who are clearly here on earth. They are likely to be identified either as (a) God’s people, who have heard the prophecies of Isaiah, or (b) the nations, who are only just now learning of them as the nation is restored. They ask:
Who has believed what we have heard?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? (v. 1)
Isaiah 52:10 said that the arm of the Lord had been revealed “before the eyes of all the nations,” suggesting that they are the same group that “has believed what we have heard”—in other words, the Gentiles, who have been astonished by the miraculous fall and restoration of God’s people, though they have learned about God’s plan only now (Isa. 52: 15).
The Speakers Amazed at the Suffering Servant
The resulting astonishment focuses on the figure of the Servant. The background for the astonishment is provided in verses 2 and 3.
As a minor nation among the great powers of the Ancient Near East, Israel would have seen to have grown up before God “like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground,” and from their perspective, Israel would have had “no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2).
Consequently, Israel “was despised and rejected” by its neighbors. Israel was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isa. 53:3).
But now, beginning in verse 4, comes the astonishing part. In the humiliation of his people’s defeat and Exile, God has done something extraordinary: He has treated Israel as a sin offering, for “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Yet that is not how it initially appeared to the Gentiles, for “we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted” (Isa. 53:4).
The reality, however, was different: Israel “was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).
The Gentiles then acknowledge their guilt, for “all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way,” but the Lord has made atonement for them using his people as a sin offering, for “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6).
As a minor power in the Ancient Near East, God’s people were no match for the greater nations they faced. Their powerlessness before them is compared to the powerlessness of a sheep: “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb,” Israel “opened not his mouth” (Isa. 53:7).
Consequently, by the “oppression and judgment” of the Gentiles, Israel “was taken away” from his land, resulting in a metaphorical death as a people, for in the Exile, Israel “was cut off out of the land of the living” where God had planted them.
In this experience Israel was “stricken for the transgressions of my people” (Isa. 53:8). Although the phrase “my people” is often used by God, the speaker here is a chorus of Gentiles, and so it would mean that Israel suffered—in keeping with its role as a sin offering—for the sins of the Gentiles.
Having been taken from the Promised Land—the land of the living—Israel is buried in Exile, among the Gentiles, so that “they made his grave with the wicked,” and because of the Gentiles’ rich, opulent rulers, Israel was “with a rich man in his death.”
This experience occurred despite the fact that to the Gentiles Israel “had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth” toward them (Isa. 53:9). They were the aggressors toward God’s people, not the reverse.
All this happened because “it was the will of the Lord to bruise him” and “he has put him to grief” so that he becomes “an offering for sin.”
Yet now that the time of Israel’s restoration has come, “he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand” (Isa. 53:10). God’s people can thus look forward to new generations being born that will have long and prosperous days.
God Has the Final Word
The Lord begins speaking again by verse 11. As a result of his restoration, Israel “shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11a)
Further, Israel’s knowledge of the Lord and his righteous ways will now benefit the Gentiles with whom they have come in contact, for “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous.”
As Isaiah elsewhere notes, the return from Exile would bring many Gentiles who would come to worship the Lord and be “his servants” (Isa. 56:6).
Thus by the experience of Exile and the consequent enlightening of the Gentiles, Israel would “bear their iniquities” (Isa. 53:11b). Consequently, God declares that in restoring Israel:
I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isa. 53:12).
Evaluating This Interpretation
How well does this interpretation of Isaiah 52 and 53 hold up?
It’s striking that the passage would speak of Israel and its sufferings as involving a sin offering on behalf of the nations. This type of language is not used elsewhere in the Old Testament, either for Israel or others, which is one of the things that makes it such a striking case of messianic prophecy.
However, the passage also contains points that in their literal sense do not point directly to Jesus. The reference to the Servant seeing “his offspring” fits the restored Israel well, for there would be new generations born in the land. However, Jesus did not literally have offspring (children), and so this element must be spiritualized when the passage is applied to him.
If we focus on the sin offering aspect of the text, it is clear that God did not use Israel as a sin offering the fashion he did Jesus, who dealt with sin in the full and final way. However, we can see how God used Israel and its sufferings to bring spiritual benefits to the Gentiles with whom the Exile brought it into contact.
This is seen in the reference to the Servant’s knowledge of the Lord and his will, so that “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous.”
The result of this is then seen in Isaiah’s references to Gentiles coming to worship the God of Israel, keeping his sabbath, etc. (Isa. 56:6)—a phenomenon we know happened in the pre-Christian period. This is why Isaiah understands the restored temple as “a house of prayer for all the nations” (Isa. 56:7), and it is why the temple had an outer court—known as the Court of the Gentiles—that was specifically designated as a place for Gentiles to pray.
We also see the pattern in the Bible of God treating some individuals more kindly than he otherwise would because of a person who pleased him. Thus God treats Solomon more kindly than Solomon’s sins deserved because David had pleased him (1 Kings 11:31-32). Similarly, in the New Testament, St. Paul states that even Jews who opposed the gospel and became “enemies of God” are nevertheless beloved on account of the patriarchs, who had pleased God (Rom. 11:28).
We thus may understand that God would treat Gentiles more gently than their sins otherwise deserved for the sake of Israel, or at least the righteous of Israel, thus allowing them to be depicted metaphorically as a sin offering.
This metaphor may ultimately rest in the promise given to Abraham that he would become a blessing to all nations (Gen. 12:3; cf. Gal. 3:8).
These same themes would then be fulfilled in an even greater way through Jesus.
Individualistic Interpretations?
We have just explored Isaiah 52 and 53 in light of the idea that the literal sense of the text envisioned Israel as the original Servant of the Lord. We thus looked at a corporate interpretation, with the whole nation pictured as a single Servant, as in other passages of Isaiah.
However, individualistic interpretations are also possible. In other words, the literal sense of the text might have envisioned a single person—such as the prophet himself, one of the Gentile rulers, or the Jewish governor Zerubbabel—as the Servant.
In that case, the relevant passages would deal not with the travails of the whole nation but of the individual in question and the role his sufferings played in the restoration of God’s people to their land (the subject introduced in chapter 52).
Some of the details of the interpretation would change: Instead of it being Gentile speakers throughout the amazement section, the speakers might include Jews, and it might be their sins that the Servant metaphorically bore.
However, the fundamental message would remain the same: God used the sufferings of the Servant to bring about benefits, including spiritual benefits, for others, and the sufferings of the Servant were so extreme that he experienced a metaphorical death.
However, eventually he would be restored by the Lord so he could “see his offspring” and “prolong his days” (Isa. 53:10), so he could “see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11), and so he could receive “a portion with the great” and “divide the spoil with the strong” (Isa. 53:12).
In coming posts, we will look at how the Suffering Servant passage relates more specifically to Christ and the atonement he performed on the Cross.
The New Testament quotes three Old Testament books more than any others: Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Isaiah.
The latter is quoted, in particular, because it contains messianic prophecies that point to Jesus, and the New Testament authors record how he fulfilled them.
As Christians, we are so familiar with these passages and how the New Testament uses them that we assume they are only about Jesus:
All of these are messianic prophecies, and Jesus did fulfill them.
But the biblical concept of fulfillment is richer than we sometimes imagine.
Prophecy in the Bible
The biblical authors recognized Scripture as operating on multiple levels. For example, Matthew interprets the Holy Family’s flight to and return from Egypt as a fulfillment of the prophetic statement, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”
But in its original context, it is obvious the “son” of God being discussed is Israel, for the full verse reads: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt, I called my son” (Hos. 11:1).
Matthew understood this. He had read the first half of the verse and knew that, on the primary, literal level, the statement applied to the nation of Israel. But he recognized that on another level it applied to Christ as the divine Son who recapitulates and fulfills the aspirations of Israel.
In the same way, it is obvious in Isaiah that on the primary, literal level the prophecy of Immanuel applied to the time of King Ahaz (732-716 B.C.). At this point, Syria had forged a military alliance with the northern kingdom of Israel that threatened to conquer Jerusalem (Isa. 7:1-2). God sent Isaiah to reassure Ahaz the alliance would not succeed (Isa. 7:3-9) and told him to name a sign that God would give him as proof (Isa. 7:10-11).
Ahaz refused to name a sign (Isa. 7:12), so God declared one: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. . . . For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted” (Isa. 7:14-16).
For this sign to be meaningful to Ahaz, it would have to be fulfilled in his own day—indeed, very quickly. It therefore points, on the primary, literal level, to a child conceived at that time (perhaps Ahaz’s son, the future King Hezekiah).
Like the other New Testament authors, Matthew recognized the biblical text as having multiple dimensions, so the prophecy was not only fulfilled in Ahaz’s day but also pointed to Christ as “Immanuel” (Hebrew, “God with us”).
The Literal and Spiritual Senses of the Text
In the Christian age, a way of classifying the different levels on which Scripture works was developed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:
According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church (CCC 115).
It goes on to explain the literal sense:
The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I:1:10 ad 1) (CCC 116).
Because the literal sense is the foundation of all the other senses, we need to establish it before looking at additional meanings found within the spiritual sense of the text.
The rules of exegesis (interpretation) require us to establish the literal sense by asking what a text meant in its original context—what the biblical author was trying to communicate to his audience.
Thus we discover that, in Hosea 11:1, the son of God in the literal sense of the passage was Israel, but the spiritual sense of the text includes Jesus as the ultimate Son of God.
Similarly, we discover that in Isaiah 7:14, the son to be named Immanuel was, in the literal sense of the text, a child born in Ahaz’s day, but the spiritual sense includes a reference to Jesus as the greater Immanuel or “God with us.”
Isaiah 53
A number of New Testament passages focus on Isaiah 53, which describes a figure known as the Servant of the Lord (or, in some scholarly publications, the Servant of Yahweh).
The identity of this figure is not immediately obvious from reading the text of Isaiah 53, as the encounter that Philip had with the Ethiopian eunuch makes clear:
Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the scripture which he was reading was this:
“As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearer is dumb, so he opens not his mouth.
“In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken up from the earth” [cf. Isa. 53:7-8].
And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, pray, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”
Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus (Acts 8:29-35).
Philip thus correctly identified this text points to Jesus, at least in its spiritual sense. But for a complete understanding of it, we still need to ask what its literal sense was and whether it may have pointed to someone or something in addition to Jesus.
Servants in Isaiah
The Hebrew word for “servant” used in the key passages of Isaiah is ‘ebed. This word appears 40 times in the book, in 36 verses.
In some cases, it refers to the servants of human beings:
This last servant is also likely one of the figures described as a “servant” of the Lord, which brings us to the category we are primarily interested in: those who serve God.
Many of the uses of ‘ebed in Isaiah are in the plural and refer to God’s servants collectively. This theme emerges in chapter 54 and is especially prominent in the final four chapters of the book:
We thus see that in Isaiah God actually has many servants.
Individual Servants
Not all uses of ‘ebed are in the plural, and there remain 22 uses which speak of individual servants of the Lord. Four of them are named:
That leaves us still to explain 10 uses of ‘ebed. We won’t here propose definitite identifications for these passages, but we can say something about how their literal sense can be plausibly understood.
The Priority of Israel
Jewish interpreters tend to see the Servant of the Lord as Israel, and there are two reasons that suggest this should be our starting point in seeking to establish the literal sense of the text:
The logical procedure is thus to examine the remaining uses to see whether they could plausibly describe Israel or whether they more likely refer to something or someone else.
Servants Beside Israel?
It appears that at least some of the passages refer to a servant other than Israel. With one exception, all of the Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah 49:3 identify Israel as the servant of that verse, but just a few verses later we seem to be reading about a different servant:
And now the Lord says, who formed me from the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him,
for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord, and my God has become my strength—
he says: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:5-6).
If the identification of Israel as the servant of verse 3 was in the original Hebrew text (something some scholars have disputed), then it seems that we are reading about a different servant in verses 5 and 6, since this servant has a mission to Jacob/Israel.
Who might this be? A plausible answer is Isaiah himself. He has already been named as a servant of the Lord in 20:3, and he has the prophet’s mission of calling God’s people “back to him” that they may be “gathered to him” so that God might “raise up” his people and “restore the preserved of Israel.”
If this understanding is correct, then the Ethiopian eunuch’s guess that the prophet was speaking of himself in Isaiah 53 might be correct—in the literal sense of the text, though a reference to Jesus is clearly to be found in its spiritual sense.
Isaiah, however, is not the only other possibility for an individual servant in the remaining passages. One that is sometimes proposed is Cyrus the Persian, who is described in Isa. 45:1 not with the term “servant” (‘ebed) but using the parallel term “anointed” (mashiakh or “messiah”).
Anyone anointed by the Lord is functioning as his servant toward the purpose for which he was anointed, and Cyrus was given a mission of restoring Israel and bringing them back both to their land and their God by allowing them to return and rebuild the Jerusalem temple.
God also describes Cyrus in Isaiah 44:28 as “my shepherd,” again indicating he is serving God.
Other figures—such as Cyrus’s successor Darius or the returning Jewish governor Zerubbabel—have also been proposed as God’s servant in various passages. However, these rest on more speculative reconstructions of historical circumstances, since these figures are not named in the book.
Conclusion
From what we have seen, there are multiple servants of the Lord described in the literal sense of the book of Isaiah—some of whom are identified by name.
In light of this, we need to approach the servant texts and ask the standard question for determining the literal sense of a passage: What would this have meant in its original context? How would the author and his audience have understood it?
After determining this to the best of our ability, we will be in a better position to explore the spiritual sense of the text, including the applications it may have to Jesus.
The nation of Israel originally had 12 tribes, but at a certain point 10 were taken into captivity and became “lost.” Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli explore the claims and counterclaims about what happened to them, then look at the evidence from both Jewish and Christian traditions as well as historical records and DNA evidence.
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This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week from 27 October 2018 to 8 November 2018.
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The Motion Picture was the first evidence that Star Trek could be revived following the cancellation of the original series. Jimmy Akin, Dom Bettinelli, and Fr. Cory Sticha go back to re-examine the first Trek movie, ask whether it still works, and look at the big questions it raises about personhood and being.
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The Doctor has a P’Ting problem and Jimmy Akin, Dom Bettinelli, and Fr. Cory Sticha are here to talk about it, as well as male doulas, antimatter, and a misplaced Tardis… again.
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In the ancient world there were two forms of books: the scroll and the codex.
These two types of books amounted to different forms of “book technology.” They worked in different ways, as the ways of accessing the material (rolling vs. flipping) indicates.
Before the rise of Christianity, scrolls were by far the most popular format for books. We have almost no references to pre-Christian books being sold in codex form, and pagans and Jews used scrolls almost exclusively when they had scribes copy books for them.
By contrast, Christians were enthusiastic users of codices. This is clear from the surviving second and third century Christian manuscripts, the large majority of which are in codex form. (See Larry Hurtado’s catalogue of early Christian manuscripts.)
Scholars have debated why the codex became so popular among Christians, and they have proposed many possible reasons. However, we don’t know for sure. Codices have some advantages, but they aren’t decisive. (See Larry Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, and Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church).
The primary reason was likely cultural: Somebody in the Christian community started producing books in codex form—perhaps a very influential edition of a major Christian text (likely something that’s now part of the Bible)—and this became the expected form for books among Christians.
However that happened, the trend must have started in the first century, because it was clearly in place by the second century.
We can’t be certain, because there are other possibilities, but my guess would be that the influential codex that started the trend was one of four things:
Is there any way we can shed light on this question?
Book Technology and the Synoptic Problem
British scholar Alan Garrow has done a lot of work on the Synoptic Problem—the question of how Matthew, Mark, and Luke are related to each other.
He advocates the “Matthew Conflator Hypothesis” (sometimes called the Wilke Hypothesis), which holds that Mark wrote first, Luke used Mark, and then Matthew conflated Mark and Luke (as well as other sources).
This has been my preferred view for a long time, though I’m open to arguments for other positions.
You can watch Garrow’s videos arguing for this view here.
In his third video, he makes an argument that involves the scroll vs. codex issue. He points out, as have others, that when people were copying from a scroll, they tended to do so in a different way than if they were using a codex. This was because of the physical nature of the book, the ease of maintaining eye contact with the text being copied, and the ability to easily move between passages.
Scroll-users have a greater tendency than codex-users to:
By contrast, codex-users have a greater tendency than scroll-users to:
In light of this, what can we say about the Synoptic Problem?
What If . . . ?
See Garrow’s third video for the details, but we can say the following:
Garrow argues that these (and other) considerations give us reason to prefer the Matthew Conflator Hypothesis because it allows Matthew to behave consistently: He operates like a codex-user when dealing with both Mark and Luke.
However, if the situation were reversed (a view known as the Farrer Hypothesis) then Luke would be inconsistent: He would operate like a scroll-user with Mark but a codex-user with Matthew.
These facts are certainly consistent with the Matthew Conflator Hypothesis, but I don’t think they provide a particularly strong reason to favor it. This seems to be the weakest part of Garrow’s case, and the arguments he advances in the other videos are much stronger. (There are also arguments that he doesn’t go into in the videos.)
Why Not?
So why don’t the above facts give us strong reason to favor the Matthew Conflator Hypothesis?
The reason has to do with the availability of books in scroll and codex forms. Scribes were overwhelmingly used to producing scrolls, and it is unlikely that the codex trend began with the very first Christian books and then instantly dominated the Christian book world. Indeed, Hurtado’s list shows that Christians were still using scrolls for centuries, even after the codex form became dominant.
It is thus likely that the first Gospel to be written—Mark—was originally published as a scroll, something supported by the fact that Luke seems to have used a scroll of Mark.
Further, books in this period were fantastically expensive due to the costs of materials and the hand copying that was involved. This means that, if you were an Evangelist, you would be incentivized to use whatever copy of a prior Evangelist’s Gospel you had—whether it was a scroll or a codex.
You wouldn’t be likely to undertake the expense of having the earlier Evangelist(s) re-copied into your preferred format. And even if you had a rich patron, he might not be inclined to go along with what he would see as a frivolous expense.
Nor would you be likely to slice up a scroll and convert it into a codex. That would produce a very damaged copy as you would be slicing through the joins where the individual sheets were attached, it would be hard to effectively bind them to a single spine, and the book would be extra thick since scrolls were usually written only on one side of the page.
The probability is that you would use the prior Evangelist(s) in whatever format you had.
If Luke was the last of the Synoptic Evangelists to write, the reason for his inconsistency in how he treated Mark and how he treated Matthew thus might simply be due to the fact that he had a scroll of Mark but a codex of Matthew—and he didn’t bother having Matthew recopied as a scroll before he set to work.
I’m not saying that this possibility deprives Garrow’s argument of all force. There is still some value in a scenario that allows the final Synoptic Evangelist to use his sources in a consistent manner. However, I do think the possibility substantially weakens this particular argument for the Matthew Conflator Hypothesis.
What Was the Influential Codex?
Can we learn anything from this about what the influential book may have been that kicked of the Christian codex trend?
It seems that we can.
Earlier I proposed four possibilities for what this book may have been:
Since it would have taken time for the codex trend to become established in Christian circles, it is likely that Mark—the first Gospel written—would have initially appeared as a scroll. This is supported by the fact—as Garrow points out—that Luke seems to have used a scroll of Mark. So option 2 is less likely than the others.
The facts we’ve seen also lend some extra probability to the idea that Matthew may have been the influential codex:
Further, if Matthew was using codices of Mark and Luke, then—unless he were the kind of codex superfan we’ve just described—copies of Gospels in codex form were already in circulation, and they were probably separate copies—i.e., not bound together as a single volume. This would remove a degree of probability from option 4.
Of the four options, then, Garrow’s analysis causes both Mark and a multi-Gospel collection to lose probability as the influential codex—and Matthew to gain it.
However, Paul’s initial letter collection (Rom.-Gal.) is still a strong possibility.
And there are other options. We are not locked into these four. It could be that Mark was initially a scroll but—by Matthew’s time—it was available as a codex. Or that it was initially a codex but some people made scrolls of it because these were the more familiar book form. The same possibilities are true of Luke.
Either of these thus could have been the book that kicked off the codex trend—and there are other possibilities yet. The key work even could have been an influential work from the Old Testament (a copy of the Pentateuch?) or even an unknown work, though these possibilities are less likely.
Unless dramatic new evidence emerges, this matter will retain its mystery.
Separating fact from science fiction, Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss cloning, what it is and isn’t, its surprisingly long history, the moral implications, and future prospects.
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