Note 9 — Chapter XI · THE LOGIA THEORY AND THE HISTORICAL TEXT

Let us see how Dr. Petrie’s method explains Matthew x, 5: “Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city of the Samaritans.” It occurs only in Matthew: Luke gives the parable of the Good Samaritan, with its flings at the lawyer and at the Jews in general; and in John the Founder makes Samaritan converts. The anti-Gentile text Dr. Petrie never discusses! Yet his method does not permit him to exclude it. It belongs to his “sixth class,” of “sayings and episodes which only occur in one Gospel. These classes are almost entirely in Matthew and Luke, and are the accretions which were added after the Gospels had finally parted company.”9 So that after the Gentile period had set in, Matthew, the one “professional scribe among the apostles,” somehow found a logion Iesou which suited the need of the Church to exclude Samaritans and Gentiles, while Luke found another which suited the need to welcome them. And yet, in respect of its very purport, the anti-Gentile and anti-Samaritan teaching ought, if genuine, to belong, on Dr. Petrie’s general principle, to the earliest collection of all. Such is the dilemma to which we are led by the strictly statistical method of selection, conducted without any higher light.