Note 55 — Chapter VI · THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE THREE FIRST GOSPELS.1

Luke, also, has only three of the seven parables given in Matt. xiii.; namely, those of the sower, the mustard-seed, and the leaven; so that the parables of the buried treasure, the pearl, and the net, as also that of the tares in the field, are peculiar to Matthew. The parable of the sower is placed by Luke (viii. 4 ff.) somewhat earlier, and in other circumstances, than by Matthew, and apart from the two other parables which he has in common with the first Evangelist’s series. These he introduces later, xiii. 18–21; a position which recent critics unanimously acknowledge as the correct one.55 But this decision is one of the most remarkable to which the criticism of the present age has been led by its partiality to Luke. For if we examine the vaunted connectedness of this Evangelist’s passages, we find that Jesus, having healed a woman bowed down by a spirit of infirmity, silences the punctilious ruler of the synagogue by the argument about the ox and ass, after which it is added (v. 17), And when he had said these things, all his adversaries were ashamed; and all the people rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him. Surely so complete and marked a form of conclusion is intended to wind up the previous narrative, and one cannot conceive that the sequel went forward in the same scene; on the contrary, the phrases, then said he, and again he said, by which the parables are connected, indicate that the writer had no longer any knowledge of the occasion on which Jesus uttered them, and hence inserted them at random in this indeterminate manner, far less judiciously than Matthew, who at least was careful to associate them with analogous materials.56