Note 73 — Chapter VI · THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE THREE FIRST GOSPELS.1

The maltreatment and murder of the king’s messengers are features in the narrative of Matthew which at once strike us as inconsistent—as a departure from the original design. Disregard of an invitation is sufficiently demonstrated by the rejection of it on empty pretexts such as Luke mentions; the maltreatment and even the murder of those who deliver the invitation, is an exaggeration which it is less easy to attribute to Jesus than to the Evangelist. The latter had immediately before communicated the parable of the rebellious husbandmen; hence there hovered in his recollection the manner in which they were said to have used the messengers of their lord, beating one, killing and stoning others (λαβόντες τοὺς δούλους αὐτοῦ ὃν μὲν ἔδειραν, ὃν δὲ ἀπέκτειναν, ὃν δὲ ἐλιθοβόλησαν), and he was thus led to incorporate similar particulars into the present parable (κρατήσαντες τοὺς δούλους αὐτοῦ ὕβρισαν καὶ ἀπέκτειναν), overlooking the circumstance that what might have been perpetrated with sufficient motive against servants who appeared with demands and authority to enforce them, had in the latter case no motive whatever. That hereupon, the king, not satisfied with excluding them from the feast, sends out his armies to destroy them and burn up their city, necessarily follows from the preceding incidents, but appears, like them, to be the echo of a parable which presented the relation between the master and the dependents, not in the milder form of a rejected invitation, but in the more severe one of an insurrection; as in the parable of the husbandmen in the vineyard, and that of the rebellious citizens, which we have above separated from the parable of the minæ. Yet more decidedly does the drift of the last particular in Matthew’s parable, that of the wedding garment, betray that it was not originally associated with the rest. For if the king had commanded that all, both bad and good, who were to be found in the highways, should be bidden to the feast, he could not wonder that they had not all wedding attire. To assume that those thus suddenly summoned went home to wash, and adjust their dress, is an arbitrary emendation of the text.73 Little preferable is the supposition that, according to oriental manners, the king had ordered a caftan to be presented to each guest, and might therefore justly reproach the meanest for not availing himself of the gift;74 for it is not to be proved that such a custom existed at the period,75 and it is not admissible to presuppose it merely because the anger of the king appears otherwise unfounded. But the addition in question is not only out of harmony with the imagery, but with the tendency of this parable. For while hitherto its aim had been to exhibit the national contrast between the perversity of the Jews, and the willingness of the Gentiles: it all at once passes to the moral one, to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy. That after the Jews had contemned the invitation to partake of the kingdom of God, the heathens would be called into it, is one complete idea, with which Luke very properly concludes his parable; that he who does not prove himself worthy of the vocation by a corresponding disposition, will be again cast out of the kingdom, is another idea, which appears to demand a separate parable for its exhibition. Here again it may be conjectured that the conclusion of Matthew’s parable is the fragment of another, which, from its also referring to a feast, might in tradition, or in the memory of an individual, be easily mingled with the former, preserved in its purity by Luke.76 This other parable must have simply set forth, that a king had invited various guests to a wedding feast, with the tacit condition that they should provide themselves with a suitable dress, and that he delivered an individual who had neglected this observance to his merited punishment. Supposing our conjectures correct, we have here a still more compound parable than in the former case: a parable in which, 1stly, the narrative of the ungrateful invited parties (Luke xiv.) forms the main tissue, but so that, 2ndly, a thread from the parable of the rebellious husbandmen is interwoven; while, 3rdly, a conclusion is stitched on, gathered apparently from an unknown parable on the wedding garment.