Note 23 — Chapter VIII · EVENTS IN THE PUBLIC LIFE OF JESUS, EXCLUDING THE MIRACLES.

It will not be denied that the petition of the sons of Zebedee, is in itself too specific and remarkable to be a mere background to the ensuing discourse; and the same judgment must be passed on the scene with the child: so that we have already two cases of contention for pre-eminence subsisting in themselves. If we would assign to each of these occurrences its appropriate discourses, the declarations which Matthew connects with the presentation of the child: Unless ye become as this child, etc., and Whosoever shall humble himself as this child, etc., evidently belong to this occasion. On the other hand, the sentences on ruling and serving in the world and in the kingdom of Jesus, seem to be a perfectly suitable comment on the petition of the sons of Zebedee, with which Matthew associates them: also the saying about the first and the last, the greatest and the least, which Mark and Luke give so early as at the scene with the child, Matthew seems rightly to have reserved for the scene with the sons of Zebedee. It is otherwise with the contention spoken of by Luke (xxii. 24 ff.). This contention originates in no particular occasion, nor does it issue in any strongly marked scene (unless we choose to insert here the washing of the disciples’ feet, described by John, who, for the rest, mentions no dispute;—of which scene, however, we cannot treat until we come to the history of the Passion). On the contrary, this contention is ushered in merely by the words, ἐγένετο δὲ καὶ φιλονεικία ἐν αὐτοῖς,—nearly the same by which the first contention is introduced, ix. 46,—and leads to a discourse from Jesus, which, as we have already noticed, Matthew and Mark represent him to have delivered in connexion with the earlier instances of rivalry; so that this passage of Luke has nothing peculiarly its own, beyond its position, at the last supper. This position, however, is not very secure; for that immediately after the discourse on the betrayer, so humiliating to the disciples, pride should so strongly have taken possession of them, is as difficult to believe, as it is easy to discover, by a comparison of v. 23 and 24, how the writer might be led, without historical grounds, to insert here a contention for pre-eminence. It is clear that the words καὶ αὐτοὶ ἤρξαντο συζητεῖν πρὸς ἑαυτοὺς, τὸ, τίς ἄρα εἴη ἐξ αὐτῶν ὁ τοῦτο μέλλων πράσσειν; suggested to him the similar ones, ἐγένετο δὲ καὶ φιλονεικία ἐν αὐτοῖς, τὸ τίς αὐτῶν δοκεῖ εἶναι μείζων; that is, the disputes about the betrayer called to his remembrance the disputes about pre-eminence. One such dispute indeed, he had already mentioned, but had only connected with it, one sentence excepted, the discourses occasioned by the exhibition of the child; he had yet in reserve those which the two first Evangelists attach to the petition of the sons of Zebedee, an occasion which seems not to have been present to the mind of the third Evangelist, whence he introduces the discourses pertaining to it here, with the general statement that they originated in a contention for pre-eminence, which broke out among the disciples. Meanwhile the chronological position, also, of the two first-named disputes about rank, has very little probability; for in both instances, it is after a prediction of the passion, which, like the prediction of the betrayal, would seem calculated to suppress such thoughts of earthly ambition.23 We therefore welcome the indication which the evangelical narrative itself presents, of the manner in which the narrators were led unhistorically to such an arrangement. In the answer of Jesus to the prayer of Salome, the salient point was the suffering that awaited him and his disciples; hence by the most natural association of ideas, the ambition of the two disciples, the antidote to which was the announcement of approaching trial, was connected with the prediction of the passion. Again, on the first occasion of rivalry, the preceding prediction of the passion leads in Mark and Luke to the observation, that the disciples did not understand the words of Jesus, and yet feared to ask him concerning them, whence it may be inferred that they debated and disputed on the subject among themselves; here, then, the association of ideas caused the Evangelists to introduce the contention for pre-eminence, also carried on in the absence of Jesus. This explanation is not applicable to the narrative of Matthew, for there, between the prediction of the passion and the dispute of the disciples, the anecdote of the coin angled for by Peter, intervenes.