The only time I ever wrote a letter to the editor, it was about this week’s lectionary text from Matthew 5. Someone had written their own letter to the editor, complaining that the paper was misquoting the bible. “Your newspaper quoted the beatitudes wrong,” the letter went, or something like that. “You liberals went and changed it from ‘blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ to ‘blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” The letter-writer was very up-in-arms about the way the liberal media had twisted the bible, making it more about social welfare and less about piety, and apparently was unaware that the beatitudes, like many gospel texts, exist in multiple, sometimes contradictory forms in different gospels. I wrote my own letter to the editor to point out that the newspaper was not trying to change the gospel of Matthew, but rather was accurately quoting the gospel of Luke.
The beatitudes, which appear in both Matthew 5 and Luke 6, are a really fascinating case study in the ways the gospels relate to each other. Clearly the two passages are related to each other; they share a lot of the same themes and even the same words. But there are major differences between the two as well. Matthew’s version appears as part of the “sermon on the mount,” which takes place on a mountain to help Jesus look more like Moses (which is a big theme of the whole book). Meanwhile Luke’s version happens “on a level place” (6:17), which is decidedly a not-mountain kind of location. Matthew’s version focuses on spiritual and psychological conditions: mourning, being poor in spirit, meekness, mercy, purity of heart, and the like. But Luke’s version is far sharper and more political, sounding almost Marxist in its focus: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” Luke’s concern is not being poor in spirit, but being poor, and for Luke and the Jesus we meet in that gospel, poverty is its own special concern.
Luke also adds a section that Matthew doesn’t have at all, which is a list of woes. In Luke, Jesus doesn’t just dole out blessings, he also delivers woes, designed to counterbalance the blessings. Not only are the poor blessed, but “woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” Not only are the hungry blessed, but “woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” The woes make for a much sharper and socially-conscious set of sayings.
The plot thickens when we start to try to figure out how those two gospels both ended up sharing the same set of sayings, in such different forms. Normally we would look to Mark to see what that gospel, possibly the earliest of the four, says, on the premise that knowing what Mark said could help us understand which of Matthew and Luke had changed the text, and why. But Mark doesn’t have the beatitudes at all, or any of the sermon on the mount material for that matter! This story (or set of sayings) belongs to the material that Matthew and Luke share, but Mark does not have, which is sometimes referred to as Q. (Q stands for quelle, which is the German word for “source,” and it’s a hypothetical source that we don’t have anymore that helps explain why Matthew and Luke sometimes share things in common that Mark doesn’t have). If this is Q material, it doesn’t quite solve our problem. If Matthew and Luke are both looking at the same source material (that we can’t see anymore), why do they repeat it so differently? Did they have different versions of it, and if so, when did the two versions diverge, and why? Or, did they have different oral traditions of the same teaching, or different memories of it? Of course, it’s also possible that Jesus simply gave the same teaching twice with different emphases, but that seems really unlikely to me.
Choosing which version of the beatitudes you prefer is something of a theological Rorschach Test, like it was for that guy who wrote to the newspaper about it. If you think Christianity is mostly about your personal piety and salvation, then Matthew’s version is going to make a lot of sense to you. You can read it and know that Jesus is concerned with helping you moderate your own behaviors and live the way you should. But if you think Christianity is mostly about justice, equity, and systemic change, the Luke version is for you. If you take your Christianity with a side of Marxist critique, Luke’s beatitudes make Jesus look more like a revolutionary and less like a therapeutic figure.
Personally I like having both versions, though I suppose I prefer Luke’s. Jesus does strike me as a little bit of a revolutionary, and I think it’s more likely that Matthew smoothed out the edges than it is that Luke added them. I do like my Christianity with a bit of Marx. But if you don’t, it’s good to know that you have options.
I’ll take Luke!