In Luke chapter 4: 14 -
30 we read of Jesus’ return to his hometown of Nazareth. This wasn’t quite the triumphant return of
the “local boy made good.” Instead he was rejected by his friends and family
and was dragged out of town by the furious citizens who wanted to kill him by
throwing him off the edge of a cliff.
Ignoring for the moment
the fact that there is no “cliff” from which he could have been thrown, I am
curious this morning about what Jesus read in the synagogue that provoked such
a reaction. Luke tells us that “the
scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.” John P Meier suggests that Jesus chose the
passage himself as “[i]t is anachronistic to think of a universally observed
lectionary for synagogue services in the early 1st century A.D.”[i] Unrolling it, he came to the place where it
is written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the
poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the
blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the
Lord’s favor.”
But here we have a
problem. This text that Jesus read[ii]
, as Luke records it, is not found in the book of Isaiah. It is actually a conflation of two different
(but not complete) parts of Isaiah.
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Isaiah 61: 1 - 2
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Isaiah 58: 6
|
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1 The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is
on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He
has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
|
6 “Is
not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to
loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
|
The not quite complete passage
from Isaiah 61: 1 – 2 has been interrupted with a single line from a single
verse from chapter 58: 6. The lines
above in bold have been dropped from Luke’s account of Jesus’ reading in the
Nazareth synagogue.
So here’s the
question: How do we account for this
strange reading?
And here are several
possible (but not necessarily equally plausible) solutions:
Possibility 1 – The synagogue
at Nazareth had a garbled copy of the book of Isaiah. In an era of hand copied texts, there were
frequent mistakes in the process. Words
and lines were dropped or repeated, words were rearranged or changed. Various parts were merged together…. It is
possible that the scroll owned by the local synagogue in Nazareth actually
included this conflated variant reading.
Possibility 2 – Jesus,
while reading from chapter 61 (and remember that the chapter and verse divisions
came much, much, much later…) ‘improvised’ a little and included the line from
chapter 58 from memory.
Possibility 3- The
source Luke consulted during his preliminary investigations had an imprecise memory. Eyewitness testimony, while important, should
be handled with caution. Human memory is
more fluid than we might like to admit.
Possibility 4 – Luke bungled. Perhaps his information was, in fact, completely
reliable, but Luke failed to record it accurately.
Possibility 5 – Luke has
purposefully changed the text in order accommodate his narrative and
theological goals. The gospels are not
court room transcripts of historical events.
That Luke might have altered the content of Jesus’ Sabbath day reading
and subsequent discourse in the synagogue shouldn’t be surprising.
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