Rewritten Scripture in the Gospels

When we talk about ancient religious texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, we see exotic, wild texts which some isolated fringe group held dear. Such texts, of course, were dismissed by the larger communities of their time as unauthoritative in or contrary to the slowly forming lists of accepted mainline scripture. Indeed, such texts, like Jubilees, a book only accepted today in the Abyssinian Orthodox Church, are considered pseudepigraphical by scholars, meaning the authorship they claim is most likely false. In the case of Jubilees, the actual author based his writing on the stories of Genesis through the departure of Moses from Egypt, thus giving Jubilees a genre which author Sidnie White Crawford calls Rewritten Scripture in her book Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times. Jubilees and the process of rewriting scripture are seemingly far-removed from most modern audiences, and thus they come across as strange and perhaps even blasphemous to some when compared with the texts on which they were based. However, by using White’s description of the types of rewritten scriptures and motivations for making them, we can bring this process a little closer to home. 

The idea of rewritten scripture probably seems strange in large part because texts like Jubilees are not widely used and were lost to history in most traditions. The New Testament, however, particularly the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, provide an application for the idea of rewritten scripture which will be more familiar and relevant to many modern readers. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are the three Gospels which are called synoptic due to the fact that they contain many similarities in their content and wording, while John tends to tell different stories in different ways. Scholars believe Matthew and Luke to be based on the shorter Mark as well as other sources and the ideologies of their authors. For example, Matthew’s author portrays Jesus as a good, observant Jew and a fulfillment of Hebrew Bible scripture while Mark is not concerned with such a portrayal. 

To compare these texts with Crawford’s theory, we must look at the typical features which she proposes rewritten scripture has: “addition, omission, re-arrangement, anticipation, changes for clarification, and harmonization (as well as translation)” (126). The non-specific example of Matthew’s observant Jewish Jesus already addresses both addition and harmonization, meaning that its author added content and tried to line the story up with the his own worldview. Other examples from this list include the clarification seen in Matthew and Luke when they describe the birth of Christ as well as omission in that there are pieces of Mark which are included in neither. However, despite some amount of alteration and rewriting before the New Testament entered the form in which we know it today, these texts still hold great authority unlike Jubilees which never gained their widely accepted status. As such, Matthew and Luke seem to fall along Crawford’s spectrum of rewritten texts at the point where manipulation of the original is extensive enough for a new work to be formed, but the base text can still be identified, and the author still claims the same derivation of authority as the base text. Such manipulations demonstrate the relationships which authors had with the texts of their times and the gradual process of coming to understand a text as unalterable and authoritative scripture.