Mulberry Trees and Mustard Seeds

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Ken Olson
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Mulberry Trees and Mustard Seeds

Post by Ken Olson »

This post is taken from a short series of posts I made on another list, and in it I am arguing against the view that the striking image of a mulberry tree being thrown into the sea in Luke 17.6 (which some scholars take to have come from Q) is not Lukan redaction, but a more primitive form of the saying about a mountain being thrown into the sea found in Mark 11.23 (with parallels in Matt 17.20 and 21.21b). I argue the reverse, the Lukan form is much more likely to be Luke's own redaction. The argument is directed against other scholars who accept the theory of Markan priority (particularly the Two-Document or Mark-Q theory and the theory of Matthean posteriority). Luke 17.6 is not attested to be in Marcion (according to BeDuhn's reconstruction anyway). I think the post will make sense on its own without my previous posts, but I can provide clarifications if necessary.
Luke 17.5: The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” 6 The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
In my first post, I gave reasons to reject as inconclusive three of the four arguments Fleddermann gives for thinking the form of the saying on faith with sycamine in Luke 17.6 is more primitive than the form with mountain in Mark 11.23.

I still have to deal with what I identified as the main argument: Fleddermann’s claim that Mark heightens the miraculous by changing the sycamine into a mountain, and Allison’s related claim that, “No good explanation can be given for the change from ‘mountain’ to ‘sycamine’.” As it stands, Fledermann’s claim is just a statement of what he thinks happened. The implied argument he is making is that it is not just that it is likely that Mark would have heightened the miraculous, but that it is unlikely that Luke would have lessened the scale of the miraculous by changing the mountain into a sycamine.

Is this true? Luke presumably knew Mark 11.23, with the mountain being cast into the sea, and preferred not to use it. He has, in fact, omitted the entire story of the Cursing of the Fig Tree from Mark 11.12-14, 20-25[26] from his own narrative. Instead, he has the Parable of Barren the Fig Tree in Luke 13.6-9. Many Lukan commentators, going at least as far back as J.M. Creed in 1930, have considered the parable to be a substitute for the Cursing of the Fig Tree. M.D. Goulder straightforwardly says Luke rewrote the incident as a parable (Luke, 561).

If Luke omitted a miracle story and replaced it with a parable (whether he composed the parable himself or not), this casts some doubt on the theory that he would necessarily have been concerned to heighten, or at least not lessen, the miraculous in his gospel. All four of Fleddermann’s arguments are inconclusive.

There remains Allison’s claim that no good explanation can be given for the change from mountain to mulberry tree. It is on that point, however, that I think the theory of Luke’s knowledge of Matthew has an advantage, because it can offer an explanation for the origin of the unusual and striking image of a tree being uprooted and planted in the sea.

In the NRSV, Matthew’s version of the Cursing of the Fig Tree looks like this:
Matt 21.18 In the morning, when he returned to the city, he was hungry. 19 And seeing a fig tree by the side of the road, he went to it and found nothing at all on it but leaves. Then he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once. 20 When the disciples saw it, they were amazed, saying, “How did the fig tree wither at once?” 21 Jesus answered them, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do [what has been done] to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done. 22 Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive.”
The words I have placed in brackets have no equivalent in the Greek. In its context in Matthew, the fig tree must be the one Jesus has just cursed and about which the disciples asked, so the translators are quite right to provide the back reference. However, what Jesus says in the Greek is this:
Ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν ἔχητε πίστιν καὶ μὴ διακριθῆτε, οὐ μόνον τὸ τῆς συκῆς ποιήσετε, ἀλλὰ κἂν τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ εἴπητε· Ἄρθητι καὶ βλήθητι εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν, γενήσεται·

Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done.
Taken by itself and not in its Matthean context, Jesus seems to be saying that, if you have faith and do not doubt, the thing that you will do to the fig tree you will not do only to the fig tree, but also to this mountain, if you asked it, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea.’ This would seem to imply that you will not only cause the mountain to be lifted up and thrown into the sea, but also the fig tree, if you asked it (providing that you have faith).

This seems to be how Luke took it. I am not, of course, claiming that Luke was unable to understand what Matthew meant, but that he engaged in a bit of creative (or perhaps overly literal) interpretation because he liked the striking image of a tree thrown into the sea and wanted to use it. (Again, the fact that he omitted the Cursing of the Fig Tree and included The Parable of the Barren Fig Tree in his gospel suggests that his goal was something other than heightening the miraculous).

Instead of the words “lifted up”and “thrown”, Luke substitutes the graphic verbs “uprooted” and “planted,” which are appropriate to plants and which, conveniently, he could find paired in Matt 15.13 (to which Luke has no parallel, or, rather, no other parallel):
Matt 15.13: He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted.”
There is still the problem of how a fig tree, or syke, became a black mulberry, or sycamine. All the synoptics use the word syke, but Luke alone has the sycamine (in Luke 17.6), a larger tree, and the sycamore (the tree Zacchaeus climbs to see Jesus in Luke 19.4), which is larger still. A number of Lukan commentators think that Luke actually intended the sycamore in Luke 17.6, because the Hebrew word for the sycamore is translated as sycamine in the LXX (Fitzmyer, Luke, v2, 1143; Marshall, Luke, 644). In any event, both trees are larger than the syke or fig.

Goulder argued, “Luke makes the change because the sycamine is bigger ... and its removal thus more impressive,” (Luke, 642), but I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s not the removal of the large sycamine that’s impressive (the removal of a mountain would have been more impressive), it’s the contrast between the small mustard seed and the large tree, which Luke has omitted from his version of the Parable of the Mustard Seed in Luke 13.18-20 (compare Mark 4.30-34 and Matt 13.31-35) and used here in Luke 17.6, prompted by the mention of the size of the mustard seed in Matt 17.20.
Matt 17.20 He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Luke 17.6 The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
To recap, the theory of Luke’s use of Matthew can give a strong account of the change from mountain to sycamine/mulberry tree. Luke has read Matt 17.20, and it brought to mind three other Matthean texts. The doublet at Matt 21.21 provided the image of the tree being cast into the sea, though the actual words planted and uprooted came from Matt 15.3, and the mention of the size of the mustard seed has brought to mind the image of the comparison of the small mustard seed with the large tree in the Parable of the Mustard Seed (other than the Parable of the Mustard Seed itself in Mark and Matthew, Luke 17.6 is the only place in the synoptics where the size of a mustard seed is set against the size of a large tree).

Best,

Ken
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: Mulberry Trees and Mustard Seeds

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Very well argued, Ken. I like it.
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Ken Olson
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Re: Mulberry Trees and Mustard Seeds

Post by Ken Olson »

Thanks, Ben.

To draw out the implications of what I'm arguing here, it's not only that Matthew has an earlier form of the saying than Luke in in Matt 17.20/Luke 17.6 because the mulberry tree is likely to be Lukan redaction (i.e., Luke changing mountain to mulberry tree). It's also an argument that Matthew has the earlier form of the Parable of the Mustard Seed in Matt 13.31-32/Luke 13.18-19 (also Mark 4.30-32; this is one of the so-called Mark-Q overlaps).

On his web site Mahlon Smith gives and English synopsis of the Parable of the Mustard Seed here (there's a tab for the Greek synopsis near the top of the page) here:

https://virtualreligion.net/primer/mustard.html

On the page where he analyzes the synopsis (the source hypotheses tab), Smith argues:
The fact that the phrases invoked by Luke to describe the mustard plant echo only insertions introduced in Matthew's alteration of the Markan parable makes Luke's failure to follow Mark all the more problematic. For Luke's version of the mustard seed analogy is more succinct than Matthew's precisely because it omits elements of the description that Matthew simply copied from Mark ("the smallest of seeds" becoming "the greatest of shrubs"). So, if Luke based his wording of this parable on the canonical text of the gospel of Matthew, then he must have used Mark's version as a negative filter, deliberately deleting most of the wording that Matthew & Mark had in common.
https://virtualreligion.net/primer/mustard_3.html

Smith gives pretty much the standard Two Document Hypothesis argument against Luke's use of Matthew here. It's mistaken or unsubstantiated on two things. First, it's not true that Luke has parallels only to Matthew's insertions into (or additions to) Mark. There are three way agreements among the evangelists at the beginning and end of the Parable as seen in the synopsis (kingdom, mustard seed, birds of the air, nest). What Luke is missing is the agreement between Mark and Matthew on "smallest of seeds" and "greatest of shrubs."

Second, Smith suggests that if Luke used Matthew, then Mark must have acted as a negative filter (what F.G. Downing called "unpicking" Mark from Matthew), and that Luke must have been deliberately omitting "the smallest of seeds" and "the greatest of shrubs" because Matthew and Mark agreed on them, and that would be implausible. But if one accepts the possibility that Luke omitted the comparison of the small mustard seed to the large tree so that he could use it in Luke 17.6, the argument collapses. Matthew has the earlier form and there is no reason to favor the Q theory over Luke's use of Matthew (though one can always employ the expedient of reconstructing Q to look like Matthew).

Best,

Ken
Stuart
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Re: Mulberry Trees and Mustard Seeds

Post by Stuart »

Luke uses a number of unique terms (duh, hence the famous Lukan favorite words). Curiously few if any are attested in the Marcionite text, so they may be from a later editor.

If Luke is referring to platanus orientalis, which is the European Sycamore, instead of the Mulberry Tree (common in the Middle East) it could be an indicator to his location being in either today's Greece or Western Turkey.

See map below of the native region of that tree. The range has spread in the last few hundred years.

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Ken Olson
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Re: Mulberry Trees and Mustard Seeds

Post by Ken Olson »

Stuart,

Luke 17.6: ἐλέγετε ἂν τῇ συκαμίνῳ ταύτῃ ‘you could say to this sycamine’ (usually translated as ‘mulberry tree’)

It’s specifically the sycamine, which is native to Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sycamine

Best,

Ken
Stuart
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Re: Mulberry Trees and Mustard Seeds

Post by Stuart »

Bark from the wrong tree :scratch:

Ficus sycomorus range is mostly sub Sahara Africa, but also Egypt delta and up through Isreal, Lebanon and Syria. I guess it got to Egypt via trade and they spread it up the coast.
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