In face of all this the methods of the Bernhard Weiss school and the selection theory are alike invalid. They furnish no explanation. The third Gospel is simply substituting a mission to the Gentiles for a mission to the Jews, under cover of a story of a preparatory mission to all the places that were to be visited by the Teacher on his way to his death at Jerusalem. The seventy--in some MSS. seventy-two--stand for the seventy or seventy-two peoples into whom, by Jewish tradition, mankind was divided. The notion that a genuine logion of this kind was all along lying ready to be used is surely fantastic. It is a planned myth, eking out the main myth. It yields only the same Gospel of one phrase, not meant to be understood by the hearers. But it carries in symbol a provision for the Gentiles; and immediately upon it there follows the story of the Good Samaritan, demonstrating that the real tie among men is not nationality but humanity, and impeaching the fanaticism and hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders.
Facing once more the sharp antithesis between this and the strictly Judaic command in Matthew, we dismiss as a futility the notion that the same teacher delivered both about the same time, and that the pro-Gentile compiler merely "selected" one and dropped the other. The two sayings are framed for two schools or two sects; and it is idle to see history in either. If the deified Teacher had delivered the first, the second would have been a daring blasphemy. They are alike but men's counsels ascribed to "the Lord." To this conclusion we are always driven. The starting-point of the diverging sects must be looked for in something else than a body of oracular teaching of any kind.
The diverging schools of documentary "construction" being thus alike unable to yield a coherent notion either of the process of Gospel-making or of the beginnings of the cultus, it is not surprising to find yet a third school of scholarly interpretation undertaking to do better, and to build on an "oral" basis where others have vainly built on documents. This theory, long ago predominant in Germany, [117] is latterly represented in England by the Rev. Arthur Wright, author of The Composition of the Gospels, a Synopsis of the Gospels, and Some New Testament Problems.
