Footnote 1 – Understanding Matthew’s Vitriol

Luke 11:37–52 contains a story of Jesus dining with and rebuking a Pharisee, followed by three “woes” against the Pharisees and three against lawyers. The contents of this attack have many sentences and phrases in common with Matthew, but the order is different. So is the position in the gospel. The Lukan woes occur in the middle of the gospel, in a long teaching section, not at a climactic point near the end, as in Matthew. Parts of Matthew 23 and Luke 11 were probably derived from the hypothetical Sayings Source, designated as Q, but both authors reshaped the materials to fit their purposes.