The Wisdom Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels

Abstract

An earlier generation of New Testament scholarship found the generalizing tendency of Wisdom quite congenial, and indeed interpreted the New Testament, or at least the message of Jesus, as a kind of higher wisdom.' In reaction against the tendency to reduce the New Testament message to truths, New Testament study today looks for other ways of bringing the New Testament into relation with its environment, and pays attention to Wisdom, except that inverted Wisdom, Gnosticism. Let us first then say that Jewish Wisdom was indeed characterized by the attempt to formulate brief statements about recurring processes in man's life in a word, to formulate proverbs but that Wisdom is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than the description general truths suggests. Old Testament scholarship is now recognizing the complexity and religious vitality of the Wisdom tradition,2 a fact that can provide incentive to a renewed examination of the use of, or parallels to, this tradition in the Synoptic Gospels. We may characterize the Wisdom tradition briefly, in two respects. First, though it was not historical in the sense of being concerned with the history of the covenant community, the Wisdom tradition was, in its own way, historical. That is, it was concerned with the individual man in his little history, in the context in which he made his decisions as a responsible human being. Man's real existence is lived in concrete interaction with his fellow-men. This concrete understanding of life underlies the rules that are often supposed to be the basis of wisdom.