Today I'm starting a new series on a Gospel development theory. This particular theory alleges that Matthew contains more "engagement with Pharisaism" than either Mark or Luke, that John contains more "exclusive engagement with Pharisaism" than Matthew, and that this arises from the fact that Matthew and John were both trying to make their Gospels more relevant to their audiences by changing the groups involved in certain incidents, since their audiences several decades after Jesus were suffering persecution from the Pharisees of their own time.I illustrate this theory by reading quotations from Craig Keener's commentaries on Matthew and on John. I show that these are really fact-changing theories even though Keener characterizes the theory by saying that John "updates language."As we'll see in this series, it turns out that even at the descriptive level, this theory fails disastrously. It just isn't anywhere close to being true that Matthew contains more "engagement with Pharisaism" than Luke and Mark or that John contains more than the Synoptics. Next week we'll start seeing that in detail.
