The Myth of “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” – A Study of the Most Serious Theological Interpolation
At the center of the transmitted Passion narrative stands a sentence that has defined the Christian image of the cross for almost two millennia: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” — “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
The phrase appears in the present forms of Matthew and Mark. It is absent from Luke and John, and Paul never quotes it, although it would have provided the most direct support imaginable for his claim that Christ became “a curse for us.” From this single cry, later theology constructed the image of a Son abandoned by the Father, separated from God by human guilt, and subjected to the divine punishment supposedly required for salvation.
The sentence does more than describe suffering. It changes the identity of the one responsible for the decisive abandonment. Throughout the Passion, Jesus is betrayed, deserted, condemned, mocked, tortured, and executed by human beings. Their actions already explain His agony. Yet at the climax of the narrative, “Eli, Eli…” moves the central rupture from earth to heaven. The man rejected by His society is made to appear rejected by God.
MEKORAH identifies this sentence as a theological interpolation. Matthew, Mark, and Luke originally contained one final cry: “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” Luke was left unchanged at this point and continues to preserve the authentic declaration. Matthew and Mark were subsequently modified through the insertion of the Psalm 22 formula, its translation, and the accompanying scene about Elijah. The words of the original final cry were removed from both accounts, but the textual seams created by the intervention remain visible.
The Original Final Cry Preserved by Luke
Luke begins his Gospel by explaining that many people had already attempted to compile accounts of the events concerning Jesus. He refers to testimony transmitted by those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and declares that he carefully examined the material before writing an orderly account for Theophilus. This introduction matters because Luke presents his Gospel as the result of investigation, comparison, and the organization of earlier testimony.
His account of the death of Jesus is direct and complete. Darkness covers the land until the ninth hour. Jesus cries out with a loud voice and says, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” Having said this, He breathes His last. The cry has words, the words are addressed to the Father, and death follows immediately. There is no divine abandonment, no reference to Elijah, and no second cry left without content.
This is not merely a different final saying selected by Luke from several competing traditions. Luke did not encounter the present forms of Matthew and Mark and casually discard one of the most dramatic declarations ever attributed to Jesus. If “My God, why have You forsaken Me?” had already stood within the Passion narrative he investigated, Luke could easily have preserved it before the declaration of trust. The current forms of Matthew and Mark already contain two cries, so no narrative obstacle would have prevented him from recording both.
Luke contains only one final cry because the Passion accounts he examined had not yet received the “Eli, Eli…” insertion. Matthew and Mark originally ended in the same way as Luke. Jesus cried with a loud voice, entrusted His spirit to the Father, and died. Those two Gospels were altered later, while Luke remained untouched in this passage.
The original testimony therefore did not present a choice between abandonment and trust. It contained a single coherent declaration. Jesus was rejected by people but remained united with the Father. He died neither accusing God nor asking why heaven had turned against Him. He died placing Himself in the Father’s hands.
Two Cries and the Fabricated Elijah Scene
The present form of Mark contains the clearest remains of the editorial operation. Darkness covers the land from the sixth hour until the ninth, just as in Luke. At the ninth hour, however, Jesus is made to cry, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani.” The narrator immediately translates the words as “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” Some of the bystanders then claim that Jesus is calling Elijah. Someone offers Him sour wine while saying that they should wait to see whether Elijah will come to take Him down.
After this entire scene, Mark returns to the original ending:
Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed His last.
The final cry has no words. Mark still preserves the loud voice and the immediate death, but the content has disappeared. Luke supplies exactly what is missing: “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” The wordless cry in Mark is not an unrelated sound of agony. It is the damaged frame of the authentic final declaration.
Matthew exposes the intervention even more clearly. After reproducing the “Eli, Eli…” formula, its translation, the supposed misunderstanding about Elijah, and the sour wine, Matthew says that Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and gave up His spirit.
The word “again” is the visible seam. The original account contained one final cry. After another cry was inserted before it, the original became a second cry. The interpolated declaration received words, a translation, and a theological function, while the authentic declaration was emptied of its content.
The editorial mechanism can therefore be reconstructed. Matthew and Mark originally contained the same sequence preserved by Luke: darkness until the ninth hour, a loud cry addressed to the Father, and the death of Jesus. Later editors inserted the Psalm 22 lament before the authentic conclusion. They removed the words of the original cry but retained the statement that Jesus cried out and died. Mark preserves a final cry without words; Matthew calls it another cry because the addition has been placed before it.
The entire Elijah exchange belongs to this inserted unit. The text first presents a foreign-sounding expression, then supplies the reader with an authoritative translation, and finally portrays the people at the cross as misunderstanding what they heard. The distant reader supposedly understands Jesus correctly because the narrator explains the words, while those standing near Him understand only a sound associated with Elijah.
Even within the constructed scene, the reaction of the bystanders is artificial. The confusion works only if they isolate the first sound, Eli, and ignore everything that follows. A complete sentence would not naturally be reduced to the name Elijah merely because its opening syllables sounded similar. The narrative requires the bystanders to hear too little while the editor claims to know everything.
Matthew uses Eli, while Mark uses Eloi. Matthew’s form makes the connection with Elijah easier, but both versions serve the same literary construction. They do not prove that two witnesses independently preserved slightly different pronunciations. They show the adaptation of a formula intended to produce the same theological and narrative effect.
The unfamiliar expression also creates the impression of historical authenticity. A reader who does not know the language hears what appears to be the original voice of Jesus before receiving the translation. Yet the sound itself tells that reader nothing. The meaning comes entirely from the narrator. The foreign formula creates proximity to the event while transferring authority over its meaning to the editor.
The linguistic form cannot establish that Jesus spoke these words. Even if every element of the expression were possible within a first-century Semitic environment, that would prove only that an editor used a plausible formula. The decisive evidence lies in the narrative structure: Luke preserves the complete original cry, Matthew and Mark retain its emptied frame, and the Elijah episode forms a detachable theological unit inserted before it.
The sour wine itself need not belong to the fabrication. John preserves that detail independently and gives it a coherent setting. Jesus says that He is thirsty, receives the wine, declares, “It is finished,” and gives up His spirit. The interpolated Synoptic scene absorbed a genuine detail and attached it to the artificial expectation that Elijah might come. The action remained, but its narrative function was changed.
The Character of Jesus and the Testimony of John
The inserted lament also conflicts with the character of Jesus preserved throughout the surrounding Gospel traditions. During His final hours, Jesus remains lucid. He speaks with the man crucified beside Him, addresses His mother and the beloved disciple, responds to those around Him, asks for water, forgives, entrusts, and continues to act with conscious purpose. His behavior displays agony without metaphysical despair and suffering without rupture from God.
John presents this continuity with particular clarity. Jesus sees His mother and the beloved disciple standing near the cross. He speaks to both and establishes a relationship of responsibility between them. Only after completing this task does He know that everything has reached its end. He says that He is thirsty, receives the sour wine, declares, “It is finished,” bows His head, and gives up His spirit.
John describes the action that Luke completes with words. John says that Jesus gives up His spirit; Luke tells us that He entrusts that spirit into the Father’s hands. John preserves “It is finished”; Luke preserves “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” The two accounts move in the same direction. One emphasizes completion, and the other confidence.
The coherent ending is therefore recoverable. Jesus speaks with His mother and the beloved disciple. Knowing that His responsibility has been completed, He says that He is thirsty. After receiving the wine, He declares, “It is finished.” Then He cries with a loud voice, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit,” bows His head, and breathes His last.
This conclusion agrees with the relationship to the Father that Jesus consistently proclaims. He says, “I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.” He declares, “Father, You always hear Me.” His unity with the Father is not an abstract identity of substance but a unity of mission, fidelity, authority, and purpose. Nothing in His final actions suggests that this relationship suddenly collapses at the cross.
The theology of abandonment asks the reader to believe that Jesus remained confident in the Father throughout His mission, continued to care for others during His execution, announced the completion of His course, and yet simultaneously experienced a metaphysical rupture from God. The contradiction does not arise from the life of Jesus. It arises from the insertion placed inside its conclusion.
The Father does not abandon the Melek. Human beings do. Judas betrays Him. His disciples flee. Religious authorities condemn Him. Pilate abandons justice. Roman soldiers execute Him. The crowd mocks Him. Every abandonment required to explain the suffering is already present within the historical event.
The fabricated cry changes the source of the suffering. Human rejection is no longer enough; God Himself must be drawn into the act. The victim of human violence becomes the object of divine rejection as well.
Psalm 22, Paul, and the Theology of the Curse
The words inserted into Matthew and Mark come from the beginning of Psalm 22. The Psalm opens with the anguish of a righteous sufferer who feels surrounded, mocked, threatened, and abandoned. Yet it does not conclude that God truly rejected him. Its own explanation is explicit: God did not despise the suffering of the afflicted, did not hide His face from him, and heard when he cried.
The conclusion determines the movement of the Psalm. The opening expresses the experience of the sufferer; the later declaration reveals the continuing faithfulness of God. The Psalm moves from apparent abandonment to divine response.
The interpolation reverses that direction. The opening cry is detached from the conclusion that resolves it and placed at the moment of Jesus’s death. A Psalm that declares that God did not hide His face from the sufferer becomes the principal source for the claim that God hid His face from Jesus.
This reversal fits the theology Paul had already constructed. In Galatians 3:13, Paul takes the statement from Deuteronomy concerning the body of an executed person exposed upon a tree and declares that Christ became a curse for others. The original law begins with a person convicted of an offense deserving death. Execution and exposure follow the judgment of guilt. Hanging does not make the person guilty; it displays a penalty already imposed after conviction.
Jesus exposes the danger of turning this legal description into an automatic theological formula. He is innocent. He has not been convicted through righteous judgment but eliminated through false accusation, political expediency, and religious hostility. If the position of a body on wood is sufficient to create divine guilt, then God becomes incapable of distinguishing between the criminal and the innocent man crucified beside him.
Paul reverses the moral order. Instead of allowing innocence to judge the sentence, he allows the sentence to redefine the innocent. Jesus is no longer merely treated as cursed by those who condemn Him; He supposedly becomes a curse within the saving purpose of God.
Yet Paul never quotes “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.” If the saying had existed in the Passion tradition available to him, it would have served as the perfect evidence for his claim. The One who became a curse could be shown declaring that God had abandoned Him. But Paul has no such saying. He possesses only the legal formula from Deuteronomy.
The silence is significant. Paul constructed the theology before the fabricated cry entered Matthew and Mark. Later editors supplied the missing Gospel scene. The Pauline Christ who became a curse was now given a voice expressing the presumed consequence of that curse. What Paul asserted doctrinally could be made to appear as something Jesus experienced historically.
The insertion transformed the cross. Human beings spill the blood of Jesus, but theology turns that blood into the payment God requires. Human beings place Him upon the cross, but theology makes the cross the saving instrument of God. Human beings curse, condemn, and execute Him, but Paul declares that Christ Himself became a curse. The crime remains visible while its moral direction is reversed.
This construction does not merely excuse the perpetrators. It makes their actions necessary. Caiaphas, Pilate, the crowd, and Roman power become the instruments through which the supposed divine transaction is completed. The condemnation of the innocent is absorbed into a higher plan and thereby protected from its own moral meaning.
If God required the punishment, abandonment, and death of Jesus, then the cross ceases to be fully the crime of those who killed Him. The Sanhedrin is placed back on the side of necessity. Pilate becomes the administrator of providence. The executioners perform the act upon which salvation depends. God is made a participant in the condemnation He should judge.
The Gospel testimony points in the opposite direction. Jesus is delivered into the hands of sinful men. John the Baptist is killed because people do to him whatever they want, and Jesus says that the Son of Man will suffer at their hands in the same way. The will responsible for the murder belongs to the perpetrators. God sends; human beings reject. God anoints; human beings kill. God vindicates the One they condemned.
The Philosophical Paradox and the Recovery of the Cross
Luke and John were not left unchanged because the alteration remained incomplete. Their testimony was preserved because the theological construction required both sides of the contradiction. Matthew and Mark supplied abandonment; Luke supplied trust; John supplied completion and victory. Together they allowed opposing declarations to be pronounced simultaneously true.
This becomes especially significant because Luke was traditionally associated with Paul as his companion and scribe. If the only purpose had been to make every Gospel testify that Jesus was abandoned by the Father, Luke would have been the most natural account to alter. Yet Pauline Christianity required more than an abandoned and accursed victim. It also required a perfectly faithful Son who remained obedient, entrusted Himself to the Father, and completed the supposed divine plan. Luke therefore preserved the words of trust because those words supplied the other half of the theology.
The distribution was deliberate. Matthew and Mark presented the victim as abandoned by God, while their second and final cry was left without words. Luke preserved the words belonging to that final cry: “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” John preserved its meaning through “It is finished” and the deliberate giving of the spirit. Had every Gospel contained only abandonment, there would have been rupture without fidelity or victory. Had every Gospel preserved only trust, there would have been no divine abandonment to support the theology of curse. By preserving both, the canonical construction created the paradox upon which the later theology of the cross could be built.
Jesus asks why the Father has forsaken Him, yet entrusts His spirit into the Father’s hands. He is supposedly abandoned by God, yet says that the Father is with Him. He becomes a curse, yet remains innocent and faithful. His death is committed by human authorities, yet is declared the eternal will of God. Murder becomes sacrifice, injustice becomes necessity, and divine faithfulness coexists with divine abandonment.
This contradiction is not an accidental difficulty for philosophical theology. It gives philosophy its authority. A coherent revelation can be understood through its moral direction. A canon containing opposing claims requires interpreters who determine the sense in which each contradiction must be accepted.
The reader sees abandonment and trust. Theology explains that Jesus was abandoned but not completely abandoned. The reader sees an innocent man murdered by authorities. Theology declares that the murder was also a sacrifice ordained by God. The reader sees the Father receiving the spirit of Jesus. Theology says that the same Father had turned away because Jesus bore the curse of others.
The contradiction is renamed mystery. Its existence becomes proof of theological depth rather than evidence that different layers have been placed together. Philosophy leaves the original truth in one account, inserts its opposite into another, and then claims exclusive authority to harmonize them.
The traditional arrangement of the “seven sayings from the cross” demonstrates this control. No individual Gospel contains all seven sayings. The interpreter collects them from different narratives and constructs a single sequence in which Jesus first experiences abandonment and later entrusts Himself to the Father. The contradiction is not found within Luke or John. It is manufactured by combining their authentic testimony with the inserted scene from Matthew and Mark.
Once this harmony is accepted, the text can no longer expose its own alteration. Matthew’s “again” becomes a dramatic detail rather than a seam. Mark’s wordless final cry becomes an unexplained sound rather than the damaged location of the original declaration. Luke is reduced to an evangelist with another emphasis, and John becomes the source of yet another saying. The traces of intervention are distributed among theological interpretations until their combined evidence disappears.
MEKORAH reverses this process. It does not begin by assuming that every contradiction must be preserved as a sacred paradox. It examines the direction of the narrative, the function of each unit, the surviving textual seams, and the theology produced by the alteration.
The evidence converges. Luke investigated earlier testimony and preserves one complete final cry. Mark retains a second cry whose words have been removed. Matthew reveals the addition through the word “again.” The Elijah scene forms a detachable literary construction. John confirms lucidity, completion, and the deliberate giving of the spirit. Psalm 22 denies the divine abandonment created from its opening words. Paul develops the theology of curse without possessing the saying that later appears to confirm it.
The conclusion is clear. “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” is a theological interpolation added to Matthew and Mark after their original forms had contained the declaration still preserved by Luke. Its purpose was to align the Passion narrative with the Pauline theology of curse, punishment, substitution, and divine necessity.
The cross requires none of this. It already possesses a complete moral meaning. Jesus does not die because God demands blood. He dies because religious and political power cannot tolerate the authority of the Melek. He does not become guilty through the position of His body. His innocence exposes the corruption of those who condemn Him. He does not change God through payment. He reveals what human beings do when truth confronts power.
The cross is therefore not a divine transaction but a moral revelation. Jesus does not pay; He exposes. God does not abandon; human beings abandon. God does not transform the innocent into a curse; human authorities treat Him as cursed. The resurrection is not the completion of a sacrificial mechanism but God’s answer to the murder—the vindication of the One condemned by the world.
The fabricated cry shifted responsibility away from human injustice and placed the decisive rupture within God. It sanctified cruelty by giving it a hidden purpose and made the victim appear abandoned by the One who sent Him. The contradiction then created the need for philosophical interpreters who could explain how abandonment and faithfulness, curse and innocence, murder and divine will were all simultaneously true.
The authentic record stands in direct contrast. Jesus remains lucid, completes His responsibility, trusts the Father, and gives up His spirit. His final words are not the protest of a cursed man against an absent God. They are the confidence of the faithful Melek:
“Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.”
God did not abandon Jesus. Humanity did. And God answered the human verdict by raising and vindicating Him.