When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather. — It is remarkable that some of the best MSS., including the Vatican and Sinaitic, omit the whole of these suggestive words. We can hardly think of them, however, looking to their singular originality of form, as interpolated by a later transcriber, and have therefore to ask how we can explain the omission. They are not found in St. Mark, and this in itself shows that there were some reports of our Lord’s answer to the Pharisees in which they did not appear. Possibly the transcriber in this case was unable to read their meaning, and the same feeling, or the wish to bring the reports in the two Gospels into closer agreement with each other, may have influenced the writers of the two MSS. in question. Turning (1) to the words as they stand in the received text, we note, as to their form, that the insertion of the words in italics somewhat mars the colloquial abruptness of the original, “Fair weather, for the sky is red”; and (2) that the use of “sky,” instead of “heaven,” hides the point of the answer. “You watch the heaven,” He in substance answers, “and are weather-wise as to coming storm or sunshine. If your eyes were open to watch the signs of the spiritual firmament, you would find tokens enough of the coming sunshine of God’s truth, the rising of the day-spring from on high — tokens enough, also, of the darkness of the coming storm, the ‘foul weather’ of God’s judgments.” Even the fact that the redness of the sky is the same in both cases is not without its significance. The flush, the glow, the excitement that pervaded men’s minds, was at once the prognostic of a brighter day following on that which was now closing, and the presage of the storm and tempest in which that day should end.
It is a singular instance of the way in which the habit of minute criticism stunts or even kills the power of discernment which depends on imagination, that Strauss should have looked on words so full of profound and suggestive meaning as “absolutely unintelligible” (Leben Jesu, II. viii. p. 85).
In the outward framework of the parable the weather-signs of Palestine seem to have been the same as those of England. The clear red evening sky is a prophecy of a bright morning. The morning red — not “red” simply, but with the indescribable threatening aspect implied in “lowering,” the frown of the sky, as it were (comp. Mark 10:22, where the same word is rendered “grieved”) — makes men look for storms.