Goulder on Minor Agreements

Stephen Carlson has an excellent discussion of Goulder's recent article in NovT in his Hypotyposeis blog. I have a couple of minor comments on Stephen's. He says that Goulder has launched primarily two angles of attack on the Q hypothesis, one argument relating to the Minor Agreements and the other to the alleged Matthaean language of Q. I would broadly agree with that -- these are the two areas I focused on in the first section of my Goulder and the Gospels which dealt with the Synoptic Problem. But I think one should probably add a third angle of attack, what one might call the redaction-critical argument. This is Goulder's attempt to show that Q is unnecessary given that one can make good sense of Matthew (Midrash and Lection in Matthew [London: SPCK, 1974]) and Luke (Luke: A New Paradigm [JSNTSup, 20; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989]) without employing Q.

Two further things. First, I think Streeter argued on the Minor Agreement at Mark 14.65 -- and I've not checked this -- slightly differently from Neirynck and Tuckett. I think his case was that the words τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε; were original to Mark and that that is where Matthew and Luke got them from. Second, one of the strengths of Goulder's current article is that it explains why Matthew omits the blindfold -- it is because he has those mocking Jesus spitting into his face and if he were wearing a blindfold, they would be spitting into the cloth.