One of the challenges of studying the Synoptic Problem is also one of its joys. The more you stare at the Synopsis, and the more you think about the issues, the more you realize that there are important things that you have missed. This post is about one of those things. Why had I not noticed before that it would have been impossible for Luke to have retained Matthew's order of the double tradition ("Q") material given the huge amount of special Lucan material ("L") that the author wanted to add?
Let me put the question in context, and then I'll try to explain it as clearly as I can. I tried this out in an online discussion group and had some good feedback, so I'd like to try it out here too, in the hope of getting some good feedback. And if the point still seems like a good one, I'll add it to the revised edition of The Case Against Q.
Here's the story so far. One of the two primary arguments for the existence of Q is that some scholars cannot imagine why Luke would have rearranged the order of Matthew's non-Marcan material, so he must have found this material not in Matthew but in Q. The most influential version of this argument was made just over a century ago by B. H. Streeter who in The Four Gospels argued that Luke would have been a "crank" to have taken the double tradition material from its excellent Matthean contexts only to reinsert it into different, less appropriate contexts in his own Gospel. Q sceptics like me pointed out in response that Luke's behaviour is not only explicable but expected. His rearrangement of the material makes excellent sense in his Gospel, especially when we observe the way he treats Mark. Moreover, Streeter's argument is any case simply a value judgement, a statement of aesthetic preference for Matthew's order over Luke's.
That's a quick summary of many pages of argumentation by me and others. But I realized recently that I had missed something really important. The way the argument is always framed by two-source theorists is in terms of Luke taking double tradition material from its Matthean locations and placing it somewhere new. So Streeter talks about where Luke "inserts matter also found in Matthew". He talks about how Luke would have had to "re-insert" sayings the Matthean sayings into a different context.
Even if we work with this kind of model, where source material is simply slotted into specific contexts, new or old, the framing forgets something we know for certain about Luke: he has a huge amount of Special Lucan (L) material to incorporate into his Gospel. So on the Two-Source Theory, Luke combines the Q material with this new L material. On the Farrer theory, he does the same thing, but instead of getting the double tradition from Q, he gets it from Matthew. But here's the thing. Given that Luke has so much L material, how could he have integrated this L material into the Matthean contexts where he finds the double tradition? It's just not possible.
Let me illustrate. Matthew has the Lost Sheep parable in Matt. 18.10-14, in a teaching complex that is partially derived from Mark 9. Luke could have placed the Lost Sheep parable here, in his own chapter 9, just before the Central Section begins in Luke 9.51, but he does not.
He has it instead in Luke 15.3-7, nested in a fresh literary complex, with a themed opening about Pharisees and Sinners (15.1-2), pairing the Lost Sheep with the very Lucan Lost Coin (15.8-10), leading into the legendary Lucan Prodigal Son (15.11-37).
Aside from the fact that it would be ludicrous to find Luke's new context for the Lost Sheep as having what Streeter described as "no special appropriateness", let's remember that as soon as you have double tradition material alongside L material, it makes using the Matthean location practically impossible.
If Luke had used the Matthean location, he would have had to integrate his "Lost" parable context into his Luke 9, creating a massive discourse at just the point where Jesus is about to set off on the road to Jerusalem (Luke 9.51).
In other words, it is not simply a question of where Luke "inserts" double tradition material. It is a question of what new Lucan material lies alongside it, and those decisions surely impact Luke's decisions about the placing of the material. The special Lucan material really matters when we are looking at Luke's location of double tradition material. It's key in seeing how Luke adopts and adapts the material he takes over from Matthew.
To illustrate further: the big criticism of Farrer's Luke is that he does not retain Matthew's marvellous Sermon on the Mount all in one piece. I and others have argued that this is a really problematic argument (e.g. The Case Against Q, Chapters 4, 5, and 6), but let us for a moment imagine that Luke had wanted to retain all 138 verses of Matthew's masterpiece in one place. Does this Luke not want to add his Friend at Midnight parable (Luke 11.5-8) to Matthew's "Ask, Seek, Knock" (Matt. 7.7-11 // Luke 11.9-13)? Does he not want to add the Rich Fool parable (Luke 12.13-21) to the "Consider the Lilies" (Matt. 6.25-34 // Luke 12.22-31) material? And so we could go on. Luke's Sermon would now have to be over 200 verses, and for an author who even cuts Mark's Parables discourse (Mark 4.1-34, a mere 34 verses) almost in half (Luke 8.1-18, 18 verses), I can't see that as viable.
To be fair, I made a related point in The Case Against Q, Chapters 4 and 6, arguing that Luke's new locations for the double tradition material made good narrative sense, but what I had not seen so clearly was that this is not simply a question of the locations for the material. It is also a question of the impossibility of retaining the Matthean locations given that Luke has related special material that he wants to place adjacent to it, material that would expand the Matthean discourses, which are already massive, into monster discourses.
A two-source theorist might say that this is a circular argument. Am I not just surmising that Luke wanted to place special Lucan material alongside the double tradition material because that is what he did? I don't think so. The point is that even on the two-source theory, Luke made the decision to place Q material alongside contextually relevant, narratively interesting L material. Farrer's Luke wants to do the same thing, but in his case, it necessitates recontextualizing Matthew's material, the very thing that Q theorists find so problematic.
I am surprised that I have only just realized this. I suppose it's in part because I was seduced by the two-source theorists' own rhetoric, which causes us to focus on where Luke "relocates" or "reinserts" material, without noticing the impact that retaining as well as adding would cause.
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