James Edwards on Andrew Gregory on the Gospel of the Ebionites

In my previous post, James Edwards on McIver and Carroll, I mentioned that I am reviewing James R. Edwards, The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) and that I don't have space there to deal with all the detail.  In this post, I would like to touch on the question of Edwards's treatment of an article by Andrew Gregory, "Prior or Posterior?  The Gospel of the Ebionites and the Gospel of Luke," NTS 51 (2005): 344-60.

Gregory's article is important because it provides a clear critique of Edwards's own earlier work on the Hebrew Gospel, "The Gospel of the Ebionites and the Gospel of Luke," NTS 48 (2002): 568–86.  In the article, Gregory argues persuasively that the Gospel of the Ebionites, as witnessed in quotations in Epiphanius's Panarion, is best understood on the consensus theory that it is a post-synoptic harmony, against Edwards's theory that it is one of Luke's sources.  Now in Edwards's book, Gregory's article is given scant attention.  Rather than engaging with Gregory's critique of his earlier work, Edwards deals with it in a footnote to the following effect:

In response to my article . . . . Gregory . . . seems to concede 1) that all but two of the excerpts of the Gospel of the Ebionites that are found in Epiphanius are more closely related to Luke than to any other Gospel, and 2) that the Lukan parallels usually appear in Luke's single tradition (349).  Gregory dismisses the weight of this evidence, however, and in a chain of reasoning that is neither entirely clear nor compelling concludes that the Hebrew Gospel was a compilation from Luke and the other Synoptic Gospels (p. 66, n. 65).

Edwards's 1) and 2) here are poor summaries two sentences in Gregory's article to the following effect:

Of the seven excerpts of the Gospel of the Ebionites that are found in Epiphanius, five include details that are paralleled in Luke. As Edwards notes, many of these parallels come from Lukan single tradition.

In other words, Gregory points out that "five [passages] include details that are paralleled in Luke", which is quite different from saying that they are "more closely related to Luke than to any other Gospel".  Gregory's comment that "many of these parallels come from Lukan single tradition" does not translate into "the Lukan parallels usually appear in Luke's single tradition".

Aside from the misreading, it is disappointing that Edwards does not take Gregory's critique seriously.  It is not the case that Gregory's reasoning is "neither entirely clear nor compelling".  On the contrary, Gregory applies the well-established criterion of looking for evidence of Matthew's and Luke's redactional activity in the material that is paralleled in the Gospel of the Ebionites.  The point of this kind approach, which is common in discussions of the relationships between Gospels, is that the presence of redactional activity signals use of the Gospel in question rather than its source material.

James Edwards on McIver and Carroll

I have recently finished working through James R. Edwards, The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). I am reviewing the book for CBQ, but I have quite a lot to say about it and there are several things I won't have space for in the review, so I will let them overflow here in the blog.

In no particular order, the first of these is a discussion of Robert K. McIver and Marie Carroll, "Experiments to Develop Criteria for Determining the Existence of Written Sources, and Their Potential Implications for the Synoptic Problem", Journal of Biblical Literature 121/4 (Winter, 2002): 667-687. Edwards brings up McIver and Carroll's work in order to corroborate both Marcan Priority and the notion that "Matthew concludes and consummates the Synoptic tradition" (251), though it is not quite clear what he means by this given that elsewhere "double tradition" is retained as a source for Matthew's and Luke's non-Marcan material (Chapter 7; cf. the diagram on p. 262 in which Matthew and Luke are independent of one another).

Edwards reviews one of the key conclusions of McIver's and Carroll's study, quoting with approval their comment that "Any sequence of exactly the same 16 or more words that is not an aphorism, poetry or words to a song is almost certain to have been copied from a written document" (681; Edwards, 250; italics original). Edwards then draws attention to the 23 parallel passages listed by McIver and Carroll as including 16 words or more in verbatim agreement. He notes that three of the pairs are Mark // Luke, nine are Matthew // Mark and eleven are Matthew // Luke. He then writes:

Of a total of 23 pairs shared by Luke and Mark, or Luke and Matthew, or Mark and Matthew, Matthew shares 20 of them. Matthew, in other words, is almost twice as likely to share material in common with Mark, or in common with Luke, as either Luke or Mark is to share material in common with the other. This statistic suggests that Matthew is either the source of material for Mark and Luke; or, conversely, that Matthew is the recipient of material from either Mark or Luke. (251).

The deduction from the data is puzzling. McIver and Carroll's data clearly show that there is literary dependence of some kind in these passages, but the data tell us nothing in themselves about the direction of dependence. Edwards goes on:

The theory of Markan priority supplies solid and repeated evidence for the assumption that Matthew has been the recipient of Markan material (251).

I am sympathetic with this view, but it cannot be deduced from McIver and Carroll's data. What the data demonstrate is copying of some kind, but there is no indication of direction of dependence.  If there is one thing that might be deduced from their data with respect to Marcan Priority it is that Matthew and Luke are unlikely to have used Mark independently of one another. Two of the eleven Matthew // Luke pairings are actually in triple tradition, Matt. 8.1-4 // Luke 5.12-16 and Matt. 16.21-28 // Luke 9.21-27, i.e. they feature Minor Agreements that generate extended conjoined sequences of verbatim agreement, which suggests that if Matthew and Luke used Mark, there is also a direct link of some kind between Matthew and Luke.

Incidentally, McIver and Carroll appear unaware of this themselves. They list one of these passages, Matt. 8.1-4 // Luke 5.12-16 (Leper) among their pared down list of nine passages that "almost certainly contain copied material" without noticing that this runs contrary to the Two-Source Theory that elsewhere they apparently assume (683, "perhaps Q?"; see further John C. Poirier, "Memory, Written Sources, and the Synoptic Problem: A Response to Robert K. McIver and Marie Carroll", JBL 123/2 (Summer, 2004):  315-322 (316-7).)

But back to Edwards.  His discussion of McIver and Carroll concludes:

The foregoing arguments, and especially the list of examples on pages 249-50 above, argue the same, that Matthew is the recipient of Lukan material. The work of McIver and Carroll seems to supply further statistical evidence that Matthew concludes and consummates the Synoptic tradition. (251).

The "list of examples" on pp. 249-50 of the book consists of suggestions that Matthew is a later Gospel than Luke, itself something I may return to in due course.  But the conclusion here, that McIver and Carroll's work supplies statistical evidence in favour of Matthean posteriority, is not self-evident.  It is simply asserted.

There are several minor issues that are also worth mentioning: (1)  Edwards also speaks of "46 passages" (250), but the figure should be 45 -- he has counted Matt. 16.21-28 twice; (2) McIver and Carroll do not weight these 45 passages equally.  They eliminate 14 pairs because they are aphorisms and distinctive sayings and they put stress on only 9. (3) McIver and Carroll are only dealing with conjoined sequences of words; this work needs to be supplemented with other Synoptic data; (4) The points made in Poirier's perceptive critique (citation above) need to be taken seriously rather than ignored.