More NT Pod Shorts: Triple Tradition; Double Tradition; Marcan Priority

I've uploaded three more NT Pod Shorts on the Synoptic Problem:

What is the "triple tradition"? 

What is the "double tradition"?

Was Mark the First Gospel? 

These are all on my Youtube Channel. If you like it, please subscribe and "like" so that I can grow the channel, i.e. produce more videos. 

I am also uploading them to TikTok and to other social media. 

NT Pod Shorts: What is the Synoptic Problem?

 My next NT Pod Short goes back to the beginning and asks "What is the Synoptic Problem?"

NT Pod Shorts: Why is Q so Appealing?

I'm trying something new: NT Pod Shorts. These are short (less than three minute) videos about topics connected with the podcast, and the first few are going to be focused on the Synoptic Problem. Here is the first:

 The topic is: Why is Q so appealing? 

Luke's Arrangements and Luke's Special Material

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. 

NT Pod 104: The Synoptic Translation Problem

There are lots of Synoptic Problems! The latest episode of my podcast focuses on one of them, "The Synoptic Translation Problem." It  investigates a problem in English translations of the Gospels. The translations frequently mangle the agreements and disagreements between the Synoptic Gospels, and between the Synoptics and John. The podcast attempts to show how pervasive the problem is by drawing attention to conflicting translations in the NRSVUE (the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition), and proposing a way forward for future translations of the New Testament. 

NT Pod 104: The Synoptic Translation Problem (mp3)

Key texts:

(1) Matt. 27.50 // Mark 15.37 // Luke 23.46; Psalm 31.5

(2) Matt. 26.51 // Mark 14.47 // Luke 22.50 // John 18.10

(3) Matt. 26.6-13 // Mark 14.3-9 // Luke 7.36-50 // John 12.1-8

(4) Matt. 28.10 // John 20.17

Feel free to leave your feedback below, on our Youtube channel, or on social media.

Thanks to Ram2000, "Me and You", for the opening theme, released under a Creative Commons agreement.

Trump and Fatigue

Over the last twenty years or so, I have occasionally drawn attention to "the phenomenon of fatigue", according to which one can see an author making characteristic changes to a source at the beginning of a passage, only to lapse into the wording of the source later on. I have argued that one can see this in Matthew's use of Mark, Luke's use of Mark, Luke's use of Matthew, the Protevangelium of James's use of Matthew and Luke, and Hypostasis of the Archons's use of Genesis (the latter forthcoming). [*Links at the bottom of this post.]

When I am teaching, I of course like to use contemporary analogies for the phenomenon, and one of my favourites comes from the adaptation of one of Enid Blyton's Noddy books for television. But yesterday, I noticed a good example of the phenomenon in Trump's remarks on the coronavirus in his Press Briefing.





Trump likes to call coronavirus "the China virus". It is a typical (and profoundly problematic) trope of his, and although in the earlier briefings, he was beginning to drop the use of the term, it has come back in a major way in the renewed briefings this week.

In yesterday's briefing, Trump was clearly reading from a script that had been prepared for him, but he also appeared to be editing it on the hoof, substituting "China virus" every time that "coronavirus" appeared. Until, later in the speech, he lapses into the wording of the script, and he accidentally says "coronavirus". I quote here from the relevant sections of the speech, in order (full transcript here):

Thank you very much.  Thank you, everybody. Thank you. 

We’ve had a tremendous week uniting the country in our fight against the China virus.  I have reminded people of the importance of masks when you can’t socially distance, in particular.  A strong message has been sent out to young people to stop going to crowded bars and other crowded places . . . . 

. . . .And I said, “There’s nothing more important in our country than keeping our people safe, whether that’s from the China virus or the radical-left mob that you see in Portland” — where I want to thank Homeland Security and others in law enforcement for doing a fantastic job over the last few days . . . . 

. . . . Our goal is to protect our teachers and students from the China virus while ensuring that families with high-risk factors can continue to participate from home.  Very important . . . .  

. . . . Fortunately, the data shows that children are lower risk from the China virus, very substantially.  When children do contact the virus, they often have only very mild symptoms or none at all, and medical complications are exceedingly rare.  Those that do face complications often have underlying medical conditions.  Ninety-nine percent of all China virus hospitalizations are adults.  And 99.96 percent of all fatalities are adults.  That means that children are a tiny percentage — less than 1 percent, and even a small percentage of 1 percent. 

In a typical year, the flu results in more deaths of those under 18 in the United States than have been lost thus far to the coronavirus.  Many different names.  Many, many different names . . . . 

. . . . We’re asking Congress to provide $105 billion to schools as part of the next coronavirus relief bill.  This funding will support mitigation measures, such as smaller class sizes, more teachers and teacher aides, repurposing spaces to practice social distancing, and crucially, mask-wearing. 

Trump uses his idiosyncratic, problematic term "China virus" five times in the speech, and I think that each time he is editing "coronavirus" on the hoof, substituting the Trump term for the normal, accepted term. But then he lapses. He uses the correct, universally accepted term "coronavirus", and immediately realizes what he has done, and qualifies with "Many different names. Many, many different names", a standard Trump qualification for when he has veered away from his intended language. From here, he then uses "coronavirus" one more time, in the name of the "coronavirus relief bill", and "China virus" does not recur.

* Links:

Mark Goodacre, "Fatigue in the Synoptics", New Testament Studies 44 (1998): 45-58
NT Pod 39: "Fatigue in the Synoptics

Sourceomania

Samuel Sandmel's invocation of the problems of "parallelomania" in 1961 has become legendary in the field, to the point of truism, misrepresentation and cliché. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

Much less well known is sourceomania. I heard it for the first time earlier this week. Nobody even quotes it. And up until I started tweeting about it this week, even Google did not seem to know the term ("Did you mean source romania?")!*

The term "sourceomania" was coined by Morton Scott Enslin in a little known article published posthumously in 1985, “Luke and Matthew: Compilers or Authors?” ANRW II.25.3 (1985): 2357-88. The article reflects on the scholarly inclination to see the evangelists more as archivists than as authors, and to default to hypothetical sources to explain variation at every turn. Enslin uses the term twice. I quoted the first use in yesterday's post. Here is the quotation in context:

In sum, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the only support for this hypothetical Q, which so mysteriously completely vanished and of which no slightest mention is to be found in any of the Fathers, is the assumption that neither Matthew nor Luke could have been satisfied to use the other, had he known it, so meagerly. What that really means is that we could not have so done. It is easy to forget that none of these writings, which we prize so highly today, was "Holy Scripture" or "canonical" to the other writers. Obviously, both Matthew and Luke found Mark of great use, but neither hesitated to alter, shorten, or correct to a degree that a modern critic might weIl hesitate to follow. I cannot avoid the conclusion that these hypothetical sources which no one has ever seen -- be they Q or L or proto-Luke or M -- are simply the consequence of the very modern notion that one holy evangelist could not deliberately have altered or violated the writings of another. Thus these deviations, as notably Luke's flat contradiction of Mark's account of the Passion, with the Galilee chapter deftly avoided and the disciples remaining in Jerusalem awaiting their reception of the Spirit, are commonly explained as due to the utilization of a different source. Sourceomania, if I may so phrase it, is a disease from which many critics have suffered. The point to be remembered is that each of the evangelists was apparently dissatisfied with the work of his predecessors and thought he could do a better job. Else he would not have written. They were not joining with respected colleagues in contributing chapters for a Festschrift (2364; emphasis added).

 The second use of the term comes when Enslin is discussing Luke 9.51-6 (Samaritan Village):

To me the basic weakness in much source analysis is the assumption of the use of some different source every time one author alters or changes another. Luke corrects Matthew because he thinks Matthew incorrect, not because he chances to find a different version of the event in some source which he chances to have in his hand or in his memory. One of the fatal symptoms of what I have styled "sourceomania" is the inability to recognize the evangelists as authors who had ideas and were ready to express them. They did not conceive themselves as weighted down by the awesome responsibility of preserving unaltered a series of facts for future generations who would study them under the critical magnifying glass as contained in Holy Scripture (2374; emphasis added).

Although Enslin himself does not provide a definition of the term, it seems pretty clear that his problem relates to the instinctive appeal to imagined sources in lieu of even considering the possibility that a given feature might come from the author of the work one is reading. If I might attempt a definition, it would go something like this:

Sourceomania: the unnecessary and obsessional evocation of sources to explain elements in a work at the expense of considering authorial creativity.

Perhaps that definition can be improved upon, but I think the gist of what Enslin is saying is clear. As a minimum sources person, I am of course more sympathetic to the point than my maximum sources friends will be, but as a descriptor of a feature that I have seen time after time in the literature, asserted as if self evident rather than carefully argued, I think it's pretty great.

--

* When I composed this draft yesterday, "sourceomania" returned no proper hits at all on Google. Now, as well as this blog, it has found a lovely example from a book by Finn Damgaard, Rewriting Peter as an Intertextual Character in the Canonical Gospels (Copenhagen International Seminar; Abingdon: Routledge, 2016): 2:

The "sourceomania" (the word is taken from Enslin. . .) that has characterized New Testament scholarship for so long has paradoxically minimized the most obvious sources, namely the canonical gospels themselves, with the result that important insight into early Christianity has been neglected.

Morton Scott Enslin: the American Austin Farrer?

When I was putting together my website about Q, over twenty years ago, when websites were the latest thing, and when they were still fun and exciting, and when we hand-coded everything, I was aware that what I was offering was an utterly fringe theory, which would be regarded as completely maverick, so one thing I wanted to do was to show that there had been other prominent Q sceptics. I was not alone!

I pulled together a Key Quotations page and tried to show that there were several scholars who had been sceptical about Q while holding on to Marcan Priority, and I hoped that invoking names like E. P. Sanders, alongside lesser known dignitaries like John Drury, might at least lend a veneer of respectability to my strangely unorthodox site.

One issue for a British Q sceptic like me was that Michael Goulder was pretty well known in UK scholarly circles, and his works respected and engaged even by those who disagreed with him. But in the USA, things were different. The Griesbach theory (Mark used Matthew and Luke) was regarded as the official opposition to the reigning Two-Source Theory, and if you told someone you were sceptical about Q, they automatically assumed you must be sceptical about Marcan Priority too.

So I tried in my Key Quotations page to show that there was at least some kind of pedigree for the Farrer theory in the USA. Indeed, James Hardy Ropes and Morton Scott Enslin had already set out their opposition to the Q hypothesis in 1934 and 1938 respectively.  Enslin's contribution came from a lovely little book, Christian Beginnings, which was reprinted in 1956.

Up until yesterday, I thought that that was the only thing Enslin had written on the topic. But when re-reading a recent fine article by John Poirier, I spotted a footnote to a work I had never read:

Morton Scott Enslin, “Luke and Matthew: Compilers or Authors?” ANRW II.25.3 (1985): 2357-88

ANRW is famously glacial in its publication schedule; Enslin died in 1980, and this appeared five years later. Moreover, the article appears to have been written before 1976 since he talks about William Farmer's forthcoming Synoptic Problem revision, which came out that year.

Enslin's article is delightful, and has something of the "devil may care" attitude one sometimes sees in scholars who are in the twilight of their careers. Enslin was born in 1897 and was almost eighty when he wrote this piece. His central concern is the way that so many scholars see the evangelists not as authors but as "compilers" of traditions. If I were putting together my "World Without Q" website today, I might be inclined to use this quotation:

In sum, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the only support for this hypothetical Q, which so mysteriously completely vanished and of which no slightest mention is to be found in any of the Fathers, is the assumption that neither Matthew nor Luke could have been satisfied to use the other, had he known it, so meagerly. What that really means is that we could not have so done. It is easy to forget that none of these writings, which we prize so highly today, was "Holy Scripture" or "canonical" to the other writers. Obviously, both Matthew and Luke found Mark of great use, but neither hesitated to alter, shorten, or correct to a degree that a modern critic might weIl hesitate to follow. I cannot avoid the conclusion that these hypothetical sources which no one has ever seen -- be they Q or L or proto-Luke or M -- are simply the consequence of the very modern notion that one holy evangelist could not deliberately have altered or violated the writings of another. Thus these deviations, as notably Luke's flat contradiction of Mark's account of the Passion, with the Galilee chapter deftly avoided and the disciples remaining in Jerusalem awaiting their reception of the Spirit, are commonly explained as due to the utilization of a different source. Sourceomania, if I may so phrase it, is a disease from which many critics have suffered. The point to be remembered is that each of the evangelists was apparently dissatisfied with the work of his predecessors and thought he could do a better job. Else he would not have written. They were not joining with respected colleagues in contributing chapters for a Festschrift.

Enslin has a delightful turn of phrase, and I am reminded of Farrer's own "golden eloquence". I particularly like his coining of the term Sourceomania, and I am planning to post on this tomorrow. While he does appear to be aware of Austin Farrer's "On Dispensing with Q" (2365 n. 16, misspelt as "Farrar"), his views were developed long before Farrer's 1955 article, and if there is any influence, it is more likely to have gone in the other direction, from Enslin to Farrer.

Over forty years earlier, in 1933, he was reflecting on Luke's sources in Acts, and analogizing from the Gospel in this way:

Even in the Third Gospel, in spite of the amazingly fortunate accident that a primary source Mark and a probable clue to a second source by virtue of a parallel Matthew are preserved, we quickly reach an impasse in source analysis, as is abundantly evidenced by the total disagreement of scholars, vide the happy proto-Luke, our inability to determine the size or nature of Q, which now waxes, now wanes, and finally the indications that we shall awake some morning to find that it has become orthodox again to believe that Luke actually used Matthew. And this is true simply because Luke was a skilled author, not an adept with scissors and paste pot. If this is the case for the Gospel -- and I do not feel the picture overdrawn -- how much more difficult is it in Acts which stands alone. ("A Notable Contribution to Acts", JBL 52/4 (1933): 230-8 [238]).

I rather like "scissors and paste pot". I don't think I've seen that variation before. The thinking does resemble Farrer's. He was endlessly frustrated by what he called "paragraph criticism" and obsession with sources, at the expense of appreciating the the gospels as wholes. Farrer repeatedly delved into the patterning and structure of Mark, and was fascinated with the attempt to understand his mind. Enslin thinks similarly, and says of Mark:

Few books of greater power have ever been penned. On every page the unfettered author is to be seen, not the docile reteller of his teacher's sermons. That it was the death or retirement of Peter which led Mark to this new step in Christian literary activity, while often suggested, appears to me most unlikely. Rather it appears far more probable that it was the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, which convinced our author that the long expected fulfillment of Jesus' predictions of the momentary coming of the kingdom of God was now at hand ("Luke and Matthew", 2363).

Enslin's essay goes on to explicate several passages that he sees as troubling for the Q hypothesis, often anticipating arguments that Michael Goulder would use. On Matt. 4.1-11 // Luke 4.1-13 (the Temptation Story), for example, he writes:

The simplest and most natural explanation of the Matthean-Lukan form of the temptation story is that it is secondary to the Markan narrative and a deliberate recasting of it, not a parallel story from another source which Matthew and Luke independently preferred and substituted for the Markan. Attempts to see it as a more primitive story -- or at least as one preserved in a source earlier than Mark, and possibly known to him -- appear to me, as already remarked, too ridiculous to demand serious reply. And by all rules of the critical game, if a fancied Q is to be seen as providing the non-Markan parallels of Matthew and Luke, this ornate and scarcely primitive-sounding story must be seen as one of its incidents ("Luke and Matthew", 2375).

I can't help smiling at "too ridiculous to demand serious reply". Perhaps I will write like that when I am eighty.

Additional note: Further investigation reveals that the ANRW article is in fact a massively expanded version of an article that originally appeared in 1967, "Luke and Matthew", JQR 57 (1967): 178-91.

How similar are the Synoptics, and how do we represent it?

I have enjoyed the feedback, especially on twitter, from lots of people since I dusted down the blogging machine and reignited it earlier this week. I should blog more often! I had forgotten how much fun it is.

Anyway, this is the third post in the current series; cf. post one and post two.

Before continuing with critical reflections on Matthew Larsen's Gospels Before the Book, I'd like to pause to think a bit more about how we represent degrees of similarity between the Synoptic Gospels. This has been one of the most enjoyable take-aways from reflecting over the last couple of days. Larsen produced a proportional Venn diagram (p. 104) of the degree of similarity between Matthew and Mark in a bid to show just how similar these works are. He uses the pericope divisions in Aland's Synopsis. Here's my coloured version of his diagram, using my Synoptic colouring scheme: [2]:

Key:

Matthew's non-Marcan material (blue)
Mark's non-Matthean material (red)
Material shared by Matthew and Mark (purple)

The numbers:

Mark: 115 Aland pericopae
Matthew: 178 Aland pericopae
Overlapping: 107 Aland pericopae

93% of Mark is paralleled in Matthew.
60% of Matthew is paralleled in Mark.


The  diagram, though rough and ready, provides one metric for seeing how closely related Matthew is to Mark. The question then arises: what about Luke's relation to Mark? How close is it? Here's the proportional Venn diagram, again using my colouring scheme:

Key:

Luke's non-Marcan material (yellow)
Mark's non-Lucan material (red)
Material shared by Mark and Luke (orange)

The numbers:

Mark: 115 Aland pericopae
Luke: 185 Aland pericopae
Overlapping: 101 Aland pericopae

88% of Mark is paralleled in Luke.
55% of Luke is paralleled in Mark.

These figures are surprisingly similar to the figures for Matthew, surprising as Matthew is often regarded as so much closer to Mark, a kind of "second edition" of Mark. To some extent, this is a result of using the Aland pericopae rather than the traditional verse parallels, but I look forward to running some more precise numbers in due course.

The thing that got me thinking afresh about this whole question was Larsen's comment that "there are no two works from the ancient world more similar to each other" than Matthew and Mark. As I mentioned the other day, I am not sure if this is right. Matthew and Luke are much more similar overall, but we tend to miss this because of classic Two-Source Theory thinking that minimizes their macro-similarities, and projects their close non-Marcan agreements onto a non-extant source, with a view to maintaining  their independence from one another. Here's the proportional Venn diagram, again using my colouring scheme, and again using the Aland pericopae:

Key:

Matthew's non-Lucan material (blue)
Luke's non-Matthean material (yellow)
Material shared by Matthew and Luke (green)

The numbers:

Matthew: 178 Aland pericopae
Luke: 185 Aland pericopae
Overlapping: 137 Aland pericopae

74% of Matthew is paralleled in Luke.
77% of Luke is paralleled in Matthew.

I am grateful to Joe Weaks on The Macintosh Biblioblog (this is all wonderfully nostalgic!) for raising the question about the utility of traditional Venn diagrams like this. His suggestion is to work instead with rectangles:

Graphically Displaying Synoptic Data

This post shows how we can attempt to represent Matthew // Mark, Mark // Luke, and Matthew // Luke using coloured rectangles. I must admit that I really like Weaks's proposal, and not just because we use the same colour scheme. The only thing I'd say is that I think it would be harder to do the rectangle thing in black and white because it would be less clear that we are dealing with overlapping rectangles, whereas with circles, it is obvious even in black and white where one work ends and another begins.

Weaks continues by asking the next major question: can one represent the overlaps between all three Synoptics using the coloured rectangle approach? Weaks shows that it is possible here:

Graphically Displaying Three Synoptic Gospel Data

This diagram is also excellent. My only qualm is that on first sight, it can look like the double tradition (green) is also part of the triple tradition (brown), which is of course not the case, and one simply has to discipline one's mind not to see it that way, though of course in a more complex version one could at least attempt to depict with shades of colour pericopae that are pure triple (with only a handful of minor agreements), pure double (with no Marcan agreements), and everything in between. But life is probably too short for that.

Larsen's Challenge to Studying Synoptic Relations

This is a second post on Matthew Larsen, Gospels Before the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) [First post here] in which I'd like to comment on Larsen's challenge to the study of Synoptic relations in Chapter 6.

Larsen's concern is that scholars of the Synoptic Problem tend to see the gospels as separate, discrete books, each with a unique author, [1] rather than seeing the gospels as different instantiations of the same fluid textual tradition. He illustrates the point by noting the way that various Synoptic theories are diagrammed. He is talking about diagrams like these, and he gives his own versions of them (p. 102), and writes:

In all these graphic depictions, each constellation of textualized gospel tradition is represented as its own discrete unit, bounded by lines within a box or a circle or some other shape, with arrows indicating the direction of source relationship and redaction. All of this, however, as should be clear by now, serves to reinforce the third-century and subsequent gospel textuality and authorship discourse, reifying each gospel as an enclosed, separate text with its own unique author. How might we rethink the data? (p. 102).

It's actually not always the case that these diagrams are "bounded by lines within a box or a circle or some other shape"; my own preference has been to avoid the boundary lines, e.g. here in my book The Synoptic Problem: A Way through the Maze (p. 22):

In fact the irony of Larsen's concern about "clear black lines separating out discrete gospels from one another" (Larsen, p. 104) is that sometimes entities in these diagrams are placed in a box in order to show uncertainty about their existence or tangibility, as here in my diagram of the Two-Source Theory (Way Through the Maze, p. 20):

Nevertheless, Larsen's broader point is worth thinking about. Is it fair to say that diagrams like these tend to make us think too rigidly in terms of discrete, separate gospels, with different authors, and to ignore the overwhelming similarity between the Synoptics? Larsen's suggestion is to represent the "degree of overlap" between Matthew and Mark by means of a "Proportional Venn diagram of Overlap Between the Gospels of Mark and Matthew" (p. 104). So he counts the number of parallel "stories" in the index of Aland's Synopsis (see further yesterday's post):

Mark: 115 “stories”.
Matthew: 178 “stories".
Overlapping: 107 “stories”.

He then plugs these numbers into a Proportional Venn diagram, which I have adapted here in a coloured version (using my Synoptic colouring scheme) [2]:

Key:
Matthew's non-Marcan material (blue)
Mark's non-Matthean material (red)
Material shared by Matthew and Mark (purple)

It's a great idea to represent the data in this way, and I'm grateful to Larsen for thinking of it. There are precedents, e.g. the nice Wikipedia coloured diagram, but I don't recall having seen a proportional Venn diagram like this.

There is a point that needs making, though. The proportional Venn diagram is doing something completely different from the theory diagrams. The proportional Venn diagram is illustrating some of the data, while the other diagrams are illustrating theories of Gospel relationships. In other words, the Venn diagram is illustrating (an element in) the Synoptic Problem while the other diagrams are illustrating solutions to it.

It's a basic point, I know, but it is an important one. I have argued that one of the difficulties with the way that the Synoptic Problem is studied is that a theory is presented (usually Two-Source) and the data is then refracted through it. As Jason Staples says, it's "solution to plight" thinking.

In a sense, Larsen's preference for the proportional Venn diagram could be seen to forward this aim -- we might think of it as a way of encouraging people first to take the data seriously, and to get a sense of the problem before proceeding to solution. The difficulty, though, with the way that Larsen discusses the issue is that the Venn diagram is presented as an alternative to the theory diagrams, contrasting their bounded, discrete entities, with his overlapping materials. But both are necessary -- finding ways to represent the data as accurately and as clearly as possible as well as representing the theories as clearly as possible.

And with respect to those theory diagrams, everyone discussing the issue realizes that there are massive overlaps between Matthew and Mark. That's the beginning point of the discussion. If there were only differences, there would be no Synoptic Problem. Placing an arrow from Mark to Matthew (and to Luke) only expresses a model of textual relationships. One can still, like Burkitt and others, see Matthew as a "fresh edition of Mark" (see yesterday's post), and use a classic diagram to show that relationship, the new edition being subsequent to and incorporating the previous edition. Or, to use Larsen's language, if we "think of the textual tradition we call the Gospel according to Matthew as continuing the same unfinished textual tradition of “the gospel” more broadly understood", there is nothing to stop us illustrating that in a theory diagram, a diagram that would be attempting a solution to the problem, which is a quite different thing from a diagram that attempts to depict the data.

[1] Larsen regularly uses the term "human" author, though I am not sure why the adjective is necessary given that no one is arguing for animal or alien authors.

[2] Generated using the Venn Diagram Generator.

How Similar is Luke to Matthew? Reflections Stimulated by Larsen

I have recently been enjoying reading Matthew Larsen's Gospels Before the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) and have been reflecting on elements in its thesis. In one sense, I was predisposed to find the book appealing since I have myself flirted with the idea of Mark as an "unfinished" gospel (NT Pod 71), though I am less certain about some of Larsen's broader claims. In due course I hope to comment on his scepticism about our ability to do source- and redaction-criticism, but first, in this post, a couple of positive observations.

In Chapter 6 of Gospels Before the Book, Larsen reflects on how his thesis impacts on synoptic relations, which is a topic of interest to me. Larsen argues that we should not see Mark and Matthew as distinct "books", each with their own author. Each is an instantiation of a fluid textual tradition. To develop this point, he writes:

Viewed from within a different framework, we begin to see another picture. If one assumes the texts we now call the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark are not both part of the same fluid textual tradition, then to my knowledge there are no two works from the ancient world more similar to each other than the Gospel according to Mark and the Gospel according to Matthew, a fact often overlooked (101).

This perspective reminded me of the strong 20th century (mainly British) scholarly tradition of seeing Matthew as a kind of "second edition" of Mark. The tradition goes back, I think, to F. C. Burkitt in 1910, who described Matthew as "a fresh edition of Mark, revised, rearranged, and enriched with new material” (The Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910). Streeter echoed the judgement in his famous Four Gospels, and there's a fairly strong continuing tradition of seeing Matthew this way, e.g. by Graham Stanton, James D. G. Dunn, and more recently Francis Watson.

But a further thought on reading Larsen here occurred to me, and that thought was, "What about Luke?" Larsen is arguing that Mark is so similar to Matthew that there are no two works in the ancient world that are anything like as close as these two. But the point becomes stronger if one draws in Luke too. If Matthew and Mark are two of the most similar works from antiquity, surely Matthew and Luke are even more so.

The difficulty here is that decades of two-source thinking, with its insistence on Luke's independence from Matthew, have tended to immunize us against noticing the extent of the similarity between these two gospels. We allow Q to mediate their non-Marcan similarities, and then we stress their differences in attempting to underline their independence. But the similarities between Matthew and Luke are not limited to the two-hundred or so verses of double tradition. It is a question of their entire gospel projects.

I have been attempting press the point about the macro-similarities between the two works, in addition to the micro-similarities, for some years. If Matthew is effectively a kind of fresh edition of Mark, could Luke be seen still more as a fresh edition of Matthew? I don't know if I want to go that far, but I do think it worth pointing out once again just how similar these two works are. Unlike Mark, both begin with Infancy Narratives; both end with resurrection appearances & commission to "the eleven"; both feature a lot of additional identical sayings material, frequently with very close verbatim agreement.

It turns out that we can quantify the similarity between the two in a rough-and-ready way. Larsen does an interesting experiment in quantifying the degree of agreement between Matthew and Mark by using the index of Aland's Synopsis, and it's something we can extend to Matthew and Luke. Larsen's figures are as follows (pp. 103-4):

Mark: 115 “stories”.
Matthew: 178 “stories".
Overlapping: 107 “stories”. Thus, Larsen says:

93% of Mark is paralleled in Matthew.
60% of Matthew is paralleled in Mark.

I checked Larsen's numbers and they came out the same way for me. I then did a count on the Lucan parallels, and they come out like this:

Luke: 185 "stories"
Overlapping with Matthew: 137. Thus:

74% of Matthew is paralleled in Luke.
77% of Luke is paralleled in Matthew.

It is of course a clunky and imprecise way of doing things, and my own preference would be to do it on the basis of sentences or verses rather than Aland units, but it is interesting nevertheless to see just how quantifiably "similar" Matthew and Luke are to one another, at least according to this metric.

Further Response to Alan Garrow

I am grateful to Alan Garrow for responding to my post on Garrow's Flaw (details and links here) over on Bart Ehrman's blog.

I had pointed out that Garrow's model diagnoses high verbatim double tradition passages as the result of Matthew's copying of Luke alone. "High DT [double tradition] passages," he says,"are best explained by Matthew’s copying of Luke without interference from any other entity.” Low verbatim passages are the result of Matthew conflating Luke and the Didache. The claim is foundational and explicit in Garrow's work:

"[W]hen Matthew copies Luke without distraction he produces High DT passages. When, however, Matthew knows differing versions of the same event he conflates them – resulting in a Low DT passage."

In my response, I pointed out that Garrow's own list of "High DT passages" includes several cases of Matthew actually working not from "Luke alone" but from Luke and Mark. In other words, his claim that Matthew produces high verbatim passages when working from Luke alone is contradicted by his own model. 

Garrow responds by arguing that Matthew's behaviour is "consistently plausible". I quote the paragraph in full:

A good solution to the Synoptic Problem is one that allows each Evangelist to behave in a consistently plausible manner. To rebut my thesis, therefore, Goodacre must show that, under my proposal, Matthew is required to do something that is essentially implausible. The unbelievable behavior he identifies is that Matthew (according to me) sometimes very closely conflates two or more related sources (e.g. The Sin against the Holy Spirit, where Matt. 31.31-32 conflates Mark 3.28-30, Luke 12.10 and Did. 11.7), sometimes switches between sources at intervals (e.g. the Beelzebul Controversy, where Matt. 12.22-30 alternates between Mark 3.22-27 and Luke 11.14-23), and sometimes decides to forego the labor of conflation where the rewards for doing so are limited (e.g. John’s messianic preaching and the sign of Jonah: Matt. 3.12 // Luke 3.17 and Matt. 12.38-42 // Luke 11.16, 29-32 respectively). I must leave you to judge whether this variation is so extraordinary as to justify Ehrman’s view that this is a ‘completely compelling’ reason to declare that Matthew could not have known Luke.

This does not respond to my point, which is not a question about degrees of plausibility, but a question about the consistency and coherence of Garrow's model. I do not have a difficulty with the issue of variation in degrees of verbatim agreement; indeed, as Garrow points out, I have myself written about this. The issue to which I am drawing attention is straightforward: Garrow claims that high verbatim agreement in double tradition is diagnostic that Matthew is working form Luke alone. I am pointing out that on his model, high verbatim agreement does not illustrate this.

Garrow adds some general criticisms of the Farrer theory, including the old chestnut about "unpicking", which dates back to F. Gerald Downing. I have little to add here to the excellent critiques by Ken Olson and Eric Eve on this issue, but I will say that no critic of the Farrer theory has yet successfully isolated a single occasion where an advocate of the Farrer theory uses the term that they consistently put in quotation marks. I generally try to avoid putting things in quotation marks that are not quotations, but I realize that practices vary. 

Garrow concludes with his favourite quotation from me, "The theory that Matthew has read Luke … is rarely put forward by sensible scholars and will not be considered here" (The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze, 109), where I was of course just describing the field at the time of writing, a description echoed by Garrow himself three years later, "“The possibility that Matthew directly depended on Luke’s Gospel has not been widely explored” (The Gospel of Matthew's Dependence on the Didache, 228 n. 10). I should perhaps let on that my engagement with Alan's work began long before Evan's wager; that just gave me the opportunity to share work in progress. What's been fun has been the demonstration that people really are interested in the Synoptic Problem.

Garrow's Flaw

Over on Bart Ehrman's blog, there has been some fun relating to the Synoptic Problem. A commenter promised $1,000 to Prof. Ehrman's blog's charities if he engaged with Alan Garrow's work on the Synoptic Problem. Since I have read and thought about Dr Garrow's work, I thought I'd offer to write a post on it, drawing attention to what I see as one of the flaws in the argument. Prof. Ehrman has posted those comments today, and I am cross-posting them here.

I've enjoyed the social media reaction to this, with comments also on Alan Garrow's blog, The Logos Academic Blog, and no doubt elsewhere.

Please note that I do this to encourage people to visit and subscribe to my friend and colleague's blog, with the hope that others will support these great causes, including one local to us, The Urban Ministries of Durham.

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In a recent comment on Bart Ehrman's blog, "Evan" suggested that Alan Garrow's arguments are so compelling that he effectively "proves beyond any doubt that Matthew used both Mark and Luke". He says that it is "virtually impossible to believe in the Q theory once you’ve seen this data". The same commenter goes on to offer $1,000 for the charities on the blog in return for an assessment of Garrow's case, asking in particular for "holes in his arguments." As a self-confessed synoptic nerd, and as one who has spent some time with Garrow's work, I thought I would offer this critique by way of response. Since "Evan" is particularly interested in holes in Garrow's case, I thought I would focus on one particular flaw that places a major question mark over this model.

I should point out that while Bart and I are on different sides on the Synoptic Problem, he a staunch supporter of the Two-Source Theory and I an advocate of the Farrer Theory, we are both agreed that Matthew did not know Luke, which is what is under discussion here. I have enjoyed reading Bart's recent blog entries (and the multiple comments!) on these issues, and I hope to find a moment to respond, even if just to provide an excerpt from something I have written. But back to the immediately pressing issue.

Alan Garrow has made his case in a series of videos on his blog, Streeter's 'Other' Synoptic Solution: The Matthew Conflator Hypothesis and An Extant Instance of Q, and it is these videos that "Evan" is referring to. Garrow's more detailed, scholarly argument is laid out in two articles by the same names recently published in the premier journal in the field, New Testament Studies. The fact that one of Garrow's articles is entitled "An Extant Instance of Q" illustrates that it can hardly be the case that "Alan Garrow has compiled an extremely compelling argument that Q never existed" (so "Evan", on Bart's blog). Garrow is actually arguing that Matthew and Luke did use Q, and that we can see exactly how they used Q, because Q has not been lost. Q is, in fact, the Didache! The Didache is a fascinating early Christian work, first published in 1883, but Garrow is the first -- to my knowledge -- to identify it with the hypothetical Q.

Garrow's synoptic model works with Marcan Priority (something shared by Bart and me) but he adds a couple of further elements: (1) Matthew and Luke both know and use Q, which is now unveiled as the Didache; and (2) Matthew also knows Luke's Gospel. In his videos and articles, he works with the analogy of a multiple vehicle car crash. All the data, he says, need to be explained. He then pays special attention to a key element in the car crash -- the variation in rates of verbatim (word for word) agreement between Matthew and Luke in the double tradition (i.e. in passages found only in Matthew and Luke). He points out, quite correctly, that sometimes Matthew and Luke have very high verbatim agreement with one another, and sometimes they have rather low verbatim agreement with one another. This variation in verbatim agreement, he says, demands an explanation.

Garrow argues that his model provides a good explanation of both the high verbatim and the low verbatim passages. High verbatim passages are the result of Matthew directly copying from Luke. They are places where Matthew has just Luke in front of him. Here, Matthew is copying Luke "without distraction." Low verbatim passages are the result of Matthew conflating Luke with Q (=the Didache), i.e. places where Matthew does not agree as much with Luke because he is distracted by one of Luke's sources, Q (=the Didache). As he expresses it, "High DT [double tradition] passages are best explained by Matthew’s copying of Luke without interference from any other entity.”

Garrow is right that the spectrum of agreement in Matthew's and Luke's double tradition requires an explanation. Anyone studying the Synoptic Problem should certainly make sure that they have a good account of why Matthew and Luke sometimes agree very closely and why they sometimes provide the same material in very different words. But is Garrow's diagnosis correct? I don't think so. The difficulty is that it is contradicted by his own model. Several of the passages with very high verbatim agreement in Matthew and Luke are passages where Matthew, on Garrow's own theory, is also copying from Mark, passages like John's messianic preaching (Matt. 3.12 // Luke 3.17), the Beelzebub Controversy (Matt. 12.22-30 // Luke 11.14-23), and the Sign of Jonah (Matt. 12.38-42 // Luke 11.16, 29-32). In passages like these, Matthew and Luke can be remarkably close in wording, and yet these are passages where there are also parallels in Mark.

In other words, Garrow has constructed a model where Matthew is supposed to be agreeing very closely with Luke when there is no distraction, in places where only Luke has the passage in question. And he is supposed to agree with Luke much less when he is distracted by another source, the Didache (or Q). But this is sometimes manifestly not the case. We can test Garrow's thesis by asking how Matthew behaves when the evangelist is copying from both Luke and Mark. And since these passages (usually called "Mark Q Overlap passages") feature a lot of very high verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke, it is clear that "distraction" has nothing to do with it.

Garrow summarizes his own argument by saying that, "[W]hen Matthew copies Luke without distraction he produces High DT passages. When, however, Matthew knows differing versions of the same event he conflates them – resulting in a Low DT passage." But on Garrow's own thesis, Matthew is quite capable of producing high verbatim agreement when he "knows differing versions of the same event." It may be worth adding that there are plenty of low verbatim passages in Matthew and Luke where there is no parallel in Mark or the Didache, i.e. Matthew is perfectly capable of producing a low verbatim passage on his own with just one source. Whatever we might make of the wisdom of comparing one's synoptic model to a car crash, it has to be said that high verbatim agreement is simply not diagnostic of an author working from only one source, just as low verbatim agreement is not diagnostic of an author working from more than one.
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Q or not Q? Is there any shift?

Michael Goulder

Chris Keith asked earlier today whether I was still in the minority about Q.  His post generated a decent comments thread as well as a monster comments thread on Facebook (which is so often now the more lively place for conversation on these things).  I don't doubt for a moment that the Farrer theory is still the minority position, but I have been glad to see a good number of people coming over to the side of the angels as time has gone on.

I certainly feel much less lonely than I did fifteen or twenty years or so ago when it was automatically assumed in the USA that anyone who denied the existence of Q must also, of necessity, deny the existence of Marcan Priority too.  Indeed, Q sceptics probably thought the earth was flat too, and that Elvis was still alive.  I well remember Stephen Patterson describing the view as even more obscure than Griesbach.

It was something of a shock to me to discover just how deeply embedded belief in Q seemed to be, especially after I was cocooned by my Oxford education, where, in the 1980s, everyone seemed to be sceptical about Q (E. P. Sanders, N. T. Wright, John Fenton, Eric Franklin and later, John Muddiman).

Michael Goulder (above) always used to feel that he was "contra mundum" on Q and he was delighted when Ed Sanders declared his (moderated) support for his theory in the book he co-authored with Margaret Davies in 1990.  I have been lucky to have found myself a little less isolated, but even if that were not so, I would not be ashamed to find myself in the same camp as two of the finest minds (I would say the two finest minds) in NT studies in recent decades.

But now, Anthony Le Donne wants to know just how popular the Q theory is these days -- and you can vote over on the blog he shares with Chris Keith -- Do You Q?  So who do you side with?

Memories are short in the blogosphere, but a handful of regular readers may remember that back in 2007 there was a similar poll run by Brandon Wason.  The poll itself has now gone, but my post on it survives.

Update: revised link.  Already interesting results. If you have not done so already, go and vote now!

John Drane's unacknowledged use of my work in Introducing the New Testament

Regular readers will know that I like to check up on the treatment of the Synoptic Problem in the introductory New Testament textbooks.  As a student of the Synoptic Problem myself, I am always fascinated to see how the topic is getting taught to undergraduate students.  I do have a dog in the fight in that I have argued in books, websites, podcasts, articles and so on for a particular solution, the Farrer Theory, which affirms the Priority of Mark's Gospel but dispenses with Q by suggesting that Luke knows Matthew as well as Mark.

Some New Testament introductions ignore the Farrer Theory; others provide minimal, weak or flawed coverage.  Somehow, I had never thought to check, until recently, on the coverage in one of the most popular New Testament Introductions of all, John Drane's Introducing the New Testament, now in its third edition at Fortress.  As well as checking out the third edition, I found out that I already owned the second edition courtesy of Logos Bible Software.  The story of what I found is an interesting one.*

Drane's coverage of the Synoptic Problem broadly supports the Two-Source Theory but has an extra section entitled "New light on old problems", the first subheading of which is "Did Q really exist?" (177-8).  As I read through this section, I thought to myself, "This looks familiar."  In fact, it was very familiar.  The section is derived from a web page that I composed back in 1997 called Ten Reasons to Question Q.  Although the section in Drane's book is derived from my web page, it does not mention me and it does not cite the web page.

Drane appears to work in sequence through my ten points, abbreviating and paraphrasing, sometimes adding some extra material.  He begins:

There is no hard evidence of its existence. In spite of the confidence with which scholars have reconstructed Q, and even claim to be able to give an account of its own literary history and development, no one has ever seen it. There is not even a fragment of any ancient manuscript of Q, nor is there a single reference to its existence anywhere in ancient literature.  Nineteenth-century scholars believed that Papias was referring to Q in his statement that Matthew ‘compiled the logia in the Hebrew language' . . . . (184)

This is a version of my points 1 and 2:

1. No-one has ever seen Q
Current literature on Q abounds with editions of Q, investigations into its strata, studies of the communities that were behind it and analyses of their theology. In such circumstances, it is worth allowing ourselves the sober reminder that there is no manuscript of Q in existence. No-one has yet found even a fragment of Q.

2. No-one had ever heard of Q
No ancient author appears to have been aware of the existence of Q. One will search in vain for a single reference to it in ancient literature. For a while it was thought that 'the logia' to which Papias referred might be Q. Indeed, this was one of the planks on which the Q hypothesis rested in the nineteenth century. But no reputable scholar now believes this.

Drane's next bullet point begins as follows:

There are no other ancient documents that look like Q. Though some Gnostic gospels (especially the Gospel of Thomas) provide a kind of parallel for interest in collecting sayings of Jesus, and though such interest seems inherently likely among his followers, Q is not actually like Thomas in that it contains some narrative material as well. It is therefore difficult to identify a specific genre to which Q might belong (184-5).

This appears to be based on my point 3**

3. Q is unparalleled in genre
There is no ancient document that looks like Q. Some have claimed that the Gospel of Thomas provides an analogy since it, like Q, is a 'sayings Gospel'. However, there is no parallel in Thomas for the narrative material that has always been problematic for the Q hypothesis, the Temptation (Matt. 4.1-11 // Luke 4.1-13), the Centurion's Boy (Matt. 8.5-13 // Luke 7.1-11) and the Messengers from John (Matt. 11.2-19 // Luke 7.18-35). Some Q scholars, aware of this difficulty, are currently engaging in a desperate search for a genre for Q.

Drane's third bullet point reads:

In a considerable number of passages, Matthew’s and Luke’s texts agree over against Mark’s, in either wording or order. This can generally be explained by the assumption that, at some points, there was overlap between Mark and Q, and that Matthew and Luke preferred the fuller version generally believed to be contained in Q. However, some of these agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark are found in the story of Jesus’ death (compare, for example, Matthew 26:67–68 / Luke 22:63–64 with Mark 14:65), and since every account of the scope of the hypothetical Q has concluded that it did not contain a passion narrative, some scholars want to argue that this phenomenon can more easily be explained on the assumption that Luke used Matthew than by reference to the traditional view that both of them used Q (185).

This is a condensed summary of my points 4-7.  I will not quote those in full here but will draw attention to some pertinent elements:

But the existence of agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark in these very passages suggests otherwise . . . . 

Since the Q hypothesis is founded on Luke's independence of Matthew, agreement like this, agreement against Mark in both wording and order, should not be present. But the force of such major agreements tends not to be felt because of appeal to the phenomenon of 'Mark-Q overlap', both here and elsewhere (e.g. the Temptation; John the Baptist; Beelzebub) . . . . 

If one were to find a Minor Agreement between Matthew and Luke in the Passion narrative (Matt. 26-28 // Mark 14-16 // Luke 22-24), then this would be stronger evidence still against the existence of Q, for no-one thinks that Q has a Passion Narrative.  The good news is that there are several Minor Agreements in this material, the most striking of which is this: Matt. 26.67-8 // Mark 14.65 // Luke 22.63-4

Given the condensing of my points here, there are fewer verbal links in Drane's paraphrase.  However, there is a tell-tale sign of "editorial fatigue" in that Drane begins by writing "the story of Jesus' death", presumably with his introductory audience in mind, but he subsequently drifts into my wording "a passion narrative" later in the paragraph.

Speaking of fatigue, Drane's fourth bullet point (the final one in the second edition, 185, penultimate in the 3rd, 179) begins by paraphrasing my point 8 ("The Phenomenon of Fatigue"):

The existence of Q has also been questioned on the basis of considerations related to the way in which ancient authors might have operated. It has been claimed that when a writer is using a source, while the information might be sharpened up and reshaped at the beginning of the day, as tiredness sinks in there will be a tendency to revert to the underlying patterns of whatever source is being used—and that in the case of the so-called Q material, such evidence always shows Luke reverting to Matthew’s forms of expression. For example, in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30; Luke 19:11–27) Matthew has three servants, and Luke has ten. But as the story is told, Luke mentions ‘the first’, ‘the second’, and then ‘the other’ servant (19:16, 18, 20), which is easier to understand if Luke knew Matthew than if both of them were using the hypothetical Q. 

This is how I had phrased this summary of my own argument:

When one writer is copying the work of another, changes are sometimes made at the beginning of an account which are not sustained throughout - the writer lapses into docile reproduction of his / her source. This phenomenon of 'fatigue' is a tell-tale sign of a writer's dependence on a source . . . .

It is revealing that this phenomenon also occurs in double tradition (Q) material, and always in the same direction, in favour of Luke's use of Matthew. Take the Parable of the Talents / Pounds (Matt. 25.14-30 // Luke 19.11-27). Matthew has three servants throughout. Luke, on the other hand, has ten. But as the story progresses, we hear about 'the first' (19.16), 'the second' (19.18) and amazingly, 'the other' (ho heteros, Luke 19.20). Luke has inadvertently betrayed his knowledge of Matthew by drifting into the story-line of his source (see further my 'Fatigue in the Synoptics', NTS 44 (1998), pp. 45-58).

As in other places above, Drane uses synonyms where possible, "When a writer is using a source" for "when one writer is copying the work of another", "But as the story is told" for "But as the story progresses", "tiredness" for "fatigue", and so on.  Curiously, this excerpt actually illustrates the phenomenon that it is describing, with the wording closer to my wording as the paragraph progresses.

The second half of Drane's fourth bullet-point reads:

Those who wish to dispose of Q also argue that the very notion of gospel writers using sources in this way is a legacy from a previous generation which adopted a ‘scissors and paste’ approach to literature, which can no longer be sustained—and if M and L as separate written sources should be jettisoned, then so should Q.

This is a paraphrase of my penultimate point:

9. The Legacy of Scissors-and-Paste Scholarship
Q belongs to another age, an age in which scholars solved every problem by postulating another written source. The evangelists were thought of as 'scissors and paste' men, compilers and not composers, who edited together pieces from several documents. Classically, the bookish B. H. Streeter solved the synoptic problem by assigning a written source to each type of material - triple tradition was from Mark; double tradition was from 'Q'; special Matthew was from 'M' and special Luke was from 'L'. Most scholars have since dispensed with written 'M' and 'L' sources. The time has now come to get up-to-date, and to dispense with Q too.

This is a good paraphrase, retaining the sense and structure of my point but rewording with things like "previous generation" for "another age".  I must admit that I am not that keen on Drane's use of "dispose of" to replace"dispense with".

Drane's piece therefore paraphrases my "ten reasons to question Q" in order, with points 4-7 significantly condensed and point 10 omitted.  The paraphrase is well done, with effective use of synonyms and generally good summaries of my points.  There are words and phrases in common but overall the verbatim agreement is relatively limited.

It is difficult to know quite how to react to this.  On one level, I am surprised that it has taken me until now to spot it given that the passage in question has been in the book since the second edition of 1999.   I suppose that I am also pleasantly surprised to see my arguments repeated in a New Testament Introduction, even if it is without acknowledgement.  At least some of the key Q sceptical arguments are getting a hearing in an introductory textbook.

Moreover, it would be fair to say also that the genre of introductory textbook does not tend to encourage citation in the same way that scholarly monographs and articles do.  However, given the difficulty that we have in universities and colleges in training students to cite their sources, and to attribute arguments to those who made them, I think on balance that I am not happy with what the author has done here.

The basis of the plagiarism tutorials that we provide at Duke University are the imitation of good scholarly procedures, and that includes "failure to cite a source that is not common knowledge".  One way to think about this is to imagine if a passage came in like this in a student's work in my New Testament Introduction class.  What I would do would be to point out that the student has simply paraphrased a web page without citing the source.  The student in question would be unlikely to get a good grade and would probably be referred to the plagiarism tutorials previously mentioned.

I would be interested to hear what others think.  Am I being fair to Drane?  Is it OK to use scholars' web pages without acknowledgement?

I should conclude by underlining that in this post I just want to sketch out the evidence and to ask the questions.  I am not making any accusations.  Nevertheless, I do have a suggestion for a moral for the future.  If anyone is inclined to plagiarize scholarly work, it is probably not a good idea to plagiarize experts on source criticism.

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* Note: there are some slight expansions in the third edition including an extra bullet point (178) that is not derived from my web page.  Most of the pages numbers above refer to the second edition.

** Note: Drane is writing in 1999 and so dependent on an earlier version of the website, and it is that earlier (1997) version of the site that I am here quoting.  As it happens, this is one of the things that I first noticed when reading Drane -- I recognized the older wording of my site, wording that on this point  I subsequently re-worded.

Steve Walton and David Wenham on the Synoptic Problem

I have been working my way through the recently released second edition of Steve Walton and David Wenham's excellent Exploring the New Testament, Volume 1: A Guide to the Gospels and Acts.  As regular readers will know, I do like to look at New Testament introductions to see how they treat the Synoptic Problem.  Normally speaking, I have a lot to complain about, especially when the Farrer Theory gets ignored.

Well, with Walton and Wenham's introduction, there is good news for Q sceptics: the Farrer theory is treated in its discussion of the Synoptic Problem including its own diagram, brief discussion, and bibliographical references to Farrer's article, my introductory book (Way through the Maze), my monograph (Case Against Q) and even the NT Gateway (70, 73, 87).  Although it is naturally disappointing to see them dismiss the theory as having "many of the same objections as the Griesbach hypothesis" leading to the view being "not very widely held" (73), it is nevertheless encouraging to see the theory finding its way -- at last -- into the introductory literature.

What, though, of the substance of their exploration of the Synoptic Problem?  There are several reasons to find it refreshing.  For one thing, there is some discussion of the data before there is any discussion of the proposed solutions (61-5) echoing even those like me who advocate the colouring of the Synopsis (62, though I think that students will find my primary colour scheme more straightforward than their four-colour scheme).  For another, there is one sample synopsis (63, Sadducees' Question) and several lists taken over from Robert Stein's book (64, 68, 69) and one from Sanders and Davies (72).

Regular readers will not be expecting me to be unambiguously positive, though, and I don't want to disappoint them.  I would like to focus on a couple of difficulties in the discussion, the first with the way that they treat the Griesbach or Two Gospel (not "Two Gospels", 71) Theory.  Walton and Wenham offer several criticisms of the hypothesis, most of them well sustained, but the following criticism does not conceptualize the Griesbach theory fairly:

Luke's rearrangement of Matthean material   Consider the material shared by Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark (the Q material on the two source hypothesis).  Apart from rare examples (such as the temptation of Jesus, Matt. 4.1-11; Luke 4.1-13), Luke and Matthew do not present this material in conjunction with the same Markan material, but locate it in different settings in their Gospels.  In fact, on the Griesbach hypothesis, in editing Matthew, Luke has systematically moved almost all this material from its Matthean contexts to somewhere else in his Gospel.  This seems unlikely: a better explanation is that Luke is using Mark as a main source and other material to supplement Mark (73).

The difficulty with this explanation is that on the Griesbach Hypothesis, Luke is writing without reference to Mark, before Mark has been written, so the distinction between "Markan material" and "Q material" is irrelevant.  There is no option, then, for Luke and Matthew to present this material "in conjunction with the same Markan material".  For Griesbach's Luke, the distinction between double tradition and triple tradition does not exist.  This means that on the Griesbach hypothesis, Luke often follows Matthew's order; it is just that he does so most recognizably in the material that we call triple tradition.

On the Griesbach hypothesis, this material becomes "triple tradition" by virtue of Mark's subsequent action, according to which Mark shows preference for material that is in the same order in his sources Matthew and Luke.  In other words, it is an important element in the Griesbach hypothesis that Mark effectively creates the triple tradition by his selections from Matthew and Luke, a selection that is at least partly done on the basis of Matthew's and Luke's agreements in order.  Under such circumstances, it is a little unfair to criticize the theory for failing to explain Luke's ordering of double tradition.  The data set double tradition is generated by a subsequent move made by Mark, partly on the basis of the question of order, and not by Luke's editorial decisions.

The second difficulty I would like to mention also relates to the question or order, but this time for the Farrer Theory.  Griesbach is presented as the major alternative to the Two-Source theory (71-3) and Farrer is given a paragraph at the end under "Other Views".  It is dismissed in one sentence as follows:

This view faces many of the same objections as the Griesbach hypothesis, for it still holds that Luke has edited Matthew in ways that appear hard to understand and this has meant that, like the Griesbach view, it is not very widely held (73).

I disagree, of course, that it is hard to understand Luke's editing of Matthew, and it may be that Walton and Wenham's difficulty arises from their conceptualizing this work under the heading of criticizing the Griesbach hypothesis.  So let's take a look at what they say on the topic when they are discussing Griesbach:

Why does Luke break up Matthew's teaching blocks?  As we saw, Luke has most of the teaching found in Matthew's sermon on the mount (Matt. 5-7), but spread around his Gospel (see p. 69), and something similar happens with Matthew's four other teaching discourses (Matt. 10, 13, 18, 24-25).  If Luke is using Matthew, this seems unusual behaviour. (72).

On the Farrer theory, though, Luke's primary source for the structuring of his Gospel is Mark and paying careful attention to the way that Luke works with Mark helps to explain his use of Matthew.  His attitude towards lengthy discourses in his source material is consistent, and we would not expect him to retain all of Matthew's huge, theme-based structures when we can observe him reworking material in a plausible, biographical narrative (Case, chapters 4, 5 and 6; Maze, 123-8).

Take, for example, the third of the big Matthean discourses listed by Walton and Wenham,  Matthew 13.  Matthew 13, the parable chapter, is a massively expanded version of Mark's parable discourse in Mark 4.1-34.  Luke's parallel, in Luke 8.4-18, is a greatly reduced version of Mark 4, less than half its length, omitting some material and redistributing the rest.  Given that Luke here halves the length of Mark's version of the very discourse in question, it is hardly "unusual behaviour" to see him behaving in the same way towards Matthew's expansion of it (cf. Walton and Wenham's chart on 72 that nicely illustrates Matthew's expansion and Luke's reduction of Mark 4).

One last issue.  One of the things I like about Walton and Wenham's chapter is that it encourages students to pay careful attention to the Gospel Synopsis, and they provide an example of one themselves on 63, the Sadducees' Question.  Their English translation, however, masks an issue that is often missed, a telling minor agreement.  They have Matt. 22.27, "Last of all, the woman herself died", Mark 12.22, "Last of all, the woman herself died" and Luke 20.32, "Finally, the woman also died".  But Matthew and Mark are not identical here.  Matthew has ὕστερον δὲ πάντων . . . whereas Mark has ἔσχατον πάντων . . .  Luke follows Matthew and not Mark with his ὕστερον.  Why is this worth mentioning?  Because  ὕστερον is 7/0/1+0, seven times Matthew, never Mark, only here in Luke-Acts.  It is Matthew's way of representing the last in a series.  It's one of those nice minor agreements that illustrates Luke's knowledge of Matthew in triple tradition.

Matthean and Lukan Special Material, Part 2

Last week I posted part one of my review of Brice Jones, Matthean and Lukan Special Material in Matthean and Lukan Special Material, Part 1. I focused there mainly on Jones's selection of M and L passages, which is derived from Mark Allan Powell's partial list in the Fortress Introduction.

In the second part of this review, I will look at Jones's essay, "Literary Relationships Among the Gospels", which he uses to explain the role played by M and L in discussions of the Synoptic Problem.

Jones's essay forms Chapter 1 of the book (1-17) and is subtitled "A Brief Introduction to the Synoptic Problem and Matthew and Luke's Special Source Material".  He defines the Synoptic Problem and provides a little history (2-3), introducing the Griesbach Hypothesis (4) and explaining the Two-Source Theory (5), briefly offering arguments for it (6) before answering objections (7-8). Jones then introduces M and L, the main topics of the book, looking at how they functioned in Streeter's work (8-10) and in scholarship today with special reference to Stephenson Brooks and Kim Paffenroth (10-13).  The remainder of the chapter (13-17) explains the presentation and selection of data in the rest of the book.

Jones's essay typifies an approach to Synoptic Problem introduction that I have often criticized, working on the basis of the Two-Source Theory and refracting the Synoptic data through that theory.  Thus there is no encouragement for the new student to attempt to understand the data first, to study the Synopsis without prejudice to a particular way of describing the evidence.

The dominance of the Two-Source Theory is expressed in other ways in the chapter.  The Griesbach Hypothesis and the Two-Source Theory each have their own diagrams (4-5) but the Farrer Theory does not.  This is also important for new students, where visualizing a theory can greatly help in properly understanding it.   And while I am grateful to Jones for his brief reference to my work (7), I am a little disappointed to see no reference to my main book on the topic which is called The Case Against Q.

Jones lists Streeter's five points in favour of Marcan Priority (6), most of which are simple descriptions of how Matthew and Luke proceeded if they used Mark and several of which are reversible.  I think there are better arguments for Marcan Priority than those offered by Streeter and, on the whole, those supporting the "Two Gospel Theory" have had little trouble demonstrating this.  References to more recent literature by Two Gospel advocates might have helped here, especially Beyond the Q Impasse and One Gospel from Two.

Somewhat surprisingly, Jones does not offer any arguments in favour of the Q hypothesis and appears to regard it as established on the basis of Streeter's arguments for Marcan Priority.  He does, however, discuss three arguments against the Two-Source Theory (7-8), the Mark-Q overlaps, the minor agreements and the hypothetical nature of Q.  I will deal with each in turn.

(1) Mark-Q Overlaps.  Jones notes that there are Mark-Q overlap passages but does not explain why they are problematic for the Two-Source Theory.  He says:

Most advocates of the Two-Source hypothesis, however, do not think that the Mark-Q overlaps pose any real threat, since two independent yet similar traditions are bound to have existed prior to the composition of the Gospels as we know them (7).

Jones is right that advocates of the Farrer theory draw attention to the Mark-Q overlaps, but they do not do so because they think it surprising that "independent yet similar traditions" existed.  This would be a weak argument, and it is not one that I have seen. The difficulty with Mark-Q overlaps is not a general one about the plausibility or otherwise of overlapping materials.  Rather, it is specific: this data set contradicts the claim that Matthew and Luke never agree against Mark in major ways, and it contradicts the claim that Luke never takes over Matthew's redaction of Mark.  These are used as arguments for the existence of Q, arguments that are contradicted by this data set.

(2) Minor Agreements.  Jones refers to "the few cases where Matthew and Luke agree on wording with each other against Mark" (7), drawing attention specially to the minor agreement at Mark 14.65, and asking "How is this to be explained if Matthew and Luke did not know each other and the story is not found in Q?" (7).

Jones suggests that they could have been caused by shared oral tradition, or by corruption of the texts or by harmonization (though he does not explain how the last two differ).  The difficulty with the oral tradition theory is that several of the key minor agreements, including the one at Mark 14.65, feature verbatim agreement in Greek including the use of hapaxes in the Gospel in question.  The difficulty with the text-critical explanation is that it cuts both ways -- harmonization is as likely if not more likely to have diminished the number of minor agreements than to have increased them.

(3) A Hypothetical Document.  Here Jones writes:

Another difficulty is that the theory requires a hypothetical document, which is not physically attested outside of the Gospels.  This position is especially popular among advocates of solutions to the Synoptic Problem that posit Matthean and Lukan dependence.  There are difficulties in sustaining this argument, however, and most scholars tend to believe that the Two-Source Hypothesis makes the most sense of the data. (8). 

Jones here characterizes the position he is arguing against in such general terms that it is difficult to know what he is referring to.  It is true that Q sceptics will often have contexts in which noting Q's hypothetical nature will be relevant.  I have, for example, often noted the flexibility that its hypothetical nature allows for the redaction critic.  Similarly, I have drawn attention to problem of scholarly works that fail to mention its hypothetical nature, and so on.

That Q is hypothetical is a fact.  It is not an "argument" or a "position".  The question is whether positing a hypothetical text is the best way of explaining the double tradition in Matthew and Luke and the best way of establishing this is to look carefully at the evidence.