I’m taking the day off from the blog (a vacation day!), but received this comment from Mark Goodacre and didn’t want it to be lost in the comment section, as I think it is important.  (And for balance, I will indeed be posting, later,  blog-member Evan’s assessment of the whole thing, since he started it!).  Here is Mark’s response to what Alan Garrow’s post.

 

Many thanks to Dr Garrow for his interesting response. I should point out, though, that 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. 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 from Luke alone. I am pointing out that on his model, high verbatim agreement does not illustrate this. I’ve added some additional comments on my blog at https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/further-response-to-alan-garrow.html.

Many thanks, by the way, to everyone for the fascinating responses to my post, and apologies that I am so busy at the moment that I don’t have time to respond to them all. I am lost in wonder at how Bart is able to keep up with the blog!