Loading...In my previous post I gave a simplified illustration to show why it is problematic to get rid of the Q source (the hypothetical collection of sayings found in both Matthew and Luke but not in Mark). Having this hypothetical source does not actually complicate the solution of the Synoptic Problem, it makes the solution simpler. Supposing there was a Q is not a perfect solution, but it is better than the alternatives, in my opinion. As my Doktorvater Bruce Metzger used to say (about Q and other things), “It is the least problematic solution.”
The reason it makes simplest and best sense is because of the sequence of the sayings of these “double traditions” (the technical term for the sayings materials in the TWO Gospels of Matthew and Luke but not in Mark). Unlike many of the narratives of these texts, these double-tradition sayings invariably occur in different places in the two Gospels. Why is that?
It would make sense if both of them have a source with a collection of Jesus’ sayings of Jesus but did not have a narrative they fit into. The source would simply be more or less a list of sayings given without a narrative context for them (kinda like later in the Gospel of Thomas, which has 114 sayings but no stories–for more on Thomas, see Chapter 3 of my book Lost Christianities). If that was indeed the case (that is, if Q was their source) Matthew and Luke would have each taken the various sayings and simply stuck them into their narrative accounts wherever they each thought it made the best sense. Rarely would they put them in the same place or in the same sequence. And that is in fact what we find (as I’ll show below).
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If Luke was copying from Mark and Matthew, he surely realized that if he copied the stories in the same order as Matthew, he would essentially be producing “Matthew II” and not “Luke”. Who would bother with his book if it was essentially a rehash of Matthew? The author of Matthew was a whopper-teller. He invented mass amounts of material that no one had ever heard before! His new book was a best seller! Roman guards at the tomb! Dead saints shaken alive out of their graves by an earthquake! And a long list of beautiful “sayings”. Luke had to rearrange some of this new material and omit others or risk be labeled a copycat and fraud.
Gary – The picture you paint is one in which all these books exist together in the same city, perhaps. But the ancient world was one in which distances were great and travel slow. Author #1’s book, written for his own community, would eventually reach another community with a literate member who found it admirable, but lacking important stories and emphasizing a few things that seemed wrong. Author #2 would then write his own version for HIS community, a copy or two of which would eventually be asked for by other churches in other countries. None of these texts are “best sellers” in the modern meaning, with people buying this sensational new book quickly while it’s fresh. But in another sense, they’re all best sellers. All texts that seem true would be worth copying, reading aloud, and passing copies on to other churches when they asked. A slow process. Not often early-on would a church have had multiple gospels to compare with each other, nor was there concern about being perceived as a “plagiarist”. These authors claimed no credit. The kingdom was coming soon; the word must be spread.
What evidence do you have that other stories existed about Jesus prior to the writing of Mark, other than those told by Paul?
How could faith in Jesus spread throughout major cities of the Roman empire in the first century if the people who were converting to believe in Jesus had never heard anything about Jesus?
“The picture you paint is one in which all these books exist together in the same city, perhaps. ”
“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us … ”
(Luke 1:1)
It seems that the author of Luke did have access to at least ‘many’ of these books !
Mark Goodacre has what seems to me a pretty good rebuttal to this argument. Luke used Mark for the chronology, but disliked the long speeches in Matthew, and decided to break them up, finding other places for Jesus to use those lines, so he could keep the action moving. We can see from Luke’s gospel that he was an astoundingly good writer and rhetorician—he usually manages to improve on Mark and Matthew. To suppose that he would have been too incompetent to repurpose some of Matthew’s material really sells short Luke’s skill with a pen.
Well said.
“Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, 3 I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start,[a] to write a well-ordered account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may have a firm grasp of the words in which you have been instructed.” –anonymous author of the Gospel of Luke
Translation: “Matthew [and maybe even Mark] did not properly order the sequence of stories about Jesus’ life, his sayings, death, and resurrection. But I have! That is why everyone should read MY book!”
I can’t believe our trip to Greece in May is just around the corner! I’m counting down the days, and I’m so excited! It’ll be my first time in Greece, and I can’t wait to meet you. Honestly, meeting you there is going to be such a wonderful experience!
I’ve been wondering why Q hasn’t come down to us. I’ve heard before that maybe people stopped transmitting Q because Matthew and Luke made it redundant.
But then why didn’t Mark suffer the same fate?
It’s strange to me. Q was well known enough that both Matthew and Luke were aware of it and thought of parts of it as worth preserving.
Maybe Q was well known of, but not widespread. For instance: “it is said that in the church of Jerusalem there is a book of the sayings of Peter”. And then the gospel authors sought it out and both used it.
Or maybe Q had stuff in it that made it unpalatable that both Matthew and Luke declined to copy, and this is the reason why Q itself wasn’t widely copied.
Are any of these ideas worthwhile or am I off base?
I guess a lot of people find it strange, but I have to say I don’t. Luke says that there were *many* Gospels around, and we don’t have any of them. Paul must have written many hundreds of letters, and we have seven. We don’t have 99 of the writings produced in the first centuryt altogehter, and don’t have most of the writings of major authors from classical times (the Euripides!) and later, Greek, Roman and Christian. So many we’d love to have!
The easy answer is that “Q” was plagiarised by Christianity, which is why not only we haven’t found it, but also why no Patristic ever mentions it
And that, again, perfectly describes Marcion. Marcion, which Bart incredibly defends just as the orthodox do, paying lip service to the falsifying Patristics who have long ago been debunked and exposed, most recently by Klinghardt and BeDuhn.
Bart’s response to all that? “Roth is no sloth!”
Perhaps Roth is, perhaps Roth isn’t – but that’s irrelevant to the facts that I named, namely that he knows, and stealthily (in Greek alone) states that the Patristics don’t comment on the order of wine-skin and patch being reversed in between Marcion and the Synoptics. But does Roth comment on the peculiar “do as you did in Capernaum” when Luke’s Jesus, unlike Marcion’s Jesus, hasn’t been there yet
Bart, are you again going to throw the “majority consensus” at me? While knowing fully well that the majority knows nothing about Marcion but that very Patristics propaganda?
Q was plagiarised: Marcion is the Quelle to Christianity.
And Thomas in turn is the Quelle to Marcion – and we are most incredibly lucky to have it!
I think this is a very good argument against Farrer but silent on Griesbach.
Luke generally agrees with Mark’s order up to the feeding of the five thousand when he moves into his sayings section, and from that point on Matthew (who had generally been following an order different to Mark) generally agrees with Markan order for the rest of his gospel.
So if Mark is in control of the process and writing a narrative heavy account, he’ll follow Luke until Luke leaves a narrative order then follow Matthew until the end.
Although you support the four source hypothesis would you go so far as to say you find Griesbach more likely than Farrer? 🙂
I’ve never thought aobut contrasting the relative likelihoods; I’ve never found either one convincing…
I would posit that Mark was much more widely distributed and much more cherished a document than either Q for the Four Source or Matthew for the Ferrer hypothesis. Both Matthew and Luke felt they could drop some of the weirder stories of Mark, but they could not mess with it beyond that. However, Q (for both Matthew and Luke) or Matthew (for only Luke) didn’t have the same acceptance among the late first century followers of Jesus that Mark did. So, either both Matthew and Luke felt free to use Q material as they liked (as a sayings gospel, it was the natural choice) or Luke felt free to use Matthean material as he liked.
So, could Matthew have been seen by Luke as a gospel he could salvage for parts? The Four Source has both Matthew and Luke salvaging Q for parts, after all. It’s not above them there. And as you say, Dr. Ehrman, Luke “almost always” moves Q/Mt material out of Mt contexts. How could that be unless he was looking at Matthew to blow it apart? I’d expect by chance Luke and Matthew would agree on Q order and context far more.
I apologize in advance for the cut and paste below.
From paragraph 7 “…and each simply put them where it seemed to make the best sense.”
From paragraph 11 (if the table is considered one large paragraph) “…Which would be easier for Luke: inserting a list of sayings into his story wherever he wanted,…”
My question is whether you consider the two points the same. That is, do you consider “where it seemed to make the BEST SENSE” to be the same as “WHEREVER HE WANTED”
To me, these are distinctly different. Does the distinction change your main point. Just wondering.
I was speaking loosely, but I did mean them to be the same thing. He wanted to put them where they seemed best to him.
What if there were many different copies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, so they used them as Q. Then the people with the power took it upon themselves to pick and choose what they liked to fit their own biased narrative. To make books look like they all agreed.
Hi Bart. I want to confirm if my understanding is correct and want to ask whether what I will say now is correct or wrong. So the way I understand is the following: Paul also believes in apocalypticism – where there will be a future time when dead people will be raised with spiritual body and they will continue living on earth with Jesus on earth. While Paul believes in it, he also believes in interim-state where when a person dies, he/she immediatelly goes to heaven(possibly naked without a body). Luke seems to also believe the same thing – Luke believes in apocalypticism as well(Luke 21:34—36) but also believes in interim-state where a dead person immediatelly goes to God’s presence. The reason you’re thinking that Luke de-apocalyptices the message is because of interim-state, because Jesus never talked about interim-state as he thought kingdom of god would arrive in his own lifetime. Are these assumptions all correct ? Thank you so much..
Yes, more or less. But I’m saying Paul came to that view later in his life and that Luke abandoned other aspects of Jesus’ aposblyptic message (getting rid of most of Jesus’ language that the ends was coming very soon)
What’s the reason for thinking there was “a” Q – a single written source document – rather than just a number of different sets of sayings and stories, some of which both Matthew and Luke had access to or drew from (which we call “Q”), some of which only one or other did (which we call “M” or “L”?)
Or is that latter situation precisely what the Q hypothesis is actually proposing (with “the Q source” being a shorthand)? It would help explain the different ordering if Matthew and Luke were, as it were, just working from overlapping collections of scraps of papyrus
It’s because if they did rely on a common source it’s more likely than if they relied on many common sources.
You wrote, “Did he reread Mark every time he found a saying in Matthew, saying after saying after saying?”
No. Luke needed only to read Mk section by section, and find the equivalent section in Mt, as he progressed. I did the same. It is not difficult because Mt largely follows the order of Mk. Luke needed only a short-term memory of the passage in Mk that he had just read. He would then use the margin of his manuscript of Mt to indicate passages that came from Mk. He would then ignore those indicated passages when compiling his gospel, because of his preference for Mk. However, Luke might fail to spot some Mt-Mk overlap passages. Some of these overlooked passages would then be copied by Luke, creating “major agreements”. That is exactly what we find. You call them “Mark-Q overlaps.”
So Farrer wins, after all, doesn’t he?
The problem is that the sayings of Matthew are not always in the same sections they are in Mark when they overlap. In fact, that’s precisely the problem. Most of Matthew’s sayings are in collections not found in Mark. e.g. the parallel of Matthew 5:13 i Mark 9:49-50; and of Matthew 5:14-16 is Mark 4:21; of Matthew 5:23-24 in Mark 11:25; Matthew 5:27-32 in Mark 9:43-48; but most of the sayings in Matthew 5 are not in Mark at all. So the ones that are there are not in the same place or sequence and many aren’t there at all. How did Luke know that without reading through Mark each time?
You give 4 cases of displaced Mk-Mt overlap texts that Luke does not copy from Mt, but Luke uses little more than half of the material in Mt that is not in Mk anyway. Also, in two of your 4 cases Luke decides not to take Mk’s version either, so why would he have used Mt’s version?
Here are 5 Mk-Mt overlap passages that Luke DID copy from Mt (on the Farrer theory) because they were difficult for Luke to identify as Mk-Mt overlap. Mt’s version of the mission of the 12 is far out of sequence in Mt, so was easily overlooked by Luke, who then copied Mt’s version, creating the mission of the 70/72. Similarly, Mk 13:11 = Mt 10:19-20 = Luke 21:12-15 (from Mk) = Luke 12:11-12 (from Mt). Luke missed other Mk-Mt overlap passages because they are small and are surrounded in Mt by non-overlap passages. Mk 12:38-39 = Mt 23:6-7 = Luke 11:43 (from Mt) = Luke 20:46 (from Mk). Mk 4:30-32 = Matt 13:31-32 = Luke 13:18-19 (from Mt). Mk 9:42 = Mt 18:6-7 = Luke 17:1-2 (from Mt).
So Farrer has no difficulty, does he? You could ask Goodacre to comment.
I’d be interested in a Mark Goodacre rebuttal or a link to an existing rebuttal written on this level. Your reasoning looks pretty clear to me. Curious if I’d be as swayed by his. He’s clearly no slouch on such matters!
You can see is full argument in his book The Case Against Q.
I READ/typed into computer many G Campbell Morgan speeches/books.
One line [paraphrase]: the gospel of Matthew was circulating in India- by 3rd & 4th Century.
What does that mean, the people of India couldn’t be saved because the NT was incomplete?
G Campbell Morgan said this in favorable encouragement that Christianity reached out so early!