Stephen said
…one of the issues with hypotheses which seek to multiply entities (here, like Q, proposing a text without any manuscript or patristic evidence) is that the hypothetical entity can almost act without limits, since there is complete silence as to evidence about it, including silence as to negative evidence.

Well the “Q” material is a bit different.  It obviously exists and seems of a piece.  It originated somewhere.  The scholarly argument is whether it ever existed as an independent text.  I consider this an open question whether or not Luke knew Matthew.  I think you can make a case that Luke could not have used Mark or the “Q” material the way he did without having them as sperate documents even if he knew Matthew.  I think most textual scholars would probably already agree about Luke knowing Mark even if he knew Matthew.  

  

This is probably a good illustration of my point about positing new entities that can act without limitations.

One of the arguments against Q is that both Matthew and Luke often edit Mark in the same way, sometimes with verbatim editing. For example, the Parable of the Mustard Seed (Matthew 13.31-32; Mark 4.30-32; Luke 13.18-19), wherein Matthew and Luke both add “a person, having taken it,” “becomes a tree,” and “branches.” If Q is premised on Luke not knowing Matthew (and vice versa), how is it that they both edit Mark in the same way? 

Well, supporters of Q simply throw this material — originally from Mark — into the Q bucket.  But, it doesn’t stop there.

And, indeed, the agreements between Matthew and Luke, against Mark, extend not only to sayings, but also to the Passion, which is not even supposed to be in Q: Matthew 26.67-8; Luke 22.63-4 (“Who is the one who smote you?”); contra Mark 14.65.

You say as to the Q material, “it obviously exists.”  If that’s so, the question then raised here is: what are the limits of the Q material?  And, I think the answer is, following on my larger point: there are none.  Q can be whatever its advocates want it to be.

Robert said

vergari said  

You say as to the Q material, “it obviously exists.”  If that’s so, the question then raised here is: what are the limits of the Q material?  And, I think the answer is, following on my larger point: there are none.  Q can be whatever its advocates want it to be.  

I suspect you’re missing Stephen’s point, ie, that the double-tradition material obviously exists, not that the hypothetical Q-source obviously exists. There is an additional point that Stephen may be making, on which we also both agree, and that is that even if Luke knew Matthew, that fact alone might not account very well for the very different way in which Luke uses the double tradition material. 

There are absolutely limits of the Q material for disciplined scholars. Among such scholars, it is not nearly so airy-fairy as you seem to be implying. Rather good scholars follow a very specific process in reconstructing the text of Q, always, of course, with room for some disagreement.

I do agree, however, that the Mk-Q overlap material is much more extensive than some non-scholars realize. 

  

The double tradition material exists, but that’s quite a bit different than the affirmative statement that the Q material exists.

As for Q, I don’t agree that there are anything close to uniform limiting principles as to what qualifies. And, by what limiting principle can we certainly exclude any material from Mark, Matthew or Luke, as certainly not Q?

Robert said

vergari said  

The double tradition material exists, but that’s quite a bit different than the affirmative statement that the Q material exists.

As for Q, I don’t agree that there are anything close to uniform limiting principles as to what qualifies. And, by what limiting principle can we certainly exclude any material from Mark, Matthew or Luke, as certainly not Q?

Stephen can clarify whether you or I correctly understood the meaning of his statement that ‘the “Q” (note the quotation marks) material obviously exists’.

With respect to Q, how familiar with the work of hard-core Q-scholars? Take a look at Neiyrinck’s Q-synopsis or the Hermeneia volume The Critical Edition of Q. The similarity is striking. You can probably count on one hand the number of passages about which there is not substantial scholarly consensus regarding the contents of Q. As for the reconstruction of the Q text in its details, where there is word-for-word agreement, identification of the Greek text of Q is trivial. Where there is less close agreement in the texts of Matthew and Luke, one still finds very concrete and specific arguments about whether traits of Matthean or Lukan redaction can be identified based on a close reading of their respective revision of the gospel of Mark. It is highly disciplined work among Q scholars. Of course, if you are looking for absolute ‘certainty’, you’re looking in the wrong place. There will always be individual scholars who might argue that an M or L text might have been part of Q, but that is by definition speculative since such texts are not part of the double tradition. Even more speculative are attempts to define chronological strata in the development of the Q-text. 

  

I am not well familiar with the work of Neiyrinck; as such, perhaps you can opine yourself here:

There are approximately a thousand minor agreements between Matthew and Luke, against Mark. Indeed, there are virtually no pericopes in the triple tradition that do not contain a minor agreement between Matthew and Luke, against Mark. So, what limiting principle do we use to say it is substantially more probable than not that a passage containing a minor agreement is in Q?

Robert said
The use of minor agreements to identify Q is chaotic and usually inconsequential. Frans Neirynck and his students in the Leuven school have done more work on the minor agreements than anyone else. By several orders of magnitude. My best friend in graduate school did an exhaustive review of all proposed modern exegetical explanations for every minor agreement for his doctoral dissertation under Neirynck. I was more involved in the study of Markan dualism or pleonastic style, which is foundational for seeing independent redaction as an important explanation for how Matthew and Luke frequently redact Mark in similar ways. If, for example, Mark has a characteristic pleonastic phrasing, it is only a matter of chance that sometimes Matthew will revise and abbreviate by choosing one aspect, while Luke chooses the other, and other times they will agree in their editing of Mark. Yet, even when Matthew and Luke agree in redacting Mark in a similar or even in the same way, such an agreement is oftentimes part of a larger divergence or disagreement. If there are a very large number of agreements in the same passage, that might indicate the possibility of a passage being contained in Q, but this may also be optimally augmented by the presence of a doublet in Matthew, Luke, or both. And one must also consider the likelihood of deutero-Markan recensions to understand minor agreements. Thus minor agreements can be meaningful in identifying potential Q-passages, but by definition they are typically minor because they are contained in passages that are not otherwise considered part of Q, which is made up of major agreements.

  

Perhaps I just need to dig into this more to divine more concrete limiting principles. This continues to strike me as ad hoc.

Robert said

vergari said

Robert, let me ask you this: if it could be proven that Luke had access to Matthew, is the Q hypothesis rendered moot?  

From a purely logical or Platonic metaphysical perspective, yes, but reality is always more chaotic and complex than pure theory. So, no. That’s what Stephen and I mean by the coherence of the Q-material and the diverse way it is treated by Matthew and Luke. It’s also why I like Maurice Casey’s chaotic Aramaic approach to Q. 

  

Here is where I come down: if we had definitive proof that Luke had access to Matthew, that does not erase the possibility of a pre-Matthean sayings document — which includes material from the double tradition, among its contents.

What it does do, however, is make it impracticable to reliably access the contents of that sayings document in the absence of manuscript or patristic evidence — thus rendering the hypothesis for such a document entirely academic.