Freethought & Rationalism Archive

EarlDoherty · 01-23-2010, 05:02 PM

It strikes me that in most discussions about dispensing with Q, the cart is placed before the horse. The main focus seems to be on how attractive or advantageous it would be to eliminate Q (and how fashionably radical and progressive it would be) rather than first considering the strength of the actual arguments against it. Postulated advantages should only follow the establishment of the likelihood that in fact the arguments for Luke using Matthew are demonstably stronger than those for Q itself, and that it is less problematic than the 2-Source hypothesis. But this is far from having been accomplished.

The Farrer-Goodacre (if I may call it that) position is riddled with problems whose explanations are particularly weak and self-serving. I often hear it said that Doherty’s position against an historical Jesus would be greatly aided with the dispensing of Q, but it would hardly be honest for me to embrace that simply for that reason. Over the years, and now in my new book at considerable length, I have come down firmly on the side of Q because the arguments in its favor and against the Goodacre case are to me so compellingly superior, and I have seen nothing in any book or discussion board that would make me consider changing my mind. Nor have I seen much in the way of attempts to answer the objections I (and others) have raised against Goodacre.

Goodacre himself spends most of his energy coming up with defensive counters to the objections against the Luke-used-Matthew claim. Most of them I consider weak and none of them are convincing. Some are desperate. Q, on the other hand, has no severe weaknesses. To say that it is “hypothetical” or not needed, or contravenes Occam’s Razor, are hardly compelling arguments, and hardly bear the weight many try to give them. We need to look primarily at the textual indicators themselves and this is where the Luke-used-Matthew scenario becomes so problematic. And the weaker that case, the stronger Q becomes as a reasonable alternative.

Goodacre’s supporters seem to think that as long as he comes up with a counter at all to a given objection, that satisfies, no matter how unlikely or unreasonable it may be. I’ll discuss one such here by quoting from Jesus: Neither God Nor Man.

(2) Luke seems ignorant of Matthew’s modifications (‘redactional changes’) to Mark. For example, in taking Mark’s scene of 4:10f in which the disciples are given insight into why Jesus speaks in parables which some will not understand, Matthew adds (13:14-15) a quotation from Isaiah illustrating the point Jesus has just made. If he is drawing on Matthew, Luke has inexplicably failed to take over that explanatory quotation.

A much more arresting example is found in regard to Matthew 16:13-20, in the famous scene when Jesus asks his disciples “Who do men think that I am?” Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, provide Peter’s answer: that Jesus is the Christ. But Matthew has added three verses (17-19) in which Jesus heaps praise on Peter and pronounces him to be the “rock” on which the church shall be built; he will receive the keys to the kingdom of heaven with power to bind and loose in both heaven and earth. This powerful Matthean endorsement of Peter by Jesus does not appear in Luke’s scene, and there seems no good reason why Luke should have decided to ignore it when drawing on Matthew.

Goodacre’s explanation illustrates the difficulties which the ‘Luke used Matthew’ scenario must face, and the weakness of some of its defense measures. As Kloppenborg puts it,

Goodacre invokes Farrer’s notion of elements of Matthew being ‘Luke pleasing.’ Thus Luke omitted some elements of Matthew because they were not ‘Luke pleasing.’ This is a principle of exceedingly dubious merit. ‘Luke pleasing’ words are simply words that Luke has in common with Matthew.
In other words, this is a case of providing a definition for something which serves the purpose of supporting the desired interpretation, a circular device. What is needed is confirmation of that definition by providing principles determining what pleased and did not please Luke, something more than an ad hoc attempt in individual cases, especially if those ad hoc attempts fail to convince on their own. This particular passage is a case in point, as Kloppenborg details it. Goodacre has claimed that those extra verses in Matthew praising and exalting Peter would not have appealed to Luke because “Luke is not as positive about Peter overall as Matthew.” As phrased, one might note, this statement hardly supports with any force the necessity that Luke would actually feel compelled to leave out those verses. But the statement is not even an acceptable assessment of Luke’s attitude toward Peter. Kloppenborg provides several examples of Luke’s personal highlighting of Peter and his role which should have made the “upon this rock” addition in Matthew something that would have appealed to him. Besides, for Luke to leave out such a powerful addition to the scene, one which served not only to elevate Peter but the very concept of the Church and its establishment and direction by Jesus, would require a pathological aversion to Peter on Luke’s part which his Gospel as a whole does not show.

The same sort of inexplicable ‘cutting’ can be seen in the Beatitudes, in which Luke has supposedly sliced up Matthew’s grand list of “Blessed are…”s, rejecting more than half and even rendering a couple of them more crude. I called this “a pruning of the Beatitudes that has removed most of the color and scent from Matthew’s luxuriant garden….Can we believe that for Matthew’s ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ Luke would have chosen to substitute ‘Blessed are you that hunger now’?”

Sure, one could always come up with some kind of rationalization for such literary quirks on Luke’s part, but would it be likely, would it be reasonable? Is it borne out by the rest of Luke? (Luke’s sophistication and detail in, for example, the parables which are regarded as his product, like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, are second to none.) Is not a more logical explanation that Luke represents the Q listing of Beatitudes which he has more or less left untouched, while Matthew has ‘souped them up’ with additions and literary renditions of his own?

Even Goodacre’s original ideas are far from convincing. I’ll end this post with my thoughts in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man on perhaps his most well-known one:

(6) Goodacre proposes a feature which he calls “editorial fatigue.” In such a phenomenon, a writer begins a passage by imposing an intended change on his source, but before he finishes he lapses into original elements of that source, thereby creating an inconsistency or contradiction between earlier and later parts. In other words, the copying writer fails to sustain his own changes. For example, Matthew in 8:1-4 has Jesus, while being “followed by a great crowd,” cure a leper, to whom he then says: “Tell no one.” This is a pointless admonition given the presence of the crowd. But in his source, which is Mark 1:40-45, no crowd has been introduced and the admonition makes better sense. In determining to keep Mark’s latter words even in the context of a crowd, Matthew seems to have overlooked or ignored the contradiction he has created.

Does Luke do the same in any of his passages and thereby betray a lapse into a source in Matthew? Such things are not so clear as in the example given above. In that example we know that the source is in fact Mark, whereas a Lukan source in Matthew is the very thing that must be determined. Thus the examples offered for the latter need to be particularly evident.

We can look at Goodacre’s two principal examples of alleged Lukan editorial fatigue when using Matthew.

Matthew 10:11-14 presents Jesus instructing his apostles when they “enter a town” to stay in the house of some worthy citizen. He then tells them when they “leave that house or town…shake the dust from your feet.” Luke, in 9:4-5, has no initial words about entering a town, but begins by talking about entering a house; later he tells them “as you leave the town, shake the dust from your feet.” Goodacre points out that Luke’s reference to leaving the town is lacking any antecedent, since he has not mentioned a town at the opening, and this is taken to indicate that the concluding “town” is derived from Matthew’s version. But this is surely reading too much into the situation. Whether Luke has mentioned a town initially or not, it can certainly be the case that such a thing has been assumed. Luke need not be drawing from Matthew to introduce the leaving of a town, since he could simply have the assumption in mind that the house was located in a town, something that would be quite natural.

In Luke’s Parable of the Pounds (19:11-27), a departing nobleman gives ten servants each a pound, urging them to trade it wisely. When he returns, he finds that one servant has made a profit of tenfold, a second a profit of fivefold, while a third stored his pound and made no profit at all, incurring the master’s wrath. Itemizing the actions of only three servants would seem to be inconsistent with the initial statement of giving money to ten. In Matthew’s version of the parable, however, only three servants are mentioned at the beginning as recipients, so that the attention given to only three at the master’s return is consistent. Goodacre takes this as indicating that Luke, after starting out with ten servants, has lapsed into Matthew’s version (his supposed source) with only three.

Yet this seems problematic in itself. First of all, one might wonder why Luke would change Matthew’s three servants into ten to begin with. He would surely not be intending to go through ten servants’ results upon the master’s return, creating an utterly unwieldy parable. (If he did, perhaps it was “fatigue” that caused him to stop at three!) Second, the Greek in referring to the third servant is “ho heteros,” which is not “the third” but “the other,” and some translations (RSV, NASB, NIV, KJV) render it “another,” with no necessary implication that it is the third and final. Thus we need not assume that Luke has lapsed into envisioning only three servants and is thereby betraying a source in Matthew.

In fact, the likely explanation is that Luke introduced ten servants to better symbolize the meaning of his version of the parable: that Christians left behind at Jesus’ departure (at his death) are charged with spreading the faith and enlarging its membership, but he only intended to deal with three such disciples on Jesus’ return (at the Parousia) as representative examples. Understanding it this way is no doubt why some translators and commentators render “ho heteros” as “an-other,” despite the definite article—which in any case some manuscripts lack. (The Englishman’s Greek New Testament, for example, omits the article “ho” from its Greek text and translates “heteros” as “another,” pointing out that the article is added only in some manuscripts.) Besides, to think that over the course of only a few verses Luke could have forgotten that he was intending to deal with the results of ten servants’ investments would require him to have been brain-dead rather than merely fatigued….

This is only a small sample of the weaknesses of the no-Q position as put forward by Goodacre. Putting the cart before the horse in this case only gives one a cart which goes nowhere, considering that the horse is so lame in the leg it isn’t capable of pulling anything.

Earl Doherty

Chaucer · 01-23-2010, 06:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarlDoherty

It strikes me that in most discussions about dispensing with Q, the cart is placed before the horse. The main focus seems to be on how attractive or advantageous it would be to eliminate Q (and how fashionably radical and progressive it would be) rather than first considering the strength of the actual arguments against it. Postulated advantages should only follow the establishment of the likelihood that in fact the arguments for Luke using Matthew are demonstably stronger than those for Q itself, and that it is less problematic than the 2-Source hypothesis. But this is far from having been accomplished.

The Farrer-Goodacre (if I may call it that) position is riddled with problems whose explanations are particularly weak and self-serving. I often hear it said that Doherty’s position against an historical Jesus would be greatly aided with the dispensing of Q, but it would hardly be honest for me to embrace that simply for that reason. Over the years, and now in my new book at considerable length, I have come down firmly on the side of Q because the arguments in its favor and against the Goodacre case are to me so compellingly superior, and I have seen nothing in any book or discussion board that would make me consider changing my mind. Nor have I seen much in the way of attempts to answer the objections I (and others) have raised against Goodacre.

Goodacre himself spends most of his energy coming up with defensive counters to the objections against the Luke-used-Matthew claim. Most of them I consider weak and none of them are convincing. Some are desperate. Q, on the other hand, has no severe weaknesses. To say that it is “hypothetical” or not needed, or contravenes Occam’s Razor, are hardly compelling arguments, and hardly bear the weight many try to give them. We need to look primarily at the textual indicators themselves and this is where the Luke-used-Matthew scenario becomes so problematic. And the weaker that case, the stronger Q becomes as a reasonable alternative.

Goodacre’s supporters seem to think that as long as he comes up with a counter at all to a given objection, that satisfies, no matter how unlikely or unreasonable it may be. I’ll discuss one such here by quoting from Jesus: Neither God Nor Man.

(2) Luke seems ignorant of Matthew’s modifications (‘redactional changes’) to Mark. For example, in taking Mark’s scene of 4:10f in which the disciples are given insight into why Jesus speaks in parables which some will not understand, Matthew adds (13:14-15) a quotation from Isaiah illustrating the point Jesus has just made. If he is drawing on Matthew, Luke has inexplicably failed to take over that explanatory quotation.

A much more arresting example is found in regard to Matthew 16:13-20, in the famous scene when Jesus asks his disciples “Who do men think that I am?” Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, provide Peter’s answer: that Jesus is the Christ. But Matthew has added three verses (17-19) in which Jesus heaps praise on Peter and pronounces him to be the “rock” on which the church shall be built; he will receive the keys to the kingdom of heaven with power to bind and loose in both heaven and earth. This powerful Matthean endorsement of Peter by Jesus does not appear in Luke’s scene, and there seems no good reason why Luke should have decided to ignore it when drawing on Matthew.

Goodacre’s explanation illustrates the difficulties which the ‘Luke used Matthew’ scenario must face, and the weakness of some of its defense measures. As Kloppenborg puts it,

Goodacre invokes Farrer’s notion of elements of Matthew being ‘Luke pleasing.’ Thus Luke omitted some elements of Matthew because they were not ‘Luke pleasing.’ This is a principle of exceedingly dubious merit. ‘Luke pleasing’ words are simply words that Luke has in common with Matthew.
In other words, this is a case of providing a definition for something which serves the purpose of supporting the desired interpretation, a circular device. What is needed is confirmation of that definition by providing principles determining what pleased and did not please Luke, something more than an ad hoc attempt in individual cases, especially if those ad hoc attempts fail to convince on their own. This particular passage is a case in point, as Kloppenborg details it. Goodacre has claimed that those extra verses in Matthew praising and exalting Peter would not have appealed to Luke because “Luke is not as positive about Peter overall as Matthew.” As phrased, one might note, this statement hardly supports with any force the necessity that Luke would actually feel compelled to leave out those verses. But the statement is not even an acceptable assessment of Luke’s attitude toward Peter. Kloppenborg provides several examples of Luke’s personal highlighting of Peter and his role which should have made the “upon this rock” addition in Matthew something that would have appealed to him. Besides, for Luke to leave out such a powerful addition to the scene, one which served not only to elevate Peter but the very concept of the Church and its establishment and direction by Jesus, would require a pathological aversion to Peter on Luke’s part which his Gospel as a whole does not show.

The same sort of inexplicable ‘cutting’ can be seen in the Beatitudes, in which Luke has supposedly sliced up Matthew’s grand list of “Blessed are…”s, rejecting more than half and even rendering a couple of them more crude. I called this “a pruning of the Beatitudes that has removed most of the color and scent from Matthew’s luxuriant garden….Can we believe that for Matthew’s ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ Luke would have chosen to substitute ‘Blessed are you that hunger now’?”

Sure, one could always come up with some kind of rationalization for such literary quirks on Luke’s part, but would it be likely, would it be reasonable? Is it borne out by the rest of Luke? (Luke’s sophistication and detail in, for example, the parables which are regarded as his product, like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, are second to none.) Is not a more logical explanation that Luke represents the Q listing of Beatitudes which he has more or less left untouched, while Matthew has ‘souped them up’ with additions and literary renditions of his own?

Even Goodacre’s original ideas are far from convincing. I’ll end this post with my thoughts in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man on perhaps his most well-known one:

(6) Goodacre proposes a feature which he calls “editorial fatigue.” In such a phenomenon, a writer begins a passage by imposing an intended change on his source, but before he finishes he lapses into original elements of that source, thereby creating an inconsistency or contradiction between earlier and later parts. In other words, the copying writer fails to sustain his own changes. For example, Matthew in 8:1-4 has Jesus, while being “followed by a great crowd,” cure a leper, to whom he then says: “Tell no one.” This is a pointless admonition given the presence of the crowd. But in his source, which is Mark 1:40-45, no crowd has been introduced and the admonition makes better sense. In determining to keep Mark’s latter words even in the context of a crowd, Matthew seems to have overlooked or ignored the contradiction he has created.

Does Luke do the same in any of his passages and thereby betray a lapse into a source in Matthew? Such things are not so clear as in the example given above. In that example we know that the source is in fact Mark, whereas a Lukan source in Matthew is the very thing that must be determined. Thus the examples offered for the latter need to be particularly evident.

We can look at Goodacre’s two principal examples of alleged Lukan editorial fatigue when using Matthew.

Matthew 10:11-14 presents Jesus instructing his apostles when they “enter a town” to stay in the house of some worthy citizen. He then tells them when they “leave that house or town…shake the dust from your feet.” Luke, in 9:4-5, has no initial words about entering a town, but begins by talking about entering a house; later he tells them “as you leave the town, shake the dust from your feet.” Goodacre points out that Luke’s reference to leaving the town is lacking any antecedent, since he has not mentioned a town at the opening, and this is taken to indicate that the concluding “town” is derived from Matthew’s version. But this is surely reading too much into the situation. Whether Luke has mentioned a town initially or not, it can certainly be the case that such a thing has been assumed. Luke need not be drawing from Matthew to introduce the leaving of a town, since he could simply have the assumption in mind that the house was located in a town, something that would be quite natural.

In Luke’s Parable of the Pounds (19:11-27), a departing nobleman gives ten servants each a pound, urging them to trade it wisely. When he returns, he finds that one servant has made a profit of tenfold, a second a profit of fivefold, while a third stored his pound and made no profit at all, incurring the master’s wrath. Itemizing the actions of only three servants would seem to be inconsistent with the initial statement of giving money to ten. In Matthew’s version of the parable, however, only three servants are mentioned at the beginning as recipients, so that the attention given to only three at the master’s return is consistent. Goodacre takes this as indicating that Luke, after starting out with ten servants, has lapsed into Matthew’s version (his supposed source) with only three.

Yet this seems problematic in itself. First of all, one might wonder why Luke would change Matthew’s three servants into ten to begin with. He would surely not be intending to go through ten servants’ results upon the master’s return, creating an utterly unwieldy parable. (If he did, perhaps it was “fatigue” that caused him to stop at three!) Second, the Greek in referring to the third servant is “ho heteros,” which is not “the third” but “the other,” and some translations (RSV, NASB, NIV, KJV) render it “another,” with no necessary implication that it is the third and final. Thus we need not assume that Luke has lapsed into envisioning only three servants and is thereby betraying a source in Matthew.

In fact, the likely explanation is that Luke introduced ten servants to better symbolize the meaning of his version of the parable: that Christians left behind at Jesus’ departure (at his death) are charged with spreading the faith and enlarging its membership, but he only intended to deal with three such disciples on Jesus’ return (at the Parousia) as representative examples. Understanding it this way is no doubt why some translators and commentators render “ho heteros” as “an-other,” despite the definite article—which in any case some manuscripts lack. (The Englishman’s Greek New Testament, for example, omits the article “ho” from its Greek text and translates “heteros” as “another,” pointing out that the article is added only in some manuscripts.) Besides, to think that over the course of only a few verses Luke could have forgotten that he was intending to deal with the results of ten servants’ investments would require him to have been brain-dead rather than merely fatigued….

This is only a small sample of the weaknesses of the no-Q position as put forward by Goodacre. Putting the cart before the horse in this case only gives one a cart which goes nowhere, considering that the horse is so lame in the leg it isn’t capable of pulling anything.

Earl Doherty

While whatever reading I've done suggests to me that Luke probably does not have the Q passages as we find them in Matthew today in front of him, but something a bit different, however strongly or only slightly so, I do feel that someone will soon have to address the curious recurrence, as statistically analyzed here --

http://www.davegentile.com/synoptics/main

-- , of distinctly Matthean turns of phrase in some Q passages that are left unchanged in Luke. What we are left with -- unless someone can come up with a convincing statistical analysis that points to another conclusion -- are common readings that bear distinct Matthean fingerprints but none with Lukan fingerprints. That ends up suggesting that Matthew -- in some way -- is "related" to a Q form that is closer to an "original" Q than most have assumed. I'm puzzled by this, but I'm reluctant as you are to jettison the Q idea altogether. There may be some alternate explanation?

See what you think? The "home page" for the analysis is at the URL given above, which leads off into further in-depth pages that may or may not provide a convincing set of conclusions.

Thank you,

Chaucer

Cege · 01-23-2010, 06:28 PM

How long is a "tree year"?

maryhelena · 01-24-2010, 03:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarlDoherty

It strikes me that in most discussions about dispensing with Q, the cart is placed before the horse. The main focus seems to be on how attractive or advantageous it would be to eliminate Q (and how fashionably radical and progressive it would be) rather than first considering the strength of the actual arguments against it. Postulated advantages should only follow the establishment of the likelihood that in fact the arguments for Luke using Matthew are demonstably stronger than those for Q itself, and that it is less problematic than the 2-Source hypothesis. But this is far from having been accomplished.

Oh, I don't know - perhaps its Q that is the cart? - and that is why NT studies are unable to move forward...

As to “postulating advantages” should Q be abandoned - why in heavens name not? Surely, the strength of a theory is in how many questions it can answer - and, to my mind, Q comes up very short here. As far as my non technical mind works....the only benefit of Q is that it allows for an early sayings ‘gospel’ - and from this assumption, the additional assumption that there was early Christian communities prior to Mark’s gospel that believed in either a Galilean preacher or a messianic claimant. The important point for this theory being that such an individual was simply an ordinary human man ie a man without the mythology that is part of the walking on water healing the blind Jesus of Mark’s gospel. Thus, leading, of course, to the historicists position of removing Mark’s mythological elements and claiming they have found a real flesh and blood Jesus.

Great for the historicists - but surely, a mythicist has no need to play this game? Even part way - by removing the flesh and blood preacher/messianic claimant and keeping the early ‘christian’ communities.

Quote:

The Farrer-Goodacre (if I may call it that) position is riddled with problems whose explanations are particularly weak and self-serving. I often hear it said that Doherty’s position against an historical Jesus would be greatly aided with the dispensing of Q, but it would hardly be honest for me to embrace that simply for that reason. Over the years, and now in my new book at considerable length, I have come down firmly on the side of Q because the arguments in its favor and against the Goodacre case are to me so compellingly superior, and I have seen nothing in any book or discussion board that would make me consider changing my mind. Nor have I seen much in the way of attempts to answer the objections I (and others) have raised against Goodacre.

Earl, without Q, your position has to face the gospel of Mark - full on. Full on with Mark’s fully formed mythological Jesus. A Jesus that has been placed within, in Mark’s case, the historical time period of Pontius Pilate - 26 ce to 36 ce. Why?

Quote:

Goodacre himself spends most of his energy coming up with defensive counters to the objections against the Luke-used-Matthew claim. Most of them I consider weak and none of them are convincing. Some are desperate. Q, on the other hand, has no severe weaknesses. To say that it is “hypothetical” or not needed, or contravenes Occam’s Razor, are hardly compelling arguments, and hardly bear the weight many try to give them. We need to look primarily at the textual indicators themselves and this is where the Luke-used-Matthew scenario becomes so problematic. And the weaker that case, the stronger Q becomes as a reasonable alternative.

Goodacre’s supporters seem to think that as long as he comes up with a counter at all to a given objection, that satisfies, no matter how unlikely or unreasonable it may be. I’ll discuss one such here by quoting from Jesus: Neither God Nor Man.

(2) Luke seems ignorant of Matthew’s modifications (‘redactional changes’) to Mark. For example, in taking Mark’s scene of 4:10f in which the disciples are given insight into why Jesus speaks in parables which some will not understand, Matthew adds (13:14-15) a quotation from Isaiah illustrating the point Jesus has just made. If he is drawing on Matthew, Luke has inexplicably failed to take over that explanatory quotation.

And why should Luke take over Matthew’s position wholesale. Surely, Luke’s gospel is about what it’s author wanted to say - and to assume that he simply wanted to confirm everything Matthew wrote about and not to add his own take on things, his own forward movement, his developing his own ideas....methinks one is seeking to discredit any creativity on the part of Luke’s gospel.

Quote:

The same sort of inexplicable ‘cutting’ can be seen in the Beatitudes, in which Luke has supposedly sliced up Matthew’s grand list of “Blessed are…”s, rejecting more than half and even rendering a couple of them more crude. I called this “a pruning of the Beatitudes that has removed most of the color and scent from Matthew’s luxuriant garden….Can we believe that for Matthew’s ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ Luke would have chosen to substitute ‘Blessed are you that hunger now’?”

Sure, one could always come up with some kind of rationalization for such literary quirks on Luke’s part, but would it be likely, would it be reasonable? Is it borne out by the rest of Luke? (Luke’s sophistication and detail in, for example, the parables which are regarded as his product, like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, are second to none.) Is not a more logical explanation that Luke represents the Q listing of Beatitudes which he has more or less left untouched, while Matthew has ‘souped them up’ with additions and literary renditions of his own?

To deny Luke any “Luke pleasing’ elements is to deny Luke any creativity, any independent thinking, any choice of what he deemed appropriate for his gospel.

Quote:

A much more arresting example is found in regard to Matthew 16:13-20, in the famous scene when Jesus asks his disciples “Who do men think that I am?” Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, provide Peter’s answer: that Jesus is the Christ. But Matthew has added three verses (17-19) in which Jesus heaps praise on Peter and pronounces him to be the “rock” on which the church shall be built; he will receive the keys to the kingdom of heaven with power to bind and loose in both heaven and earth. This powerful Matthean endorsement of Peter by Jesus does not appear in Luke’s scene, and there seems no good reason why Luke should have decided to ignore it when drawing on Matthew.

Well, I can think of one very simple reason. Luke was having no time for any hereditary, hierarchical, sources of authority - so he set about changing course...no followers of men allowed, no central authority structure...

Quote:

This is only a small sample of the weaknesses of the no-Q position as put forward by Goodacre. Putting the cart before the horse in this case only gives one a cart which goes nowhere, considering that the horse is so lame in the leg it isn’t capable of pulling anything.

<snip>

Earl Doherty

No, Earl, its the cart that is without any wheels - it can’t pull anything - let alone a lame horse...daydreams, Earl, daydreams - that’s all a cart without wheels is capable off delivering...

If Q has indeed been the string that keeps the three synoptic gospels tied together - the cutting that string can only produce a forward movement.

1. Seeing the gospel of Mark as being the template, the ‘master-copy’ - from which both Matthew and Luke furthered the storyline.
2. Dating Luke a considerable distance from Matthew - thus allowing this gospel’s own story to be considered instead of the continual efforts to harmonize it with the gospel of Matthew.

The end of Q presents possibilities for mythicism - it could well spell trouble for the historicists.

Anyway - that's my take on things, as of now...:wave:

Chili · 01-24-2010, 05:20 AM

. . . one thing is for sure. The Jesus of Luke knew who he was while the Jesus of Matthew did not know his right hand from his left since there was no manger in Matthew to nourish the reborn inner man and so he had pondering thoughts when the magi came and thus was said to be not home to receive his dowry by way if insight in to his own past. IOW Epiphany was not part of his life and no celestial sea to walk on was revealed for Matthew and so there was no Cana event in store for him and subsequently no 'captives to be set free' when they buried him . . . wherefore then evening did come on his seventh day and therefore he had no choice but go back to Galilee.

Just take a look at his 'call of the disciples' who came from the shallow waters of Galilee and there he caugth Peter and his brother Andrew in 'faith and doubt' [at once], and at infinitum with James and John who so, too, were from their mother's womb untimely ripped because Zebedee did not sing his canticle of praise as Zechariah did.

To affirm this just read Luke and see where they caught nothing in the shallow waters of Galilee (no faith left to lean on) and so they went to the deep waters of Genessaret where they found 'the big fish' and that alone puts Luke out of bounds for the shallow rational critic except for his place in the merry-go-round of Biblical Criticism that has been going around in circles for the past 2000 years.

DCHindley · 01-24-2010, 09:32 AM

Mary Helena,

Interesting ... you just put the cart before the horse yourself, and found the same sort of "justifications" for that position as do the Q doubters.

Here's how I see the interplay of ideologies:

View of Jesus:	Ideology:	Plot:	Pro Q	Anti Q
Mythical Jesus	Anarchism (Demands rapid, perhaps even cataclysmic, social change in order to establish a new society)	Romance (Imagines the power of the historical agent/hero or protagonist as ultimately superior to his/its environment, which unfolds as a quest where final success, redemption or transcendence is assured)		X
Counterculture Sage	Radicalism (Welcomes imminent social change, but are more aware of the effects of inherited institutions, and are thus more exorcised by the means to effect change than are anarchists)	Tragedy (Imagines the agent/hero or protagonist as engaged in a quest where final success is eventually thwarted by fate or by a personality flaw)	X
Son of God/Savior	Conservatism (Oppose rapid change by supporting the evolutionary elaboration of existing social institutions, and thus most suspicious of change than the other ideologies)	Comedy (Imagines an agent/hero or protagonist as moving from obstruction to reconstruction)		X
Moral Teacher	Liberalism (Prefers the fine tuning of social institutions to secure moderately paced social change)	Satire (Imagines the agent/hero or protagonist as inferior, a captive of their world, and destines for a life of obstacles and negation)	X

DCH

Quote:

Originally Posted by maryhelena

No, Earl, its the cart that is without any wheels - it can’t pull anything - let alone a lame horse...daydreams, Earl, daydreams - that’s all a cart without wheels is capable off delivering...

If Q has indeed been the string that keeps the three synoptic gospels tied together - the cutting that string can only produce a forward movement.

1. Seeing the gospel of Mark as being the template, the ‘master-copy’ - from which both Matthew and Luke furthered the storyline.
2. Dating Luke a considerable distance from Matthew - thus allowing this gospel’s own story to be considered instead of the continual efforts to harmonize it with the gospel of Matthew.

The end of Q presents possibilities for mythicism - it could well spell trouble for the historicists.

Anyway - that's my take on things, as of now...:wave:

maryhelena · 01-24-2010, 10:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DCHindley

Mary Helena,

Interesting ... you just put the cart before the horse yourself, and found the same sort of "justifications" for that position as do the Q doubters.

Here's how I see the interplay of ideologies:

Actually, I'd much rather see the gospel 'horse' running free than have it chained up to some Q cart without any wheels...

I'm rather wondering - is this whole issue over Q some kind of 'sacred ground' upon which the unwary had better mind their step? Don't tell me that I've just jumped in the deep end...

Thanks for your chart and your ideas re an "interplay of ideologies" - don't quite get its relationship to the Q debate but interesting nevertheless.

(sorry - but your chart did not come out well in replying to your post and I had to delete it).

Chili · 01-24-2010, 12:10 PM

Not to rub your nose in it but if in Luke he goes into deep water to catch the big ones because there was nothing left his conscious mind and compare this with John 21 where he cast the net on the 'other side' of his mind (post resurrections 'upper room'), it becomes rather obvious that he was talking about his own mind, while in Mattew and Mark the best he could do was go to the other side of the lake and so send HJ theologians on a wild goose chase for the past 2000 years.

Civil1z@tion · 01-24-2010, 01:40 PM

Is it just me or is it somewhat problematical that these scholars are intentionally and purposefully undergoing research to disprove Q? It seems to me that textual analysis is one area where bias can be very important and that it is worrisome that bias is being so completely embraced here. All one would need to do is focus on passages which help one's case and ignore those that hurt it (which is of course a common complaint anyways). Shouldn't these researchers go in acknowledging the possibility for the existence of Q? Wouldn't that be a better approach than going into with the clear intent to disprove something they have apparently failed to gather sufficient information on thus far?

Clivedurdle · 01-24-2010, 02:03 PM

Why might we be finding elements of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire?

Because it is all these things?

01-23-2010, 05:02 PM	#11
EarlDoherty Veteran Member Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: Ontario, Canada Posts: 1,435	It strikes me that in most discussions about dispensing with Q, the cart is placed before the horse. The main focus seems to be on how attractive or advantageous it would be to eliminate Q (and how fashionably radical and progressive it would be) rather than first considering the strength of the actual arguments against it. Postulated advantages should only follow the establishment of the likelihood that in fact the arguments for Luke using Matthew are demonstably stronger than those for Q itself, and that it is less problematic than the 2-Source hypothesis. But this is far from having been accomplished. The Farrer-Goodacre (if I may call it that) position is riddled with problems whose explanations are particularly weak and self-serving. I often hear it said that Doherty’s position against an historical Jesus would be greatly aided with the dispensing of Q, but it would hardly be honest for me to embrace that simply for that reason. Over the years, and now in my new book at considerable length, I have come down firmly on the side of Q because the arguments in its favor and against the Goodacre case are to me so compellingly superior, and I have seen nothing in any book or discussion board that would make me consider changing my mind. Nor have I seen much in the way of attempts to answer the objections I (and others) have raised against Goodacre. Goodacre himself spends most of his energy coming up with defensive counters to the objections against the Luke-used-Matthew claim. Most of them I consider weak and none of them are convincing. Some are desperate. Q, on the other hand, has no severe weaknesses. To say that it is “hypothetical” or not needed, or contravenes Occam’s Razor, are hardly compelling arguments, and hardly bear the weight many try to give them. We need to look primarily at the textual indicators themselves and this is where the Luke-used-Matthew scenario becomes so problematic. And the weaker that case, the stronger Q becomes as a reasonable alternative. Goodacre’s supporters seem to think that as long as he comes up with a counter at all to a given objection, that satisfies, no matter how unlikely or unreasonable it may be. I’ll discuss one such here by quoting from Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. (2) Luke seems ignorant of Matthew’s modifications (‘redactional changes’) to Mark. For example, in taking Mark’s scene of 4:10f in which the disciples are given insight into why Jesus speaks in parables which some will not understand, Matthew adds (13:14-15) a quotation from Isaiah illustrating the point Jesus has just made. If he is drawing on Matthew, Luke has inexplicably failed to take over that explanatory quotation. A much more arresting example is found in regard to Matthew 16:13-20, in the famous scene when Jesus asks his disciples “Who do men think that I am?” Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, provide Peter’s answer: that Jesus is the Christ. But Matthew has added three verses (17-19) in which Jesus heaps praise on Peter and pronounces him to be the “rock” on which the church shall be built; he will receive the keys to the kingdom of heaven with power to bind and loose in both heaven and earth. This powerful Matthean endorsement of Peter by Jesus does not appear in Luke’s scene, and there seems no good reason why Luke should have decided to ignore it when drawing on Matthew. Goodacre’s explanation illustrates the difficulties which the ‘Luke used Matthew’ scenario must face, and the weakness of some of its defense measures. As Kloppenborg puts it, Goodacre invokes Farrer’s notion of elements of Matthew being ‘Luke pleasing.’ Thus Luke omitted some elements of Matthew because they were not ‘Luke pleasing.’ This is a principle of exceedingly dubious merit. ‘Luke pleasing’ words are simply words that Luke has in common with Matthew. In other words, this is a case of providing a definition for something which serves the purpose of supporting the desired interpretation, a circular device. What is needed is confirmation of that definition by providing principles determining what pleased and did not please Luke, something more than an ad hoc attempt in individual cases, especially if those ad hoc attempts fail to convince on their own. This particular passage is a case in point, as Kloppenborg details it. Goodacre has claimed that those extra verses in Matthew praising and exalting Peter would not have appealed to Luke because “Luke is not as positive about Peter overall as Matthew.” As phrased, one might note, this statement hardly supports with any force the necessity that Luke would actually feel compelled to leave out those verses. But the statement is not even an acceptable assessment of Luke’s attitude toward Peter. Kloppenborg provides several examples of Luke’s personal highlighting of Peter and his role which should have made the “upon this rock” addition in Matthew something that would have appealed to him. Besides, for Luke to leave out such a powerful addition to the scene, one which served not only to elevate Peter but the very concept of the Church and its establishment and direction by Jesus, would require a pathological aversion to Peter on Luke’s part which his Gospel as a whole does not show. The same sort of inexplicable ‘cutting’ can be seen in the Beatitudes, in which Luke has supposedly sliced up Matthew’s grand list of “Blessed are…”s, rejecting more than half and even rendering a couple of them more crude. I called this “a pruning of the Beatitudes that has removed most of the color and scent from Matthew’s luxuriant garden….Can we believe that for Matthew’s ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ Luke would have chosen to substitute ‘Blessed are you that hunger now’?” Sure, one could always come up with some kind of rationalization for such literary quirks on Luke’s part, but would it be likely, would it be reasonable? Is it borne out by the rest of Luke? (Luke’s sophistication and detail in, for example, the parables which are regarded as his product, like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, are second to none.) Is not a more logical explanation that Luke represents the Q listing of Beatitudes which he has more or less left untouched, while Matthew has ‘souped them up’ with additions and literary renditions of his own? Even Goodacre’s original ideas are far from convincing. I’ll end this post with my thoughts in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man on perhaps his most well-known one: (6) Goodacre proposes a feature which he calls “editorial fatigue.” In such a phenomenon, a writer begins a passage by imposing an intended change on his source, but before he finishes he lapses into original elements of that source, thereby creating an inconsistency or contradiction between earlier and later parts. In other words, the copying writer fails to sustain his own changes. For example, Matthew in 8:1-4 has Jesus, while being “followed by a great crowd,” cure a leper, to whom he then says: “Tell no one.” This is a pointless admonition given the presence of the crowd. But in his source, which is Mark 1:40-45, no crowd has been introduced and the admonition makes better sense. In determining to keep Mark’s latter words even in the context of a crowd, Matthew seems to have overlooked or ignored the contradiction he has created. Does Luke do the same in any of his passages and thereby betray a lapse into a source in Matthew? Such things are not so clear as in the example given above. In that example we know that the source is in fact Mark, whereas a Lukan source in Matthew is the very thing that must be determined. Thus the examples offered for the latter need to be particularly evident. We can look at Goodacre’s two principal examples of alleged Lukan editorial fatigue when using Matthew. Matthew 10:11-14 presents Jesus instructing his apostles when they “enter a town” to stay in the house of some worthy citizen. He then tells them when they “leave that house or town…shake the dust from your feet.” Luke, in 9:4-5, has no initial words about entering a town, but begins by talking about entering a house; later he tells them “as you leave the town, shake the dust from your feet.” Goodacre points out that Luke’s reference to leaving the town is lacking any antecedent, since he has not mentioned a town at the opening, and this is taken to indicate that the concluding “town” is derived from Matthew’s version. But this is surely reading too much into the situation. Whether Luke has mentioned a town initially or not, it can certainly be the case that such a thing has been assumed. Luke need not be drawing from Matthew to introduce the leaving of a town, since he could simply have the assumption in mind that the house was located in a town, something that would be quite natural. In Luke’s Parable of the Pounds (19:11-27), a departing nobleman gives ten servants each a pound, urging them to trade it wisely. When he returns, he finds that one servant has made a profit of tenfold, a second a profit of fivefold, while a third stored his pound and made no profit at all, incurring the master’s wrath. Itemizing the actions of only three servants would seem to be inconsistent with the initial statement of giving money to ten. In Matthew’s version of the parable, however, only three servants are mentioned at the beginning as recipients, so that the attention given to only three at the master’s return is consistent. Goodacre takes this as indicating that Luke, after starting out with ten servants, has lapsed into Matthew’s version (his supposed source) with only three. Yet this seems problematic in itself. First of all, one might wonder why Luke would change Matthew’s three servants into ten to begin with. He would surely not be intending to go through ten servants’ results upon the master’s return, creating an utterly unwieldy parable. (If he did, perhaps it was “fatigue” that caused him to stop at three!) Second, the Greek in referring to the third servant is “ho heteros,” which is not “the third” but “the other,” and some translations (RSV, NASB, NIV, KJV) render it “another,” with no necessary implication that it is the third and final. Thus we need not assume that Luke has lapsed into envisioning only three servants and is thereby betraying a source in Matthew. In fact, the likely explanation is that Luke introduced ten servants to better symbolize the meaning of his version of the parable: that Christians left behind at Jesus’ departure (at his death) are charged with spreading the faith and enlarging its membership, but he only intended to deal with three such disciples on Jesus’ return (at the Parousia) as representative examples. Understanding it this way is no doubt why some translators and commentators render “ho heteros” as “an-other,” despite the definite article—which in any case some manuscripts lack. (The Englishman’s Greek New Testament, for example, omits the article “ho” from its Greek text and translates “heteros” as “another,” pointing out that the article is added only in some manuscripts.) Besides, to think that over the course of only a few verses Luke could have forgotten that he was intending to deal with the results of ten servants’ investments would require him to have been brain-dead rather than merely fatigued…. This is only a small sample of the weaknesses of the no-Q position as put forward by Goodacre. Putting the cart before the horse in this case only gives one a cart which goes nowhere, considering that the horse is so lame in the leg it isn’t capable of pulling anything. Earl Doherty

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01-23-2010, 06:28 PM	#13
Cege Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: 36078 Posts: 849	How long is a "tree year"?

01-24-2010, 05:20 AM	#15
Chili Banned Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Alberta Posts: 11,885	. . . one thing is for sure. The Jesus of Luke knew who he was while the Jesus of Matthew did not know his right hand from his left since there was no manger in Matthew to nourish the reborn inner man and so he had pondering thoughts when the magi came and thus was said to be not home to receive his dowry by way if insight in to his own past. IOW Epiphany was not part of his life and no celestial sea to walk on was revealed for Matthew and so there was no Cana event in store for him and subsequently no 'captives to be set free' when they buried him . . . wherefore then evening did come on his seventh day and therefore he had no choice but go back to Galilee. Just take a look at his 'call of the disciples' who came from the shallow waters of Galilee and there he caugth Peter and his brother Andrew in 'faith and doubt' [at once], and at infinitum with James and John who so, too, were from their mother's womb untimely ripped because Zebedee did not sing his canticle of praise as Zechariah did. To affirm this just read Luke and see where they caught nothing in the shallow waters of Galilee (no faith left to lean on) and so they went to the deep waters of Genessaret where they found 'the big fish' and that alone puts Luke out of bounds for the shallow rational critic except for his place in the merry-go-round of Biblical Criticism that has been going around in circles for the past 2000 years.

01-24-2010, 12:10 PM	#18
Chili Banned Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Alberta Posts: 11,885	Not to rub your nose in it but if in Luke he goes into deep water to catch the big ones because there was nothing left his conscious mind and compare this with John 21 where he cast the net on the 'other side' of his mind (post resurrections 'upper room'), it becomes rather obvious that he was talking about his own mind, while in Mattew and Mark the best he could do was go to the other side of the lake and so send HJ theologians on a wild goose chase for the past 2000 years.

01-24-2010, 01:40 PM	#19
Civil1z@tion Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Southeastern US Posts: 6,776	Is it just me or is it somewhat problematical that these scholars are intentionally and purposefully undergoing research to disprove Q? It seems to me that textual analysis is one area where bias can be very important and that it is worrisome that bias is being so completely embraced here. All one would need to do is focus on passages which help one's case and ignore those that hurt it (which is of course a common complaint anyways). Shouldn't these researchers go in acknowledging the possibility for the existence of Q? Wouldn't that be a better approach than going into with the clear intent to disprove something they have apparently failed to gather sufficient information on thus far?

01-24-2010, 02:03 PM	#20
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	Why might we be finding elements of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire? Because it is all these things?

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