BALDUCCI

OK its Q1

Doug Shaver

I think I'd better recapitulate what got us to this point.

Responding to khalimirov's OP, I wrote:

Then khalimirov asked me:

To which I responded:

Then came this:

My response to this might have been unwarrantedly pugnacious, and if it was, I apologize. Perhaps Steve was only trying to correct my apparent attribution to Farrer of the notion that Luke was rewrriting Matthew. I did not intend that attribution, but I can now see how anybody could reasonably have inferred it.

At the time, I thought Steve was suggesting that my argument against Farrer's hypothesis was invalid because Farrer did not claim that Luke was rewriting Matthew. The point of my response was simply that my argument for Q's existence did not depend on whether Farrer had made such a claim. More specifically, I said:

Next thing I know, Steve is accusing me of attacking a straw man. And, I still haven't the foggiest notion why. And on top of that, my request for an explanation elicited your query as to whether I have read Goodacre's book.

To answer that question: No, I have not.

I have read a reprint of Goodacre's article "A Monopoly on Marcan Priority? Fallacies at the Heart of Q," originally published in Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers 2000 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000). I have also read a reprint of Farrer's 1955 article "On Dispensing With Q," and I have read various essays by both supporters and opponents of Farrer and Goodacre, some of which have appeared in peer-reviewed journals.

I do not pretend to have thus acquired more than a superficial knowledge of the evidence for and against Q's existence. But my initial posts in this thread were not addressed to the question "Can you prove Q existed?" My first post was a reply to the question "What do you think?" and the second was replying to "Why do you think so?" I gave my reasoning, I thought my reasoning was being criticized, and I explained why I considered the particular objection to be irrelevant.

After much mulling over of all the preceding, I have perhaps figured something out. In hindsight, it does seem obvious enough. I cannot account for my taking so long to see it.

I was baffled by the straw-man accusation because I never said and do not believe that Farrer saw Luke as a rewrite of Matthew. During my own flirtation with Farrer, though, I did see it that way, notwithstanding Farrer's own explicit denial of that view. On that particular point, I disagreed with him.

As an ahistoricist, I believe they were all writing fiction. So, for a while, it seemed plausible to me that Luke, having read both Mark and Matthew, and being the top-notch writer that almost all the scholars say he was, just said to himself, "Hey, I can tell this story better than either of these guys." In due course, I was persuaded that that scenario would not work, and so I decided there probably was a Q after all.

Well, if not a straw man, how about a false dichotomy? Yes, I know there are plenty of alternatives to Q besides Luke simply rewriting Matthew. But it is not apparent to me how any of those other scenarios is more parsimonious than the Q hypothesis. If Luke's sources were Matthew and Mark, and nothing else, then to me there seems to be no useful sense in which he was not simply rewriting Matthew. But if he did have at least one source besides Matthew and Mark, then how does Occam's razor justify saying it wasn't Q? What is the difference in parsimony between Q and any other document to which there is no hint of a reference in the historical record?