Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Solo · 09-20-2011, 06:36 AM

As promised, I posted my analysis of Earl's argument for Q on my blog.

Here are excerpts:

Quote:

The Q discussion opens Part Seven of JNGNM, titled Preaching the Kingdom of God. After introducing the gospel sourcing, Doherty moves to the brief overview of Markan priority which most of the academics accept, and those who subscribe to the two-source theory need to accept as sine qua non. Doherty does a decent job of defending Mark as the earliest gospel. However, his first few paragraphs already show some strange habits of thought.

One indeed may dispose of other models by pointing out the greater primitivity of Mark’s, incidence of agreements among gospels that show dependence on Mark, and the higher presence of Mark’s content in the other two synoptics than what either Matthew or Luke would show in a parallel test. But it is poor form to use formulas like gutted the Temptation scene, or discarded …the most prized of Christian ethics, to depict Mark under assumed Matthean priority. The Matthean sermon would not have been beyond dispute at the time of Mark’s writing, and the temptation landscapes in reality might have been compacted by Mark for all sorts of reasons. For example, one can postulate Mark as a gnosticizing shorthand of Matthew, forcing a single iteration of the empowerment-persecution cycle on Jesus ‘ministry’. The temptation is a mini-cycle of the spiritual crisis which resolves itself in Matthew with Jesus explicitly defeating the devil. In Mark (and Luke as per 4:13 ), the crisis is left to be resolved by the cross, a manoeuvre which is truer to Paul’s theology. In the case of the sermon, it is gratuitously assumed that Matthew’s account was immediately embraced and venerated by all Christians. But it need not have been. There are what looks like some heavy anti-Pauline salvos coming from the Mount (5:19 and Matt 7:1-2 seem obvious) which would have been, and likely were, resented in many communities. Matthew’s version of the sermon became a prized jewel of Christianity no doubt, but the poignant question is when.

These are just two examples right at the start of the section which should make people leery of Doherty’s habit of introducing a counter-argument by characterizing it.

The rhetorical posturing would come to a full relief starting in the first paragraph on the Q Document in chapter 7 (p.310). Doherty admits there is no reference to the suggested proto-gospel to be found anywhere and that its existence merely a ‘majority scholarship’s deduction’. But prior to any discussion of the viability of the Q hypothesis, he cannot help himself announcing that the arguments for the existence of Q are ‘much stronger than those against it’. Having revealed the idea of having the sentence first, i.e. dismissing objections out of hand, the wonderland captive then proceeds ‘to the examination of [this] question’. But actually, he would not do that just yet. Before the justification of Q’s existence is offered, Doherty needs to assure the reader that ‘the exact extent of Q is still matter of debate’ and walk her through two-and-a-half pages of descriptions of the layers and get even into of actually describing the nitty-gritty for the Q’s strata of development. Then, at long last, he will examine the question of existence (p. 313). But, don’t get your hopes too high !

The first sentence of the ‘Existence of Q’ section resets the readers’ expectations for a scholarly review: ‘ Having gained an overall picture of [Q], we can digress to consider the very question of whether it actually existed or not’. Wait a minute: did he write we ‘digress’ to the ‘very question’ he promised to ‘examine’ three pages earlier ? Yes, I am afraid he did.

Now obviously - or perhaps it is not obvious to some - if I were to argue for the existence of Jesus in the same manner Doherty argues for the existence of Q, the sceptics would laughed me out of the room: ‘Some say that Jesus did not exist, but the majority of scholars disagree with this view and I will show you why shortly, but first let me give you some basic data about Jesus. He was born in Bethlehem 4 BC, and after flight from Herod’s murderous hand and return to his native Galilee, his family settled in Nazareth. At a later point Jesus moved to Capernaum, where, scholars agree, he lodged in Peter’s house……now, let us digress to the silly question of the naked existence of Jesus’.

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[On Murders and such:] Having introduced the modern Q skeptics Austin Farrer, Michael Goulder and Mark Goodacre, Doherty, in the first issue of method he presents, wishes to dismiss the generally valid rule that a simpler explanation is preferable to the more complicated one. He states that using the Occam’s razor rule to ‘decide the day’ in this case would be incorrect. He writes: ‘it would be like a prosecuting attorney declaring the defendant guilty of the murder dismissing the defence’s claim that a third party was a culprit on the grounds that the latter is introducing an extra entity’ (p. 313). But this hopeless straw-man misstates both, the application of the logical principle, and the views of the scholars who consider Q extravagant or unnecessary. Occam made it clear in his rule that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. In the murder trial example, if relevant, the evidence of the third party’s involvement would be necessary to dispense justice and could not be thrown out on the principle cited. And, by the way, prosecuting attorneys do not declare guilt or innocence of the accused in any known criminal proceedings. The self-evident function of this exercise is to remove considerations of ‘raison d’etre’ for Q, the very thing that is to be decided in the chapter. Whether choosing specifically a murder trial as illustration was designed to paint the Q dissenters and create an adverse gut reaction in his inexpert audience to their ideas, I will leave to Doherty’s readers to decide.

Quote:

[On Hypotheses Supporting Hypotheses:] On the crucial issue of the hypothetical nature of Q, Kloppenborg proceeds in a manner that clearly inspired Doherty, but falters. He says, "Q is indeed a hypothetical document. Equally hypothetical, however, are Matthew and Luke’s dependence upon Mark, something that Meier (along with Farrer and Goulder) apparently did not think it worthwhile calling ‘hypothetical’". Unfortunately, one does not have the luxury of that line of defense. To proclaim the existence of a hypothetical document is not quite the same thing as proclaiming a hypothetical relationship between existing documents. The ensuing argument he makes for the ‘hypothetical nature’ of Mark simply fails to convince as it equates a presumed but unproven text (Q) and its organization with one (Mark) which although – true – we have received after much redactional development, but have received nonetheless. Unfortunately, the idea that the hypothetical nature of Q can be defended by arguing that all synoptic relationships are hypothetical in nature strikes me – purely on logical grounds – as a poorly disguised et-tu-quoque against Goodacre’s charging that Q enjoys undeservedly ‘the aura of received truth’.

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[On Luke's Order:] The attack centers on what is held as the improbability of Luke mistreating the Sermon, had he found it in Matthew as it stands. Both critics of Goodacre [i.e. Kloppenborg and Doherty] wilfully ignore his smart pre-empting this sort of attack in exposing its confessional background. He quotes one of the founders of the two-source theory, H.J. Holtzmann, who in 1860’s asked whether it was likely that "Luke should so wantonly have broken the great structures, and scattered the ruins in the four winds” (op.cit.59). He also brings in the modern commentators G. Stanton and C. Tuckett to express similar personal incredulity. He however remains undaunted in his criticism and says that ‘this argument is felt to be persuasive’, meaning, it isn’t. And, it isn’t persuasive because at the root such statements are a pious conviction that Luke knew the feelings of the later churchmen in regard to Matthew’s Sermon and would not want to hurt those feelings. Factually, substantively, there is nothing that would have prevented Luke to adapt Matthew in close to the text that we have received.

Doherty mostly repeats what Kloppenborg says even to the trite tidbit of asserting that Luke knowing Mark first and inserting Matthew into his narratives later ‘is unprovable’. Compared to what exactly, may I ask. He complains that there is no explanation for the ‘piecemeal’ handling of the Matthean pericopes, and the subjectivity of the kinds of selectors that Luke supposedly deployed in displacing what is agreed on by almost everyone else, Matthew’s superior organization of the Q-material. I admit having certain sympathy for the criticism of Goodacre on this point for his mention of the “Luke pleasing” formula of Farrer. I think the MwQH [Mark without Q Hypothesis] would be better off without this sort of explanation as it is just as circular, as Holtzmann’s thesis of “four winds”. Further, it appears that no grand theory of Luke’s composition is called for here. The redaction that seems odd to the modern exegets could have been – and probably was - the function of a number of factors. Most plausible to me is that Luke sought to devise a compromise gospel solution to squabbles between Pauline traditions and the newly arrived Jewish Christians, each prosecuting their own theological agendas. Matthew’s brilliant, ruthless demolition of the Pauline gospel monopoly proclaimed by Mark created completely new, and unexpected effects, accelerating on the one hand the unification of the churches and on the other, alienating irretrievably principled Paulinists, who on seeing a gospel with zombies walking out of tombs in Jerusalem and ravaging their communities, started an exodus into schools of docetic gnosticism.

Interestingly, Acts 1:6-7 is the only place in the New Testament that specifically concerns itself with the restoration of the kingdom of Israel. Surely there was clamour for specifically that in some quarters of Luke’s community and it was not the Gentiles. And again, the downsizing of Peter by Luke against Matthew and the formula by which he receives in Luke-Acts the credit of being the church first spokesman and envoy to the Gentiles sure looks like a tradeoff for Paul’s monopoly on the later missionary conquests. Not a peep from Luke about Peter’s church ! So, strange as it may seem to the devout and the clueless today, Matthew’s brilliant verses of the sermon might have been part of the bargaining process.

Quote:

[On Not Picking up Subtleties:] Doherty charges that Luke ‘failed to incorporate the material’ known only in Matthew, the co-called M verses. He would not be humoured, as John Kloppenborg was, by Goodacre's clever retort that this objection exists only in the minds of the two-source theory worshippers. Had any M (Matthew only) material been taken over by Luke, it would have become by definition Q material - with a different bone to pick.

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[On Alternating Primitivity:] Doherty asks naively : 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 ?”. I take the first person plural in the question, no less so than the tortured believe, to be a slip of the pen of someone who just hasn’t got a handle on the material. If Doherty bothered to take a count of the word dikaiosynē (righteousness) in Matthew and Luke he would have found that Matthew’s quill thirsted and hungered for it far more often than Luke’s. The score is seven occurrences in Matthew to one in Luke. In Matthew, then, it is not hunger (or thirst) as such but those who need to be vindicated that are blessed. In Luke it is just promise to fulfil a more basic human need. So, it just could be – could it not (?) – that we are looking here at, not as much alternating primitivity as different community ethos. It might not have been as much a ‘culling’ of the beatitudes, as Doherty describes Luke’s work on Matthew’s text, but a determined revision of the Matthean counter-claim to monopoly access to Christ that the Sermon on the Mount shamelessly proclaims for the Palestinian traditions against Mark (who just as shamelessly pushed Paul’s). The two details that Doherty generously overlooked is that Luke’s beatitudes are delivered on the Plain (i.e. by the model primus inter pares !) and that the ones blessed are addressed directly (as you, yours) whereas Matthew’s Jesus speaks on the Jewish holy mount and gives the beatitudes in the third person plural. Luke’s preference for shortening the ‘poor in spirit’ to ‘poor’ may be explained by the fact that the πτοχοι was itself a term meaning literally the needy, and a cultic designation for the Nazarenes generically (ebyonim), which actually might have been closer in meaning to ‘dispossessed’ if read as originating in Deut 15:4 . Luke’s correction of Matthew then would not be modifying the blessing but actually expanding it.

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[On 'Smart' Jesus Mythicism:] I have expressed my conviction in one of my previously blogged essays (Notes on Jesus Historicity) that the theory of the mythical origin is not a hopeless undertaking and that the contempt shown for the idea by most of the mainstream scholars may itself be foolhardy. I have also said that a better mythical theory would be more circumspect than either G.A. Wells or Earl Doherty have been about subscribing uncritically to the analytical tools of the liberal NT scholarship. For one, it is an unwise way to try to gain respectability for an unorthodox theory. More importantly, tools like Q will ensnare a mythicist and drive him or her into a corner out of which it will be hard to fight one’s way. The theory of Q presupposes a single common tradition standing opposite to Paul one on which Matthew and Luke drew differentially. I strongly believe this itself is a myth and one which needs to be resisted. The trend was most probably exactly the opposite: an early manifold of separate traditions, Galilean, Jerusalem and Pauline which gradually came together, often through acrimonious adversity and only loosely relying on the historical background of a common founder. None of these foundation strands relied substantially on actual sayings of Jesus, but they all subscribed to oracular revelations which came to be attributed to the nominal founder through a number of transport vehicles: a sort of a metempsychosis of the Thomasian school, revelations of the risen Christ among the Paulines, and cryptically as memoirs of the apostles in the Pauline-converted Nazarenes after the first Jewish war. The last mentioned were not really reminiscences of what Jesus said but middle-of-the-night oracular visitations by him (described in the Clementine Recognitions, II.1) assigned to historical figures around him as guarantors of their genuineness.

This does not exclude the possibility that some of the gospel sayings actually go back to Jesus, the historical founder. But it appears that except for a possible handful most were supplanted by wisdom sayings, moral maxims and rulings on internal disputes which were attributed through the processes just named.

Best,
Jiri

andrewcriddle · 09-20-2011, 11:58 AM

IMO the real problem with Earl Doherty's use of Q is not his belief in its existence, which I think is probably correct. The real problem is his use of speculative ideas about the supposed strata of this hypothetical document. This does seem to be piling hypothesis upon hypothesis.

Andrew Criddle

aa5874 · 09-20-2011, 02:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

IMO the real problem with Earl Doherty's use of Q is not his belief in its existence, which I think is probably correct. The real problem is his use of speculative ideas about the supposed strata of this hypothetical document. This does seem to be piling hypothesis upon hypothesis.

Andrew Criddle

What you write is a contradiction.

You ACCUSE Doherty of "piling hypothesis upon hypothesis" but you are PILING ON your own hypothesis of "Q'.

Please, please, please.

Let us deal with the EXTANT evidence until "Q" is found.

Why do people here think "Q" will support ONLY their theory?

Solo · 09-20-2011, 02:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

IMO the real problem with Earl Doherty's use of Q is not his belief in its existence, which I think is probably correct. The real problem is his use of speculative ideas about the supposed strata of this hypothetical document. This does seem to be piling hypothesis upon hypothesis.

Andrew Criddle

Thanks, Andrew. Anything you may care to add to the points made by Mark Goodacre in addressing :

1) minor agreements,
2) Luke's order, redactional cuts
3) alternating primitivity,
4) editorial fatigue ?

Thanks.

Jiri

dog-on · 09-20-2011, 02:40 PM

I always looked at Q as an alternative to saying that Matt and Luke made crap up, to suit their own particular beliefs.

Q seems to require a certain assumption that I am not sure is necessary, perhaps even a bit circular.

Solo · 09-21-2011, 09:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dog-on

I always looked at Q as an alternative to saying that Matt and Luke made crap up, to suit their own particular beliefs.

Much of the Q materials probably is Matthew's composition as are materials outside of the Q scope where he adds to or modifies Marks. The additions are motivated theologically. The writer's libido dominandi is all over the scripts.

However, I do believe there are traditions in Matthew which he did not invent but either transmitted from oral traditions or commented on as Jesus. IOW, I would not promote the view that his gospel was composition ex nihilo as reaction to Mark.

Some of the sayings have an authentic ring to them. Not because they are particularly profound theologically but because seem to reflect the what-me-worry amoral attitude that Paul and Mark would have censured. Sayings like 'foxes have holes', 'take no thought for the morrow', 'behold the fowls' are thematically a tradition cluster which is consistent with the lifestyle of the itinerant preachers and may have well come from one mouth given they bespeak a metaphoric style. There is also a rebellious, anti-nomian edge to some which comes into full relief in the "let the dead bury their dead", and in "who does not hate their mother and father, cannot be my disciple".

I think this last saying, was more authentically picked up by Luke (as the core was preserved by Thomas) precisely because of the nasty edge of it was blunted by Matthew who changes it to "he who loves [them] more than me". Matthew - forever the righteous one - evidently sided with Mark on this score and repeated his anathema (Mk 7:10/Mt 15:4), even with the inauthentic addition of "let him surely die" to Deut 5:16. Mark of course shamed him into it, with his outrageous recitation by Jesus of the decalogue, adding a new commandment "do not defraud" before "honour your father and mother". Luke on the other hand does not explain how one honors one's parents if one is to hate them in order to follow Jesus.

So, traditions there were, but I am not sure where the Q-theorists feel they have the ground to insist there was a written document.

Quote:

Q seems to require a certain assumption that I am not sure is necessary, perhaps even a bit circular.

All you actually need to convince yourself there was a Q, is keep saying Luke would not have scattered Matthew's sermon "into the four winds" until you believe it.

Best,
Jiri

andrewcriddle · 09-21-2011, 11:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

Thanks, Andrew. Anything you may care to add to the points made by Mark Goodacre in addressing :

1) minor agreements,

Hi Jiri

One problem IMHO with the minor agreements is that a number may be textual issues.

IE in a number of places the original text of Matthew probably did not agree with the original text of Luke against the original text of Mark. However textual corruption has meant that for example while originally Luke and Mark agreed against Matthew, our current text of Luke has been 'corrected' to agree with Matthew and hence disagree with Mark.

Andrew Criddle

Solo · 09-21-2011, 03:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

Thanks, Andrew. Anything you may care to add to the points made by Mark Goodacre in addressing :

1) minor agreements,

Hi Jiri

One problem IMHO with the minor agreements is that a number may be textual issues.

IE in a number of places the original text of Matthew probably did not agree with the original text of Luke against the original text of Mark. However textual corruption has meant that for example while originally Luke and Mark agreed against Matthew, our current text of Luke has been 'corrected' to agree with Matthew and hence disagree with Mark.

Andrew Criddle

Hi Andrew,

Do we have examples of this type of assimilation, which are supported by manuscript evidence ? Or are these in bulk mostly "conjectural emendations" that Goodacre discounts, as an example of one unprovable hypothesis fixing the problems of another ?

Best,
Jiri

aa5874 · 09-21-2011, 07:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

......One problem IMHO with the minor agreements is that a number may be textual issues.

IE in a number of places the original text of Matthew probably did not agree with the original text of Luke against the original text of Mark.

However textual corruption has meant that for example while originally Luke and Mark agreed against Matthew, our current text of Luke has been 'corrected' to agree with Matthew and hence disagree with Mark.

Andrew Criddle

Well, you are piling on hypothesis upon hypothesis.

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

.......IMO the real problem with Earl Doherty's use of Q is not his belief in its existence, which I think is probably correct. The real problem is his use of speculative ideas about the supposed strata of this hypothetical document. This does seem to be piling hypothesis upon hypothesis.

Your problem is FAR WORSE than Earl. You accuse him but do the VERY SAME thing.

EarlDoherty · 09-21-2011, 08:07 PM

Jiri, your ‘rebuttal’ to my chapters on Q was a waste of time, both for yourself and for everyone here. You failed to discredit a single argument of mine in favor of Q and against the Luke used Matthew scenario. Instead, there was a heavy reliance on snide comment with very little of substance to accompany it.

Sorry if you saw me as guilty of “poor form” in some of my language, but voicing that opinion does not constitute a counter-argument.

Quote:

…and the temptation landscapes in reality might have been compacted by Mark for all sorts of reasons. For example, one can postulate Mark as a gnosticizing shorthand of Matthew, forcing a single iteration of the empowerment-persecution cycle on Jesus ‘ministry’. The temptation is a mini-cycle of the spiritual crisis which resolves itself in Matthew with Jesus explicitly defeating the devil.

Mark compacting Matthew makes no sense. He would have deliberately ‘compacted’ in the direction of greater primitivity and more difficult readings? He would have compacted by removing virtually all the sayings of Jesus found in Matthew? As for Mark reflecting gnosticism, there is so little, if anything, in that direction that the idea is insupportable. And you’ve done nothing to justify thinking that Mark would take Matthew’s Temptation scene and reduce it to a single mundane sentence, devoid of all power and educational value. (Of course, the same objection applies in regard to Luke supposedly doing the same type of hatchet job and moving toward greater primitivity throughout his alleged use of Matthew.)

And you may not have been able to grasp the common sense necessity in giving the reader a basic idea of what Q is and what it contains before discussing the validity of its hypothesized existence, but I daresay others can. For the question of the existence of Q to be at all understandable, the reader has to know what we are talking about; the arguments against Goodacre’s contentions, for example, inevitably rely on having established some concept of what Q contains. Sorry if all that was beyond your grasp. Your objection does not constitute a counter-argument. Just a sneer.

As for Occam’s Razor, I was addressing myself to those who actually say that the ‘simpler’ explanation with the least elements ought to win the day. Period. My analogy showed up the ludicrous nature of that argument. Your posturing on what would actually happen in a murder trial is irrelevant, since I was hardly pressing the analogy to that extent. This was more padding on your part, and did nothing to actually counter the principle I was making, let alone offer any definitive insight on how Occam’s Razor should be applied to the question of Q—other, that is, than the simplistic and too-common handling of it I was aiming to discredit. I notice you throwing in more sneering comments like “inexpert” in regard to my readers. Once again, no counter-argument in evidence here.

Quote:

To proclaim the existence of a hypothetical document is not quite the same thing as proclaiming a hypothetical relationship between existing documents. The ensuing argument he [Kloppenborg] makes for the ‘hypothetical nature’ of Mark simply fails to convince as it equates a presumed but unproven text (Q) and its organization with one (Mark) which although – true – we have received after much redactional development, but have received nonetheless.

If we had no extant copy of Mark, we could postulate the existence of something of the kind from the texts of Matthew and Luke, and that earlier Gospel on which the latter two were dependent would be no more nor less hypothetical or justified than postulating Q itself. The case for Luke using Matthew is every bit as much an “hypothesis” as interpreting their common passages as reflecting a common source document. The fact that we have no actual surviving copy of Q does not detract from the analysis of Matthew and Luke which offers as one explanation the existence of an earlier document from which both drew. (Is anyone really going to claim that every document from that period survived? It’s ludicrous to suggest that the Q hypothesis should be rejected on the grounds that such a document is not extant. There must have been thousands of early Christian documents that disappeared into the dust. Indeed, we often see commentators of the time referring to documents which we no longer have or cannot identify.) If you can’t see the logic of that, too bad. Trouble is, that is where Occam’s Razor is inevitably drawn in. Kloppenborg and Goodacre represent two arguable hypotheses. My chapters on Q demonstrate that the Goodacre hypothesis is by far the more problematic, but in the face of that our no-Qers too often simply appeal to Occam as though postulating a source which has not survived breaks some logical rule and is sufficient in itself to override and ignore all the problems Goodacre & Co. present in their hypothesis. That’s nonsense. It’s certainly not logic.

Quote:

Both critics of Goodacre [i.e. Kloppenborg and Doherty] wilfully ignore his smart pre-empting this sort of attack in exposing its confessional background. He quotes one of the founders of the two-source theory, H.J. Holtzmann, who in 1860’s asked whether it was likely that "Luke should so wantonly have broken the great structures, and scattered the ruins in the four winds” (op.cit.59). He also brings in the modern commentators G. Stanton and C. Tuckett to express similar personal incredulity. He however remains undaunted in his criticism and says that ‘this argument is felt to be persuasive’, meaning, it isn’t. And, it isn’t persuasive because at the root such statements are a pious conviction that Luke knew the feelings of the later churchmen in regard to Matthew’s Sermon and would not want to hurt those feelings.

This is simply a red herring. No one made any appeal to “pious convictions” about the worth of the Sermon on the Mount for modern believers. 1900 years ago we could have placed Luke’s Beatitudes beside Matthew’s Beatitudes and the same question would have arisen. I did that on page 318 of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. Matthew’s Beatitudes possess style and class, their language is powerful and moving. They soar. Luke’s list on the other hand is truncated, flat and linguistically pathetic. Modern confessional interests have nothing to do with it, and all Goodacre “exposed” was his own desperation to come up with anything that could even feebly ‘explain’ why Luke would do such a crude hatchet job on Matthew’s Beatitudes.

I am reminded of a similar desperation from those who regard the Johannine epistles as written later than the Gospel of John, and have to try to explain how the lofty and powerful hymn to the Logos which opens the Gospel could possibly have been reduced to the 'prologue' of 1 John.

Quote:

Doherty asks naively : 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 ?”. I take the first person plural in the question, no less so than the tortured believe, to be a slip of the pen of someone who just hasn’t got a handle on the material.

Naively? Tortured? Language like this does not constitute counter-argument but simply a smear. And what follows in your paragraph is some of most “tortured” explanations for why Luke deviated so radically from his Matthean source. This is a specialty of Goodacre (and some other modern scholars), that he can come up with the most overly-sophistic and jargon-laden justifications for explaining away the problems inherent in Luke using Matthew, explanations which would leave the first century head scratching itself. Clearly more primitive versions of pericopes in Luke are dismissed as differing “community ethos.” Luke was “determinedly revising” Matthew’s “counter-claim to monopoly access to Christ that the Sermon on the Mount shamelessly proclaims” (does anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean?). This sort of thing is simply scholarly gobbledygook to throw up a smokescreen over the plain questions surrounding the problems in Luke using Matthew. Mark is also accused of “shamelessly pushing Paul”. If anyone would like to demonstrate just how Mark pushes Paul, whether shamelessly or otherwise, I’d be happy to learn.

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I have also said that a better mythical theory would be more circumspect than either G.A. Wells or Earl Doherty have been about subscribing uncritically to the analytical tools of the liberal NT scholarship. For one, it is an unwise way to try to gain respectability for an unorthodox theory. More importantly, tools like Q will ensnare a mythicist and drive him or her into a corner out of which it will be hard to fight one’s way. The theory of Q presupposes a single common tradition standing opposite to Paul one on which Matthew and Luke drew differentially. I strongly believe this itself is a myth and one which needs to be resisted. The trend was most probably exactly the opposite: an early manifold of separate traditions, Galilean, Jerusalem and Pauline which gradually came together, often through acrimonious adversity and only loosely relying on the historical background of a common founder.

More circumspect. Hmmm… One wonders how a case can be presented and argued by not placing the evidence in plain view. Jiri seems to advocate a ‘wisdom’ based on sidling in by the back door, hedging on conclusions drawn from evidence, and avoiding controversy. And by the way, just why is my support for Q, along with a fairly non-radical dating of the Gospels and other early Christian documents, and my championing of an authentic core of Pauline letters, etc. an “unwise way” to gain respectability? Once again, Jiri's antagonism seems to boil down to my defense of a Q, which from the look of it is almost a greater sin to some people on discussion boards like this than a denial of any historical founder Jesus, whether lying behind the Pauline cult or at the root of the Palestinian sayings tradition (I style it the “kingdom preaching” tradition). Also by the way, I have not limited the early Christian picture to two separate and monolithic movements. The early record witnesses to a multitude of different sectarian expressions. I simply focused, and not exclusively, on the two which were the most important, and had the most influence on what became a composite Christianity.

Once again, other than offering alternate ‘explanations’ for the problems in Luke using Matthew, none of which are based on any perceivable textual evidence but only on the claim that, well, they could theoretically be so, Jiri has offered absolutely nothing by way of counter-argument or rebuttal to my defense of Q in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man.

But that’s no surprise. It’s consistent with his usual fare.

Earl Doherty

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09-20-2011, 11:58 AM	#2
andrewcriddle Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Birmingham UK Posts: 4,876	IMO the real problem with Earl Doherty's use of Q is not his belief in its existence, which I think is probably correct. The real problem is his use of speculative ideas about the supposed strata of this hypothetical document. This does seem to be piling hypothesis upon hypothesis. Andrew Criddle

09-20-2011, 02:40 PM	#5
dog-on Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: The Netherlands Posts: 3,397	I always looked at Q as an alternative to saying that Matt and Luke made crap up, to suit their own particular beliefs. Q seems to require a certain assumption that I am not sure is necessary, perhaps even a bit circular.

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