GentDave

Bernard,

The study suggests that what is commonly called "Q" (202) has a vocabulary profile related to sondergut Matthew (200), (or the parts of Matthew found only in Matthew.) It also suggests the "minor agreements" (212) are related to other words in the triple tradition found only in Matthew. (211)

In other words, both the "minor agreements", and "Q" look at least somewhat Matthian in style.

For clearification, "Q" is large sections of text found in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. The minor agreements are in sections of text that are in all three gospels, and where the exact wording of Luke and Matthew agree against Mark.

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Could one author have a style that could not be seperated from another? I suppose they could. The vocabulary of Mark, Matthew, and Luke as they stand is distinct enough that the study can easily tell them apart, however, any one of them could contain work by more than one author. The "style of Matthew" could potentially just be the style that results from two differant authors in colaboration, for example.

I doubt that "author-sayings" and "author-Matthew" would share the same vocabulary, however. And even if the same person did write them, the differance in genera might set them apart. That's why the study can't firmly say there was a saying source. It might show up as distinct, even if written by "Matthew".

Bernard Muller

Another rumination of mine. I did look at your pages, believe me, even if nothing is clear in my mind.

Let's say, in Matthew's community, someone wrote the deutero-GMark. Then a large amount of Q material was generated in the same community, knowing about deutero-GMark, and therefore using some of the same syntax (possibly to have the sayings seemingly coming from the same author), and that got compiled within the hypothetic Q document. Matthew, then, for his own material, stayed close to the syntax of Dtr-GMark and Q, for the aforementioned reasons. In other words, Matthew tried to pretend his gospel was a second expanded/corrected/better edition of GMark (rather dtr-GMark), suddenly rediscovered.
Luke, working from dtr-GMark and Q, reproduced the MA's, but for his/her own material, broke loose, without conforming to the syntax in dtr-GMark & Q.

Would that be acceptable according to your findings, as I think it would (if I got something right!)?

Best regards, Bernard

Mathetes

Maybe this belongs to another thread, but...

In the 3SH, I understand that Luke uses Mark, Q and Matthew as sources. In the parts that are common to GMk and GMt, Luke is closer to GMt. It is hard to believe, then, that he was using the cannonical Matthew as we know it.

If this were true, the Luke redactor had a strange way of dealing with the Matthew source. He had to do the following:

- Throw away Matthew's genealogy, and invent a competing one.
- Throw away the Magi/Herod/Innocents stories, and put in his own almost completely independent infancy stories.
- When it comes to Jesus ministry, however, he copies Matthew more than he copies Mark.
- After the resurrection, he throws away Matthew's accounts and writes his own, in Jerusalem instead of Galilee.

This "selective copying" does not make much sense to me. Maybe the version of Matthew that he had did not contain the beginning and the end?

Bernard Muller

Yes, the 3SH does not make sense, because:
If "Luke" knew GMatthew, why GLuke does not incorporate more Matthean material. There are no reason for "Luke" to reject a lot of Matthean stuff, some of it actually would be very suited for "Luke" (such as Mt25:35-45) and many corrections "Matthew" made on GMark would have helped "Luke".
On the Q side, "Luke" incorporated sayings which hurt the Gentile cause of the author. One example is
Lk16:17 "But it is easier that the heaven and the earth should pass away than that one tittle of the law should fail." (parallel Mt5:18)
So why did "Luke" not use favorable Matthean material when he/she used unfavorable Q material?
The argument is valid also if Q is believed to have originated from within GMatthew (FH).
Among the conflicts between "Luke" and GMatthew, the circumstances leading to the death, and the description of the death itself of Judas could have been easily harmonized by "Luke" if he/she had known about GMatthew.

Best regards, Bernard

GentDave

Bernard,

On the assumption that being produced in the same community can lead to the same style, your solution would probably work.

I'm disinclined to make that assumption, but I can't rule it out. Keep in mind that most of the words we are dealing with are very common ones like "has", "was", etc. I'm not sure why two authors in the same community would have a tendency to use those words with similar frequency, but its not impossible.

Regarding your latest post:
Why did Luke not use more of Matthew?

What if Luke did not believe that Matthew was, in general, historically accurate, but Luke believed Mark and Q were?
Luke then only used Matthew's Greek, here and there, and used a very few select pericope from Matthew. (What the 2SH calls the Mark/Q overlap)

GentDave

Mathetes,

Actually, on the 3SH, in the triple tradition, Luke is almost always using Mark almost exclusively, just as on the 2SH. He may occationally borrow some wording from Matthew, but mostly he used Mark's words, or his own words. Luke selects a very few select bits from Matthew to use. (The Mark/Q overlap and some of Matthew's "Q").

Basicly, the 3SH claims that Luke knew Matthew, but made extreamly limited use of Matthew.

Bernard Muller

A) :banghead:

Dave, I would like a straight answer from you.
I am not asking you to approve the above theory, far from that.
My question is: can this hypothesis fit confortably within your findings? If not, what would be the problem(s)?

B) :banghead:

Are you talking about my own quote above? I wonder.
Here, I made a point that those authors (some of the Q ones and "Matthew") would intentionally used some of the verbose as the one into a hypothetical deutero-GMark. Which "Luke" would follow, at least for Markan & Q material, but adopt his/her own style for the Lukan one.

C) I have a big problem with that, as you guessed already.
I cannot understand: if "Luke" did not like GMatthew, if "Luke" thought GMatthew was not accurate, why would "Luke" pick up some 700 MA's from GMatthew? That does not make sense.
It makes more sense that "Luke" picked up that from a DTR-GMark, and parts of Q which followed the syntax of DTR-GMark. And "Matthew", for whatever reasons, decided to write in the way of DTR-GMark and Q.
That would explain most of the MA's, and why GLuke is close to GMatthew (Matthean stuff included) on Q and Markan material, with the MA's.
Would that scenario explain what you found in your studies?
Again, I do not ask you to endorse the aforementioned hypothesis.

D) Does your study allow the overlaps to be part of Q, and generated after GMark, or better, after DTR-GMark?

Best regards, Bernard

GentDave

Bernard,

A & B) You asked if the hypothesis fits with my results. The answer is a qualified yes, given what I consisder a somewhat unlikely but cerainly possible assumption. The assumption is that a number of authors from the same community would produce documents with the same vocabulary style. That's probably the best answer I can give.

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C) On the next point, I may be wrong, but I think you have an incorrect idea regarding the relationship between the three gosples in the triple tradition. In the triple tradition material, Mark is the middle term. That is there are large numbers of agreement between Matthew and Mark, and large numbers of agreements between Mark and Luke. There are also places where all three texts are differant, and places where they are argee. But there are relatively few agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark. In short, Luke is unquestionably closer to Mark's text than to Matthew's text.

Almost none of the MAs that come to mind involve any significant factual information. The greatest bulk of them are KAI => DE that is Mark used the word KAI, and Luke and Matthew tend to use DE, both of which mean "and".

Mark wrote in very very basic Greek. Luke I believe has something like 3 times the vocabualry of Mark. Suppose Luke is setting out to do two things, get the facts as straight as possible, and write an elegant document. It is quite possible that Luke would ignore Matthew as far as most facts go, but pick up a turn of phrase here and there. Mark and Q may have been around for 30 years, at the time Luke is writting. Matthew may be contemporay with Luke, and may give Luke the inspiration to attempt what he does.

D) The overlaps are found in Mark, so they had to be in existance at the time of Mark. Maybe I misunderstood that question.

The interesting fact about the overlap section is that they are found in all 3 gospels, but whereas normally Mark is the middle term, here Matthew is the middle term. Mark-Luke agreements against Matthew are rare here. On the 3SH these represent the few instances where Luke actually choose to use Matthew's idea's and text, instead of Mark's.

So according to the 3SH in most of the triple tradition the pattern is:
Mark => Matthew
Mark => Luke (with an occational turn of phrase picked up from Matthew)
but in the overlap the pattern is
Mark => Matthew => Luke

I would also speculate that in the Q sections the pattern is mostly:
Q => Matthew
Q=> Luke
but occationally:
Q => Matthew => Luke

GentDave

Bernard,

Let me suggest another idea, a proto-Matthew.

Suppose we have Mark and Q.
Proto-Matthew combines them but the saying are still mostly in an ill arrainged block.

Luke then uses Mark, proto-Matthew, and perhaps the original Q.

Matthew later comes along and produces a new version of his own document, giveing us Matthew.

So:

Mark + Q => p-Mat
Mark + Q? + p-Mat => Luke
p-Mat => Matthew

That fits completely with the study.

Yuri Kuchinsky

OK, Dave, so let me rephrase it then. You _ended up_ your study by comparing the 2SH with the other 2 theories. But in reality -- i.e. in the real world -- 2SH had already been excluded even before you began your study. Because the 1000 Anti-Markan Agreements exclude 2SH from consideration under normal conditions, where empirical evidence and logic are respected.

What I'm saying is that, assuming 2SH, your category 212 (Anti-Markan Agreements between Mt and Lk) shouldn't be there at all. Just by being there, 212 constitutes a death blow to the 2SH.

So what do you have left then? You have FH and 3SH, neither of which has any realistic hope of success, since they are burdened by too many shortcomings of their own.

So what's the value of your study then?

Quote:

Reduced to its basics the study says 4 things: 1) For the majority of text that Mark and Matthew have in common Mark is more original.

Might be...

Quote:

2) For the majority of the text Mark and Luke have in common Mark is more original

So what about those 1000 Anti-Markan Agreements (the Lukan side of them)? How can Mk be more original than Lk in these 1000 triple tradition passages? This sounds highly unlikely to me.

Quote:

3) For the majority of the text that Matthew and Luke have in common outside of Mark, Matthew is more original.

But that's in contradiction with the whole Q scholarship, dozens of detailed studies. Maybe it's _your_ analysis that's in the wrong here, in such a case?

Quote:

Note that I said the *majority* of the text, not *all* the text.

And the Q scholars have demonstrated in many detailed studies that, for the *majority* of the text that Matthew and Luke have in common outside of Mark, Luke is more original.

Regards,

Yuri.