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I might be causing some confusion here. When I talk of a baptist tradition, I merely refer to various disparate clues for the existence of believers in a religion initiated by JtB. The believers seem to have had a written infancy narrative, perhaps more written material, but we don't have any evidence for more. So this fragment, plus the various indications from the gospels point to a JtB religion. There is a tradition behind the JtB material in the gospels and they glimpse small fragments of it.

The christian incorporation of JtB is first manifested in Mark, but the Q material has very little really in common with the Marcan material, as seen by what is used by our Lucan writer in his presentation of JtB. This suggests that the christian JtB traditions were developing irregularly in different places.

You wrote before:

In the infancy, Luke either considered his source to be more reliable than Matthew, or simply didn't have Matthew. But once you move past that, all of Luke's information about JBap comes from either Matthew/Q or Mark. So his source either didn't have any more information, or Luke didn't consider it reliable anymore.

It the two-source hypothesis this isn't as damaging. It's not helpful, but doesn't really hurt. Luke could have considered his source to be reliable enough for the infancy, because it's all he had, other than, perhaps, oral traditions shaped by Matthew. Once he moved on to material he had other sources for, he favoured them.

But in a Mark-without-Q world you start to have a problem, because Luke either had a very strange looking source in front of him, or a source that he, curiously, only considered reliable for the infancy.

Unless we're going to hypothesize that Matthew for sure, and possibly Mark, had access to the same tradition. But then why does Luke seem to favour their redaction over his source? Surely he'd be aware that his predecessors had used the same material. Why consider them the better source?

Let me assume that I don't understand what you mean by the above. (I'll assume the references to evangelists indicate the various writers/redactors/editors.) From what I read the assumptions you make aren't transparent to me.

I talked about an infancy fragment for JtB and materials from JtB and those believers of his entering into early christian traditions. The sources that the Lucan writer had were a JtB infancy fragment and the christian disseminated JtB materials, part of which seems to have been included in a written source available to both Matt and Luke traditions (ie Q). In total the Lucan sources were a infancy fragment, the JtB material in Q and various other bits and pieces. None of Mark's baptism seems to have made it into Luke. Neither has the death of JtB. So I am at a loss to understand what you're saying about Luke seeming "to favour their redaction over his source". The Lucan writer has generally gone his own way with the JtB material.


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