Rick Sumner

You might want to recheck your discernible stats on that scholar count.

spin

Actually it seems like you've got backwards. The lord's harvest runs straight into the mission in both Matthew and Luke, so the lord's harvest is tied to the mission. It's just in Luke tied to the seventy. To think that the lord's harvest would elicit a second mission while launching into one mission narrative seems hopeful.

The simplest explanation is two (same) sources used by Matthew and Luke differently, not two sources used by Matthew and two sources (Mark and Matthew) used by Luke whose author picks out the non-Marcan material from Matthew to write a second mission from apparently one. Occam says the simpler is the more likely.

Without other works demonstrating the same minute processing of several texts, the unthreading of Matthew seems contrary to scribal activity.


spin

spin

I'm happy to follow Metzger on the writing issue (in an early Revue de Qumran article circa 1960). According to him there are no signs of the use of tables in writing in various NE cultures for several centuries after Qumran times. Perhaps new data has come to light.


spin

aa5874

But, the author of Exodus gave the dimensions of a table and the material to be used in the construction perhaps before the Qumran were written.

Exodus 25.23 And since either Jesus or his father was a carpenter in gMark and gMatthew or perhaps even "Q", then at least one of them should be able to build a table and not a cross.

angelo

According to Burton L. Mack, the Q document puts us in touch with the first followers of Jesus. It is the earliest written record we have from this Jesus movement. This is because for around fifty years until the Jewish- Roman war this documents the history of a single group of Jesus people. It also puts us as close to any historical Jesus as we're ever able to get. This document is all there was until after the war that destroyed Jerusalem and Mark's gospel was written. No doubt more and more sayings and teachings were added as been from Jesus in all this time, but all the parallels in Luke and Mathew cannot have come from any other source but Q.

aa5874

But, you have only confirmed what I wrote earlier.

1. You cannot show or demonstrate that Luke and Matthew wrote their gospels with "Q" and Mark in front of them

2. It is those who need "Q" that will believe it existed.

Once it is assumed that the author of gMatthew used material from gMark, then anyone who copied from gMatthew may have material common to gMatthew but not found in gMark. And further it is then not even necessary for the author of gLuke to have actually copied from gMark since once he copies from gMatthew he is likely to include material found in gMark.

The inclusion of gJohn in the Canon shows quite dramatically that the authors of the Synoptics may have fabricated stories about Jesus without the need of any other external source.

It would appear that the author of gJohn used the basic storyline of the Synoptics and re-invented Jesus, it therefore can be that the author of gLuke used material found only in gMatthew to re-formulate parts of his Jesus story.

It must be noted that material common to both gMatthew and gLuke at times do not even show cohesive sequence or comonality in word structure. The birth story, for example, although common to both gMatthew and gLuke, are completely different to each other and appear not to be derived from the same source.

And even the so-called sayings of Jesus may have been simply derived from the Septuagint or Hebrew Scripture. Parts of the Sermon on the Mount found in gMatthew may have been derived from Psalms, Isaiah and other books of the Septuagint or Hebrew Bible.

Another example is the saying of Jesus in Matthew 5.5 appears to be derived from Psalms 37.11

Matthew 5.5 Psalms 37.11 It cannot be shown that there was a document called "Q" in front of the author of Matthew and Luke but it is almost certain that they had the Septuagint or the Hebrew Scripture.

Rick Sumner

Are you aware of a known document in which we can observe the application of two--independent--sources, copying it more or less verbatim, in harmony with a second known source?

Q is unprecedented--not postulating a lost source, but postulating a lost source that was applied in the sense Q was, with Mark, independently. There is no other trio of works that compares to the relationship between the synoptics. And what I'm postulating is only unprecedented because you apply Q to our only possible test. Drop Q, and Luke did it more than once. It's not "unprecedented," it's "distinctively Lukan."

Besides which, you are aware that Q was largely ad hoc itself, right? Of the apologetic concerns Holzmann was quick to elaborate on with its application (didn't even get out of the preface without pointing them out).

His λ and A were born largely out of a need to answer the challenge of David Strauss. Much as Mack still applies Q, Holzmann hoped that our earliest sources would give us our authentic Jesus. That the Q Jesus sounded so much like a contemporary German theologian was an added bonus, and one that was often abused. Of course, it did nothing to truly avert Strauss' assault, but it did give them somewhere to hide from the unrelenting gaze of critical insight until someone came up with something better.

Q doesn't seem ad hoc now because there are two centuries of study behind it. But it wasn't born of the study so much as it was a perceived necessity. It was born as that special kind of apologetic ad hoc we see when someone's entire worldview is taking a beating that's only going to get worse.

The simple reality of it is, if Luke is familiar with things that are distinctively Matthean, it doesn't matter how hard things are to explain. He still knows the shoes are red. He's still seen the musical.

As the tale spread, views varied; some believed
Diana’s violence unjust; some praised it,
As proper to her chaste virginity.
Both sides found reason for their point of view.
- (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3:253-55)

Support for Q looks no more substantial to me, I'm afraid.

Still mulling over a response to your comments on Nazara. I might not have one though.

Rick Sumner

Certainly they can. They can come from Luke reading Matthew (or, far less popular but not as unheard of as Goodacre and Goulder would lead you to believe, Matthew reading Luke). Or, of course, from the Griesbach arrangement.

Solo

Say what you will. Jesus' existence looks ten times more certain than Q's.

I think Farrer had it dead on : unless you have good reasons to believe Luke did not know Matthew, the postulate of Q is unnecessary. Goodacre`s argument strikes me as right; the reasons usually given for Luke's ignorance of Matthew are quite weak and dogmatic, certainly not enough to build around them a theory of a document unknown to anyone: the orthodox, gnostics, pagans or whoever.

Jiri

Rick Sumner

Actually, what Occam says is do not multiply entities unnecessarily. The "simpler explanation" is a (frequent) abuse of the principle that bears his name. It is not the "simplest explanation," but the one with least "unnecessary entities" that is to be preferred. So the one with three entities is to be preferred over the one with four, unless the fourth can be shown to be logically necessary.

I'll let you follow that one through to its application here.