Kosh

Well, they've already got their conclusion, they just need to decide how to get there... there are lots of creationists to give them guidance.

spin

There is no comment from you as to how the process in Goodacre's application of the Farrer hypothesis could work.

We could assume for argument's sake the possibility of the Lucan writer making a list of Matthean material from the sermon on the mount and spreading them through his own gospel. It is possible, but what about the use of Mark as a yardstick to separate the non-Marcan bits from the Matthean mission narrative in order to writer a second mission narrative? I'm sure you can intellectually conceive of the possibility, but how do you imagine it was done? Where would your precedents come from?

The Farrer idea seems to me to imply maintaining three texts in operation throughout the Lucan construction process. We've seen the Matthean process, working from Mark and adding secondary materials. This process is similar to the way Josephus worked, ie a principal text augmented. Something very novel is being proposed for the Lucan process.


spin

spamandham

Are we using 'Q' in this discussion as it has historically been used - a hypothesized text containing a collection of sayings - or are we using it more generally to refer to any nonextant source?

angelo

Q has always been hypothetical. but there are very few scholars if any who don't agree it existed in a Q community of some sort. There's little doubt Luke and Mathew wrote their gospels with Q and Mark in front of them.

dog-on

Luke, for whatever reason, needs to have Jesus commission 70 (72) additional guys. He needs some words to do this. He already told the basic story in a previous chapter.

So, he could either use the wording from the first commissioning verbatim, or not.

Te fact that his wording mirrors both Mark and Matt, to some extent, seems to make the possibility of his doing just that, anything but ad hoc, imo.

aa5874

If people did not use desks they must have use some other FLAT surface. It is inconceivable that people did not have anything on which to place writing material when writing was probably the only source of recording information.

What surface did Suetonius, Tacitus, Josephus, Philo, Pliny or any other writer of antiquity use?

On what surface did scribes write while they copied volumes upon volumes of books?

It must be that in antiquity that there was some FLAT surface easily available on which to write.

Solo

...and it is for a good reason. Goodacre stays away from Farrer's theory of the Lukan composition. He perceives it as unnecessary (and vulnerable to boot). His mission is simple: to demonstrate that the Q-hypothesis is extravagant and built on false assumptions. Goodacre takes the thrust Farrer's argument which goes something like this:
He then shows there indeed there should be no difficulty in assigning Luke knowledge of Matthew. The weight of his argument is on the Mt-Lk agreements against Mark, both major and (especially the number of) the minor ones. He also maintans after Farrer, that the Q theory underestimates Luke's creativity and comes from an age in which scholars believed the gospel was simply a compilation and minor redaction of previously existing texts, with the more or less accepted premise that the textual regression terminated with the actual words of Jesus taken first or second hand by the first available scribe.

So, in other words, what you are saying is: since there is not a "second mission" in Matthew, there must have been another source to authorize Luke's Jesus to launch the missionary carpet bombing. But we don't know that, historically speaking, do we ?

There might have been a Q-text that Mark and Matthew either misread or compressed or mutilated and Luke restored. (Otherwise what accounts for the disparities, one vs two missions, 12 vs 70 ?) Or, Luke may simply have created a second, larger mission out of the original Markan/Matthean one, as an action item complementing Matthew's prayer for labourers in Lord's harvest. If the latter was the case, all Luke needed was the idea, not a textual precedent for it.

No, Luke essentially would still have two-text sourcing: Mark + Matthew. To that one adds Luke's and his community's imagination and factors their predilections in augmenting, ordering and filtering the preceding texts.

Jiri

aa5874

Your statement cannot be demonstrated to be true that "there is little doubt Luke and Matthew wrote their gospels with "Q" and Mark in front of them."

This is like claiming that there is little doubt Joseph Smith used the Golden plates or some similar unknown source or that people of antiquity had no ability to invent or fabricate their own version of the Jesus story.

It cannot be shown or demonstrated that any Jesus story writer would have only used what was in front of him or that any Jesus story writer had never and was highly unlikely to have removed, added or invented events and characters for his story.

The belief that "Q" existed has no value as evidence.

Plus, it is those whose theories depend on "Q" who must ultimately believe that it did exist.

DCHindley

The crazy notion that scribes wrote without tables is due to illustrations (on vases, pottery, Egyptian tombs, etc) in which a scribe assumes a stylized posture of submission before his lord, kneeling and resting the papyrus against his leg as he writes. Unfortunately, they also show nothing to suggest an ink pot, or if they are assumed to be writing on some sort of wax tablet, the tablet.

Stylized conventions do not always portray reality: Do women always trip when being chased by a killer, just because they almost always did in older movies or still do in modern day horror flicks?

DCH (on PM break, boss)

Kosh

C'mon spin....

King Tut's booty

Even the ancient egyptians had desks....