Category: Bible

Did Mark Abridge Matthew’s Gospel?

St_Augustine_-_Lightner_MuseumAccording to a view that St. Augustine proposed when he began his Harmony of the Gospels, Mark was the second Gospel to be written, and it was basically an abridgement of Matthew.

Luke then wrote third, and John last.

This idea is known as the “Augustinian hypothesis.”

Despite its historical popularity, there are several reasons to think that it is incorrect.

 

Augustine’s Arguments

St. Augustine wrote:

Mark follows him [Matthew] closely, and looks like his attendant and epitomizer.

For in his narrative he gives nothing in concert with John apart from the others: by himself separately, he has little to record; in conjunction with Luke, as distinguished from the rest, he has still less; but in concord with Matthew, he has a very large number of passages.

Much, too, he narrates in words almost numerically and identically the same as those used by Matthew, where the agreement is either with that evangelist alone, or with him in connection with the rest [Harmony of the Gospels, I:2:4].

Augustine thus argued that Mark followed Matthew (he was “his attendant”) and that he shortened Matthew (he was his “epitomizer”). He therefore offers two arguments for his proposal:

1) Mark has a great deal of material in common with Matthew compared to Luke and John.

2) Mark’s wording is very similar to that of Matthew compared to Luke and John.

 

The Argument from Parallels

It’s quite true that Mark’s Gospel has a great deal in common with Matthew’s Gospel.

It is commonly estimated that 90% of the material found in Mark is also found in Matthew (B. F. Streeter, The Four Gospels, 160). Nine out of ten verses in Mark are paralleled in Matthew!

There are more parallels between Mark and Matthew than in any two other pairings of Gospels, so there does seem to be a special relationship between the two.

Augustine could be correct, then, that Mark took Matthew’s Gospel and abridged it, but it could also be the other way around: Matthew could have taken Mark’s Gospel, used nine tenths of it, and then added traditions from other sources.

Like many arguments concerning the Synoptic Problem, this one is reversible. Either Gospel could be using the other, so more evidence is needed to decide the question.

 

The Argument from Language

A problem for Augustine’s argument based on similarity of language is that, even if he is right that Mark’s language is most similar to Matthew’s, the argument would be reversible.

Just as with the previous argument, such similarity of language could be explained either by Mark using Matthew or by Matthew using Mark.

We still need to look for more evidence.

 

Matthew the Eyewitness

Some have argued that if, as traditionally has been held, Matthew was the author of the Gospel that bears his name then he would have been unlikely to use the Gospel of Mark.

It is pointed out that Matthew was an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, whereas Mark was not. Would an eyewitness really base his Gospel on one written by a non-eyewitness?

Some have suggested that the answer is no, he would not be likely to do that. Therefore, since there is a relationship between Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels, this relationship is better explained if Mark—the non-eyewitness—used Matthew’s Gospel rather than the other way around.

How good is this argument?

One could challenge it by arguing that Matthew didn’t write the Gospel attributed to him, but I support the traditional authorship view, so I don’t have an interest in going that route.

I do, however, think the argument is open to serious critique.

 

It’s Weak

First, each of the Gospels uses material that the author was not an eyewitness of. None of them are simply memoirs of what someone experienced when they were with Jesus.

This demonstrates that the Evangelists were not averse to describing events that they did not witness and for which they had to rely on sources.

Second, Matthew’s Gospel indicates that he was not among Jesus’ first disciples. That group was recruited in chapter 4, but Matthew doesn’t appear until chapter 9.

While Matthew likely heard the content of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) multiple times during his time with Jesus, he is dependent on others for what happened before he joined Jesus’ band of disciples.

Third, the issue is not whether a text was written by an eyewitness but whether it is accurate.

If Matthew thought that Mark’s Gospel was accurate then he could use it as a source whether it was written by an eyewitness or not. Indeed, he could have found that Mark corresponded well with his own memories of Jesus’ ministry and used it as a source.

Fourth, the earliest evidence we have—evidence that dates from the first century figure known as John the Presbyter (who may or may not be the same as John the Apostle)—indicates that Mark was based on the preaching of Peter, and Peter was an eyewitness.

Indeed, Peter was an even more authoritative eyewitness than Matthew (cf. Matt. 16:18). He was also one of Jesus’ first disciples and had been with Jesus longer than Matthew.

The view that Mark’s Gospel was based on Peter’s preaching was present in the first century, and for precisely this reason Matthew might have chosen to use it as one of his sources.

Furthermore, according to Acts, Matthew and Peter seem to have spent more than a decade living and preaching in Jerusalem after the ministry of Jesus. Matthew thus would have heard Peter’s preaching on many occasions and would have been able to recognize Mark as an accurate record of it.

 

My Own Experience

I can also speak from my own experience, here.

In the ancient, pre-copyright age, authors borrowed much more freely from each other than they do today.

This was particularly so in anonymous works, which both Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels were in the sense that their names are not recorded in the text itself.

If Matthew came across Mark’s Gospel and realized that it presented the core of the story of Jesus in much the way he would present it then he would have been inclined to use it as a laborsaving means.

Why reinvent the wheel? Why not use what’s already there, supplement it, and polish it?

This is an experience I have had many times. For over twenty years, I have worked in an educational ministry that publishes a lot of resources, often without bylines.

In this informal, collaborative environment, I have had the occasion many times to take a text originally written by someone else, apply it to a new purpose, and modify it accordingly.

I don’t do that for books, articles, or blog posts that are meant to be copyrighted and published under my name. Modern rules about copyright and plagiarism apply to those.

But there is another class of materials (e.g., materials the ministry publishes without a byline or that are attributed to “staff”) where those rules do not apply, and different internal authors may freely borrow from one another.

If I was producing such a text, and a prior text of the same category was available that did much of what I wanted the new text to do, I would not hesitate to use its language—extracting, expanding, abridging, and editing it to fit the new purpose.

This environment is much like the one that seems to have prevailed among the Synoptic Evangelists—where they were all united in the common purpose of telling the story of Jesus and questions of authorial “ownership” of their texts were secondary.

Since Matthew was not producing a memoir but a biography, he was willing to use sources to describe things that he didn’t see. Given that, he likely would have been willing to use sources to describe things he did witness—rather than insisting on deliberately starting from scratch to describe them.

Based on my own experience, I have no difficulty imagining Matthew taking Mark’s Gospel in hand and saying, “This does much of what I want. I’ll use it as a base text and expand and modify it to suit the purposes I want my own Gospel to fulfill.”

The argument that Matthew would not have used Mark because Mark was not an eyewitness thus strikes me as very weak.

 

Mark the Epitomizer?

Augustine said that “Mark follows him [Matthew] closely, and looks like his attendant and epitomizer” (Latin, Marcus eum subsecutus, tanquam pedissequus et breviator ejus videtur).

Many moderns may be puzzled by the meaning of this, because for us the term “epitome” is usually understood to mean an outstanding example of something (e.g., “George was the epitome of a Southern gentleman”).

In the ancient world, though, an epitome was something else: It was a shortened version of a literary work—something like the Reader’s Digest “condensed” books that were popular some time ago.

If you’re too young to remember those then think of the book summaries published by CliffNotes or SparkNotes, though those aren’t as close a parallel.

Epitomes allowed ancient readers to get the gist of a work of literature without having to read the whole thing, which could often be quite long–and expensive, given the ancient cost of producing books.

By saying that Mark “looks like” Matthew’s epitomizer, Augustine means that Mark appears to have made a condensed version of Matthew.

 

A New Opportunity

The idea that Mark is an epitome of Matthew opens up a new way to shed light on our question because it allows us to ask: “If Mark is an epitome of Matthew, does it fit the model of other ancient epitomes?”

If Mark works like other ancient epitomes then it would strengthen Augustine’s case.

On the other hand, if Mark does not work like other ancient epitomes then it would weaken it.

It is clear that Mark looks like an epitome of Matthew in two respects:

  1. It is shorter than the original.
  2. It parallels much of the substance of the original rather than just a part or a few parts of it.

In every other way, though, Mark does not look like an epitome of Matthew.

This is perhaps why Augustine uses somewhat cautious language, saying that Mark “looks like” Matthew’s epitomizer rather than fully asserting it. Augustine may realize that Mark didn’t fit the model of other ancient epitomes.

 

Ancient Epitomes

In 2001, Robert Derrenbacker published a fascinating doctoral thesis entitled Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (online here). He has a very helpful discussion of ancient epitomes and how they worked (see, esp., pp. 79-86).

One of the things that Derrenbacker brings out is the fact that ancient epitomes tended to be abridgements of much longer works.

For example, 2 Maccabees is an abridgement of a five-volume history by Jason of Cyrene (2 Macc. 2:23). This means that 2 Maccabees, which originally fit in a single scroll, was a condensation of a work that originally filled five scrolls.

Another thing Derrenbacker brings out is that ancient epitomizers didn’t just shorten works. That’s something they could do simply by deleting sections of the work. Instead, they also tightened up individual sections—or pericopes (per-ih-ko–PEEs)—of the works.

Thus, in the case of a historical or biographical epitome, they would recount incidents found in the original book but use fewer words to tell the story.

This was one of their key tools in making the epitome shorter than the original since it allowed them to save space without losing substance.

 

Mark vs. the Epitomes

When we compare the Gospel of Mark with the kind of epitomes used in the ancient world, we find that it is dramatically different on both of the counts just mentioned.

Matthew has 18,345 words in the Greek New Testament, while Mark has 11,304. This means that Matthew is only 1.6 times as long as Mark. (Put another way, Mark is 62% as long as Matthew.)

Contrast that to the original work of Jason of Cyrene, which was at least 5 times longer than 2 Maccabees.

Furthermore, Matthew was itself a fairly short work that could fit inside a single scroll. Given its word count, it could be read out loud in less than two hours.

Matthew was thus not the kind of work that called for an epitome. It was too short for that.

And it certainly didn’t call for an epitome that was 62% the length of the original. That’s not a great deal of space savings, and so there wouldn’t have been a great deal of demand for such a work.

 

Mark’s Pericopes

Another striking way in which Mark does not look like an epitome of Matthew is the fact that the individual pericopes within it don’t tend to be shorter than the parallels in Matthew. Instead, they tend to be longer.

B. H. Streeter notes:

For example, the number of words employed by Mark to tell the stories of the Gadarene Demoniac, Jairus’ Daughter, and the Feeding of the Five Thousand are respectively 325, 374 and 235; Matthew contrives to tell them in 136, 135 and 157 words [The Four Gospels, 158].

So Mark typically uses more words to tell a given story about Jesus than Matthew does.

But that is not what ancient epitomizers did. As we said, they tended to tighten up stories and use fewer words to recount them because this was a key tool in making an epitome: It allowed the author to save space while retaining substance.

The fact that Mark does the opposite would make him unlike any other epitomizer in the ancient world, and thus we have evidence that he wasn’t epitomizing.

Instead, the fact that Matthew uses fewer words to tell the same stories as Mark suggests that Matthew was producing an expanded edition of Mark—keeping 90% of the substance but tightening up the stories for reasons of style and perhaps to make room for all the additional material he wanted to include.

This brings us to the question of editorial choices the Evangelists made about what material to include.

 

Important Material Cut Out?

If Mark is an epitome of Matthew then we must ask the question of why he omitted the particular parts of Matthew that he did.

Doing so surely saved space, but he could have achieved the same goal by omitting other parts of Matthew—so why did he skip the ones that he did?

Here’s a list of the pericopes of Matthew that Matthew would have had to leave out:

  • The Genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1:1-17)
  • The Birth of Jesus (Matt. 1:18-25)
  • The Slaughter of the Innocents (Matt. 2:1-23)
  • The Beatitudes (Matt. 4:23-5:12)
  • The Value of the Law (Matt. 5:17-20)
  • Teaching About Killing and Anger (Matt. 5:21-24)
  • Make Peace with Your Accuser (Matt. 5:25-26)
  • Teaching on Adultery and Lust (Matt. 5:27-30)
  • Teaching on Divorce and Adultery (Matt. 5:31-32)
  • Teaching on Swearing (Matt. 5:33-37)
  • “Love Your Enemies” (Matt. 5:38-48)
  • Piety Before Men and Alms (Matt. 6:1-4)
  • Piety Before Men and Prayer (Matt. 6:5-8)
  • The Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9-15)
  • Piety Before Men and Fasting (Matt. 6:16-18)
  • “Treasure in Heaven” (Matt. 6:19-21)
  • “The Lamp of Your Body” (Matt. 6:22-23)
  • “You Cannot Serve God and Mammon” (Matt. 6:24)
  • “Do Not Be Anxious About Your Life” (Matt. 6:25-34)
  • “Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged” (Matt. 7:1-5)
  • Pearls Before Swine (Matt. 7:06)
  • “Ask, Seek, Knock” (Matt. 7:7-11)
  • The Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12)
  • The Narrow Gate(Matt. 7:13-14)
  • “No Good Tree Bears Bad Fruit” (Matt. 7:15-20)
  • Putting Jesus’ Teaching into Action (Matt. 7:21-27)
  • The Centurion’s Servant (Matt. 8:5-13)
  • Excuses for Not Following Jesus (Matt. 8:18-22)
  • Healing Two Blind Men (Matt. 9:27-31)
  • Exorcizing a Mute Demoniac (Matt. 9:32-34)
  • “The Harvest is Plentiful” (Matt. 9:35-38)
  • Fear and Comfort (Matt. 10:26-33)
  • Jesus Brings Division (Matt. 10:34-36)
  • The Cost of Discipleship (Matt. 10:37-11:1)
  • A Question from John the Baptist (Matt. 11:2-19)
  • Woe to Unrepentant Cities (Matt. 11:20-24)
  • Hidden from the Wise (Matt. 11:25-30)
  • “By Your Words You Will be Justified” (Matt. 12:33-37)
  • “The Sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:38-42)
  • The Unclean Spirit Returns (Matt. 12:43-45)
  • The Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (Matt. 13:24-30)
  • The Parable of the Leaven (Matt. 13:33)
  • The Parable of the Weeds Explained (Matt. 13:34-43)
  • The Parable of the Treasure in the Field (Matt. 13:44)
  • The Parable of the Precious Pearl (Matt. 13:45-46)
  • The Parable of the Net Thrown into the Sea (Matt. 13:47-52)
  • Does Jesus Pay the Tax? (Matt. 17:24-27)
  • The Parable of the Lost Sheep (Matt. 18:12-14)
  • Forgiving the Brother Who Sins (Matt. 18:15-22)
  • The Parable of Unforgiving Debtor (Matt. 18:23-35)
  • The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16)
  • Jesus in the Temple (Matt. 21:14-17)
  • The Parable of the Banquet (Matt. 22:1-14)
  • Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23:1-36)
  • “Your House Is Forsaken” (Matt. 23:37-39)
  • “The Son of Man Is Coming at an Unexpected Hour” (Matt. 24:42-51)
  • The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt. 25:1-13)
  • The Parable of the Talents/Pounds (Matt. 25:14-30)
  • The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt. 25:31-46)
  • Securing the Tomb (Matt. 27:62-66)
  • Explaining the Empty Tomb (Matt. 28:11-15)

One can imagine Mark omitting material he considered to be of lesser importance, but that does not seem to be a description of much of the material in this list.

Mark would have deleted everything concerning the genealogy, birth, and early life of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of Jesus’ parables, as well as other notable passages.

While we might suppose he would omit some of the items above for space reasons, some are simply too important—in contrast to what Mark retained—to suppose that this is the answer.

For example, is the Lord’s Prayer—which he would have omitted—really less important than the encounter with the Syrophoenician woman or the healing of the man with the withered hand—both of which he would have chosen to retain?

 

Unimportant Material Added?

On the epitome hypothesis, Mark didn’t just omit material from Matthew. He also added new material of his own:

  • Exorcising an Unclean Spirit in the Synagogue (Mark 1:23-28)
  • Departure from Capernaum (Mark 1:35-39)
  • Jesus Teaches by the Sea (Mark 2:13)
  • Jesus’ Family Hears (Mark 3:20-21)
  • The Kingdom Like Seed (Mark 4:26-29)
  • Healing a Deaf Man (Mark 7:32-37)
  • Healing a Blind Man (Mark 8:22-26)
  • The Unauthorized Exorcist (Mark 9:38-41)
  • Visiting the Temple (Mark 11:11)
  • The Widow’s Mite (Mark 12:41-44)
  • Jesus Appears to Two Disciples (Mark 16:12-13)

Again: Is this material of sufficient value to warrant omitting much of the material he would have excluded?

Is the Lord’s Prayer really less important than Mark’s note about Jesus departing Capernaum or his family hearing about what was happening with Jesus before they show up?

Is it worth omitting the bulk of Jesus’ teachings as found in Matthew in order to add material that largely concerns additional stories about healing and exorcism and that duplicate other, similar accounts?

By contrast, if Matthew used Mark then, given the minor importance and largely duplicative nature of this material, it is easy to see how Matthew could have omitted it in interests of space (so he could add all Jesus’ teaching material) rather than the other way around.

 

An Unsuccessful Epitome?

One of the things that Derrenbacker brings out in his discussion of epitomes is that they tended to replace the works that they abridged.

Very often the epitome was more popular than the original, and so more copies of it were made than of the original. This allowed the epitome to survive the ages while the original perished.

A case in point is 2 Maccabees. We have this epitome, but Jason of Cyrene’s original, five-volume history is lost.

The reason for this phenomenon is that the epitomes were of more value to the ancient audiences than the original. It was a case of “less is more”:

  1. The epitomes took much less time to read and absorb, while still allowing the reader to get the gist of the original.
  2. Also, being shorter, they were much cheaper in an age in which books had to be hand written and so were much more costly than today’s printing technology makes possible.

But what value did Mark think he would be adding for the reader by producing an epitome of Matthew?

He wasn’t giving them extra value in terms of dramatic space savings. And he wasn’t giving them extra value in terms of new material. The handful of minor, reduplicative stories he would have added would scarcely offset the loss of the huge bulk of teaching material in Matthew that he would have had to set aside.

This lack of added value—both in terms of space and content—would have set Mark up to be an unsuccessful epitome.

And, in fact, Mark’s Gospel was by far the least popular of the four Gospels in the early Church. One of the ways that we know this is by counting the number of early manuscripts of the Gospels that have survived.

Of the Gospel manuscripts that date to the second and third centuries a.d., there are 12 of Matthew, 7 of Luke, 16 of John, and only 1 of Mark! (Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, ch. 1). The fact that so few manuscripts of Mark have survived from this period compared to the others suggests that there were fewer copies of Mark in circulation.

Given that there are twelve ancient manuscripts of Matthew and only one of Mark, it is clear that Matthew was quite a bit more popular than Mark.

This means that Mark, if it was an epitome of Matthew, was a spectacularly unsuccessful one that did not, in the eyes of the ancient readers, add significant value over its original. Indeed, as the number of surviving manuscripts suggests, they saw it as quite a bit less valuable.

The Case Against the Augustinian Hypothesis

We have seen a number of reasons to be skeptical of St. Augustine’s proposal that Mark was the second Gospel written and that it was an epitome of Matthew:

  • Both of the arguments that Augustine proposes are reversible and can support either the view that Mark used Matthew or that Matthew used Mark.
  • The idea that Matthew wouldn’t use Mark because the latter was not an eyewitness is unconvincing.
  • We have first century evidence, via John the Presbyter, that Mark was based on the preaching of Peter rather than on Matthew.
  • Matthew is not a long enough a work to need an epitome.
  • Mark is not a major abridgment of Matthew, being 62% as long as the proposed original.
  • By regularly using more words rather than fewer to recount the same stories, Mark would have been behaving very unlike ancient epitomizers and rejecting one of the key tools they used to make their abridgments.
  • Much of the material Mark would have omitted seems more important than what he retained.
  • The material that Mark would have added to Matthew seems much less important than the material he omitted.
  • By adding so little value in terms of space savings and content, Mark would be a badly designed and unnecessary epitome which went on to be very unpopular.

In view of these facts, Augustine’s impression that Mark “looks like” Matthew’s epitomizer is true only in a very superficial sense. A closer examination of the matter suggests that Mark’s Gospel is not an epitome of Matthew.

 

Augustine’s Later Doubts?

In his initial discussion of the matter, Augustine used cautious language—only asserting that Mark “looks like” or “seems like” Matthew’s epitomizer.

He may have become even less confident of this idea as he worked on his Harmony of the Gospels, because there is a later passage that some scholars have taken as a modification of his initial view.

After having worked through and carefully compared the three Synoptics, Augustine makes this statement:

Mark . . . either appears to be preferentially the companion of Matthew, as he narrates a larger number of matters in unison with him than with the rest . . . or else, in accordance with the more probable account of the matter, he holds a course in conjunction with both [the other Synoptists]. For although he is at one with Matthew in the larger number of passages, he is nevertheless at one rather with Luke in some others [Harmony of the Gospels 4:10:11].

Here Augustine seems to make two proposals.

  • The first seems to be a restatement of the view he expressed at the beginning of his harmony—that Mark accompanies or is “the companion of Matthew” as he writes his Gospel.
  • The second acknowledges that as he writes his Gospel he “holds a course in conjunction with both” Matthew and Luke, though he follows the first more than the second.

This may mean that, after his close comparison of the Gospels, Augustine had reason to modify his view of Mark as an apparent epitome of Matthew and that he may have concluded that “the more probable account of the matter” was that Mark used both Matthew and Luke.

This would be consistent with the modern Griesbach Hypothesis, though we must be careful here, because Augustine is not fully clear in what he says.

By speaking of Mark accompanying and “holding a course” with the other two Synoptic Evangelists, he may simply be noting the parallels in sequence that occur between them, without supposing a particular theory of how they were composed.

If so, he would have arrived at the insight that many moderns have proposed—that Mark is the “middle term” between Matthew and Luke. This, however, can be explained in more than one way. The Griesbach Hypothesis is one proposal that makes Mark the middle term, but there are others.

Thus David Pearson, who wrote a key paper on this topic, cautioned:

The question of whether or not Augustine had two views of the order in which the gospels were composed just as he had two views of their mutual relationships must remain open [“Augustine and the Augustinian Hypothesis: A Reexamination of Augustine’s Thought in De consensu evangelistarum,” in New Synoptic Studies: The Cambridge Gospel Conference and Beyond (ed. William R. Farmer, Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1983) 37-64].

Regardless of whether Augustine later changed his view of the order in which the Gospels were composed, his initial proposal that Mark was an epitome of the Gospel of Matthew appears to be mistaken.

Celebrating the Archangels: 7 things to know and share

archangelsSeptember 29th is the feast of St.s Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael—archangels.

These are the only three angels whose names are mentioned in Scripture, and this is their day.

Here are 7 things to know and share . . .

 

1) What is an archangel?

The word “archangel” (Greek, archangelos) means “high-ranking angel”—the same way that “archbishop” means a high-ranking bishop.

Only St. Michael is described as an archangel in Scripture (Jude 9), but it is common to honor St.s Gabriel and Raphael as archangels also.

 

2) Why are they called “saints” if they’re angels rather than humans?

The word “saint” (Greek, hagios) means “holy one.”

It does not mean “holy human being.” As a result, it can apply to holy ones that aren’t human.

Since St.s Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael all chose to side with God rather than the devil, they are holy angels and thus saints.

All angels that sided with God are saints, but these three’s names are known to us, and so they are picked out by name in the liturgy.

 

3) Does this day have any other names?

Yes. Traditionally in English it has also been called “Michaelmas” (i.e., the Mass that celebrates St. Michael, on the same principle that “Christmas” is the Mass that celebrates Christ’s birth).

 

4) What do we know about St. Michael?

His name means “Who is like God?” (The implied answer is: Nobody; God is the greatest there is.)

St. Michael is mentioned by name in three books of Scripture:

  • In Daniel, he is described as “one of the chief princes” in the heavenly hierarchy (Dan. 10:13). He is also described to Daniel as “your prince” (Dan. 10:12). The meaning of this phrase is later clarified, and Michael is described as “the great prince who has charge of your people” (Dan. 12:1). He is thus depicted as the guardian angel of Israel. These same passages also refer to Michael doing battle against the spiritual forces at work against Israel.
  • In Jude 9, Michael is said to have contended with the devil over the body of Moses. On this occasion, we are told, “he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’”
  • In Revelation, Michael and his angels are depicted fighting the devil and casting them out of heaven (Rev. 12:7-8). He is also commonly identified as the angel who binds the devil and seals him in the bottomless pit for a thousand years (Rev. 20:1-3), though the name “Michael” is not given on this occasion.

 

5) What do we know about St. Gabriel?

His name means “God is my warrior” (meaning, essentially, “God is my defender”).

St. Gabriel is mentioned in two books of Scripture:

  • In Daniel, he is assigned to help Daniel understand the meaning of a vision he has seen (Dan. 8:16). Later, while Daniel is in a prolonged period of prayer, Gabriel comes to him (Dan. 9:21) and gives him the prophecy of “seventy weeks of years” concerning Israel’s future (Dan. 9:24-27).
  • In Luke, he appears to Zechariah the priest and announces the conception and birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1:13-19). Later, he appears to the Virgin Mary and announces the conception and birth of Jesus Christ (Luke 1:26-33).

 

6) What do we know about St. Raphael?

His name means “God heals.”

St. Raphael is mentioned in a single book of Scripture: Tobit.

In Tobit, the blind Tobit and the maid Sarah, whose seven husbands have been killed by the demon Asmodeus, pray to God.

The prayer of both was heard in the presence of the glory of the great God. And Raphael was sent to heal the two of them: to scale away the white films of Tobit’s eyes; to give Sarah the daughter of Raguel in marriage to Tobias the son of Tobit, and to bind Asmodeus the evil demon, because Tobias was entitled to possess her (Tob. 3:16-17).

Raphael thus becomes a travelling companion of Tobias, posing as a relative named Azarias son of Ananias (Tob. 5:12). He eventually binds the demon, enabling Tobias to safely marry Sarah, and provides the means for Tobit to be healed of his blindness.

Afterward, he reveals his true identity, saying:

I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One (Tob. 12:15).

 

7) How is this day celebrated?

In addition to its commemoration in the liturgy, there are various local ways of celebrating this day. See here for some examples.

See also here.

It might also be a good day to say the Prayer to St. Michael:

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Don’t Hate on Q

q-redRecently, I’ve been doing a series of blog posts about how the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke relate to each other.

In biblical studies, this is known as the Synoptic Problem.

Today the most popular solution to this problem is known as the “Two-Source Hypothesis.”

According to this view, Mark was the first Gospel to be written, and it was used by both Matthew and Luke.

In addition, this view holds that Matthew and Luke also used a lost, hypothetical source known as Q.

 

Q and Me

Personally, I am a Q skeptic. That’s why I’ve written more than once about reasons to doubt the existence of Q.

I think that the data that advocates of Q appeal to likely can be explained in other, better ways.

Before resorting to hypothetical, lost documents to explain the fact that Matthew and Luke have a large number of verses in common, we should give serious consideration to the idea that Luke drew these verses from Matthew or that Matthew drew them from Luke.

 

Hating on Q

I’ve been surprised, in the comments boxes and on Facebook, at the amount of hostility that some folks have displayed toward the idea of Q.

For example, some have dismissed Q as “the claptrap of modernistic historical criticism” and declaring it “a diversion from the truth” and similar things.

But while disagreement with the Q hypothesis can be justified, outright hostility toward it is uncalled for.

 

The Basis for the Idea

The idea behind Q is that there was a source—likely a written source—behind the 235 verses in Matthew that are paralleled in Luke but not in Mark or John.

This is a large number of verses, and it amounts to more than a fifth of Matthew and Luke.

Given that amount of material in common—and the fact that the material is sometimes presented in the same order—it isn’t unreasonable to propose that there is a source behind this material.

In fact, we’ve already seen two such proposals: Matthew was Luke’s source for this material, or Luke was Matthew’s source for it.

Either of these possibilities would explain both the content of the material and the elements of common order that it displays.

 

But If . . .

But if one could show that both of these possibilities are unlikely for some reason then it would not be unreasonable to propose that there was a third source that both Matthew and Luke drew upon for the material.

Neither would it be unreasonable to propose that this source was written.

Luke even alludes to previous written accounts of Christ’s ministry (Luke 1:1).

Since he says that he wrote his own Gospel after “having followed all things closely for some time past”—with “all things” seeming to include the previous written accounts—it is very likely that Luke used such written sources.

Indeed, virtually everyone agrees that he either used Matthew or Mark as a source (possibly both), so there is no reason to be hostile to the idea that he used another such source.

 

A Lost Source?

Since we don’t have any manuscripts of Q today, if it ever existed, it has been lost.

But the idea of a lost source is not intrinsically problematic.

Indeed—all of the sources that the Evangelists used, whether written or oral, seem to have perished, leaving only the Gospels themselves.

 

An Objection

One could object that many of the people who advocate Q—including some of its earliest advocates—have tried to use the claim to undermine the authority of the Gospels.

This is true, but it does not ultimately matter.

The idea that there is a common source behind the 235 verses Matthew and Luke have in common does not do anything, of itself, to undermine the authority of the Gospels.

The Gospels are based on sources—as Luke acknowledges—and so the idea of sources behind them is not intrinsically threatening.

The proposal that a common source is behind these 235 verses is an idea that needs to be evaluated based on the evidence—not who proposed it or what their motives were.

 

Ad Hominem Arguments

Indeed, arguments that attack an idea based on who proposed it or what that person’s motives were—rather than evaluating the evidence for and against it—are known as ad hominem arguments (i.e., arguments “to the man” rather than to the evidence).

Such arguments are at high risk of committing a logical fallacy.

More generally, rejecting an idea because of where it came from risks committing the genetic fallacy.

 

A Better Way

A better way of approaching the question is to set aside these issues and look at the Q proposal objectively, weighing the evidence for and against it.

If you want to go after Q based on the evidence, have at it!

I do that myself!

In fact, here’s a book by Mark Goodacre that can help you do that.

And here’s another.

 

Faithful Q Scholars

While it may be true that some advocates of Q have an agenda of undermining the authority of the Gospels, they are by no means the only Q advocates out there.

There are also lots of biblical scholars who thoroughly uphold the authority of Scripture and who endorse the Q hypothesis.

Indeed, in a 2003 speech, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) addressed the Pontifical Biblical Commission and noted that the Two-Source Hypothesis (which proposes Q as one of the sources behind Matthew and Luke) is “accepted today by almost everyone” [Relationship Between the Magisterium and Exegetes].

That “almost everyone” includes lots of faithful Catholic biblical scholars, as well as lots of non-Catholic ones who support the authority of the Gospels.

 

A Present Minority

Actually, the fact that Q-skeptics, such as myself, are a small minority today is something that provides us with another reason to keep the rhetoric cool.

If you want to get people to change their minds about Q, a calm, reasoned approach based on the evidence will get you a lot farther than just dumping on the view of the majority.

And there is another, even more fundamental reason to take this approach . . .

 

The Golden Rule

Majorities can often ill-treat minorities, and it’s certainly been the case that some advocates of Q have used inflammatory, insulting language regarding those who are skeptical of Q.

Indeed, if you read the books of Q skeptics, they point out the inflammatory language that has been used against them and their proposals.

Naturally, they don’t like being treated that way in print.

Fortunately, many of them—including many of the most effective Q skeptics—have resisted the temptation to answer in kind.

After all, didn’t Jesus say something about treating others the way that you would like to be treated?

That statement is found in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31, but it isn’t found in Mark or John.

Ironically, it’s part of the Q material!

And whether Q was a separate, written source or not—this saying of Christ is authoritative.

The Synoptic Problem

Here is a series of posts I’ve been doing about the Synoptic Problem (i.e., the way in which the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are related to each other):

GENERAL:

MATTHEAN PRIORITY OPTIONS:

The Augustinian Hypothesis:

The Griesbach Hypothesis:

The Orchard Hypothesis:

LUKAN PRIORITY OPTIONS

The Lockton Hypothesis:

    • Did Mark base his Gospel on Luke?

The Büsching Hypothesis:

    • Did Mark base his Gospel on Luke and Matthew?

MARKAN PRIORITY OPTIONS:

Markan Priority

The Two-Source Hypothesis:

The Farrer Hypothesis:

The Wilke Hypothesis:

BONUS SECTION: John’s Gospel

Visualizing Q

q-narrative-vs-sayings - CopyThere are 235 verses in Matthew that are paralleled in Luke but not in Mark or John.

This number represents more than a fifth of Matthew and Luke, and so some scholars have proposed that there was a written source—called Q—that both Evangelists drew upon, though it is now lost.

There are, of course, other possibilities. One is that Matthew simply used Luke; another is that Luke used Matthew.

It is possible that they both used a lost written source for this material, but there are reasons to question this.

A while back, I blogged about one such reason.

Now I’d like to use a visual means of making the same point and to advance it further.

 

The Basic Argument

The argument I made before was based on one posed by New Testament scholar Mark Goodacre (see his book The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem, 170-185).

Scholars who advocate the existence of Q frequently state that it was a “sayings gospel,” because the material in it largely consists of sayings of Jesus.

They then place it in the same category as other sayings collections, like the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.

But Goodacre points out that, if it existed, Q would not have been simply a collection of sayings. Instead, it has narrative passages (passages that recount events rather than simply sayings).

Q thus would not parallel Thomas or other ancient sayings collections.

 

Visualizing the Phenomenon

In my previous post, I listed a number of narrative elements that Goodacre identified in the Q material.

Now I would like to visualize the way that this material shifts back and forth between narrative and sayings.

To do this, I used a copy of The Critical Edition of Q: A Synopsis Including the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mark and Thomas With English, German and French Translations of Q and … & Historical Commentary on the Bible), edited by James Robinson, Paul Hoffmann, and John Kloppenborg.

Several years ago, this trio of scholars led an international team that attempted to establish the original text of Q, in its original order, to the extent that this can be done by present scholarship.

The Critical Edition of Q is a useful text for studies of the Synoptic Problem because it is a consensus text that does not rest on the work of any single scholar. As a result, it can be used as a neutral reference point for testing hypotheses about Q, because the question of whether a single scholar has biased the selection of texts in favor of his hypothesis does not arise.

The scholars who produced The Critical Edition of Q identified 92 passages that they think were or likely were in Q.

I typed these passages into a spreadsheet and then classified them based on whether they involved significant narrative elements, sayings, or something that could be regarded either way.

I also counted the number of verses in each passage and assigned a color to the three categories, as follows:

  • Red: Narrative
  • Orange: Mixed
  • Yellow: Saying

For something to classify as more than just a saying, it had to involve more than just a note that Jesus responded to something that someone said. The reason is that in the Gospel of Thomas Jesus occasionally responds to things that people said, and I wanted to show that Q involves narrative elements that go beyond those found in the Gospel of Thomas.

Using these classifications, I then created an image consisting of colored bars whose widths are based on the number of verses in these sections.

This is the image that resulted . . .

 

An Image of Q?

q-narrative-vs-sayings

If you want to see the results of my study as an image in spreadsheet form, click here.

Here, in sequence, is what the colored bars represent.

Bar 1 (red): This bar, at the left of the image, represents 24 verses that are all at the beginning of Q and that have narrative elements. This section includes the ministry of John the Baptist, the Baptism of Jesus, the Temptation, and a reference to Jesus going to “Nazara.”

Bar 2 (yellow): This represents 26 verses of sayings material. The material is found in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke.

Bar 3 (red): This represents 6 verses. It contains the story of the Healing of the Centurion’s Servant.

Bar 4 (orange): This represents 19 verses. It includes the question that John the Baptist sends to Jesus by his disciples, Jesus testimony about John, the reaction of the people to Jesus’ testimony, and Jesus discussion of the present generation in light of the way John and he have been treated. It also includes Jesus’ interactions with several individuals who end up not following him.

I classified this material as “mixed” because you could look at it either as involving significant narrative elements or simply as sayings with minimal narrative elements.

While it consists principally of sayings, the John the Baptist material involves the coming and going of John’s disciples, which can be considered narrative. It also harks back to Jesus’ earlier interaction with John, in which John identified Jesus as a major figure in God’s plan. Now John asks if he was correct in that assessment, making this a continuation of the previous encounter—and thus part of a larger, overarching story about Jesus and John.

Finally, the interactions of Jesus with the people who don’t end up following him could be considered narrative.

I think that there is a good case for classifying this material—or at least the material involving John the Baptist—as narrative, but since it is principally in the form of sayings, I left it orange.

Bar 5 (yellow): This represents 11 verses in which Jesus gives the disciples instructions about a preaching mission that they are to go on—how to conduct themselves, what to bring, etc.

This material is all sayings, so I left it yellow, but I think it could justifiably be colored orange or even red, because the instructions that Jesus gives the disciples about their mission suggests that they went on such a mission and later returned from it, just as we read in Luke 10:17.

If Q contained material about the departure or return of the disciples then this would create forward movement, narratively speaking, and earn an orange or red classification.

Bar 6 (orange): This represents 3 verses in which Jesus pronounces woe on various towns in Galilee.

I classified this as orange because, although it is in the saying form, it implies visits to the named towns in which Jesus encountered opposition, and Q could have contained prior references to Jesus encountering such opposition.

Even if it didn’t, the references to these towns imply visits and thus situate Jesus’ activities in a geographical way that takes us beyond abstract philosophical/theological sayings.

Bar 7 (yellow): This represents 147 verses that consist of sayings without significant narrative elements.

 

Implications

You may or may not agree with my classifications. Indeed, I think that some of them—particularly some elements in Bars 4-6—could be classified differently.

However, even if we assume the classification most favorable to Q, where everything that is not red should be classified as yellow, something very interesting emerges.

It isn’t only that Q switches between narrative and sayings material, as Goodacre pointed out. It’s that Q switches between them in a very noteworthy way.

If only Bars 1 and 3 are classified as involving significant narrative elements and everything else is classified as sayings then:

  • Q would begin with clearly narrative material (John the Baptist and the beginning of Jesus’ ministry).
  • It would switch to a major sayings collection that is clearly presented as a unit in Matthew and Luke (the Sermon on the Mount/Plain).
  • It would revert to a narrative for a single story (the Healing of the Centurion’s Servant).
  • Then it would switch back to an extremely long series of sayings.
  • Finally, it would end without returning to the kind of narrative framework that it began with.

This is very unlike what we see in ancient sayings collections like Thomas, Proverbs, or Sirach.

 

Matters Get Worse for Q?

Things get even worse for Q if some of the material is classified differently.

If Bars 4-6 are classified as narrative, if only some parts of them are, or if we allow a mixed “narrative/sayings” classification then we have an even more complex picture that deviates even further from the idea that Q is a “sayings gospel.”

 

Conclusion

If we attempt to visualize Q in terms of the narrative and sayings elements that it would have included, we find that it switches back and forth between them in a way that is not like other ancient sayings collections.

This gives us more reason to see the hypothetical, lost Q as a unique document and thus as one that was less likely to exist, in view of the fact that we do not have ancient parallels for it.

Does Luke Contradict Himself on When Jesus Was Born?

lukeSt. Luke begins the second chapter of his Gospel with a chronological note about when Jesus was born: writing:

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled.

This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria [Luke 2:1-2].

This passage has been subject to a lot of criticism, because Luke has already linked the birth of Jesus to reign of Herod the Great (Luke 1:5), and Quirinius did not become governor of Syria until years afterwards.

 

What Happened When?

Precisely when Herod’s reign ended is a matter of dispute. Historically, the most common view—which is also in accordance with the Church Fathers—is that Herod died in 1 B.C.

Just over a hundred years ago, however, a German scholar named Emil Schürer argued that Herod died in 4 B.C., and this became the most popular view in the 20th century.

More recent scholarship, however, has supported the idea that Schürer was wrong and that the traditional date of 1 B.C. is correct.

After Herod’s death, his kingdom was divided, and his son Archelaus became the ruler of Judaea (Matt. 2:22).

Archelaus, however, was a terrible ruler, and in A.D. 6 he was removed from office by the Romans and banished to what is now France.

In his place, a Roman prefect was appointed to govern the province, which is why Pontius Pilate—rather than one of the descendants of Herod the Great—was ruling Judaea at the time of Jesus’ adult ministry.

According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Quirinius (aka Cyrenius) was sent to govern Syria after the banishment of Archelaus. He also took a tax census of Judaea at this time and made an accounting of Archelaus’s finances (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18:1:1).

 

The Sequence

From the above, the overall sequence of events is clear:

  1. Herod the Great dies (1 B.C. or 4 B.C.)
  2. Archelaus becomes his successor in Judaea
  3. Archelaus is deposed
  4. Quirinius does his census (A.D. 6)

Given that sequence, if Luke identified Jesus’ birth with a census conducted in A.D. 6 then we would have an implicit contradiction with Luke 1, which links Jesus’ birth to the reign of Herod the Great, and an even clearer contradiction with Matthew 2, which is explicit about the fact that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great.

 

Finding a Solution

Scholars have proposed a number of solutions to this. There isn’t space to review them all here, but I’d like to look at one of them.

In his book Who Was Jesus? the former Anglican bishop N. T Wright states:

The question of Quirinius and his census is an old chestnut, requiring a good knowledge of Greek. It depends on the meaning of the word protos, which usually means ‘first’.

Thus most translations of Luke 2.2 read ‘this was the first [protos] census, when Quirinius was governor of Syria’, or something like that.

But in the Greek of the time, as the standard major Greek lexicons point out, the word protos came sometimes to be used to mean ‘before’, when followed (as this is) by the genitive case (p. 89).

The genitive case is a grammatical feature in Greek. It is often used to indicate possession (as in “Jesus’ disciples”) or origin (as in “Jesus of Nazareth”). Wright, however, is pointing to a special use of the genitive when it follows the word protos and protos ends up meaning “before.” He writes:

A good example is in John 1.15, where John the Baptist says of Jesus ‘he was before me’, with the Greek being again protos followed by the genitive of ‘me’.

In a footnote, Wright continues:

The phrase is repeated in John 1.30; compare also 15.18, where Jesus says ‘the world hated me before [it hated] you’, where again the Greek is protos with the genitive.

Other references, in biblical and non-biblical literature of the period, may be found in the Greek Lexicon of Liddell and Scott (Oxford: OUP, 1940), p. 1535, and the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament of W . Bauer, revised and edited by Arndt, Gingrich and Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 725f. 19 .

 This solution has been advanced by various scholars, including, interestingly, William Temple in his Readings in St John’s Gospel (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 17; cf. most recently John Nolland, Luke 1–9: 20 (Dallas: Word Books, 1989), pp. 101f.

 

Wright’s Solution

Wright then explains how this can relate to the enrollment of Quirinius:

I suggest, therefore, that actually the most natural reading of the verse is: “This census took place before the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

He also notes:

This solves an otherwise odd problem: why should Luke say that Quirinius’ census was the first? Which later ones was he thinking of?

This reading, of course, does not resolve all the difficulties. We don’t know, from other sources, of a census earlier than Quirinius’. But there are a great many things that we don’t know in ancient history.

There are huge gaps in our records all over the place. Only those who imagine that one can study history by looking up back copies of the London Times or the Washington Post in a convenient library can make the mistake of arguing from silence in matters relating to the first century.

My guess is that Luke knew a tradition in which Jesus was born during some sort of census, and that Luke knew as well as we do that it couldn’t have been the one conducted under Quirinius, because by then Jesus was about ten years old. That is why he wrote that the census was the one before that conducted by Quirinius.

 

An Objection

An objection that some have raised about this solution is why, on this theory, Luke would bother mentioning Quirinius’s census.

Think about it for a moment: It can sound a little strange to say, “This census took place before the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

Why would Luke do that?

There are at least three reasons . . .

 

Avoiding Confusion

The census of Quirinius was famous enough that Luke’s audience would have heard of it—otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it.

Given that it was well known, Luke would have wanted to avoid people confusing it with the enrollment during which Jesus was born.

He would especially want to avoid confusion in light of what he had established about King Herod . . .

 

Herod’s Death

Previously, in Luke 1:5, the Evangelist established that John the Baptist was conceived by his mother Elizabeth during the reign of Herod the Great.

Then, in 1:26 and 36, he established that Gabriel announced the conception of Jesus “in the sixth month” (i.e., what we would call the fifth month) of Elizabeth’s pregnancy.

This means that Jesus would have been conceived much too early to have been born during Quirinius’s census.

Since Luke has already established this, it gives him a reason—when he records the fact that Jesus was born in connection with an enrollment—that it was not the famous census of Quirinius. It was an earlier one, in keeping with the timeframe Luke has already established.

But there is another reason why Luke would want to point this out . . .

 

In the Fifteenth Year of Tiberius Caesar

Luke 2 begins with a time cue that connects the birth of Jesus to the reign of Augustus Caesar. Luke 3 begins with an even more elaborate time cue linking the beginning of Jesus’ adult ministry to the reign of Augustus’s successor, Tiberius.

Luke writes:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, in the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness [Luke 3:1-2].

The fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar is what we would call A.D. 28/29.

After John’s ministry begins, Jesus quickly comes and is baptized, thus beginning his own ministry.

When that happens, Luke informs us:

Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age [Luke 3:23].

If you back up 30 years from A.D. 28/29 (remembering that there is no “year 0” so you skip from A.D. 1 directly to 1 B.C.), you land in 2/3 B.C., which is the year that the early Church Fathers overwhelmingly assign Jesus’ birth to.

People back then knew when Tiberius reigned, and they could do the math as well as we. In fact, since they were used to dating years in terms of the emperor’s reign, they would realize even more quickly than we the year in which Luke 3 indicates Jesus was born.

Thus, on Wright’s theory, Luke would have an additional motive to make sure there was no confusion about Jesus being born during the famous census of Quirinius.

Think about it from Luke’s point of view: After years of gathering his research, he’s now drafting his Gospel, and, when he reaches Luke 2, he includes a time cue for the birth of Jesus during an enrollment ordered by Augustus.

He already knows, however, that he is planning on beginning Luke 3 with a time cue identifying the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry and that he’s going to give Jesus’ approximate age at the time of his own ministry’s commencement.

Since the later time cues he’s planning to give point to a date earlier than the famous census of Quirinius, Luke would want to head off any potential confusion by stressing that this happened before that census, in keeping with the implications of Luke 3.

What Is the “Synoptic Problem” and Why Do Apologists Need to Know About It?

Synoptic EvangelistsThree of the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are very similar to each other when compared to the fourth Gospel, John. They tell the story of Jesus in very similar ways, frequently including the same stories and sayings and often using exactly the same words.

That’s why these three are known as the “synoptic” Gospels—because they offer a “shared view” of Jesus’ life (Greek, sun = “together” + opsis “seeing”).

They are so similar that scholars have tried to figure out why. This is known as “the synoptic problem.”

In the last two centuries, there has been an enormous amount written about the subject, and we can’t hope to more than scratch the surface here. We will, however, look at some of the more popular solutions to the synoptic problem.

 

Is There a Problem at All?

diagram oral sourcesIt’s tempting to ask whether there even is a problem to be solved. Relying on eyewitness evidence and oral tradition, couldn’t Matthew, Mark, and Luke have written independently of each other? Couldn’t they include the stories and sayings that they do just because Jesus did and said those things?

This view is known as the Independence hypothesis, and it is the position that most people hold, at least before they start looking closely at the issue.

Despite its appeal, the Independence hypothesis has not won many advocates among scholars in recent years. Part of the reason is the Gospel of John. It is missing many of the familiar stories and sayings found in the other three, and it has a great deal of new material not found in them.

What’s more, John indicates that there was an even larger pool of material about Jesus to select from. At the end of his Gospel, he writes: “There are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25).

That means we have to ask the question of why Matthew, Mark, and Luke chose the material that they did. It isn’t that they were recording everything Jesus said and did. They could have picked different stories and sayings, like John. If they wrote independently of each other, why did they make so many of the same choices?

It is commonly estimated that 90% of the material found in Mark is also found in Matthew (B. F. Streeter, The Four Gospels, 160). Nine out of ten verses in Mark are paralleled in Matthew! That seems to be too large an amount of material in common for it to just be random chance. It suggests a common source.

 

An Oral Gospel?

What could that source be? One possibility is that it was an oral equivalent of a Gospel.

People relied on and trained their memories to a greater extent in the past, and it is not impossible that the early Church developed a standard way of recounting the ministry and passion of Jesus—a cycle of stories and sayings that were memorized in a definite order, rather than just as a pool of traditions. If so, they had the oral equivalent of a Gospel, and the Synoptic Evangelists could have drawn on this for the material they share in common.

Most scholars have not favored this viewpoint. Memorizing such a Gospel would have been quite an achievement—particularly without a written text to work from—and it is not clear that the early Christian community had enough people willing to perform the feat. Further, we have no record of people in the first century attempting this, and we have no record among the Church Fathers of the Synoptics being based on such a source.

 

A Lost Gospel?

diagram lost gospelMost scholars think that the similarities among the Synoptics are due to a common written source. The question is: Do we still have this source?

Some have suggested that we don’t—that the common source behind the Synoptics was a now-lost “proto-Gospel” that each drew upon.

Luke tells us that, in his day, “many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us” (Luke 1:1). It is possible that the three Evangelists used one of these prior narratives in composing their own Gospels.

But we should be careful about claiming that there was a single, written source that explains the similarities among the Synoptics.

This view invokes a hypothetical source, and Occam’s Razor indicates that we shouldn’t propose hypothetical sources beyond what is necessary to account for the data. Otherwise, the problem will become nightmarishly complex. (Indeed, one web site devoted to the synoptic problem—hypotyposeis.org—listed 1,488 solutions! That number is made possible by freely proposing hypothetical sources for which we do not have clear evidence.)

Rather than proposing hypothetical, lost documents, we should at least initially try to explain the material in the Synoptic Gospels by appealing to documents that we know existed: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

 

Who’s on First?

It’s possible to explain the shared material in the Synoptics by proposing that one of them is the common source. In other words, one of the Evangelists wrote first and the other two borrowed from him.

You could explain the 90% of Mark that is paralleled in Matthew either by saying Mark wrote the first Gospel and Matthew borrowed from him or that Matthew wrote first and Mark did the borrowing.

You don’t need a hypothetical source to account for the material. You just need to identify which was the first one written.

On this, there are two major views: One holds that Matthew wrote first and the other that Mark did. Virtually no one in Church history has claimed that Luke wrote first.

The idea that Matthew wrote first is known as “Matthean priority,” and it was the most popular view in most of Church history. The alternative view, that Mark wrote first, is known as “Markan priority,” and it is the most popular view today.

 

The Augustinian Hypothesis

diagram augustinian hypothesisFor much of Church history, the standard theory of how the Gospel were composed is that Matthew wrote first, Mark then did an abbreviated version of Matthew, while adding a small amount of material of his own. Finally, Luke wrote.

This view takes its name from St. Augustine (354-430).

At the beginning of his Harmony of the Gospels, Augustine took the position that the Gospels were written in this order, though a statement that he made later in the work has led some to think that he may have revised his view or become less sure about the order.

 

The Griesbach Hypothesis

diagram griesbach hypothesisAnother view, known as the Griesbach hypothesis, agrees that Matthew wrote first, but it holds that Luke wrote second and that Mark wrote last, making his Gospel a combination and abridgement of the first two. (Mark is quite a bit shorter than either Matthew or Luke.)

The view is named after Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745-1812), the German scholar who proposed it.

This is the second most popular view among biblical scholars today. (We will discuss the most popular one shortly.) The best-known advocate of this theory in recent years was William Farmer (1921-2000).

 

The Farrer Hypothesis

diagram farrer hypothesisIf you hold that Matthew wrote first then the Augustinian and Griesbach hypotheses are the two obvious options. But what if you hold that Mark wrote first? Again, there are two options that don’t involve hypothetical documents.

The first is known as the Farrer hypothesis. According to it, Mark wrote first, then Matthew used and expanded on Mark, and finally Luke drew from and abridged the first two, while adding some new material from his own sources.

This view is named after the English scholar Austin Farrer (1904-1968), who proposed it. It is popular principally among British scholars.

 

The Wilke Hypothesis

diagram wilke hypothesisThe other obvious view based on the idea that Mark wrote first is known as the Wilke hypothesis. According to this view, Mark wrote the initial Gospel, Luke wrote next drawing partly on Mark and partly on his own sources, and then Matthew wrote last, drawing on both Mark and Luke.

This theory is named after the German scholar Christian Gottlob Wilke (1786-1854), who was also a convert to the Catholic Church from Lutheranism.

The Wilke hypothesis has received a surprisingly small amount of attention in recent literature, with many authors gliding over it in a sentence or failing to mention it altogether. Despite that, it has been attracting renewed attention in the last few years, with a number of new advocates. Among them was German scholar Martin Hengel (1926-2006), who proposed a version of it.

 

The Two-Source Hypothesis

diagram two-source hypothesisBy far the most common theory today is the “Two-Source hypothesis.” According to this view, Mark wrote first and then Matthew and Luke used him independently of each other.

This would account for why both Matthew and Luke have certain material in common with Mark, but it would not account for why they have certain material in common with each other.

There are around 235 verses in Matthew that are paralleled in Luke, and many scholars have proposed a common source for this material. They have dubbed this source “Q.” It is often claimed that this is short for the German word Quelle, which means “source,” but this is not certain.

The view is known as the “Two-Source hypothesis” because it holds that Matthew and Luke used two major sources: Mark and Q.

Note that the idea of a Q source (which might have been written or oral) is only needed if you assume that Matthew and Luke wrote independently of each other. If you hold one of the views mentioned above, you don’t need to propose a Q source. For example, Luke could have drawn all of the so-called “Q material” directly from Matthew under the Augustinian, Griesbach, or Farrer hypotheses. Alternately, Matthew could have taken all of this material directly from Luke under the Wilke hypothesis.

The Two-Source theory was first proposed in 1838 by the German scholar Christian Hermann Weisse (1801-1861) and was elaborated by various others—most notably by the English scholar B. H. Streeter (1874-1937).

In 1911 and 1912, the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a pair of decrees that insisted Catholic biblical scholars were to teach that Matthew wrote first, thus ruling out the Two-Source hypothesis.

These decrees were disciplinary and provisional, and they were ultimately superseded. The Two-Source view then became dominant among Catholic scholars.

This was acknowledged by Benedict XVI, before he became pope and while he was himself the head of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. In an address to the commission, he noted that the Two-Source theory is “accepted today by almost everyone” (Joseph Ratzinger, On the 100th Anniversary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission).

Upon coming into office, Pope Francis wrote a letter to an Italian newspaper that indicated that he, personally, adheres to the idea that Mark wrote first:

“I would say that we must face Jesus in the concrete roughness of his story, as above all told to us by the most ancient of the Gospels, the one according to Mark” (“Pope Francisco writes to La Repubblica: ‘An open dialogue with non-believers,’” La Repubblica, Sept. 11, 2013; online at repubblica.it).

Pope Francis did not indicate whether he also believes there to have been a Q source—and letters to newspapers do not count as acts of the papal Magisterium—but this does indicate the degree of acceptance that Markan priority has achieved in Catholic circles.

 

How Certain Can We Be?

By the mid-twentieth century, the Two-Source hypothesis had achieved such dominance that it was often presented as one of “the assured results of modern scholarship” (to use a common phrase).

This began to change, with a notable number of scholars challenging it and with even its advocates making more modest claims on its behalf.

For example, Joseph Fitzmyer—an advocate of the Two-Source hypothesis—famously said:

“The history of Synoptic research reveals that the problem is practically insoluble. As I see the matter, we cannot hope for a definitive and certain solution to it, since the data for its solution are scarcely adequate or available to us” (“The Priority of Mark and the ‘Q’ Source in Luke,” Jesus: Man’s Hope, 1:132).

Advocates of other views have often agreed that the best we can achieve is a probable solution, not a certain one.

This is because the data we have is limited and often difficult to assess. Basically, it comes in two forms: external and internal.

External data consists of what we can learn about the Synoptic Gospels from outside sources, such as the Church Fathers. Internal data consists of what we can learn by comparing the Synoptic Gospels with each other. Both kinds can be difficult to assess.

 

Mixed Messages

The external data can be difficult because, although the Augustinian hypothesis eventually became the majority view and remained so for a long time, the Church Fathers do not all agree, particularly in the period before Augustine.

This can be seen by looking at what they have to say about Mark. According to Augustine, Mark was the second Gospel to be written, after Matthew and before Luke. He wrote: “Mark follows [Matthew] closely, and looks like his attendant and epitomizer” (Harmony of the Gospels I:2[4]).

But Clement of Alexandria, the late-second century head of a catechetical school in Mark’s see of Alexandria, may have held Mark was written third—after both Matthew and Luke, for he said the Gospels with the genealogies (Matthew and Luke) were written first (Eusebius, Church History 6:14:6-7). This would be in keeping with the Griesbach hypothesis.

The earliest statement we have comes from the early second century historian Papias, who in turn quotes a first century figure known as “John the Presbyter” or “John the Elder” (Greek, presbuteros = “elder”). This figure was a disciple of Jesus. He is sometimes identified with John son of Zebedee, but a careful reading of Papias indicates that he may have been a separate individual (see Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, ch.s 2, 9, 16).

According to John the Presbyter,

“Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and not to state any of them falsely” (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:15).

Since John the Presbyter is a first century source and a witness of Jesus’ ministry, his testimony regarding Mark’s composition has great weight.

It was also held by many in the early Church (see Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men 9 and 18) and by a number of modern scholars (including Richard Bauckham, Martin Hengel, and Benedict XVI) that John the Presbyter had a hand in writing at least some of the Johannine literature in the New Testament, especially 2 and 3 John, which are addressed as being from “the Presbyter/Elder” (2 John 1, 3 John 1; see Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth 1:224-227 for his view of John the Presbyter’s role in the origin of the Johannine books).

If this is true then his testimony regarding the origin of Mark’s Gospel would have even greater weight. It would represent the testimony of one of the other authors of the New Testament! (The same would be true if John the Presbyter were identified with John son of Zebedee.)

Either way, if Mark’s Gospel is based on his memory of things Peter preached and if 90% of Mark is in Matthew then it would seem that Mark wrote first and Matthew borrowed from him. It would seem hard to say that Mark is based on Peter’s preaching if 90% of it came from Matthew.

However, some advocates of the Griesbach hypothesis have proposed that Peter gave a series of lectures based on Matthew and Luke and that Mark had these lectures transcribed (so Dom Bernard Orchard, David Alan Black). In this way, Mark could be based on Peter’s preaching and still have so much of its material taken from Matthew.

This, however, does not seem to correspond to what John the Presbyter says: He states that Mark “wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ” based on Peter’s preaching, “with no intent of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses.” The stress is placed on Mark’s after-the-fact memory of Peter’s preaching, not on the transcription of a set of lectures.

 

Internal Evidence

If the external evidence can be difficult to assess, so can the internal evidence that scholars have gleaned by comparing Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The literature on the subject is vast, often brain-crushingly detailed, and frequently the arguments don’t prove what they’re supposed to.

For example, one argument B. H. Streeter proposed for Mark being the first Gospel is that its literary quality is not as high as Matthew or Luke. This is true, and it is especially clear in the Greek text. The claim is that Mark reads like a first attempt at a Gospel and that Matthew and Luke then expanded on and polished the material, producing Gospels of higher literary quality.

This argument has weight, but it is not conclusive. It is possible that Mark could have decided to do an abbreviated Gospel, and—in his retelling of the material—he revealed that he was not as accomplished an author.

Another argument is based on the fact that the Synoptics often present the same stories and sayings in a different order. Streeter argued that, when this happens, either Matthew tends to follow Mark’s order or Luke does. Matthew and Luke virtually never agree with each other against Mark’s sequence. This suggested to him that Matthew and Luke were using Mark as a source but occasionally changed the sequence in which they presented material.

Unfortunately, this argument—like many—is reversible. As later scholars pointed out, the same phenomenon can be explained if Mark was compiling his material from Matthew and Luke. At any given point, it would have been natural for Mark to follow Matthew’s order or Luke’s order, but he couldn’t do both when they were different.

The difficulty in finding conclusive arguments—based on internal or external evidence—has convinced many scholars that we simply can’t have conclusive proof. The best we can hope for is a probable solution, and some scholars don’t even hold out that hope and think the matter is unknowable.

This leads to a final question.

 

How Important Is the Synoptic Problem?

The answer will depend on your perspective. For some scholars, the subject is crucially important. This is particularly the case for those engaged in “the search for the historical Jesus.” These scholars tend to think that the true Jesus—“the Jesus of history”—has been obscured by successive layers of tradition and dogma and so been transformed into “the Christ of faith.”

For them, finding the truth about Jesus involves peeling away and discarding the layers of tradition, and if you want to do that then it matters very much which Gospel was first and whether lost sources like Q were being used. You need to identify the earliest material you can so that you can dismiss later material as saying something about the Church rather than about Jesus.

This is why it’s important for apologists to know about the Synoptic problem. Regardless which solution (if any) one thinks persuasive, apologists need to be able to interact with the kind of arguments involved. Otherwise, they will be unprepared to deal with those who use the relationships among the Synoptics to discredit them.

From the perspective of faith, the matter is much less urgent. Knowing how the Synoptic Gospels were composed can help shed light on particular passages, but it is not necessary for a basic understanding of Jesus and his message. From a faith perspective, the Gospels are inspired by the Holy Spirit and are reliable records of Jesus’ life and teachings.

In other words, the Jesus of history is the Christ of faith.

Did God Deceive Jeremiah?

jeremiahThe readings you heard at Mass on Sunday say that God “duped” Jeremiah.

Wait . . . what?

How could an all-holy God “dupe” or deceive anybody?

What’s going on here?

 

Let’s Start with the Text

The readings for the 22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A), contain a passage from Jeremiah, which reads, in part:

You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped;
you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.
All the day I am an object of laughter;
everyone mocks me [Jer. 20:7].

“Duped”?

Okay, let’s start by noting that “duped” is a tin-eared translation. The word is too colloquial and comes of as jarring in this context.

How does the verse read in other translations? Here it is in the RSV:CE:

O Lord, thou hast deceived me,
and I was deceived;
thou art stronger than I,
and thou hast prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all the day;
every one mocks me.

Hm. It doesn’t have the jarring lurch into the colloquial, but it still has carries the implication of God actively doing something evil by deceiving someone.

 

The Language of Direct Attribution

Now, the Old Testament does have a mode of language in which—sometimes—everything that happens is attributed directly to God.

This happens, for example, when 2 Samuel 24:1 says God moved David to take a census that he shouldn’t have, whereas 1 Chronicles 21:1 says the devil moved him to do it.

2 Samuel is using the language of direct attribution, where the bad thing that happened (David’s census) is attributed directly to God, whereas 1 Chronicles uses a more refined mode of language that recognizes the bad thing that happened was prompted by the devil, with the implication that God allowed it.

The language of direct attribution is an ancient way of showing the fact that everything happens under God’s providence, but this mode of language does not distinguish between things that God intends and actively causes and those things that he merely allows.

When this mode of language is in use, bad things are spoken of in a way that directly attributes them to God.

In reality, God is all-holy and does not do anything evil. He tolerates evil with a view toward bringing good out of it. Thus the Catechism states:

The fact that God permits physical and even moral evil is a mystery that God illuminates by his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose to vanquish evil. Faith gives us the certainty that God would not permit an evil if he did not cause a good to come from that very evil, by ways that we shall fully know only in eternal life [CCC 324].

But, particularly in the Old Testament, they didn’t always make this kind of distinction and had a way of speaking that attributed everything—good or bad—directly to divine agency.

Is that’s what is happening in Jeremiah 20:7? Did Jeremiah get into the role of prophet not knowing what would happen to him and the suffering he would experience, so now he is using that mode of language?

That would be one way of solving the problem, but there are others . . .

 

The Language of Subjective Feeling

Scripture has another mode of language in which a person speaks his feelings without necessarily implying that what he says is to be taken literally. He may be expressing his feelings using hyperbole (i.e., exaggeration to make a point).

A jubilant example of this occurs in Psalm 108:2, where the psalmist cries:

Awake, harp and lyre; I will awaken the dawn!

This means that the psalmist is really jubilant and wants to go on and on praising God with song.

It need not literally mean that he will stay up all night praising God. (Indeed, I don’t have any evidence that Psalm 108 was used exclusively in all-night prayer services.)

It certainly does not mean that the psalmist will sing so long and so loud that he will literally awaken the sun from its slumber and cause it to come up.

We thus might suppose that Jeremiah is doing something similar, only with a negative emotion instead of a positive one.

Perhaps he didn’t realize what he was getting into by becoming a prophet and now he feels like he was deceived. On this theory, he would just be “venting” to get it out of his system, without it being literally the case that God tricked him.

And there is another way of looking at the text . . .

 

Look Closely at the Verb and the Context

The verb being translated as “dupe/deceive” is pathah, and while it can mean these things, it also has other meanings, and in this context it may well have one of those.

Writing in the Word Biblical Commentary (vol. 26, Jeremiah 1-25), Joel Drinkard writes:

The verb pathah is variously translated as “deceive, seduce, persuade.” . . .

[D]espite the common English translation of pathah as deceive (KJV, RSV), the context does not indicate that Yahweh has in any way deceived Jeremiah: from his call experience on, Yahweh has warned Jeremiah of the opposition he would encounter.

The context rather suggests the meaning of persuasion. Clines and Gunn suggest that the word pathah deals especially with attempts, not necessarily success, in persuading, hence the title of their article, “You Tried to Persuade Me.…”

However, in this passage, the context makes clear that Yahweh was quite successful: Yahweh persuaded and Jeremiah was fully, completely persuaded. Yahweh’s persuasion overpowered (khazaq) Jeremiah, and Yahweh overcame (yakol) [comment on 20:7, bibliographic references omitted].

An example of where God warned Jeremiah about the trials he would face as a prophet is found right at the beginning of the book, in Jeremiah 1:18-19:

And I, behold, I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people of the land. They will fight against you; but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, says the Lord, to deliver you.”

So while it could be that the text is using the language of direct attribution or the language of subjective feeling, we don’t have to go that far. It is also possible—and, in view of God’s warnings to Jeremiah, perhaps even probable—that the verb is just being used in the sense of “persuade” rather than “deceive” or (cringe!) “dupe.”

What Now?

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Hah! A Tiny Biblical Mystery Solved

st-paul-baptizingI just realized the solution to a minor biblical mystery.

There is a famous passage in 1 Corinthians, where Paul is rebuking the Corinthian Christians for forming factions around different Church figures, and he writes:

Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

I am thankful that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptized in my name (1 Cor. 1:13-15).

Then he writes:

I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any one else (1 Cor. 1:16).

Paul clearly forgot about having baptized the household of Stephanas, but something jogged his memory.

What was it?

At the very end of the epistle, we read about a group of Corinthians who had come to visit Paul and were with him at the time. He writes:

Now, brethren, you know that the household of Stephanas were the first converts in Achaia [i.e., Greece], and they have devoted themselves to the service of the saints; I urge you to be subject to such men and to every fellow worker and laborer. I rejoice at the coming of Stephanas and Fortunatus and Achaicus, because they have made up for your absence;  for they refreshed my spirit as well as yours. Give recognition to such men (1 Cor. 16:15-18).

A-hah! Stephanas was with Paul at the time the letter was written!

That gives us a very good idea what–or rather, who–jogged Paul’s memory: Stephanas himself!

In all likelihood, Paul was dictating away, he mentioned baptizing Crispus and Gaius and then moved on, and then Stephanas piped up with something like, “Um, you baptized my household as well.”

And so, having been reminded, Paul mentioned them as well and–lest he forgot anyone else–said he didn’t remember if he baptized anyone else.

Heh. I love little discoveries like that–and imagining the human dynamics at play in the event, such as Stephanas’s embarrassment at having to correct Paul and Paul being embarrassed that he forgot Stephanas’s household and possibly others.

It would have been particularly embarrassing for him to realize that he had forgotten that he baptized the household of Stephanas since, as he says in the second passage, they were the very first converts in Greece!

Questioning Q

Q fadeIn a previous post, I looked at the hypothetical document Q, which most contemporary Bible scholars think was used by Matthew and Luke when they composed their Gospels.

The reason they think this is that there are 235 verses in Matthew that are paralleled in Luke but not in Mark or John.

The proposal is that there was a document in the early Church that contained (roughly) these 235 verses and that both Matthew and Luke copied from it.

That proposed document is commonly called Q.

 

Hypothetical vs. Lost

Previously, I pointed out that the Q document is not simply lost.

There are lots of documents from the ancient world that we know existed even though they are now lost. We can be confident that these works existed because the ancients talk about them in their surviving writings.

But Q is not in that category. We don’t have any ancient references to it. It isn’t just a lost document; it’s a hypothetical lost document. That means we must be more cautious about its existence than the lost documents that we know existed.

Here’s another reason we should be cautious . . .

 

A Unique Document?

If it existed, Q seems to have been a unique document. We are not aware of other documents of the same kind. In other words, Q does not fall into a recognized literary genre.

You will often hear the opposite. Specifically, you will hear that Q belongs to the same genre as the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, which was rediscovered in 1945 in Egypt and published in 1956.

The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings that are attributed to “the living Jesus.” A few of these involve a brief dialogue with another character, but there is no story—no narrative—to the Gospel of Thomas.

Many have claimed that Q belongs to the same genre as Thomas because a lot of the verses paralleled in Matthew and Luke are sayings of Jesus.

The difficulty is that, unlike the Gospel of Thomas, the hypothetical Q document is not simply a “sayings gospel.”

 

Narrative in a Sayings Gospel?

If it existed, Q included a large number of narrative elements. These are documented by Mark Goodacre in his book The Case Against Q (pp. 170-185).

There, he shows that the hypothetical Q would go beyond sayings and have a narrative structure as follows:

  1. Q introduces John the Baptist, apparently before it introduces Jesus (Q 3:2), who is located in the region of the Jordan (Q 3:3; note: In contemporary scholarship, citations attributed to Q are based on the verses in Luke, so Q 3:2 is found in Luke 3:2).
  2. There, people come to him to receive his baptism (Q 3:7) and John warns them to bear fruit befitting repentance (Q 3:8).
  3. Then John begins contrasting himself and his baptism with the one who comes after him, who will have a greater baptism (Q 3:16-17).
  4. Jesus is then introduced, there is a reference to the Spirit descending on him, and he is indicated to be God’s Son (Q 3:21-22).
  5. The Spirit then takes Jesus to the wilderness (Q 4:1), where he is tested by the devil with regard to whether he is God’s Son (twice: “if you are the Son of God . . .” Q 4:3, 9).
  6. Then Jesus goes to “Nazara” (Q 4:16).
  7. Jesus then gives a major discourse (Q 6:20-49).
  8. Q then notes that after Jesus finished these sayings he entered Capernaum (Q 7:1). This is a very clear indicator of narrative structure, particularly in an alleged sayings gospel.
  9. We then have the healing of the Centurion’s servant (Q 7:3, 6-10).
  10. Then John the Baptist hears what is going on with Jesus and, apparently unable to come himself, sends messengers to ask if Jesus is the one after all. Jesus responds by pointing to the many miracles he has done and his preaching of the good news and urges John not to disbelieve (Q 7:18-23).
  11. When John’s disciples has left, Jesus speaks to the crowd, he reminds them of when they went out to see John (referenced earlier in Q), and he pays tribute to John (Q 7:24-28).
  12. Afterward, Jesus pronounces woe on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum for failing to respond to the wonders he did in them (Q 10:13-15).

Goodacre goes into more detail than we can here, but the point is made: This is a narrative; it’s a story. It’s not just a collection of Jesus’ sayings.

It has a geographical progression (Jordan, the wilderness, Nazara, Capernaum); it has elements pointing forward and backward (e.g., the early indication that Jesus is the one to come, followed by the later questioning of whether this is the case); there are narrative transitions between one unit and the next; and it contains at least one miracle account, while referring to many more being done.

It is only after this narrative sequence that Q would have been largely composed of sayings, and that places it in what seems to be a unique category: a work that would start as a narrative and then become a sayings collection.

How does that compare to other ancient sayings collections?

 

Actual Sayings Collections

There were sayings collections in the ancient world—and not just Thomas. Proverbs and Sirach spring readily to mind.

It is common for such collections to have a brief statement at the beginning about who originated the sayings, but in none of these cases is there a big narrative about that person.

Proverbs does not begin with a biography of Solomon but with the simple statement, “The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel” (Pr. 1:1).

Sirach does not begin with a biography of Sirach but is prefaced by a brief, non-narrative introduction by his grandson, who translated the book from Hebrew into Greek.

Thomas begins with the statement, “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded.”

In none of these cases do we have anything like the lengthy, complex narrative that can be reconstructed from the Q material.

Ancient Judeo-Christian sayings collections appear to have been just that: sayings collections, not sayings collections preceded with an extensive narrative about the person from whom the sayings came.

 

More Caution on Q

If there was a Q document, it does not appear to have belonged to a known genre of Jewish or Christian writing from the time.

This means that we have extra reason to be cautious about whether it existed. Not only are we talking about a document that is lost and hypothetical, it is also of an otherwise unknown, unattested type.

It would be one thing to propose a lost document that fits a known type—which is why Q advocates frequently appeal to the Gospel of Thomas as a parallel, though the comparison does not hold up. It is another thing to propose a lost document that does not have any parallels in the relevant ancient literature.

We thus have another reason to be cautious about the existence of Q and another reason to look at alternative explanations of the 235 verses Matthew and Luke have in common—like the idea that one Evangelist used material from the other.