Beyond Literary Dependence and Independence

Last updated on: October 14, 2009 at 1:56 pm by James F. McGrath

Beyond Literary Dependence and Independence 2009-10-14T13:56:00-04:00 James F. McGrath

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I just finished reading Mark Goodacre’s book The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and Synoptic Problem. I now see why he has sometimes found it so frustrating talking to people like me who take Q for granted and repeat common claims that he’s sought to investigate in his book, and often found to wanting – or at best, less clear-cut than is often assumed.

On the one hand, even after reading the book I still find it unlikely that Luke used Matthew’s Gospel as a source in the sense of having it open in front of him as he composed his Gospel. I previously posted on how the infancy narratives seem to me to fit poorly with a scenario of direct literary usage of Matthew by Luke or vice versa.

If one takes Matthew’s Gospel and tries to follow the geographical and temporal flow, here’s what one gets. The first place Jesus’ family is said to be is in Bethlehem. When the magi arrive they find them in a house. Herod’s decision to slay all male children 2 years and under after inquiring when the star appeared suggests that the author does not think Jesus is a newborn at this point. The family flees to Egypt, and when they want to go home their instinct is to return to Judea. It is only because they are afraid of Archelaus (and warned in yet another dream) that they go to Nazareth. If one had only this Gospel, they would understand Jesus’ family to have been from Bethlehem and that they went to Nazareth later as a necessity.

In Luke’s Gospel, on the other hand, Mary and Joseph are from Galilee. They go up to Bethlehem because of a census, and after a little over a month (according to Leviticus 12 they go up to Jerusalem not much more than a month after Jesus is born. In Matthew’s Gospel they would presumably avoid Jerusalem as Herod’s capitol, but in Luke they make a “public” appearance. We are then told that after they had done all that the Law required, they returned to Nazareth in Galilee, their hometown.

Although I can perhaps imagine Matthew modifying Luke out of a concern to have Jesus’ family’s hometown be Bethlehem, it still seems hard to imagine either of these authors using the other as a source which they have open to hand while composing their own work, and yet ending up so divergent, even contradictory, on not only specific details but on the overall narrative flow.

I have been careful thus far to specify a scenario in which one Gospel’s author has the other there before him when composing. If there is something that I particularly valued in Mark Goodacre’s book, it was his recognition that the dichotomy between literary dependence and independence of Gospels is a false one. The “alternating primitivity” of Matthew and Luke is explicable in terms of Q, but also in terms of one Gospel’s author knowing the other’s, and yet also knowing a story or saying independently of (i.e. before and apart from encountering it in) that written source (p.188).

Once we begin to entertain such a scenario and reflect on the details, it becomes clear that there is a whole range or spectrum of possible ways that two texts may be related in a first-century context. The two may be completely independent, or on the other extreme, another Gospel may have been open and the author may have copied word-for-word directly from his source. In between, there is the possibility that one author heard another Gospel read at some earlier time, but did not have a written copy available when composing his own Gospel. He may have heard that other Gospel read aloud once, or repeatedly, in its entirety or in part. He may have read it (once or many times, in part or in its entirety), but not had a copy available to him when composing his own Gospel. Or he may have had that Gospel available, but because of the nature of ancient composition, he may not have looked things up. He may have had an assistant who read a passage out loud to him when necessary, without the author actually reading or copying the text word for word. And as Mark Goodacre pointed out, even if the author had a source before him, that doesn’t mean that in any specific case he would necessarily have copied the source. This might be due to disagreement with the story, or to prior knowledge of it. It is easy to imagine Luke, for instance, glancing at Matthew or having it read aloud to him, and stopping before the end of a story because he already knows it – although from our perspective it turns out that Luke knew it slightly differently than Matthew did.

In view of all these possibilities, the most crucial question seems to me to no longer be “Did Luke know Matthew?” but “How, if at all, could we tell apart any of these various scenarios?”

The role of oral tradition is thus taken seriously by Mark Goodacre, but is perhaps not given sufficient credit for its potential to convey even a few verbatim words at times. For instance, on pp.157-160, he looks at the Matthew-Luke agreement on adding five identical words in Greek where Mark lacks them: the words “Who is the one who struck you?” in Matthew 26:67-68//Luke 22:64. In a footnote, it is asked whether oral tradition could account for reproducing 5 words verbatim in the same context.

The answer to this last question seems to be “yes”. Unless one posits John’s knowledge of the Synoptics, then we have an instance of just such a verbatim agreement:

John 5:8 εγειρε αρον τον κραβαττον σου και περιπατει
Mark 2:9 εγειραι και αρον σου τον κραββατον και περιπατει

While there are variant readings in the manuscript tradition which might suggest that more precise agreement was brought about subsequently by scribes harmonizing the two, nevertheless we have roughly 5 words exactly the same even if such factors are taken into consideration. This suggests that, although Mark and John tell variations on the same basic story or tradition, in fact diverging in many important respects on the details, even so certain phrases could remain largely fixed in the collective memories of earliest Christianity in those diverging and developing traditions.

Although there is much more work to be done, the recent attempts by scholars to do quantitative research on the capacity of human memory to recall verbatim, and the gist, is extremely helpful.

So what is my conclusion? I’m not sure I can truthfully claim to have one! On the one hand, I am not only open to but already involved in “altering the default setting” when it comes to literary dependence and oral tradition. I am particularly appreciative of the ways in which Mark Goodacre has brought not only oral tradition but narrative criticism and even film studies to bear on the subject of the Synoptic problem. But I am not yet ready to jettison the Q hypothesis. It has served me and others well as a working hypothesis on the relationship between Matthew and Luke. In order to modify my thinking on this subject, I would really need to make the time to study the whole of Matthew and Luke, in detail, in Greek. I was particularly struck by how, at one point in his book, Mark Goodacre notes how John Dominic Crossan allowed an English translation to lead him to a conclusion that the underlying Greek texts did not justify (pp.149-150). I can do little more at this stage than plan to survey the evidence in detail in coming years, with recent insights into oral tradition, memory, and ancient compositional practices kept in mind.

But one thing I can already say for certain at this stage – I will try to no longer use some of the rhetorical dismissals of Q-skepticism that have sometimes been used (as much as I think phrases like “unscrambling the egg with a vengeance” are delightfully evocative). And I can also strongly recommend that those interested in the Synoptic problem read Mark Goodacre’s book The Case Against Q!

One final note: I found myself wondering whether the appropriate way of referring to Mark’s scholarship was by his first name, last name, or both. In a review in a journal, I would refer to him by his last name even if we are on a first name basis in other contexts. But what about on a blog? Is this a formal or informal interaction? Is anyone aware of any discussion of this topic in the blogosphere or elsewhere?

Thanks, Mark, for your stimulating, insightful and interesting work on this subject!

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