Historical questions

[Julia_Mae]

There is a short article here with the basic arguments for Q:

• Sometimes the exactness in wording is striking, for example, Matthew 6:24 = Luke 16:13 (27 and 28 Greek words respectively); Matthew 7:7–8 = Luke 11:9–10 (24 Greek words each).
• There is sometimes commonality in order between the two, for example Sermon on the Plain/Sermon on the Mount.
• The presence of doublets, where Matthew and Luke sometimes each present two versions of a similar saying but in different context, only one of those versions appearing in Mark. Doublets may be considered a sign of two written sources, i.e., Mark and Q.
• Luke mentions that he knows of other written sources of Jesus’ life, and that he has investigated in order to gather the most information.

I didn’t find anyplace Luke said there were other written sources, though I imagine there were probably many letters and sets of letters and things written circulating around.

The “protoMatthew” hypothesis makes sense to me.

 

[SGWessells]

Also, each author is unique, with his own way of thinking, as God created them.

There is somewhere over the internet a post regarding this same topic, where the author states this is simply a contradiction of the Gospels.

Of course, this is absolutely false, for God, who does not deceive nor cannot be deceived, cannot contradict Himself either. We, Catholics accept all Christ left for us in His Church, use the Catechism, as the manual of instruction when reading the Word of God, and ask the Holy Spirit to guide us in our journey.

Hence, to use, say, the time indicators in Mark one would have to assume that the events happened in the exact order as they appear in that Gospel. Which puts you in a dilemma if you look at Matthew and Luke: which Evangelist then represents the correct sequence? And is it not equally possible that Mark was the one who changed things instead of Matthew or Luke?

So how is the second quote not a demonstration of contradiction? Or if that isn’t enough for you, what did the disciples do between the resurrection and Pentecost? Matthew says they went to Galilee, Luke says they stayed in Jerusalem. When did the Holy Family have time to go to Egypt? According to Luke, they stayed in Bethlehem until “the days were completed for their purification according to the Law of Moses” (40 days), after which they “took [Jesus] up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord” (Luke 2:21,22). After some prophecies, Luke 2:39 says, “when they had fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of the Lord, hey returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.” No two year vacation is mentioned, nor is there time for one. After three months (8 days for circumcision, 40 days for purification) they were back home in Nazareth.
Matthew, on the other hand, wrote his story of the journey to Egypt to make a parallel between Jesus and Moses, as the NAB notes show. Of course, if they had never gone there, the parallel would not exist.
At any rate, they start out being already in Bethlehem in Matthew’s gospel, then after the return from Egypt, Joseph heard that Archelaus, a son of Herod, ruled in Judea, so he was afraid to return there. So, Matthew continues, being warned in a dream, he departed for the region of Galilee [ruled by someone else], 2:22b. “He went and dwelt in a town called Nazareth,” verse 23 says. Now this is not how one writes of someone returning to their hometown, as in Luke. Instead of “their own town of Nazareth,” Mat. has them going to some strange town they had never seen, to escape Archelaus in Judea. But if Nazareth had been their home from the beginning, as Luke says, they wouldn’t have had to escape Archelaus, flee to Galilee, and find some obscure little village where no one would find Jesus and kill him; they would just have gone home to Nazareth.
So the two stories cannot be reasonably reconciled. If God inspired both of them, he either inspired them in such a way as to permit downright fiction, or he contradicted himself. You choose.

 

[patrick457]

There is a short article here with the basic arguments for Q:

• Sometimes the exactness in wording is striking, for example, Matthew 6:24 = Luke 16:13 (27 and 28 Greek words respectively); Matthew 7:7–8 = Luke 11:9–10 (24 Greek words each).
• There is sometimes commonality in order between the two, for example Sermon on the Plain/Sermon on the Mount.
• The presence of doublets, where Matthew and Luke sometimes each present two versions of a similar saying but in different context, only one of those versions appearing in Mark. Doublets may be considered a sign of two written sources, i.e., Mark and Q.
• Luke mentions that he knows of other written sources of Jesus’ life, and that he has investigated in order to gather the most information.

I didn’t find anyplace Luke said there were other written sources, though I imagine there were probably many letters and sets of letters and things written circulating around.

The “protoMatthew” hypothesis makes sense to me.

As expected from a theory which some of the finest minds in the field helped to shape and perfect, the Two-Source hypothesis does have some admittedly pretty strong arguments for it. Aside from the ones you mentioned, there are also these:

1.) Luke’s order. Supporters argue that Luke’s arrangement of double tradition material is inexplicable on the assumption that he knew Matthew. While a lot of double tradition in Matthew appears in five blocks of thematically related discourse (5-7, 10, 13, 18, 24-25), the same material appears in Luke’s Gospel in a different format, much of it in a big central section: the travel to Jerusalem in 9:51-18:14. The point is felt so strongly that supporters of the theory have posed this question: if Luke knew Matthew, why would he choose to ‘disrupt’ and ‘demolish’ Matthew’s clear and concise arrangement and scatter the whole thing all over the place? Case in point: the Sermon on the Mount/Plain. If Luke knew Matthew, authors would argue, why would Luke have wanted to disturb and spoil what is usually regarded as one of the finest religious writing of all time and place different parts of it in an unconnected form throughout his Gospel? The implication being that if Luke was aware of Matthew’s Gospel and yet consciously tampered with it, he was a very poor writer.

An important aspect of this argument is that Matthew often seems to find an appropriate Markan context for double tradition while Luke does so rarely. The preaching of John the Baptist and the Temptation, which feature both Markan and ‘Q’ elements, occur in the same context across all three Gospels, but afterwards, Matt and Luke usually diverge in their arrangement of double tradition pericopes.

2.) Luke’s ignorance of Matthean ‘additions’ to Mark. A typical example given is Matthew 12:5-7, which is a Matthean addition to the parallel account in Mark 2:23-28.

Matthew: At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

Mark: One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”

Luke: On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” And Jesus answered them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?” And he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

Other examples given are the Walking on the Water (Matthew 14:23-31) and Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (Matthew 16:17-19). The question asked is, why would Luke have omitted this fresh Matthean martial, if he knew Matthew’s Gospel? It would of course imply that if Luke was ignorant of Matthew in passages like these, he was ignorant of Matthew everywhere, which would make the Two-source theory necessary in order to make sense of double tradition.​

 

[patrick457]

3.) Luke’s lack of Matthean (M) material. This is related to number 2, in that both focus on material present in Matthew but lacking in Luke. The question asked is, if Luke knew Matthew, why did he constantly omit Matthean material in episodes which do not have parallels in Mark, e.g. the Infancy and the Resurrection narratives? At first this argument sounds circular (Luke obviously would not feature M material, by definition), but the point generally made is that it would have been unlikely that Luke would have omitted so much of this rich Matthean material.

Case in point: why would Luke, who was so interested in gentiles, omit the story of the non-Jewish magi coming to pay homage to the infant Jesus? Indeed, why is Luke’s birth narrative radically different from Matthew’s, aside from the bare facts (Jesus was born in Bethlehem and His parents were named Mary and Joseph)?

4.) Alternating primitivity. The argument goes like this: if Luke was aware of Matthew’s Gospel, his versions of double tradition material ought always to be secondary to Matthew’s versions. On that theory, he would, after all, always be writing after Matthew and thus with earlier versions of sayings in front of him, something that, according to most, is not the case. Rather, it seems that sometimes, Matthew preserves a more ‘primitive’ form of a double tradition saying while in others, it is Luke who does so. This, it is believed, is inexplicable if one (Luke) is following the other (Matthew).

One example of an instance in Matthew where it is believed that he preserved the more original form of the saying rather than Luke is Matthew 7:11 (cf. Luke 11:13).

Matthew: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

Luke: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

According to the Two-Source hypothesis, it is more likely that Q (Matthew’s and Luke’s purported source) featured the term ‘good things’, which makes good literary sense of the material that preceded this conclusion, which talks about ‘good gifts’; hence Matthew has kept the more primitive form of Jesus’ words in this case, Luke interpreting Q’s and Matthew’s “good things” as “the Holy Spirit,” in keeping with his special interest on the latter.

This does not pose any problem for the idea of Luke’s awareness of Matthew, but the situation seems to be not always like this. The Two-source theory seems to be demanded by the presence of other occasions of more primitive wording in Luke’s form of double tradition material. The most well-known example given is the Our Father:

Matthew:

“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.”

Luke:

“Father,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread,
and forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation.”

Luke’s more terse version of the prayer is believed to be more original than Matthew’s, because it is thought unlikely that Luke would have pared down the Matthean version so familiar to us. The Q version of the prayer, then, will have probably looked more like the Lukan version, and the extra Matthean parts will be additions distinct to Matthew, such as “our Father in heaven” (since the phrase “your Father who is in heaven” is apparently a favorite of Matthew’s). Likewise the Beatitudes: Luke’s “Blessed are you poor” is thought to be more original than Matthew’s more spiritual “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The reverse idea, wherein Luke derives his more down-to-earth version from Matthew, is thought to be unlikely. In these and other cases, it is felt that the Lukan version is less characteristically Lukan than the Matthean version is characteristically Matthean, a situation easily explicable if both are independently redacting an unknown source, but implausible if Luke is redacting Matthew.​

 

[patrick457]

5.) The distinctive character of the Logienquelle. The four preceding arguments work that by demonstrating that it is impossible to think that Luke knew Matthew, one establishes the plausibility of the Q hypothesis. However, the two-source hypothesis is not simply about the unlikelihood of Luke’s knowledge of Matthew. It is also about the probability of the Logienquelle (‘logia-source’), aka Q. There is therefore, a second category of argument concerning Q’s existence and it is based on the notion that Q makes its presence felt in the Gospels. It distinguishes itself from the other material in the Synoptics not just because it provides a preferable explanation for the phenomenon of double tradition but also because it is held to have a special theology, vocabulary, history, structure and style unique to its own. Q is very different from Matthew and Luke; it is properly a beast of its own.

6.) Q aiding the task of redaction-criticism. A third category of argument, in addition to those from the unlikelihood of Lukan use of Matthew and the distinctiveness of Q, depends on the success of a related discipline known as redaction-criticism. Redaction-criticism, simply put, is the study of the way in which an author ‘redacts’ his source material with a view to ascertaining the theological standpoint of the text and its author. But in order to study the ways in which the author handles his source material, one has to have an idea as to what the source material exactly is.

On the whole, most scholars today have worked with the presupposition that Matthew and Luke used Mark and Q. It is then thought that the success with which the redaction-critics’ work has been done provides a corroboration of the starting-point. What it amounts to is a ‘If-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it’ type of situation, wherein one ought to maintain the status quo in the light of the fine scholarship that the concensus has produced.

The Q-believing majority takes the hypothesis for granted in its studies on the New Testament, and every time it is presupposed, the argument for Q apparently gains more ground. If Q consistently makes sense in so many different studies on the New Testament, it would seem to be a workable theory. And a workable hypothesis might well seem to be a plausible one.

 

[gkrohm]

I have wondered why the Transfiguration was not in John’s Gospel. I would think it would have been like Revelation to John.

Yes, there are many anomalies in the gospel of John. Others that strike me:

1. the absence of a last supper Eucharistic celebration, yet the strongest and most stringent statements about “eating my flesh and drinking my blood” or you will have no life.
2. three journeys to Jerusalem, instead of only one in the explicit text of the synoptics
3. no use of pure parables for Jesus’ teaching
4. a very different account of the Resurrection
5. more explicit and powerful Marian content
6. the account of the Passion has Jesus in total command of the situation demonstrating complete reliance on his Father’s love and ultimate reversal of the death the Roman’s are inflicting on him.

Clearly, the author(s) of John have a unique theological message to share. It is my favorite gospel, though I must admit I don’t always have a ready interpretation of some of the sayings and deeds of Jesus given by the author(s) of John.

Also, Pope Benedict in his masterful work Jesus of Nazareth, makes a good case that John was written (at least its first version) by someone with intimate knowledge of Palestine and contemporary Jewish customs at the time of the historical Jesus.

 

[gkrohm]

Patrick

I really liked your post on “Q” The more I study the sources, the more it makes sense that Matt and Luke relied on Q, though, as you point out, redacting it in different ways to suit their theological purpose.

Cheers!

 

[Jerry-Jet]

Why would the early church have been unaware of Q? Don’t you think they would know the author of Q by name and would want his version in the bible?

Satan made up Q!

And why is it that the current scripture scholar geniuses who believe in Q should be given more credibility than the Early Church Fathers?

Do you hear any of the Early Church Fathers waxing poetic over Q? No!!

Do you think that people died for the word that came from Jesus’ disciples(Matthew and John) and their early disciples(Luke and Mark) or from a MYSTERIOUS Q bunch of sayings that know one knew who had compiled them?

And what percentage of these 20 and 21st century scholars do not believe the FACT of the loaves and the fishes?

How many of them do not believe that Jesus RAISED Lazarus from the dead?

Don’t you think a story of someone rising from the dead would come from the disciples themselves and not a MYSTERIOUS Q source?!

Give me a break!

People don’t die for the word of Q–they do die for the word of the disicples and their disciples who saw the events themselves or were informed of the events by the disciples themselves AND the Holy Spirit!

And are all the former popes for the last 20 centuries who believed that the disciples were the authors–are they idiots?

I’ll tell you this–I’ll believe them and the Early Church Fathers over the current scholars ANY day!

It is beyond the comprehension of modern day “biblical scholars” to believe that the Holy Spirit can inspire a written biblical passage–but they have no problem believing that NON current with the events themselves disciples COPIED sayings that were edited, copied…how much of a leap of Satanic faith is it to DOUBT and believe that the storeis were MADE UP!

That’s what we’re really dealing with here–the “modern scholarship” lie that masquerades as the truth while all the time it does the devil’s will.

And NO SIR!–if you do not believe in Q that doesn’t make you a literalist–a fundamentalist–or any less of a Catholic than people like St. Thomas Aquinas who also never believed in Q garbage!

The only synoptic problem there is is people blieving that the Holy Spirit cannot inspire the scriptures the way it did–I guess the modern scripture scholars feel like the Holy
Spirit needs to get their permission on how the bible should be written!

 

[patrick457]

Patrick

I really liked your post on “Q” The more I study the sources, the more it makes sense that Matt and Luke relied on Q, though, as you point out, redacting it in different ways to suit their theological purpose.

Cheers!

Please don’t be so fast. I gave the arguments for Q first; next I’ll be giving the arguments against it.

 

[patrick457]

Let’s take a break first here. It seems that scholars are unable to talk about the idea of Luke’s knowing Matthew without resorting to rhetorical questions, with exclamation marks, joke quotation marks, humorous imagery, and at times, even ridicule thrown into the mix. So we get to hear of Luke “unscrambling the egg with a vengeance” (in the words of the late Reginald H. Fuller), ‘destroying’ or ‘demolishing’ Matthew’s fine order. Matters are not implausible or improbable, they are ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘inexplicable’.

Part of the reason why strong language tends to be employed in this type of thing is because arguments for the existence of Q tend to occur in places where the scholar has word-limits and the reader’s patience to worry about, such as introductory pieces and dictionary definitions. So what often happens is, rhetorical question and overstatement stand in for patient argumentation. The other reason is probably the conscious imitation and unconscious influence of B.H. Streeter’s seminal work, The Four Gospels (1924), where he attempts to dispose of the theory that Luke used Matthew in stinging rhetorical language (p. 183):

Sir John Hawkins once showed me a Greek Testament in which he had indicated on the left-hand margin of Mark the exact point in the Marcan outline at which Matthew has inserted each of the sayings in question, with, of course, the reference to chapter and verse, to identify it; on the right-hand margin he had similarly indicated the point where Luke inserts matter also found in Matthew. It then appeared that, subsequent to the Temptation story, there is not a single case in which Matthew and Luke agree in inserting the same saying at the same point in the Marcan outline. If then Luke derived this material from Matthew, he must have gone through both Matthew and Mark so as to discriminate with meticulous precision between Marcan and non-Marcan material; he must then have proceeded with the utmost care to tear every little piece of non-Marcan material he desired to use from the context of Mark in which it appeared in Matthew — in spite of the fact that contexts in Matthew are always exceedingly appropriate — in order to re-insert it into a different context of Mark having no special appropriateness. A theory that would make an author capable of such a proceeding would only be tenable if, on other grounds, we had reason to believe he was a crank.

The influence of Streeter’s words has been overwhelming, to no surprise, since the rhetoric is instantly memorable. No one really wants to call Luke “a crank”: they do not want to slander the Evangelist or risk being called stupid themselves. Nor does anyone want to imagine that behind Luke’s Gospel there lies a perverse and inappropriate demolition of Matthew.

Yet another reason for the choice of words may be a feeling of frustration: as I’ve mentioned, one of the arguments for Q is it aiding the task of redaction-criticism. There prevails the attitude that matters are already settled a long time ago: the foundations are laid successfully and people have been building on them without trouble ever since. The Two-source hypothesis could very well be ‘gospel truth’ (pun intended). Q skeptics are thus pretty much a nuisance because it is perceived that they have the nerve of thinking to be able to overturn the scholarly concensus.

A common truism has it that scholars tend to be lazy people. Many scholars are usually hesitant to challenge accepted hypotheses since it would require major reassessments of virtually everything from the bottom up, obviously a very difficult task. The Q theory is so predominant nowadays that it is basically considered almost as an established truth: the student would literally get drenched in it as soon as he steps foot in the world of New Testament studies. The downside of this is that many of the alternative solutions to the Synoptic Problem don’t get much serious consideration either because they are deemed ‘unacceptable’ or ‘unpalatable’. That, or they are simply too obscure to merit any attention.​

 

[patrick457]

The “protoMatthew” hypothesis makes sense to me.

That is in fact what 19th-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, one of the first people to propose the existence of a Q source (An Anglican bishop named Herbert Marsh beat him to it a few decades earlier), thought. He theorized that Papias’ famous cryptic testimony as quoted by Eusebius (Church History 3.39.16) that “Matthew compiled the logia in the Hebrew tongue” may refer to a Q-like document which Matthew may have drawn upon. In fact, Q is still called Logienquelle (‘Logia-source’) in German today, a sort of relic of this original idea. Way before Schleiermacher even came into the scene, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1778 had already posited that a lost Hebrew Gospel was a common source for the Synoptics.

The idea of a source document and Markan priority was first combined together by Herman Christian Weisse (the father of the Two-Source hypothesis) six years after Schleiermacher, in 1838.

 

[Jerry-Jet]

Are the Q scholars smarter than over 1800 years of Catholic theologians? Are they smarter than all of those popes? Are they smarter than St. Thomas Aquinas?

Has the Q hypothesis been supported by the magisterium of the Catholic Church? Have any popes as popes ENDORSED it?

 

[Voco_proTatiano]

Why would the early church have been unaware of Q? Don’t you think they would know the author of Q by name and would want his version in the bible?

Satan made up Q!

And why is it that the current scripture scholar geniuses who believe in Q should be given more credibility than the Early Church Fathers?

Do you hear any of the Early Church Fathers waxing poetic over Q? No!!

Do you think that people died for the word that came from Jesus’ disciples(Matthew and John) and their early disciples(Luke and Mark) or from a MYSTERIOUS Q bunch of sayings that know one knew who had compiled them?

And what percentage of these 20 and 21st century scholars do not believe the FACT of the loaves and the fishes?

How many of them do not believe that Jesus RAISED Lazarus from the dead?

Don’t you think a story of someone rising from the dead would come from the disciples themselves and not a MYSTERIOUS Q source?!

Give me a break!

People don’t die for the word of Q–they do die for the word of the disicples and their disciples who saw the events themselves or were informed of the events by the disciples themselves AND the Holy Spirit!

And are all the former popes for the last 20 centuries who believed that the disciples were the authors–are they idiots?

I’ll tell you this–I’ll believe them and the Early Church Fathers over the current scholars ANY day!

It is beyond the comprehension of modern day “biblical scholars” to believe that the Holy Spirit can inspire a written biblical passage–but they have no problem believing that NON current with the events themselves disciples COPIED sayings that were edited, copied…how much of a leap of Satanic faith is it to DOUBT and believe that the storeis were MADE UP!

That’s what we’re really dealing with here–the “modern scholarship” lie that masquerades as the truth while all the time it does the devil’s will.

And NO SIR!–if you do not believe in Q that doesn’t make you a literalist–a fundamentalist–or any less of a Catholic than people like St. Thomas Aquinas who also never believed in Q garbage!

The only synoptic problem there is is people blieving that the Holy Spirit cannot inspire the scriptures the way it did–I guess the modern scripture scholars feel like the Holy
Spirit needs to get their permission on how the bible should be written!

JerryJet, friend,
Q is NOT PROVEN.
However, we can see in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, alterations which he made to his works, while he was working on them, and by that, we judge them genuine, for notes and alterations are evidence of original thought.
We all assume without question that Albert Einstein started his work with scribblings on the equivalents of cigarette packets. Likewise Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and other greats.
Yes, we have found, and treasure the scribblings of Da Vinci, but what of the others?
Scriblings are scriblings, rubbish to be discarded. The wonder is Da.Vinci’s survived, not that Q is lost.

BTW, I do not denigrate faith, or Faith. But if you are selling a message, you need more.
Lacking real evidence, cogent logical argument, based on probability is a good place to start. Even if it is set aside by facts.
That is how science works.

 

[Jerry-Jet]

Would you consider any of Orchard’s arguments against Q as being scientific?

Does he qualify as a “modern” scholar?

What should the Catholic faithful believe when confronted with modern scholars who support Q and 1800 years of Catholic teaching which doesn’t?

Should current Catholics believe the Pontifical biblical commission of the early days of the 1900s that was supported by papal teaching

OR

“current modern Catholic scholarship”?

As for scientific evidence–if we were to go by that would anyone believe that Jesus ROSE from the dead?

wouldn’t SCIENCE discount the resurrection DESPITE the witnesses of Jesus being truely alive?

I could care less about any “modern scientific scholarship” that would disbelieve the resurrection!

And yes it is a fact–that many so called modern biblical scholars DO NOT BELIVE in the resurrection!

That’s not saying that all scholars do or that scholarship is bad–it is saying that one does need to look at the FAITH of a biblical scholar and asking if he sees the bible through the lense of Catholic teaching and tradition over the centuries.

If he doesn’t–WHO CARES what he has to say?

At one time Martin Luther was a “modern biblical scholar”!

Who cares what he had to say?

Pope benedict XVI has stated that the historical criticism approach to the bible can go too far.

Why don’t people believe the pope when he says that?

Enamored Q lovers don’t have a clue what tradition means!

 

[patrick457]

Would you consider any of Orchard’s arguments against Q as being scientific?

Does he qualify as a “modern” scholar?

What should the Catholic faithful believe when confronted with modern scholars who support Q and 1800 years of Catholic teaching which doesn’t?

Should current Catholics believe the Pontifical biblical commission of the early days of the 1900s that was supported by papal teaching

OR

“current modern Catholic scholarship”?

As for scientific evidence–if we were to go by that would anyone believe that Jesus ROSE from the dead?

wouldn’t SCIENCE discount the resurrection DESPITE the witnesses of Jesus being truely alive?

I could care less about any “modern scientific scholarship” that would disbelieve the resurrection!

And yes it is a fact–that many so called modern biblical scholars DO NOT BELIVE in the resurrection!

That’s not saying that all scholars do or that scholarship is bad–it is saying that one does need to look at the FAITH of a biblical scholar and asking if he sees the bible through the lense of Catholic teaching and tradition over the centuries.

If he doesn’t–WHO CARES what he has to say?

At one time Martin Luther was a “modern biblical scholar”!

Who cares what he had to say?

Pope benedict XVI has stated that the historical criticism approach to the bible can go too far.

Why don’t people believe the pope when he says that?

Enamored Q lovers don’t have a clue what tradition means!

Why not add Mark Goodacre (to whom I am indebted to) into the mix?

 

[patrick457]

Without further ado, the rebuttals against the six arguments for the existence of Q.

1.) Response to Luke’s order.

We’ll look again at B.H. Streeter’s quote:

If then Luke derived this material from Matthew, he must have gone through both Matthew and Mark so as to discriminate with meticulous precision between Marcan and non-Marcan material; he must then have proceeded with the utmost care to tear every little piece of non-Marcan material he desired to use from the context of Mark in which it appeared in Matthew — in spite of the fact that contexts in Matthew are always exceedingly appropriate — in order to re-insert it into a different context of Mark having no special appropriateness. A theory that would make an author capable of such a proceeding would only be tenable if, on other grounds, we had reason to believe he was a crank.

There are problems with this statement, not least that Streeter misrepresents an important fact. As it stands the rhetoric appears convincing because the process described would indeed make Luke “a crank.” The process, however, is inaccurately described.

Most of Luke’s double tradition material do not appear in “a different context of Mark,” because very little of Luke’s double tradition occurs in a Markan context at all. In other words, whereas Matthew often features the material in Markan contexts, Luke rarely does. Most of Luke’s double tradition are concentrated into two sections, 6:20-8:3 and 9:51-18:14, where there is very little use of Mark. So the question we should ask is not ‘Why does Luke place non-Markan material from Matthew in different Markan contexts?’ but rather, ‘Why does Luke place non-Markan material from Matthew in non-Markan contexts?’

The second major problem with Streeter’s statement is that it itself is based on a rather dubious value judgment, one which prefers Matthew’s arrangement over Luke’s. While there is no doubt that Lukan ordering of double tradition is different from Matthew’s, one should not think of the difference as somehow evidencing inferiority to Matthew. After all, it was Matthew’s personal order, and if one pauses to think about it, it is easy to see why Luke would have wanted to change it.

As we have mentioned, Matthew’s Gospel has a distinctive structure to it: there are five major blocks of discourses (5-7, 10, 13, 18, 24-25), each one marked off with: “When Jesus had finished these sayings…” Parallel material between Matthew and Mark occurs to varying degrees in each of these structures, so Matthew 13 is parallel with the shorter parable chapter in Mark 4, and Matthew 24-25 is parallel with the shorter apocalyptic discourse in Mark 13, while other Markan material is interpersed in between these. What we need to ask then is whether it is plausible that Luke would have felt himself obliged to follow Matthew’s highly rigid order. We can answer that Luke is highly unlikely to have done so, since one cannot help thinking that the narrative flow in Matthew is severely and frequently compromised due to the way he arranges discourses. Within the arguments for Q there seems to lie an underestimation of Luke’s ability as a writer, and it kind of shows here.

Perusing through Luke’s Gospel, one can see that he has a certain reticence over long discourses, something that would suggest that he will have been more concerned still with the notoriously excessively long Matthean discourses, e.g. the Sermon on the Mount. While Mark does not have anything as long as the Sermon on the Mount, he still does have a sizeable amount of discourses, one of which is the chapter on parables (Mark 4). Where Matthew has 52 verses in his parallel (Matthew 13:1-52) in contrast to Mark’s 34 verses, Luke shortens it, so that is discourse is only 15 verses long, less than half the length of Mark’s.

Mark’s discourse consists of the parable of the Sower and its interpretation (4:1-20), the Lamp under a Bushel (4:21-25), the Seed Growing in Secret (4:26-29), the Mustard Seed (4:30-32), and a summary (4:33-34). Matthew, with the exception of the Secret Seed, includes most of these parables and much more besides (such as the Weeds, the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl, and the Net). Luke on the other hand, chooses to retain the Sower (8:4-15) and the Lamp (8:16-18), omits the Seed Growing in Secret and the summary, and moves the Mustard Seed someplace else (13:18-19).​

 

[gkrohm]

Let’s take a break first here,.

I found the above statement to be extremely insightful. I also though it was very forthright and balanced. As a student of scripture I learned a great deal from this discussion thread, particularly from Patrick.

Cheers
Greg
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[gkrohm]

Would you consider any of Orchard’s arguments against Q as being scientific? …
Pope benedict XVI has stated that the historical criticism approach to the bible can go too far.

Why don’t people believe the pope when he says that?

Enamored Q lovers don’t have a clue what tradition means!

In my estimation Jerry is, to use an old phrase, being “more Catholic than the Pope” Below is what Pope Benedict says in the forward of the second volume of his master work on the historical Jesus:

“One thing is clear to me: in two hundred years of exegetical work, historical-critical exegesis has already yielded its essential fruit. If scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypotheses, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character. It must learn that the positivistic hermeneutic on which it has been based does not constitute the only valid and definitively evolved rational approach; rather, it constitutes a specific and historically conditioned form of rationality that is both open to correction and completion and in need of it.”

 

[Voco_proTatiano]

We’ll look again at B.H. Streeter’s quote:

If then Luke derived this material from Matthew, he must have gone through both Matthew and Mark so as to discriminate with meticulous precision between Marcan and non-Marcan material; he must then have proceeded with the utmost care to tear every little piece of non-Marcan material he desired to use from the context of Mark in which it appeared in Matthew — in spite of the fact that contexts in Matthew are always exceedingly appropriate — in order to re-insert it into a different context of Mark having no special appropriateness. A theory that would make an author capable of such a proceeding would only be tenable if, on other grounds, we had reason to believe he was a crank.

If we look at Streeter’s conclusion, we can see immediately a huge logical fault.
There is an elephant in the room.

If Luke is derived from Matthew and Mark, a very likely poposition, for we know that Luke presents little of his own witness until he gets to Acts, then, how do we know that the Markan material came directly from Mark, and not via Matthew?

Indeed how do we really know that Q contained no Markan material?

 

[gkrohm]

Voco makes a good point that if Luke had only Matt he could have produced his gospel much the way he did incorporating the elements of Mark in different places than Matt. But isnt it also true that he uses parts of Mark that Matt doesnt and adhers to Markean wording were Mat modifies it? How could this be unless Luke read Mark independently?

Why do you say that Luke “had little of his own witness” until Acts??? There are many sayings/facts in Luke that are not in Mark or Matt. Either Luke made them up or he got them from independent witnesses.