When you can demonstrate the majority of Biblical scholars agree with your somewhat self serving potted history of the landscape I will take your views more seriously.
Well, the way I see it, just because there’s a majority that believes it that doesn’t automatically make it correct.
The reason why I don’t believe in Q is because I don’t really see it as necessary. I never really found the arguments that claim Luke could
not have known Matthew - which is one of the pillars Q is standing on - to be very persuasive. In fact, there are
agreements between Luke and Matthew against Mark that you could take as a sign that the two
are related.
I suppose you do not accept Mark is a source for Lk and Mt either then?
After all this theory denies tradition. The early Fathers all believed Mt was the first Gospel.
Yet the vast majority of scholars cannot agree with this from a study of the texts in Greek.
Those few scholars who disagree say there may have been an earlier version of Mt.
Just as plausible as Q then I suppose
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No. I’m an adherent of the so-called
Farrer-Goulder theory. Accepting Markan priority is not the same as accepting Q. (Admittedly, it’s a rather less-well-known theory, but at the moment I find this the most persuasive.)
The thing about the Fathers is this. Our earliest source Papias is silent about the order of the gospels. If anything, it seems that he even talks about Mark first followed by Matthew. (One scholar named Francis Watson (
Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective) even uses this to claim that Papias actually envisioned Mark writing first.)
The Elder used to say: Mark, in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory—though not in an ordered form—of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him, but later, as I said, Peter, who used to give his teachings in the form of
chreiai (anecdotes / quotes), but had no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the
logia (‘sayings’, ‘oracles’) of the Lord. Consequently Mark did nothing wrong when he wrote down some individual items just as he related them from memory. For he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or to falsify anything. …] Therefore Matthew put the
logia in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew
dialektō (language / style), but each person interpreted them as best he could.
The earliest explicit source that could be read as claiming that Matthew wrote first was St. Irenaeus (who seems to have used/adapted Papias).
Matthew also published a gospel in writing among the Hebrews in their own language, while Peter & Paul were preaching the gospel and founding the church in Rome. But after their death, Mark, the disciple & interpreter of Peter, also transmitted to us in writing what Peter used to preach. And Luke, Paul’s associate, also set down in a book the gospel that Paul used to preach. Later, John, the Lord’s disciple — the one who lay on his lap — also set out the gospel while living at Ephesus in Asia Minor. (
Against Heresies 3.1.1)
Now If you read closely, Irenaeus was not explicitly mentioning the order of composition of the synoptics. While he claims John wrote “later,” he lists Matthew, Mark and Luke with parallel grammatical conjunctions (“also…also…also”). Nor did he mention any literary relationship between the gospels. What we can only get from Irenaeus is:
(1) Matthew published “a gospel in writing among the Hebrews” while Peter and Paul was in Rome. Insterestingly, Irenaeus claims historical priority only for a Hebrew version of Matthew (which is no longer in existence) but does not mention anything about a Greek version of this work.
(2) When Peter and Paul ‘departed’ (died or left Rome), Mark (Peter’s associate) and Luke (Paul’s associate) composed their gospels. No mention of which of the two came first.
(3) John was written “later.”
I said this in a past post:
In the case of the Fathers, there is first the issue of whether these testimonies are independent or not. IMHO the case would certainly be stronger if all the writers who spoke of Matthew writing (a Hebrew gospel) first are independent on each other, since if it turns out that these writers copied (and adapted) what a past writer wrote, it will place a burden on the earlier authors who made the claim, especially St. Irenaeus …] In other words, a lot of things will stand or fall on Irenaeus. So there’s this issue at the first: were these early Christian writers simply repeating what a past writer had written (dependency), or was there this common tradition that they all independently drew from (independency)?
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