After reading more about the issues involved I guess I am in the minority. The Augustinian hypothesis doesn’t seem to be realistic–that is total independence of all the gospel authors.
That’s pretty much why the modern variants of the Augustinian hypothesis themselves posit literary dependence. In one scenario, you have Matthew writing first, Mark using Matthew, and then Luke used both Mark and Matthew. (This is of course slightly different from St. Augustine’s original scenario: where Mark is a condensed version of Matthew, but whether Luke used those two gospels is a little unclear.) We can call the idea that the evangelists relied upon each other’s works the
utilization hypothesis.
As I mentioned, the alternative to the utilization hypothesis/literary dependence to explain the partial agreements between the synoptics is really literary independence, at least in the sense that the evangelists did
not use each other’s gospels. But even then, discounting the idea of the evangelists serendipitously happening to use the exact same structures and same words independently on their own, the alternative is that they all depended on a common source. There’s three possible avenues, all first proposed during the 18th-19th century:
(1)
The proto-gospel theory. As you might know, the 2nd-century Church Father Papias wrote that “Matthew compiled/composed the sayings (
logia) [of Jesus] in the Hebrew dialect, and each one interpreted it as he could,” which is basically our earliest surviving testimony linking Matthew with a gospel of sorts. In fact, later Fathers, based on Papias, thought that there was an earlier version of Matthew’s gospel written in ‘Hebrew’ (Aramaic?), which some of them dubbed ‘the Gospel of the Hebrews’ - with our canonical Greek Matthew being a deritative of said Hebrew gospel. To sum, some scholars basically read Papias as evidence that there was a now-lost ‘proto-gospel’ written before our canonical gospels. Perhaps all three evangelists even made use of this proto-gospel when they composed their own gospels, which would explain the similarities between them. Now this is basically where Q comes from: Q’s full name in German is
logienquelle ‘
logia source’, a nod to Papias’ testimony of a collection of
logia of Jesus in ‘Hebrew’ (or a remnant of this idea). The two-source hypothesis is essentially the proto-gospel theory combined with Markan priority.
(2)
The fragment hypothesis. This is pretty similar to the proto-gospel theory, only instead of a proper document, you have different accounts, long and short, circulating about certain episodes in Jesus’ life which the evangelists pieced and connected together to make a proper narrative. This theory would explain why the gospels are so episodic (composed of stand-alone pericopes) in nature.
(3)
The tradition hypothesis. Instead of a written document, this theory posits that the whole gospel tradition was first developed and passed down orally,
viva voce, by the early Christians: the evangelists translated and transcribed the same oral tradition, which explains the similarities between them. This theory in its original form mainly draws a distinction between Hebrew culture characterized by the oral transmission of small texts with the Greco-Roman cultures of predominantly written large-scale literature.
On the other hand the two source hypothesis and some of its variants that include “Q” I believe are hard to square with the church’s teachings regarding the historicity of the gospels.
You know what’s ironic? Farmer once claimed that Griesbach’s theory was ditched in favor of the two-source hypothesis because it was felt the two-source hypothesis supported the historicity of the gospels more than Griesbach’s did. To explain the mechanics: the liberal Tübingen school of scholars was notorious for dating the gospels very late, even by modern standards (2nd century). Now during the 18th century, there was a growing consensus that Matthew was written
after the period of the eyewitnesses; so assuming that Matthew was written first and that the other gospels were based on it was felt to make the historicity of the gospels suspect. According to Farmer, Griesbach was adopted by the prominent members of the Tübingen school (such as
David Strauss and his teacher
Ferdinand Christian Baur) to develop their theories which resulted in radical skepticism about the gospels’ historical reliability. This to Farmer explains why Griesbach dropped out of the scene when the Tübingen school collapsed: it was (unjustly) connected by critics with the hyper-skepticism of the Tübingen school and was summarily dismissed without a fair hearing. Now the reason why Markan priority and the two-source hypothesis came to the fore, Farmer says, was because it satisfied a theological need: over against the Matthean priority proposed by Griesbach’s theory championed by the Tübingen school, those who wished to lay claim to the reliability of the gospels championed Mark (because we all know Matthew was late
) and Q instead.
If it might interest you, there are even theories which say that
Luke wrote first.
), so back in middle and high school (just three to seven years ago) what me and my friends did was that we usually didn’t answer the workbook using our heads. We would often get told to do a certain number of pages, but whenever we didn’t know/forgot how to solve it, what did we do? We just copied the answers from the workbook to get it over with. I took it up a notch: as part of an (unsuccessful, apparently) attempt to disguise the fact that I was copying the workbook, I would get an answer wrong on purpose here or do a different solution (if I knew an alternative) or skip a page - on the pretext of forgetting how the thing worked - there. But even then, I found out that trying to think of ‘wrong’ answers is tiring, so I invariably end up looking at the answer book again. Of course there would be good/smart students who answered their workbook correctly without ever looking at the answer sheet, but in my particular case, the exact similarities between the answers in my workbook and those in my answer sheet can be explained with the fact that I was de facto cheating by copying the answer. 