The Synoptic Problem — Ian Mills (Duke University)

I'm Ian Mills and I am among other things not Douglas Campbell and we will today be discussing the synoptic problem the synoptic problem has suffered the Talon Eve of being called boring and it is my purpose today not to walk you through all of the data not to explain to you all the competing theories but to put to rest this libelous charge the synoptic problem is the most interesting puzzle in New Testament studies it is not only exegetically significant but theologically relevant and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably a falling scholar and who would you rather be reading the synoptic Gospels are Matthew Mark and Luke not John why not John because John is weird John has no exorcisms John had no parables John has no Pitney short sayings the Jesus silent as a lamp before his slaughter in the Gospel of Mark gives a disposition on the nature of truth before Pilate and John these three Gospels Matthew Mark and Luke tell D tell basically all the same stories and this is the spooky bit they tell them stories in basically the exact same words so John isn't unimportant isn't interesting it's definitely my top five Gospels but these three the Synoptics are going to interest us today because however John relates to these it doesn't relate to them in the same way that they relate to each other there are three parts to the synoptic problem um the good news for those of you who want to preach and don't love unsolved puzzles is that two of the three are completely are as completely uncontroversial as anything is in scholarship right there are no credentialed living academics working a synoptic problem who will disagree with what I have to say about these first two things and that's helpful to you you can find people on the internet but you can always find people on the Internet the good fight rages on on point number three and this is the contentious topic we're going to spend because I think it's useful to you spend the bulwark of bulwark the the larger part of our time on the first two points um we will conclude with three and I will tell you the arguments that are classically use for both sides and what I think um but the first two are what I want to nail down for you so these are that there is a literary that word is in bold for reason a literary relationship between the synoptic Gospels somebody was reading somebody the second is that Matthew Luke are dependent on mark Matthew and Luke we're reading Mark's Gospel when they were writing the gospel they were copying about and the third is the question of how do Matthew and Luke relate to another there are two hundred or so verses in Matthew and Luke that are verbatim parallels that are not found in mark so if Matthew and Luke are reading mark where does that material come from and that's our or how did that happen and that is our third question today and to keep all the theologians in the room interested we'll conclude with an exegetical slash theological payoff um so a payoff to getting the synoptic problem right lend you so let's do one at a time there is is there a literary relationship between the the Gospels I don't know about you but I grew up learning that the GUP the synoptic Gospels were actually all four Gospels were different perspectives on the same story and there's there's something right about that of course um but there's also something really wrong or something that's missing I grew up learning that these were three eyewitness accounts three people standing by a car accident reporting it in different ways that's the classic apologetic metaphor right and that account it has to be wrong and I'm going to show you why I'm not gonna ask you to take my word for pretty much anything today I'm gonna show you why scholars think what they think what um so are the Gospels copying one another so piece of evidence number one hi verbatim strings of agreements I've lined up in all these slides in the gospel text up there I have lined up to the best of my ability the things in parallel doesn't always work we're dealing with favorite languages written in Greek in English um but so we have two stories here this is the Johanna Thunderbolt because this passage is in the Synoptics but sounds like John don't worry about that um and here we have a twenty nine word verbatim string of agreement word for word what stands up different a change in tense a relative pronoun it's the same story word-for-word same order another story this is the story of the faithful faithful slave a rather distasteful story with a really horrible receptive history but we don't even talk about them today we can talk about the twenty eighth word verbatim agreement and this happens over and over and over again there are 23 I've got in my notes there are 23 stories I think of in the synoptic Gospels yeah I got a write with sixteen words or longer strings of verbatim agreements if I asked you three of you to tell me to give me a story of something you all witnessed how long do you think your strings ever been in agreement with me where your four words maybe five words if you have to tell me what Doug she was about Wednesday right exactly maybe abducted something really memorable something mean-spirited about the new perspective for instance you might you might have a slightly stronger verbatim agreement um but twenty thirty words you think I'm seriously skeptical but the case is stronger because you see Doug wasn't teaching the lesson last week in English he was teaching it in Mandarin Chinese and you have to tell me the story in English and that's what we're dealing with here Jesus didn't speak in Greek Jesus spoke in Aramaic so what's the most famous thing Jesus excited what most famous engine said sorry the most memorable Aramaic life Lama Lama sabachthani right or Eli Eli lama sabachthani my God my God why have you forsaken me mark translates and this witness is a perfectly good translation my God my god kind of what did you forsaken me I'm Matthew translates in this way these are both good translations of the Aramaic they have two words in common when you translate Aramaic or any language into another language there's lots of good ways to do that right um you have to you these are both good translations and we have all these changes taking place on and the same thing would have happened when you translated Jesus's teachings into Greek so to go back to you telling you different versions of Doug's lecture we have Doug preaching or speaking in Mandarin Chinese and you were translating it into English independently do you think you'll get a word-for-word 29 agreements but never I mean you're gonna say um 23 of them right you know in a rather small book that is Mark I don't think so um this is color coded the way I had to do color coded I won't have a lot of slides like this because this is hard to follow what I want to draw your attention to here is that um look how little is - Matthew and Luke we have pronouns a conjunction the word and a single phrase and the glory another pronoun another conjunction another conjunction um everything else is pulled over is shared with another gospel same with Matthew the only real significant unique think of these two phrases um if I got your papers for those of your book precepts if I got your papers and they looked something like this you are all getting submitted for plagiarism right and that's what we're dealing with with the Gospels now without the modern opprobrium we attach to plagiarism there's a big question about whether or not people were sensitive to plagiarism in antiquity it's really hard to speak for submitted historiography because we don't have a lot of people discussing that um but we so we have strings of high verbatim agreement in speeches we also have it in narrative material so the purple is what your attention to here purple is places where Matthew and Luke share strings this is the story of Jesus betrayal they're not only reporting Doug's speech in the same words in the same order they are telling me about what he's wearing what's on his slides and what the weather was like that day right these are narrative lengthy narrative agreements word-for-word and if you are holding out oh you are still under way today that the Gospels are using each other this is my favorite so in your book report you say and this is my favorite part right there's an editorial interjection that you're interested in that is what we have in Matthew Mark in the synoptic apocalypse where Jesus is predicting the end of the world he steps aside at one important crucial moment and says let the reader understand and Matthew copies it over well we have established that they both do they both have the same editorial interjection somebody is copying somebody so how about trying to do there is indeed a literary relationship between the three synoptic Gospels Jack what is Mark's relationship to Matthew and Luke why are we asking this question next because it's the next easiest one to solve I will explain to you why so we have Matthew Luke how does mark relate to them there are of course other possible arrangements at this point these basically don't get any attention and you'll see why as we move forward um so we're going to focus on these two is Mark Prior Matthew and Luke or interior mark in priority or mattheum mark or monthly in priority or market interior or I guess um we're commonly called marking priority and the grease bucket hypothesis although you'll see that diagram changed a little bit um so why do we start with mark because in most stories in the synoptic Gospels there is a interesting year pattern look how little Matthew and Luke share against mark there's lots of colors up there but there's almost no orange an orange is where Matthew and Luke are agreeing together against mark what do we have we have a instead of follower we have come one of the most common verbs in the New Testament Gospels um and we have a slight just a syntactical shift right one extra word um easily explicable on coincidence so we call this mark as the middle term middle term was once upon a time an analogy backward people studied Aristotelian syllogisms in high school because nobody does that anymore we can say something like common denominator it is the thing that Matthew and Luke have in common it's the bit that they shared and this is useful because it this is useful because it kind of narrows down the options this is why the other father I put up there don't really make sense these two are basically the only options once you realize mark is the middle turn in most stories it's the place where Matthew and Luke agree they only agree with mark sometimes math you'll agree with mark sometimes little great mark but Matthew and Luke never agree together unless they agree with mark spoiler that's not always true we'll get there interestingly this actually isn't ruled out by the marketing legal term this is just a caveat EP standards one of my favorite Bible scholars of all time makes this mistake but there's other good reasons to rule it out and that's I think the one thing you're gonna have to trust me on today okay traditional arguments for marking priority again this marking priority is basically uncontroversial the last major proponent of this actually died earlier this year and basically there aren't people working at our water significant research to the staffing problem crystal advocated something else um it doesn't mean all the arguments used for this are good in fact the most common arguments used to support marking priority or rather bad so let's just deal with them quickly um mark is a bit simple he uses all present tense verbs and it's not literally true but he uses facing the present tense verbs he repeats the word regally 40 times beginning about her story um he has some grammatical constructions that you know you're a great teacher if you're taking a composition class but say like you can't be better than this there are some geographical problems in mark you someone pointed mark 7 Jesus goes from Sidon to the Sea of Galilee by way of higher that's like going from here to New York City by the way of Savannah Georgia like um so there's some geographical issues and there are at least two places where Marcus seems to well one place for sure he sort of gets the scriptural citation wrong and another place where it's certainly open to interpretation that wrong these urban clumsy things and Matthew makes all these and people have said look clearly this shows that Matthew Luke more later that Marcus earlier in Matthew that could come in and fix the problems the problem with this of course is redactors don't improve things I recommendations gospel a second century gospel and he misses all sorts of stuff up that word problems in the original you can make a text worse by copying off by rewriting it so there's no reason to think that Matthew and Luke are necessarily later on the basis of these three things um again nothing like good or later but these aren't comedians don't think so so let's look at some slightly better considerations not a lot better but a little bit better and then we'll get to the good ones um theological considerations so christological updates do I want to talk about um the qualifier here later but the qualifier here there's an old model of like development of theology that says the earliest authors have the lowest Christology and the later authors have the highest Christology and this I mean this isn't how history works right um it also doesn't make good sense of the data as you've already influenced to you know better um this is not how this argument works that it is not that mark has to be earlier because it has a lower Christology um the idea is that mark not that later authors may be more sensitive to the christological implications of their narratives that mark was so let's take a look what I'm talking about that era wasn't supposed to be there that get away my conclusion um so mark six five and he could do no power he could do no need of power there except that he lays it laid in his hands on a few sick people and cleared them he could do no need of power Matthew has and he did not do many deeds of power there because of their unbelief Jesus could not or did not um I think it's plausible that Matthew is more sensitive to Jesus not being able to do something would be problematic later in church history but even if you don't buy that what kind of picture to begin of Mark who is copying word-for-word of Matthew and decides to change Jesus's decision to Jesus's inability that the kind of person we think would spend their life writing a gospel that who wants to Jesus to be unable to do something I mean it's worth asking oh that's what they were supposed to show um Jesus said to him why do you call me good this isn't a dialogue with why do you call me good there's no good no one good but God that seems possibly to imply the Jesus isn't God or at least he isn't good right maybe that's not what's going on there there's other ways to read the text but it certainly could be read that way and Matthew wipes out the issue and he said to him why do you ask me about what is good right we have Jesus asking a sort of abstract erudite question instead of questioning whether or not he is in fact good again maybe you don't buy that later authors to be more sensitive to theological implications I think there's a good reason to do so if you look at the way people change the text tradition or the way later Gospels are written but even if you don't buy that what kind of author is Mark who copies word-for-word of Matthew and changes why do you ask me about the good - why you call me good okay so we've got a decent set of arguments these aren't awesome these are okay um let's look a little bit more at the redaction profile or gonna explain that redaction profile of Mark if we think he's later a reduction profile is when one author is rewriting a source what what are the changes tell us about that author right there are five editions of marriage Frankenstein and you can see the things she becomes aware of and become sensitive to in her later editions of this text and the things personal your husband was sensitive to you in the third edition um right so let's take a look so we are asking if this is what's happening what do we know about mark well what what is what does mark omit from the Gospels from Matthew and Luke on this supposition um he cuts out the resurrection it cuts out the Nativity are we what kind of Christian do we have who comes across Jesus dying and then there's a story of Jesus coming and being resurrected in sis app don't need that alternatively if we flip this you have a Christians coming across the Gospel of Mark and saying Jesus dies and nothing happens we probably should fix that and in fact scribes of mark fixed that there are five endings to the Gospel of Mark in the text revision and if you wanna hear more about that you can come to my text criticism lecture on March 22nd at 1:30 in the same room um I get the boring topics my friends and professors asked me to flexure on the boring topics because I love them um the Lord's Prayer I won't really go this whole argument go pick up my good acres case against Pew he shows that the Lord's Prayer point-by-point is the sort of thing marked light mark has parallels to most of the elements of the Lord's Prayer so if you came across this wonderful prayer that of course is this you know we all love Lord's Prayer right um and he why would he cut it out what is marked ad right 661 verses in market 600 of them are taking over from a Tony Matthew and some of the others taken over in Luke if we think Marcus later what sort of things is he adding in and what does it tell us about who mark is well he adds in the healing of the deaf-mute which is where Jesus has to stick his fingers in the ears and spit on blind man of Bethsaida where Jesus has to try twice to kill the guy and also uses spitting now it's possible of course market like these stories and added them in that's not inconceivable um he has all these stories of Matthew and Luke where Jesus is able to heal at the power a word is able to heal the distance the Centurion servants and adds in some stories where Jesus has to scoop up bed and throw it on the guy um that's possible but it's also possible that Matthew and Luke were sensitive to the charges that Jesus was a magician and we have these charges a guy named el cysts and the toilet issue some anti-christian texts where Jesus is called a magician and Matthew Luke thought why don't I take these people and put them in other stories and get out the mud and the spitting stuff also mark adds the naked man running away Yosemite it's possible of course mark put in a story about a naked boy running away the never explains it um I'm sure why not sure what though tell us about marking but I think it makes a lot of sense to see Matthew Hicks a naked boy got seven eight Jesus is dying and resurrecting why is this here and cutting it out that's what most people think okay so this this these arguments are also just okay I think they're better than the first three they're also not great if this was all we had on if this was already out in the field would definitely be more split this is not in fact all we have let's do better this is mark Pesce decker i don't know what the S stands for but he's a good man he like him he's a Duke professor and my advisor that dissipation adviser um he put forward he has an article called fatigue in the Synoptics and he put forward something called editorial fatigue he didn't quite invent it there's some Golder and some other people but he has the greatest particular I think I made you all read that so we're not going to go through all of his examples but I want to sort of just make sure you get the picture because this argument is awesome um thorough fatigue has been an author copying out of a source makes a characteristic change to the source and then lapses back in to verbatim copies from their source and in doing so creates an inconsistency didn't get that that's okay we'll go through some examples I mean you guys are all very smart you got it so yeah mark he writes a story and then Matthew comes along and takes over mark but makes it very messy and read change and in doing so creates an inconsistency within his own narrative Jodi my wife looked at this chart and said this doesn't make any sense so if you do this I've done better think of the five thousand on this is one of my favorite examples in mark they went away by themselves to a deserted place right and when Jesus is the disciples are talking to Jesus they say we are here this is this desert place send the people away to the surrounding village and countryside to go get food Luke as so often with Mark rearranges the narrative he sorts out the order with which the episodes happened and he places this story in a different context now the feeding of the 5,000 happens in Bethsaida a major fishing village but when Luke is copying out the material from mark he preserves the statement we are here in a deserted place send go to the surrounding villages and countryside to get food doesn't Jesus respond open your eyes people worry about SATA like their beer they don't have to go to villages let them go get food here no because this is an example of Luke opting out of market making a change that is very very Lucan and then slipping back into verbatim copying that's the bit oh I copy this product let's bring the other one parents Greece don't take my words Marcus another slide for this uh in mark Herod doesn't want to kill Jesus he likes listening to him to them he says he likes listening to him and Herodias wants to kill Jesus right sorry about this thank you sorry Herod wants to kill John the Baptist does not want to kill Don the Baptist in market but Herodias does and then when that the dancing scene happens and he offers her anything that and she asks for John the Baptist Ted Herod is sad because he has to kill someone he doesn't want to kill Matthew erases Herod being sad from the very beginning of that story parody doesn't like John the Baptist he wants to kill John the Baptist but when you get to the end of the story Herod still sad matthew copies out mark's wording here again and says that Herod was grieved but why is he grieved in Matthew he doesn't like John the Baptist in Matthew it's because Matthew was copying out of work hey I just got the wrong heading it's the same okay you see the things I wasn't lying to you this is we have the water oh boy one moment there we go great the grief is preserved even though at the beginning of the story Herod once drawn it off his data in Matthew but mark good the other good documents that's one very good arguments for marking priority here's another one that gets a little bit less airtime and we're not going to be able to go into it because time but historians in antiquity as Darren Bakker and earlier scholar named downing have shown work from one source at a time and there's probably a couple explanations for why this happens partially it's because you don't have writing desks in antiquity you write with the book on your knee and so you can look at one text in front of you but there is no evidence that anyone ever set books out on a table and compared them though Origen in the fourth century and even then I don't think you did you copied one it's called it it doesn't matter you don't need to the point is that something called micro inflation where you are conflating different stories a word at a time or a phrase at a time doesn't happen anywhere in any of our literature in all of antiquity you know yeah um with with a few like blade constraints but so they sort of copying that mark would have had to do to produce his gospel conflating Matthew and Luke seems to have been impossible and this will come up again later in our talk when were you just talking about to you this is another good arguments for marking priority I got a really excellent question during the break to clarify real quick um somebody asked me if it's implausible that mark can metric incited Matthew and Luke widen why is it not implausible that Matthew Myer considered mark um and you look at a diagram real quick actually it's just right here part of the answer is that Matthew and Luke don't have to do any vector translation they're reading one text and copy another gospel if Mark is later then mark has to be going through Matthew Luke and pulling a word from here or word from here a phrase from here a phrase from here this slide that I put up there is not what the design illustrate micro conflation there are some much better examples where we have word for word skipping between Gospels but you can sort of see a phrase for phrase here right this is where Mark is pulling off of on the idea of Mark as a micro conflate er we have mark pulling a word or phrase from Matthew here and then pulling a phrase from Luke here and then we've got a from both the drug back and forth right you see um so mark if he's working with your text is doing a process that basically um is unprecedented whereas if Matthew and Luke are copying out of mark they're just they just have one texting in front of them in their copy well that's helpful let's return to where we finished so that's just a quick review there there is older relationship between the three synoptic Gospels somebody was copying somebody second mark Matthew and there we're copying out of mark and there are lots of bad arguments for this the idea that there's Grammatik Rolexes there are some decent arguments for this the idea that we have increased sensitivity to theological controversies and we have a really impossible redaction of portrait of mark somebody who doesn't want to include resurrection who is interested in Jesus choosing not to do something and changes it to cannot do something right we've got an implausible profile of who mark would be you see the kind of person who decides to go write a very reverential gospel that includes all this stuff so we have Matthew and Luke dependent mark these as I introduced are the uncontroversial bits you will have to search long and hard to find a credentialed living academic who disagrees on these two points my friends the good fight rages on Matthew and Lucas relationship to one another I am slightly unfortunate position of holding a slightly minority and this isn't like a 10% of academia I'm probably with about 40% of academia so but I still in a minority school so as we go through this I will tell you their arguments and the argument to the side I ascribe to but be aware you are hearing and it is slightly slanted version of things just something you're very unfamiliar with so far the joke is on the book which we already revisited which is John a bit of the Synoptics that sounds like John we have here a double tradition this story is not in mark at all and yet hi verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke there has to be some connection between these two and they're not copying out of Mark so where's it coming from so these there are two basic explanations one is that Luke copied out of Matthew this or that there was another source and now lost source now if you move shared a source that we longer have and we call this Q all right I'm gonna get here koala um my German pronunciation is terrible which is the word the German word for source these are both very reasonable explanations I don't want you walking out of my lecture saying Q doesn't exist because we don't have any manuscripts of it this is the sort of argument you find an empty right you don't find this in people who study the synoptic problem all right this is called the Ferrer theory named after a famous British devoted name of Boston Ferrer he does yes Louis's funeral and this is called the to source theory why does their theory to be called the description of the data ours is named after a dude I don't know but I'm a fair theorist as should be obvious um but I'm gonna give you good reasons to believe you exists know if you exists what is it look like these are the stories that are found in Matthew and Luke with hi verbatim agreements that don't have a virgin in mark right and these are all just saying this material so if you existed it seems to have been mostly a collection of savings the introductory matter to most of these where we have Matthew Luke agree against mark or read without mark against but without marking most of these the narrative introductions are different but the words of Jesus or the words of the disciples are verbatim agreements it's a same source strangely with a narrative introduction and we don't have anything else that looks like this in antiquity but here I go slipping into arguments for Ferrer so how would we know who's right this is the question you should ask yourself rather than going through the data and coming up you know trying to fit something into a solution what would it look like for one of these people to be right well you is the answer to a question of why do these two agree if they don't know each other those ignorance of Matthew is the constitutive explanation of Q that is there is no reason to believe in Q apart from Luke's ignorance of Matthew but if Luke doesn't know Matthew and Matthew doesn't know Luke you must exist because we have those hybrid agreements so the Q theory two sorts theory is not sealing there has to be a Q if Luke doesn't know Matthew so how do we figure out whether or not sorry I said if you're about to go flip isn't about there how do we figure out if that's the case Luke doesn't know about the therefore there must be a cute one set of arguments is called alternative alternating and primitivity which is again a fancy phrase unnecessarily that is Matthew and we alternatively preserve the older form of the save so if one is has the older in my place and the other has older in another place then they must be drawing in a common source not one drawing on the other that Matthew often has the older form of the same is uncontroversial but that Luke ever has the older form of the same is where the fight is so Matthew 5:3 the Beatitudes blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven Luke has blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God and cute theorists two sorts theorists would say what's the more likely the historical Jesus said which one looks churchy ER and which one looks more like an Aramaic peasant prophet who is railing against the system right um and most I mean you source theorists all think Luke here looks older so that might be a good reason to think here exists right well maybe I think determining which is older just based on your impressions of the historical Jesus or based on which is Church here is pretty loose ground to stand on and this one of their best examples is even looser because what does Luke love what does the add into mark over and over and over again what is it one of his emphases and acts well it's the plight of the poor and the marginalized right Jesus in Luke Mark has one story where Jesus goes off and deals with the poor the marginalized basically look at these and have over and over again so if Luke comes across the story that says blessed are the poor in spirit and his favorite thing in the world would is Jesus caring about the poor isn't it keeping for him to take out the spirits and have Jesus here again say blessed are the poor i I think so this accords with a independently verifiable redaction tendency in Luke that is we can see Luke does this sort of thing elsewhere right um I kind of forgot about my slideshow the another famous example is in the novel peretta P um Luke in Matthew jesus heals by the Spirit of God and Luke just heals by the finger of God same problem Spirit of God sounds Church your finger of God sounds I don't want to say more than you wish that's affordable it sounds people would say more Septuagint more more like the biblical account right um well maybe I mean but figure of God and Spirit of God is also very difficult um bad news and Luke elsewhere in a number of places ads in anthropomorphizing bodily metaphors for talking about God's agency but finger right um so again the two most popular best examples of alternative productivity are bolster places where Luke makes that kind of change elsewhere in his narrative so I think this argument is a bit of a a bit of a stinker doesn't really get you where you want to go this Luke incorporate Matthew's changes to mark I'm kind of combining a number of arguments if you go over the case against Q this will be broken down to a few but this to me seems like the biggest right if Mark we're arguing that this is looking what how would we know if this is the case if Matthew is copying out of Mark and the Luke is copying out of Matthew what we expect some of these changes made here to stroke you I think the answer quite reasonably is yes and to theists are few theorists are right to point out that in most stories mark is the middle turn that means in most places in triple traditions that is places that Matthew market all have the same story we don't have Luke incorporating Matthew's changes to market so cute theorists have a very reasonable case for the existence of a not extent source for Matthew and Luke we've forgotten about something I said earlier which is that sources in antiquity all these in antiquity you don't mic her complaint so Luke has to pick who is copying her and if he's copying out of Mark then he's not copying out of Matthew at the same time and this is the pattern we see in the Gospels it's true that a lot of the time Matthew Luke II copies out of Mark Matthew and we see this in the narrative sequence of the Gospels the first 10 chapters of Mark are copied over into Luke in the same order with one tiny chick with one important change Nazareth gets bumped off to the front but Luke is copying out of mark but there are places my friends where he does not um there are they are classified unhelpfully into minor and major agreements and um I have to once again acknowledge mark here he's got a great chapter on this the minor major agreements don't fall into 2d classes we have a continuum of agreements between Matthew and there goes mark so this is an example of a minor agreement this is in the scene where Jesus is about this going to be crucified and they're mocking Jesus right um mark has they struck his head with a reed spat upon him and dealt out an homage to him after mocking him they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him then they led him out to crucify him Matthew and Luke are both copying out of this there's verbatim agreements all around this but they both add in the phrase prophesied to us Messiah who is it that's struggling this shouldn't happen right this is exactly the sort of thing that doesn't happen on if Matthew if Luke doesn't know sorry if Luke doesn't know Matthew this shouldn't happen they shouldn't have both of them adding in a lot phrase independence poor actually against Mark's Gospel another mighty Greek minor agreement not in a saying this time but a narrative um they both are telling are all three Gospels are telling the exact same story but both Matthew and Luke add in what might be an editorial conjunction what exactly is he doing I mean behold they out of this behold men bringing up on a bed a person who is paralyzed um they have the same word for better they have this interjection behold against mark it's not in mark Matthew and Luke both add this in this and the narrative here is very similar against Mark these look like places where Luke is copying out of Matthew instead of copying out of mark and there are others there are no temptation scenes you just attempted and then next the next sentence is moving on from that story the three temptation seems that Matthew and Luke share our agreements between them against mark the preaching of John the Baptist is significantly expanded in both Matthew and Luke against mark the Beelzebul controversy Matthew and Luke agreed verbatim throughout mark had the same story but in different words it looks like there are places where Luke is no longer copying out of mark but has picked up his text of Matthew and said I want this version of the story on the fare theory he's copying out of mark most of the time which is where we get our mark his middle term but he that comes along afterwards and says picks it was copied Matthew and says yeah I got all these stories but I have all these with all this extra stuff that Matthew added into mark that I didn't incorporate while I was copying out of Mark I should do something with this and so what does he do he creates a road trip in the Gospel of Luke and on this road trip he places all of those Matthew editions to mark in the same order they appeared on with of course some small exceptions what's the objection to my minor agreements because Q people are very smart people and have been working on this for a long time well I'm sorry to tell you but the Gospels the Bible did not descend from heaven we don't have the autographs that Jesus wrote down we have instead thousands and thousands of manuscripts and there are every word in the New Testament there are roughly three variants in the manuscripts wanna hear more about that March 22nd 1:30 one of the most common kinds of variation are hard monistic impairments that is where there's a disagreement between Gospels the scribes will fix it because they don't like that so in mark Jesus says oh sorry and Mark the voice from heaven at Jesus baptism it says you are the son of God in Matthew he says this is the Son of God I know world-changing the theological difference but some people don't like this um and so we get in copies of Matthew some people face again so God just says one thing in both Gospels right so the Gospels agree and they argue that this may be what happened with the minor agreements that I showed you um prophesied who hit you they'll say okay we don't have any copies of Matthew or Luke that lacked us admitted over 5,000 some manuscripts 10,000 virginal manuscripts all of our patristic quotations there's no evidence that in either gospel this was ever committed but maybe it happened and we lost their comments and that's why these agreed against each other and so we thereby say you not sure where that was relevant major agreements not all the agreements are so tiny as I pointed out this is the Beelzebub Kirkeby which I mentioned earlier um we have here places where all four agreed with each other so it looks on the fair theory Matthew is copying out of mark and it makes some major additions the new comes along and is he copying mark no he's copying Matthew on the fare theory on the we have here exactly the arrangement of data which cute theorists say shouldn't never exist this is what evident if you've never had evidence that Matthew with the Luke was reading Matthew this is what it would look like right and irritants what are they what's their solution well this is a big problem these shouldn't exist so they said mark and Q must have overlapped so one of them was reading each other and while this is not itself implausible I remind you we're gonna sound like a dread for one second we thought nobody manuscripts of Q hue is a hypothesis it's a solution to a very real problem but but the problem is that mark and Q never over the problem is that Matthew and Luke never agree against mark and we just showed that they did and they're now saying yeah but they overlapped so that exception doesn't work but they've shifted the burden of proof they're supposed to show me that there's a problem that justifies positing and unattested document and I'm saying the problem doesn't exist the the kinds of evidence that you think should be there are in fact there you just come around afterwards and make up a new solution which is marking Hugh had verbatim overlaps between them yeah that works the the justification for positing a hypothetical document doesn't exist and that's all ready to demonstrate it's not the ready to demonstrate the marking you couldn't have overlapped of course they could have the point is that your reason for thinking there might be a common source doesn't exist ooh I slept really an affair about there sorry okay so I've undermine I think her theorists have undermined the justification for thinking he exists but that's not a very satisfying argument right don't you hate arguing with someone and they just can only say why you're wrong they don't have any reasons to think they're right well let me tell you there are reasons to think we're right is there any evidence positive evidence that map that Luke copied out of Matthew well we return once more to the ghost that haunts us while we discuss the synoptic problem mark Goodacre gives us editorial fatigue Wow this bug is all sorts of messed up so what was the bit of all up there and we'll walk through it really that was a very good slide I took a lot of time to write this one and that error was coming last um so we have we have the parable under one second I'm going to leave all right here will the talents good parable Matthew has yes servants three slaves to when he gives five talents to another two and to another one each according to his ability right right then we have three servants um um the one um the good one the best one that gets five talents they spoke more talents and has ten talents correct all the mouth is good we're working up we've got three three servants ten talents so take from him give it to the one with ten talents Matthew is perfectly consistent exactly what we'd expect we move over to the Gospel of Luke which surprise surprise isn't going to be Luke likes the story but changes it funny thing about Luke he likes the number ten you read through his stories we have ten minutes of ten what are they ten of the ten virgins 10 we have tens showing up in all the parables over and over again um Luke likes changing numbers to ten I don't know why it's probably not very important it probably just sounds cool um so the three slaves become ten slaves but as we go as he copies the narrative we have the first the second and the last we only have three slaves as the parable were filled out and the problem is of course worse the first one comes forward and said Lord your pound has made ten more pounds in Luke each servant each slave gets one pound and he makes from these ten pounds so how many does he have I was supposed to ask you that it's supposed to say eleven and then I put it up there he's on the bounce right then the second came and then the other came and so we get to the end of the story take the pound from him and give it to the one who has ten pounds but look there's nobody in your store that has ten pounds we have an eleven pounder and we have a these guys good I think this one good six and this one doesn't get anything taken away from we haven't we have an eleven pounder and a 6 pounder the ten pounder only exists because in Matthew we have a five pound guy makes another five pounds Luke has copied over verbatim from him source a 10 pound servant slightly so this is when the error goes up it looks like what we have here is a case where Luke has copied out of this source and made a very characteristic change independently verifiable change that Luke likes making to a source and then in copying out the rest of the story he has preserved a detail from Matthew that only makes sense in the in context there are other cases of this between these two Gospels but I don't believe and people have spent their time looking for these there are no cases working in the other direction there's actually an article came out like last Sunday arguing that there's a one working in the other direction you can go look it up I don't need a good example Paul Foster has come up with something counter examples and they're real not good so this to me looks like strong evidence that's Luke copied out of Matthew so alternating permittivity doesn't really get us anywhere does Luke incorporate Matthew's changes to mark I say yes but they say yeah but uh conjectural emendation x' you know that could be prop from the manuscript radition they already evidence for which Woody Smith used to call conjectural emendation when you make up a reading that you don't have any witnesses for you last refuge of scoundrels so conjecture liquidations and the mini qyn mark overlap which undermines their point but they have explanations for these away so maybe you should just rest on those laurels but finally you get to editorial fatigue and this I think shows us positive evidence that Luke has worked from Matthew I have no our three puzzles there is a literary relationship between the synoptic Gospels nothing lucrative ended in market but what is the relationship between Matthew and look this these two are basically settled you go to the SPL synoptic problem meetings there are three of them they're full of great nerdy people basically no one is going to different disagree with you on these two you are gonna find people on each other's throats in the third as much as anyone gets up each other's throats over the synoptic problem John collenberg and mark mark could occur the two like heads of the opposing schools they're good friends but this is a really unsettled right this Luke is defended about this this is this is my slant and you know what for what it is this is in fact what the Gospels relate to one another so let's why should you care well what as far as Matthew feel about the law I've been waiting - reduction reduction is how do the office change their sources what are the tell us about them well we have this famous bit from the Sermon on the Mount Matthew five do you don't think that I've come to abolish the law I have come not to abolish where it breaks the lease to one of these commandments teaches others to do the same Paul I mean it's not like a bad character Paul but I'm not going to go into there but teach others to do the same before I tell you unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of God this sounds to me like a law observant to Christians but of course as you know this is hoppy hoppy debated and I don't think the best way to solve this is arguing over what righteousness means here or what fulfil means here these are 50 things maybe redaction criticism maybe problem right well over here so in mark in the hand-washing controversy they're fighting over whether or not the disciples have to wash their hands which is a good idea you're gonna do this says otherwise do you know to see whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile us since it enters the stomach and goes up to the sewer thus mark interjects with us Jesus declares all food and clean Matthew copies this over verbatim word for word look at those agreements these are all the same words he repeat sizes a little redundancy there in mark which is a super common but he's copying over this story word-for-word and cuts out dust the Declaration of food being clean Matthew doesn't like Jesus declared all foods clean it seems this story can be read without that introduction to just be a very traditional rabbinic story over the nature of talked or observance mark brothers are down the story it's very good actually so Marcus um another example in mark 13 stopping apocalypse we've been here before Jesus predicted into the world bad things are happening we have this story on the nose in Judea the must flee into the mountains a little more of the committee like a sentence then woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days pray that it may not be in winter for in those days there will be great suffering why don't you want to flee in the winter well I mean I'm from Minnesota you don't want to flee in the winter Matthew Papi's is over word-for-word long strings of a bit of agreement but adds in one little bit next to not fleeing in the winter pray that you don't flee in the winter or on the Sabbath who can't travel on the Sabbath people who are lives or so Laura doctors fester may disagree with me on this she's running at his vision method which is very very smart but it looks to me that the redaction profile of Matthew is of a law observant Christian he is adding him is cutting out the abolition of the Torah is adding in commands to follow the Torah and you can only figure that out by getting the relation of these Gospels to each other right um another nice payoff is where what we traditionally call queue material or double tradition places we're bathroom the agreeance mark these can now be understood asmath the in compositions and this helps with things like the certain amount no longer are these drawing on a previous source but they reflect Matthew's own thought which is something you don't get on the to source area a composition doesn't mean he's inventing this you get that right Karma's a means he's the first person writing this up as a text he may have borrowed stuff he may have had a Wells of oral tradition um water metaphors in oral tradition that's just a thing but he's the very person reading it all and so it reflects Matthew's slant on the Gospel see all right um that's not the problem here's what I want you to say I don't want you to say there's no Congress in peace I don't believe it exists I want you to say he doesn't exist because Matthew yeah that's a great question and it's a really piece of powerful evidence that Matthew was not first met with us there's no reason to think Matthew is composing in Greek copying verbatim out of Mark um he was not I mean the guy who wrote Matthew unfortunately is not Jesus's disciple as much as I would have loved because that'd be really cool but there's no reason to think that Matthew is minor or major right so the stuff that the by what we have here is we have some triple revision agreements which is where on the Pharisee read Matthew is copying out-of-market um but Matthew is rewritten this rewritten this doesn't agree with mark at all and Luke here copies over Matthew's changes to mark yeah read his triples read the subject in ignore it's the block you envision that was probably a mistake we don't have any biker conflation we don't have anybody from fighting sources we have Matthew copying mark doesn't copy these together he just copies master so he's getting that Mac burger the argument against micro conflation was introduced as an argument against the very theory but I think it supports the fare theory better than anything else I have a friend who just published James Parker published something against my conflation and none of his examples work but that's another matthew has that mark didn't have selective severing the mouth where didn't Matthew where did Matthew get well we freezing-cold ultras yes I mean the synoptic problem can't tell us where new inspiration comes from I'm saying on the fare theory it's in the theme composition that's not the same thing as saying event it is saying hero mark is all a marking composition unless you think there are sources which they might be but it's mostly market composition it doesn't mean he may be dissolved it means he wrote this stuff down and I think the same thing is true of Matthew where it did a sermon about come from where did these things you know um that's the question for historical Jesus studies which is a fascinating several discipline the joke okay I'm not sure yes the church thought Mathur was the first most of them because they thought Matthew was a disciple of Jesus and Mark is a hear of Jesus it doesn't make any sense for nothing to come first interestingly enough Poppaea Sarkar is tradition on this whole thing doesn't reflect that and may in fact attest something like marking priority he certainly discusses mark first and then does Matthew later but I don't think there's any good reason at all to trust durably church as a reliable witness augustin origin Eusebius these are not people who have access to the history of how the attacks were composed they think Matthew was written in Hebrew which is something that can't be the case like this is a this is a so obviously agreed text and you can go on the stores I got Papas things is the Philips confused he doesn't have any like genuine connection to what actually happening they're coming up with traditions they're receiving really good I think it's really really cool to say look hey historians have an assorted no one else has listened church people there's something you even know about the Q document and by the way it supported Jesus who's all about peace and justice which these are justice all part obviously but it was very very trendy you've heard of probably the Jesus Seminar q looks a lot like the Jesus they wanted to look like except where it doesn't than they did ignore those passages and pretend that cute and they have layers in cute apocalyptic layer and this is a whole problem but I think I think it's convenient um and it's also real problem there's a real problem there how does how can Luke you know Matthew with all this marking as midterm like it's a real issue except it's not a real issue it's just one that you got to do um very common word about yeah yeah I think it's true I wouldn't have tried to characterize that but I don't trust myself on that alright I think we're done thank you

Channel: New Testament Review Podcast

Views: 5,874

Rating: 4.8674035 out of 5

Keywords: Synoptic Gospels, New Testament, Bible, Jesus, Christianity, Religion, Synoptic Problem, Source Criticism, Ian Mills, Ian N Mills, Ian Nelson Mills, New Testament Review, Q Source, Gospels

Id: k8z0rgxGNxM

Length: 66min 42sec (4002 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/dazedandconfused6102]

Great info OP. I grew up as an Evangelical, so the way i was taught to understand scripture was that everything in the canon is God inspired and without error. Now i am discovering that this point of view is very messed up. I am currently reading Miss quoting jesus by Bart D. Erhman and find it almost overwhelming as it pulls apart my biblical understanding. Do you have any advice or sources for helping me widen my view without losing my faith . Do i trust Bart's insights or not?

[u/NewTestamentReview]

One significant slip-up. I said the minor agreements are places where Luke is copying out of Matthew. This would require micro-conflation (which, contra-Barker, is a problem). The major agreements are places where Luke is copying out of Matthew. The minor agreements, apart from coincidental conjunction, pronoun, and tense changes (agreed to by both sides), are mostly places where Luke is recalling a phrase from Matthew while still copying out Mark.

[u/northyorkninja]

This was very informative! Thanks for sharing. The projector covering up part of the screen and the distance made it really hard to make out the text of the slides. Will you be making them available to download?

[u/John_Kesler]

You mention "corrected scriptural citations" as a bad reason to believe in Marcan priority and refer to Tatian's Diatessaron as an example of a redactor making things worse. But is the fact that redactors sometimes can make things worse a reason to conclude that corrections aren't evidence of redaction? When comparing manuscripts, the criterion of lectio difficilior potior is used, so why wouldn't Mark's more "difficult" readings be evidence that Mark preceded Mathew and Luke? E.g. wouldn't Matthew's (12:1-7) and Luke's (6:1-5) omission of "Abiathar" from Mark 2:26 be evidence of correction?

And speaking of the Diatessaron, would it not be an example of "micro-conflation," which you say is not possible and proves Marcan priority?

[u/anathemas]

Looks really interesting!