Why the 2-Source hypothesis, why Q
This post is a continuation of a previous post on Casey’s synoptic approach, but now presenting what persuades me that the two-source hypothesis is the best one, much of what I’m saying is found in Kloppenborg’s helpful volume Q: the Earliest Gospel.
Markan priority has been a consensus for a long time now, and it’s grown stronger over time (as the Greisbach hypothesis is fallen out of favor), the two alternatives to the two source (Q and Mark) hypothesis have been the Farrer hypothesis and Matthean posteriority. The Greisbach hypothesis has fallen out of favor for good reason, since it requires Mark to omit material that would be extremely helpful to the narrative, for seemingly no reason, it also requires Mark to have had both gospels and zig zag between the two: to make a kind of hybrid gospel, but yet do so in such a way that omitted material from both gospels that make up a coherent sayings collection, and that he then lengthened the Matthean and Lukan material yet edited out stylistic improvements and clarity. It also assumes Luke knew Matthew (or vice versa), an assumption crucial to the Farrer hypothesis and Matthean posteriority hypothesis, which is in itself problematic.
The Mark without Q hypotheses (Farrer and Matthean posteriority), largely depend on the places where Matthew and Luke agree with each other against Mark (the argument being they knew each other, or one knew the other). However, these agreements are easily explainable with the two-source hypothesis. The major agreements (one clear example of this is Jesus being tempted by Satan, or the Pharisees asking for a sign, in which Luke and Matthew have an expanded version) can be easily explained by the hypothesis that Q and Mark had different versions of the same story, and why shouldn’t they? Q and Mark were both writing about the same individual, if the former was primarily a sayings collection and the latter primarily a narrative, one would expect that they would be significantly different; nevertheless, we would also expect that there would be quite a bit of crossover, and that one had details the other left out with regards to the same saying. In most of these cases, as one would expect, Matthew and Luke expand the sayings, whereas often Mark gives a longer version of accounts than Matthew and Luke, this would make sense if Matthew and Luke prefer Q’s expanded version of sayings to Mark’s condensed versions, rather than Matthew or Luke generally condensing Mark’s accounts and only expanding the sayings.
We then have minor agreements, where the agreement is often one word, or one grammatical form, sometimes not in the sayings but in the narrative itself. These agreements are very few in number, and can be explained in various ways, sometimes the agreements are just obvious improvements to style (Mark’s style can be pretty tedious at times, with the over use of kai and euthus, which is indicative of an oral style, which fits well with the tradition that Mark was largely using Peter’s preaching as a source), some of these could be explained by the possibility that the Mark Luke and Matthew used was slightly different from the Mark we have (Markan manuscripts are very poorly attested among early NT manuscripts, the earliest fragment being in the later second or early third century, or by the possibility that there was an oral tradition beside the written Mark that influenced both Matthew and Luke.
One real persuasive argument for myself has been the amount of disagreement between Matthew and Luke. Matthew often ignores Luke’s stylistic improvements, and Luke often ignores Matthew’s, they also generally condense Mark in different ways. Although they both largely follow Mark’s narrative structure, the sayings material is largely divergent in its placing. So, what the Mark without Q hypothesis would require is that either Luke or Matthew pick out all the sayings material not in Mark, from the other gospel, and reconfigure them into Mark again, while carefully ignoring almost all the other gospel’s modifications of Mark, this is an extremely difficult redactional practice that seems rather implausible. In other words, Matthew or Luke would have to almost construct something that looked like Q from the other gospel, and then put it back into Mark.
Yet if we take the two-source hypothesis, then we have Matthew organizing his material one way, following Mark’s narrative and adding in the sayings material where he deemed appropriate, and Luke doing the same thing seemingly anware of how the other is organizing the material and editing it. We see, for example, that Luke seems to preserve Q’s order, which is what one would expect given Luke’s beginning where he claims to be doing careful historical reconstruction, whereas Matthew’s weaving of Q’s material is wildly different combining sayings together, puttins them in different contexts, and in completely different sequences, but doing so in a way that is coherent with his own portrayal of Jesus as a new Moses.
When we see the Q material reconstructed, we see a collection with its own coherency and internal structure that differs from both Luke and Matthew, it’s rurally focused, it’s more focused on the kingdom, less on the passion, it’s more Galilean, it’s more ethically driven, it shows no sign of knowledge of a gentile mission (present in both Matthew an Luke), it (like Mark, as James Crossley has shown) assumes a torah observant audience, and it’s use of scripture is internally consistent, it has its own Deuteronomistic theology. The likelyhood that Luke's or Matthew’s own additions to Mark, happen to have the internal coherence of a document that seems to be independent of Matthew’s or Luke’s structure and form, seems unlikely, not to mention the improbability of the redactional pretzel it would have required.
The tradition that Matthew was written first largely comes from Papias, who said that Matthew wrote the oracles or sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew language or Hebrew dialect, this could very well be Q, especially since Maurice Casey has demonstrated Aramaic backgrounds to both Q and Mark. If it is the case that the gospel of Matthew used Mark and Q, it could very well be that it was Matthew himself to combined his own written collection of sayings with Peter’s preaching as recorded by Mark (this might explain Matthew’s freedom in weaving in the Q material as he saw fit, as opposed to following its own sequence), and later on Luke, as a careful historian unconnected with the historical events, was more careful to follow the sequence of Mark and Q, editing and redacting as he saw fit, but maintaining the structure of the material he was working with.