MetaCatholic

James McGrath follows up his posts on Q with a suggested Synoptic meme. He’s partially right that we’re talking about paradigms (a much overused word that I’m not entirely sure isn’t a bit too overblown for discussing models) for viewing the gospels here, where any individual piece of evidence won’t work. The crucial piece of evidence is a bit like that moment on a flight. Your hearing’s all weird as you take off, and then at a certain point, your ears pop, and hearing is restored to normal. What James is after is those moments in Synoptic study when our ears pop. What passage was the proximate cause?

It’s a great idea, and I’m afraid I can’t oblige him, which is probably just another illustration of the ways in which we’re all different, but let me say why.

I have, since I first began to engage in critical study, always believed in Markan priority. I guess that says something about my teachers, including the parish priest of my parents’ parish, who didn’t believe in hiding these things from the simple and unlearned. I’ve never come across an argument or exegesis that seriously made me question that.

When it comes to the second half of the problem, the relationship of Matthew and Luke, I haven’t really got an ear-popping moment either. I am, and I’m sure this is a disgraceful thing to say, a “don’t know”. There are some passages which make me think a direct literary dependence is a good explanation, as in my previous post on the infancy narratives. There are other places where Q appears to be the most economical explanation: “the finger of God” (Luke 11:20) is one such. Luke’s version seems to fit his theology less well than Matthew’s version would have.

This latter could, of course, be explained by Luke knowing this particular tradition well already from an oral source, and falling back on the more familiar wording. But once you do that, you’re admitting that neither the Farrer theory, nor the Two Document theory, are entirely adequate explanations. In fact, I think that’s right, they can’t be, without reducing what must have ben a more complex process to a literary theory. Either theory needs some chastening supplementation from oral tradition. But that doesn’t solve the problem of the underlying model one works with.

What has made me receptive to the Farrer theory (apart from sitting in the pub with Mark) is something different. It’s the dogmatism of those who talk about “The extant text of Q.” It’s the faux-archaeological literary approach of those who detect layers within a non-existent text. It’s the assumption that between them Matthew and Luke left hardly anything out of Q. Things like that. In short, it is less a case of evidence than irritation. The evidence is constructed by the theory which explains it. The attraction of the Farrer theory is that (even chastened by the acceptance of an ongoing interplay with oral tradition) it doesn’t mean constructing a literary source, but working with the ones we’ve got.

I am aware that falls well short of an argument, but it increasingly seems to me that the most sound approach would be first to explore the literary relationship between the texts we have, and only when it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Synoptics cannot be accounted for in those terms, should we turn to postulating hypothetical documents. The problem with the 2DH is that it took the field in advance of that exploration, before, as it were, it earned the right to do so. I am becoming ever more persuaded by Mark and others that Q was premature, and that a good case can be made for the Farrer theory.

I’m not quite there yet. But the Q hypothesis doesn’t need attacking: the Farrer theory needs exploring. If Farrer can be shown to offer a reasonable and reasonably full (not complete) account of the evidence, then Q is simply redundant.