Abstract
Can we explain the textual parallels and theological relationships between Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel without insisting that a (hypothetical) lost ‘Q document’ was involved? This short and accessible volume has a clear aim: assuming that Mark was the earliest of the Synoptic Gospels to have been written, Eric Eve introduces readers to the suggestion that Luke’s principal written sources included Matthew as well as Mark. Eve follows in the footsteps of earlier Q-rejecting writers including Austin Farrer (1950s), Michael Goulder, John Drury and Eric Franklin (1970s onwards), and, in more recent decades, the Oxford-trained (but USA-based) Mark Goodacre. I have always admired the creativity, common-sense and elegance of these British scholars’ writings and found the overall thrust (if not every detail) of their approach convincing. Eric Eve’s clear and convivial book describes and extends this tradition and could help give it the popular pedestal it truly deserves but has not yet achieved.
In terms of issues and topics covered, Eve is addressing those new to the field and does not spring any major surprises on expert readers. There are some discussions of issues of dependency across parallel passages and of evidence pointing to Luke’s knowledge of Matthew’s Gospel as a whole. The question of how and why Luke would have performed so many re-orderings, some major, of Matthew’s structure is a particularly challenging one, and Eve adds his own reconstruction to the list of those given by previous authors: not all of their suggested explanations can be correct, but that does not mean that none of them are.
An engaging early chapter explores the working methods of ancient writers and the consequences of this area of study for our understanding of gospel composition and for assessments of synoptic relationships, and is linked to a particularly useful appendix suggesting further reading.
I think Farrer’s synoptic solution – certainly ‘straightforward enough to be useful’ (p. 33) – is helpful pedagogically, providing a workable basis for students to identify what is ‘distinctly Matthean’ and ‘distinctly Lukan’ in those two Gospels, without the waters being muddied by the spectre of a further, non-Markan, shared written source. Eve’s book is generally more focused on describing how Luke may have transformed Matthew than considerations of the origins of Matthew’s non-Markan material, but the omission from the bibliography of Michael Goulder’s revolutionary 1974 volume Midrash and Lection in Matthew (on Matthew’s ‘Q-less’ expansion of Mark) is still surprising.
The Q hypothesis is tenacious, perhaps because so many New Testament introductions, monographs and commentaries take it as the ‘standard solution’ as if it were proven. Another reason (implied but never spelled out by Eve) may be that an abandonment of ‘the Q source’ raises major questions around what a Gospel actually is. If Gospels are seen as stitchings together of primitive written (and other) traditions about Jesus, then the Q source will need to feature. With the Farrer hypothesis (now sometimes known as the ‘L/M hypothesis’, so as to avoid its association with a single scholar’s ‘take’), it is a different matter: Gospel writing is seen as a creative enterprise in both literary and theological terms. Some people really struggle to cope with the implications of that.