Abstract
The cadre of scholars questioning the Two-Document Hypothesis and the Q hypothesis and favoring the multiply-named Farrer-Goulder Hypothesis, Farrer Hypothesis, or Mark without Q Hypothesis, is growing. Each academic generation persuades a few more professors, who go on to train graduate students, who themselves train more students from within academic positions. This book testifies to that trajectory, as most of the contributors were not part of the 2004 predecessor project.
There are nine original essays collected here, together with a detailed, careful, and complimentary response by John Kloppenborg to each of the essays. John C. Poirier opens the volume with an interesting but short introduction. In it, he claims that there are four reasons that the Farrer Hypothesis is gaining in popularity:
that the gospel writers were creative shapers, not merely cutters-and-pasters; that each subsequent gospel writer, such as Luke, wrote not to complement his predecessors but to replace them; that there is creative genius in Luke's composition; and that Luke was likely a second-century creation, and thus increasingly likely to have been familiar with Matthew.
In his essay, “The Devil in the Detail: Exorcising Q from the Beelzebub Controversy” Eric Eve argues that Luke was familiar with Matthew 9:32–34, Matthean composition. This, he suggests, makes Q unnecessary and implausible. The agreements, the disagreements, and the literary nature of the pericope all favor the Farrer Hypothesis over the Two-Document Hypothesis. In “Problems with the Non-Aversion Principle for Reconstructing Q” Stephen C. Carlson questions the wisdom of grading variants “virtually certain” when the entire enterprise is so uncertain at every level. In the instance of one of these variants, regarding the opening of the Lord's Prayer, Carlson argues that the textual reconstruction offered is far from certain, and could easily be different.
Heather H. Gorman (“Crank or Creative Genius? How Ancient Rhetoric Makes Sense of Luke's Order”) laments that too often scholarly judgments about plausible editorial scenarios on the part of the gospel writers are based on modern literary assessments. She claims that the literary values of ancient rhetoricians would be a better option. On this standard, she argues that Luke's order and arrangement of material is both logical and typical of the ancient bios. In “Too Good to be Q: High Verbatim Agreement in the Double Tradition,” Mark Goodacre argues that the Farrer Hypothesis has an easier job of explaining the difference between the level of verbatim agreement in triple and double tradition. The Two-Document Hypothesis cannot explain why Matthew and Luke follow Q more closely than they follow Mark. The Farrer Hypothesis succeeds here, he claims, because Matthew and Luke have different ways of writing, not different ways of editing their sources.
In his essay “Luke 11:2–4: The Lord's Prayer (Abridged Edition),” Ken Olson argues that Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer is not the original, as suggested by supporters of the Two Document Hypothesis, for whom Luke's Prayer is as it was found in Q, and it was expanded by Matthew. Instead, Olson argues that it is more plausible that Luke abridged Matthew's version by making it clearer and less repetitive.
The essay by Andris Abakuks, “A Statistical Time Series Approach to the Use of Mark by Matthew and Luke,” is the essay most strangely compelling and likely the least accessible to the vast majority of readers. He argues that a statistical analysis reveals that Matthew and Luke share much more vocabulary than can be accounted for on the theory that they wrote their Gospels independently of each other.
The essay by Jeffrey Peterson, “Matthew's Ending and the Genesis of Luke-Acts: The Farrer Hypothesis and the Birth of Christian History,” discovers a number of links between the ending of Luke and Matthew 28:16–20. In Matthew's ending Luke found a useful way of thinking about history, but one that needed to be altered to suit his own needs.
David Landry, in “Reconsidering the Date of Luke in Light of the Farrer Hypothesis,” critiques the various methods and means for dating the composition of early Christian writings. In particular, Landry defends the notion that Luke was composed in the second-century, thereby increasing the likelihood that he was familiar with Matthew when he wrote his own Gospel.
If the final essay offered by the supporters of the Farrer Hypothesis is entitled “Delbert Burkett's Defense of Q,” this essay is in actuality “John C. Poirier's Defense of Mark Goodacre.” That is, Burkett has carefully critiqued Mark Goodacre's explanation of the Farrer Hypothesis, and in this essay, Poirier takes Burkett on point-by-point.
John Kloppenborg engages each of these essays, and while encouraging the debate, agreeing with several of the arguments, and accepting correction on occasion, remains unpersuaded that the essays collected here require one to abandon the Q or Two-Document Hypothesis. In some instances, this is because the essay in question, while valuable and promising, has lacked the detailed analysis necessary to persuade. In general, however, Kloppenborg admits that the Synoptic Problem is unsolvable, and that the competing hypotheses come down to different ways of explaining data which themselves are quite difficult to collect. I leave it to the reader to read Kloppenborg's valuable response to each essay.
I wish to add an item of critique of one point raised in this book. One encounters it articulated first in Poirier's introduction, and sees the limitation of it in action later. Poirier claims that scholars have been, and must continue to be appreciative of Luke as a creative writer. Questions such as “Why would Luke have taken apart the Sermon on the Mount?” (as one question among many of this type) unreasonably constrain Luke's creativity as an author, he claims. While on the surface a reasonable point, it risks ending up with no standard by which to question or query any of Luke's editorial decisions. The problem is evident in a number of essays, as seen especially in Kloppenborg's critique of Eve's essay, where he shows that the Eve's explanation of Lukan editing flatly contradicts the editorial decisions Luke makes in other places. Valuation of Luke's creativity cannot be allowed to result in an editorial process for Luke that is so creative that it borders on chaotic. Put differently, random illogical creativity is not a solution to the synoptic problem; it is a way of not letting the evidence guide one to a logical explanation. Like Kloppenborg, however, I share the position that the Synoptic Problem does not admit to a solution, and the essays presented here are all valuable contributions to our on-going wrestling match with the puzzle presented by gospel composition.