At 05:10 11/04/2008, Stephen C. Carlson wrote:
>"Tim.Lewis" <tim.lewis.au@...> wrote:
> >I've just finished reading Tuckett's "Current State of the
> >Synoptic Problem" and Foster's "The M-Source: Its History
> >and Demise in Biblical Studies." I'm currently wondering
> >about the relative age of our respective recontructed Gospels,
> >i.e. Isn't our recontructed text of Mark later than that
> >for Matthew and/or Luke? I have yet to see any discussion
> >of this but I'm about to read Boring's paper ("The 'minor
> >agreements' and their bearing on the synoptic problem")
> >which hopefully discusses it.
>
>Peter Head has a paper on Textual Criticism and the Synoptic
>Problem, but I'm not sure he discusses the relative ages of
>the reconstructed texts of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

No, not in any detail. And I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.
I did discuss the fact that our textual evidence is quite different
for the three synoptic gospels: Matthew: lots of small fragments,
some commentaries, but for text as a whole still dependent on
Sinaiticus and Vaticanus; Mark: no small fragments, a bit in P45, no
evidence from commentaries; Luke: much fuller early material (P4,
P45, P75) than the others; some commentaries - the only synoptic
gospel for which we are not completely dependent on 4th cent mss.
But this is not the same as 'the relative ages of the reconstructed
texts'. You could argue that they are all pretty much the same age,
i.e. around 130 years old (with Luke having been revised in around 50
years ago).

Is this what you are thinking of?

Peter



Peter M. Head, PhD
Sir Kirby Laing Senior Lecturer in New Testament
Tyndale House
36 Selwyn Gardens
Cambridge CB3 9BA
01223 566601