To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG
In Response To: Ron Price
On: Alternating (MT/Lk) Primitivity #7-8
From: Bruce

CASE 7 (Lk 12:11 || Mk 13:9f || Mt 10:19f, 24:9f), the persecutions of the
faithful; Ron's focus phrase was EPI TAS SUNAGWGAS.

Ron [now adds]: "Matthew's omission of "synagogues" in Mt 10:19a was
probably because he had already mentioned them in 10:17. Thus both Matthew
and Luke mention synagogues in this context, and "synagogues" was probably
in the original."

Bruce: Thanks to Ron for pointing out the larger context. My way of saying
this (I am not so far operationally convinced that Mt and Lk had a sayings
source original) would be that both Mt and Lk have synagogues in their
respective passages, so that both cover the same ground, and there is thus
(contrary to my earlier and too hasty suggestion) no directionality, as
between Mt/Lk, in the word "synagogues."

If there is no directionality, then there is no directionality, and at least
on these grounds, we cannot declare for either Mt > Lk or for Lk > Mt. I
think that discussion should probably end at this point. I repeat that the
Matthean doublets could use work, but don't propose to take up that work at
this moment. Meanwhile, the case as cited, and as further defined by Ron,
seems incapable of yielding a firm directionality finding.

CASE 8 (Lk 12:22-24 || Mt 6:25-38, with emphasis on Lk's "consider the
ravens" against Mt's less specific "birds of the air." I had said that I see
no directionality as between general vs specific.

Ron: I beg to differ. Other things being equal I think the specific is more
likely to be original, especially where poetry is concerned. The specific
makes for colourfulness, and vivid poetry is more impressive than dull
poetry.

Bruce: On the primacy of poetry over prose, see my preceding note. As for
the primacy of vivid poetry over dull poetry, we are surely here on pretty
subjective ground. And in general, it is not given that in a derivative
sequence, later imitative poets are always either better or worse than their
predecessors, the original poets. Instances of both can be cited by the
handful.

As for "other things being equal," that is not the case here. There is a
rich variety of differences to analyze, including the fact that the full
Lukan passage is paralleled by passages occurring at different places in
Matthew. The relative narrative placement is also different. Somebody is
certainly operating very actively on somebody else, and there are lots of
places where we might seek for clues as to which is which. The item Ron (or
his source) chooses from the passage is not necessarily the most decisive
detail.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/wsp

To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG
In Response To: Ron Price
On: Alternating [Mt/Lk] Primitivity #9-10
From: Bruce

CASE 9 (Lk 13:20-21 || Mt 13:33, no Mk; parable of the leaven, emphasizing
TINI OMOIWSW THN BASILEAN TOU QEOU). The case is Kingdom of Heaven (Mt) vs
Kingdom of God .....

Ron: The phrase "kingdom of heaven" is exclusive to Matthew, so most
commentators consider Luke's "kingdom of God" to be original here.

Bruce: Since Kingdom of God is characteristic of Lk, this could be run the
other way with equal convincement. When a common passage is well adjusted to
its two surroundings, there is no directionality indication.

Ron: But what about the question format? Goulder thinks Luke was influenced
by Mk 4:30. But this seems fanciful as (a) Luke wasn't in a 'Markan block'
in Lk 13:20 and (b) he's just written the very similar Lk 13:18. The
question format in the mustard seed's Lk 13:18 is probably original (Semitic
poetic parallelism). Therefore the question format in the similar yeast's Lk
13:20 is probably also original.

Bruce: The Mustard Seed is an interesting case; one of the obvious
relocations by Luke of material which had originally stood in Markan order,
being shifted to another location in the second stratum of Lk (Luke B). It
will be noticed that as it stands, the Mustard Seed parable in Luke draws on
both Mk and Mt; this (to me) indicates revision of a Mk-derived story as a
consequence of later contact with Lk. As they stand, the parables seem to me
to form this sequence:

Mk: Birds make nests in the shade of the mustard SHRUB
Mt: SHRUB becomes a TREE; birds nest in its branches
Lk: It grows into a TREE; birds nest in its branches.

The mustard plant is in fact a tall shrub, not a tree. We see here, I would
suggest, a progressive exaggeration of the mustard seed contrast, with the
shrub nature of the plant increasingly occluded as we pass from Mk to Mt to
Lk.

The question introducing the Mustard Seed parable is original in Mk,
retained (despite later Mt contact) in Lk. A holdover phenomenon.

CASE 10 (Lk 14:35 || Mt 5:13 || 9:50, salt losing its savor, the noted
passage is OUTE EIS GHN OUTE EIS KOPRIAN "[suitable] neither for soil nor
for manure").

Ron: Again this is more specific (and poetic) than the doubtless accurate
but rather dull Matthean alternative ("anything" NRSV). The former is
therefore more likely to be original.

Bruce: Having found the Markan version of the mustard plant more accurate,
and thus more original than the exaggerated Mt/Lk versions, I probably can't
argue with a dullness argument here; fortunately for those who are keeping
score on the Matthean side, this leads to a judgment Mt > Lk.

I take alarm however at the reintroduction of the "poetic" argument. For
reasons earlier mentioned, I think there can be no such general principle.

For that matter, accuracy (one form of "dullness") as a criterion has its
hazards too. If you happen to like that side of the Quartodeciman
controversy, it means that GJn, being more accurate historically, is also
the earlier text, and that Luke, giving much more detail than Mt about
Jesus's paternal ancestry, is therefore earlier than Mt, and in giving much
more detail about the year and circumstances of Jesus's birth than Mk, is
therefore earlier than Mk. There are reasons why those conclusions don't
validly follow. One of them is that later writers know the value of
circumstantial detail, and may therefore include it purposely.

[I had again suggested including Mk, where available, in these Mt/Lk
judgements, and of Mt, I here add that it is interesting that Lk 14:33-35 is
opposite to Mt 5:13-16 in the order of its elements]

Ron: I agree that we should take Mark into account. There is no direct
parallel to the phrase in Mark (unless we count Mk 9:50b, which looks pretty
obviously redactional). Looking elsewhere in the saying, I think the MWRANQH
("made foolish") of Mt and Lk is a nonsensical mistranslation from Aramaic,
and here Mark alone got it right with ANALON GENHTAI "lost its saltiness".

Bruce: I decline for reasons of ignorance to follow in the pathways of
Aramaic. But I take some comfort from the fact that all texts before us are
in Greek. Consulting those texts, I find that the "salt" business is a
famous perplexity. How can salt lose its quality, whatever that quality may
be? In Mk, the saying leads to a recommendation to "be at peace with one
another." Mt/Lk both seem to work it into a warning about damnation. They,
as a group, seem to be more obviously concerned with the struggles of the
early churches than Mk, who does legislate for them too, but who maintains
something more of a consistently historian-of-Jesus posture in so doing.

MWRANQH. Balz/Schneider gives a helpful overview of meanings and theories.
It generally means "foolish," as Ron says, and must be translated
"tasteless, insipid" only in the two Mt/Lk skew parallel passages, where the
meaning is constrained by the context. Here is a passage which might come
under Ron's "apothegm" category; Mk as well as Mt/Lk seem to be struggling
with it (and I can't see any great difference in their struggles, except
that Mt or Lk is obviously following an improvement, for so they must have
seen it, which was suggested by the other).

I am struggling with it too. How, in the first place, can salt lose its
saltiness? It can become contaminated, and some commentators make that
suggestion, but that is not what the context requires. The context requires
the loss of a characteristic quality.

Oppenheimer would say at this point, We need new ideas here. Surely some of
the Synoptic throng have experience in and around the kitchen. What can
happen to salt that renders it unfit for its intended use in salting things?
If we knew that, we might be in a better position to estimate what, or what
things, is being attempted by this odd saying, and whose perplexing version
is earlier than which other perplexing version.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/wsp

To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG
In Response To: Ron Price
On: Alternating [Mt/Lk] Primitivity (#11-12)
From: Bruce

CASE 11 (Lk 17:6, moving the sycamine tree). I had suggested Mk 17:20, which
includes both a tree and a mountain as objects for faith to move.

Ron: Mt 21:21 is dependent on Mark, and I posit that it was Mark who first
introduced the "mountain" into the saying on faith, using the mountain to
replace the sycamine tree. Matthew later remembered and preferred the vivid
"mountain" when editing the 'faith-can-move-a-tree' saying.

Bruce: Ron here assumes that his prior source, whether Q or his own variant,
not only precedes Mt/Lk, which is the usual formulation, but also precedes
Mk. I am not prepared to go that far. I rest content with the use made of Mk
by Mt/Lk, a fact which puts their different examples (one a tree, the other
a mountain) in a new and useful perspective. Mk introduced the topos; Mt
took one branch of it, and Lk, ever the perverse and unwilling learner, took
the other. It is futile, in such a three-way situation, however construed,
to try to decide matters with a two-way model.

Ron [on my suggestion to look at Matthean doublets]: Not a bad idea!
Doublets, along with Alternating Primitivity, constitute two of the
strongest arguments for the existence of an early sayings source behind the
synoptic gospels.

Bruce: I would need to see that demonstrated. As for alternating
primitivity, as far as my results on this list of Twelve goes, I am still
looking. And thus we come to the last of them:

CASE 12 (Lk 17:24 || Mt 24:27, Lk OUTWS ESTAI O UIOS TOU ANQRWPOU EN TH
HMERA AUTOU, "the day of the Son of Man'). Another Son of Man saying, and I
am with difficulty withholding my analysis of that phrase in all the
Synoptics (plus once in Acts).

Ron: . . . and the main choice here is between Matthew's "coming" and Luke's
"day". The former is the generic description of the expected phenomenon. The
latter is the poetic metaphor, and therefore seems more likely to be
original.

Bruce: As before, I doubt that there is any reliable directionality
indicator as between more or less poetic. If we find Lk to be a poet, and
certainly some have been willing to testify in his behalf, then we will see
the poetic metaphor as typical of Lukan processing of more pedestrian
Matthean originals. Or, with almost equal ease, vice versa. I don't trust
these isolated single-bit determinations, especially when decided by very
general criteria, without regard to the information lying next door to the
saying(s) in question. Who has written a paper on Poetic Quality in Luke's
Parallels to Matthew? Who has a book about to be published on the logic of
Luke's travel narrative? I, for one, would like to hear from those people.

Luke is here nearing the end of his Travel Narrative, such as it is, and we
have gotten to the end of Ron's list of proposed Lk > Mt examples. I must
confess that I end as I began, finding that none of them is very
consequential, and that some of them are downright indeterminate. I think
that the question of Synoptic priority needs to wait for a decision on more
decisive, less gossamer, materials, and with less general, more specific,
criteria.

But such as the twelve cases here considered may be, and to the best of my
doubtless limited ability in looking for directionality indications among
them, I don't see anything that would seriously challenge or threaten to
modify the FGH view of things: Mk > Mt >> Lk.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/wsp

Chuck Jones wrote:

> I'm not so sure this one is as easy as you suggest.  Lk may have edited the
> story to focus on Nineveh's shocking repentance at the preaching of a Jewish
> prophet.  Which foreshadows the development of Gentile Xnty Lk will document
> in Acts.
>
> On the other hand, Mt loves to upbraid the Jews for rejecting Jesus, and the 3
> days and 3 nights part of the story is when Jonah is getting his comeuppance
> for rebellion against God's command.  (And it's a command to preach to
> Gentiles, cf. Mt's great commission!)
>
> So I think a case can be made for either direction.  Heck, maybe they both
> fiddled with the source.

Chuck,

Your argument considers only how one version could have been edited and
changed into the other. We should also consider which version is more likely
to have been produced by the original author (whoever that was). Matthew and
Luke both attribute the saying to Jesus. I am generally a sceptic, but I
can't see any reason to deny this attribution *except* for the bit about 3
days and nights in a fish's stomach, which was clearly introduced to
illustrate the resurrection of Jesus. Thus (unless you introduce another
piece of magic, namely Jesus prophesying the time his body would remain
entombed)  Matthew's version is inconsistent with the attribution of the
saying to Jesus. When we add to this the fact that there are two other
authentic-looking sayings with a similar message but no trace of magic (Mt
13:16-17 // Lk 10:23-24; and Lk 12:54-56), it surely becomes obvious that Lk
11:30 was most likely part of an authentic saying of Jesus, and therefore
that Mt 12:40 was a Matthean embellishment of the saying.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

I would have to disagree with the characterization of using "raven" versus
"birds of the air" is a case of poetry becoming less specific. I think the
author Luke is using the imagery of the unclean raven of Leviticus, along with
the apocalyptic "day of retribution" found in Isaiah 34, where only the owls,
ravens, jackdaws, thorns, nettles, briers, etc, will live. The author is
building in the chapter a scenario where the "Christians" will be brought up
before the authorities, who might be killed, etc to say that God knows all,
takes care of all, it is God's kingdom, and he even takes care of the unclean,
the ravens, juxtapositioning a symbol of purity, the lily into the image to
reinforce the same notion, God loving all. Then the author really goes into
apocalyptic mode, telling the audience to be mindful, that this day (of
retribution) will happen at some unknown moment, led by Jesus. Considering the
Cynic parallels, I would consider the block historical only to the author(s).

   Had it been merely poetry that was glossed over, the imagery of lilies would
have been left out, I think, and replaced by "flowers," in order to remain
consistent with the hypothesis.

   Dennis Dean Carpenter
   Dahlonega, Ga.




   CASE 8 (Lk 12:22-24 || Mt 6:25-38, with emphasis on Lk's "consider the
   ravens" against Mt's less specific "birds of the air." I had said that I see
   no directionality as between general vs specific.

   Ron: I beg to differ. Other things being equal I think the specific is more
   likely to be original, especially where poetry is concerned. The specific
   makes for colourfulness, and vivid poetry is more impressive than dull
   poetry.

   Bruce: On the primacy of poetry over prose, see my preceding note. As for
   the primacy of vivid poetry over dull poetry, we are surely here on pretty
   subjective ground. And in general, it is not given that in a derivative
   sequence, later imitative poets are always either better or worse than their
   predecessors, the original poets. Instances of both can be cited by the
   handful.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Synoptic
In Response To: Ron Price
On: The Sign of Jonah
From: Bruce

In responding to Chuck Jones, about the Sign of Jonah saying (#4 of the
Twelve list), Ron had said:

Ron: Matthew and Luke both attribute the saying to Jesus. I am generally a
sceptic, but I can't see any reason to deny this attribution *except* for
the bit about 3 days and nights in a fish's stomach, which was clearly
introduced to illustrate the resurrection of Jesus. Thus (unless you
introduce another piece of magic, namely Jesus prophesying the time his body
would remain entombed)  Matthew's version is inconsistent with the
attribution of the saying to Jesus. When we add to this the fact that there
are two other authentic-looking sayings with a similar message but no trace
of magic (Mt 13:16-17 // Lk 10:23-24; and Lk 12:54-56), it surely becomes
obvious that Lk 11:30 was most likely part of an authentic saying of Jesus,
and therefore that Mt 12:40 was a Matthean embellishment of the saying.

Bruce: We seem to be substituting, for the old criteria, a new and to me
worrisome one: the probability that a given saying goes back to the
historical Jesus. I'm only a stranger in these parts, so what do I know, but
frankly, I would recommend keeping these thoughts in abeyance for the time
being. Proper methodology, as I understand it, is seeing what the sources
give us, as to whatever they may contain, whether Jesus or any other figure,
rather than reading them on the assumption that we already know the answer
to that question. The danger of wishful circularity is too great. Ne nos
inducas in tentationem.

Just as an experiment, though I normally try to keep my responses clear by
avoiding "Q," I sat down and read straight the thing that the IQP has now
officially defined. Did I get the sensation of a historical person speaking
to his own times? Not a bit of it. I got the sensation of advice to later
times being retro-attributed to the movement founder.

One gets exactly the same thing, by the way, at enormously greater length,
in the Pali Buddhist canon, where in sutta after sutta some question of
monastic discipline comes up for decision, and is referred to the Buddha.
Are those authentic utterances of the Buddha, or can they be seen as going
back to the Buddha? Not very credibly. Buddhism began in an early phase of
Ganga urbanization, and it wasn't until a hundred years later that things
had progressed to the point where sufficient excess money was available to
fund such a thing as a monastery. Buddha himself (like other people I might
mention) was an itinerant, enjoying progressive hospitality at a series of
houses (let me tell you, those who know this material get a special
resonance out of certain recently discussed Mt/Lk sayings), but not himself
permanently resident, or serving as the abbot of a permanent monastic
residence.

The leading NT workers of the early 20c, now a hundred years ago, had by and
large come to the conclusion that the Gospels, under the rubric of Jesus,
tell us chiefly about the early Church. The further down the Mk > Mt > Lk >
Jn line we go, as it seems to me, the more obviously true that gets (and the
Church about which they tell us becomes itself more and more advanced).
Here, I suggest, is the expectation to hang onto. People are naturally
curious as to any earlier stages, but all I can offer them is the advice to
be patient. We have not yet finished assessing the texts, and taking full
account of what in them is directed to their readers. There will come a time
to consult the residue for hints as to what might have come before, but I
can't myself see that time as arriving within the present weekend.

Best wishes of which to all present,

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/wsp

To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG, WSW
In Response To: Chuck Jones
On: Implications of Alternating Primitivity
From: Bruce

CHUCK: So, if analysis shows that sometimes the directionality of entire
passages flows from Mt to Lk and sometimes it flows from Lk to Mt, then this
alternating primitivity is in fact the evidence for an independent source.

BRUCE: Strictly speaking, there are other possibilities. For instance, it
can also happen that one or both of the texts is accretional, so that
instead of A vs B, you have A1, A2 vs B1, B2. If then we had material
created in the following absolute order:

         A1, B1, A2, B2

and if the quality of "lateness" is apparent in the texts, as you move to
the right, then to the analyst thinking of the material as solely composed
of A and B, and unaware of the accretional dimension, it will sometimes seem
that A is earlier (eg, A1 is earlier than both B1 and B2) but sometimes also
that B is earlier (eg, B1 is earlier than A2). This is not necessarily
evidence for a Text C, may be, and in this case it is, a warning that either
A or B or both are not integral texts.

C remains a possibility, but it seems worth bearing in mind that it is not
the only possibility.

[For those who would like a real world example of an accretional text, and a
few instances of the interaction of two accretional texts in real time, I
might venture to say that a good many theological libraries have on their
shelves E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks, The Original Analects, Columbia 1998, or
if not, I understand that there are a few HB copies left. For the
back-and-forth examples, see especially Appendix 3. Those examples are
especially clear because they are not parallel (two texts purporting to
describe the same thing, as is the case with the NT Gospels), but
adversative (two texts arguing back and forth, each being obviously the
antagonist of the other, and the logic of the argument serving to
sequentialize the various pieces of it in real time). I do not apologize for
mentioning easy examples; they are good practice for looking at the harder
examples].

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/wsp

Bruce Brooks wrote:

> CASE 1 (Lk 6:39, the blind leading the blind).
> ....... We should distinguish original material from inertial material, that
> retained from Mk or another predecessor. The latter may be there simply
> because it is there in the source. The former is more likely to show where
> the author personally is at. There is no nullification.

Bruce,

I agree with the distinction. But it doesn't apply in this case because my
example of Luke retaining criticisms of Jewish groups in Lk 11:39ff., and
your claim that Luke would have dropped the criticism of Pharisees because
he lacked interest in them, both involve material belonging to the category
you call "inert", i.e. material from a predecessor. Therefore the
nullification stands.

> ....... I am open to statistics. Meanwhile, I am prepared to allow Luke to
> vary Matthew's rhetoric, if only to fend off boredom.

Anyone can argue for a remote possibility. Probable? No.

> ..... Except that I go on to argue that the "blind" passage *does* link to
> the following Lukan text, which then becomes relevant to interpretation.
> Does this in turn mean that Lk is "taking sayings from an early source and
> KEEPING them in their original order?"

As it happens, yes. According to my reconstruction of the logia, 'Blind
guide' (A9, Lk 6:39) originally had a different saying in front of it (A8,
Lk 6:27-30,32-36), but was followed by the same saying (A10, Lk 6:40).

> ..... As to Ron's own version
> of Q, to which he here refers, I note that B4 and D4 stand notably apart in
> it, and I cannot at this moment see what would be gained by Luke's
> attempting to establish a link between them.

It wasn't Luke who created a link between them, but the author of the logia
who ensured a link between each saying in section B and its corresponding
saying in section D. Likewise with sections A and C. This "ensuring" was
primarily by putting the sayings in a suitable order, but occasionally as in
this case it may have involved a minor amendment to the saying to create the
link.

> ....... Luke has previously written
> his account of the Sending of the Twelve (Lk 9), based essentially on Mark.
> He is now coming up to write his account of the Sending of the Seventy (Lk
> 10). Ron has said that the number seventy [-two, let's not quibble] is an
> "editorial addition: by Luke. Editorial addition to what?

To his adaptation of the logia 'Mission instructions'.

> Bruce: But why have a second version at all?

For two reasons. Firstly because he had another source (the logia)
containing a slightly different set of mission instructions. Secondly to
symbolize the mission to the Gentiles.

> Multiplication of sources ad hoc. I reject it.

So do I.

> We have a perfectly
> clear "kernel" in Mark, the Sending of the Twelve. If Luke had additional
> information about that event, I would expect him to use it to enhance his
> version of the Markan prototype, not to start a second Sending with it.

As noted above, Luke had two reasons to duplicate the story. To elaborate on
the first: as a good scholar he probably realized that the Aramaic logia
version was older than the Greek Markan version, but with no established
source-critical techniques he may have been reluctant to attempt a
combination of these important sayings from his two best sources.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

Bruce Brooks wrote:

> Maybe Ron could contribute to present discussion the passage or passages
> that convinced him of the need for a third source hypothesis in the first
> place?

Bruce,

It is not any particular passage that convinces me that a non-synoptic
source is required. Firstly there are so many authentic-looking sayings in
the synoptics, and I am highly sceptical of the FT soft-line presumption
that oral tradition could have preserved them over several decades until the
publication of Matthew's gospel. Secondly the presence of many doublet
sayings in Matthew (in contrast with hardly any in Mark) in my opinion cries
out for a second source in addition to Mark in order to explain Matthew's
repetition of so many sayings. Thirdly the straightforward interpretation of
Papias' testimony about the 'logia' is that there once did exist a
stand-alone collection of sayings attributed to Jesus.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

I had written:

> The phrase "kingdom of heaven" is exclusive to Matthew, so most
> commentators consider Luke's "kingdom of God" to be original here.

Bruce Brooks replied:

> Since Kingdom of God is characteristic of Lk, this could be run the
> other way with equal convincement.

Bruce,

Clearly this discussion will not make any progress given this sort of
response. There is an obvious asymmetry here which you fail even to
acknowledge.

> ....... As they stand, the parables seem to me to form this sequence:
>
> Mk: Birds make nests in the shade of the mustard SHRUB
> Mt: SHRUB becomes a TREE; birds nest in its branches
> Lk: It grows into a TREE; birds nest in its branches.
> The mustard plant is in fact a tall shrub, not a tree. We see here, I would
> suggest, a progressive exaggeration of the mustard seed contrast, with the
> shrub nature of the plant increasingly occluded as we pass from Mk to Mt to
> Lk.

On the surface this sequence might seem plausible. But it's not convincing.
Matthew's use of both "shrub" and "tree" is most neatly explained as his
combination of the former from Mark and the latter from the early sayings
source.

- - - - - - - - -

I have found it surprising that you're never prepared to assess one phrase
against another to see which is more *probably* original. This is the
essence of source criticism and you always seem to bypass it. Nor does it
help throwing in questions to which you know no answer. Nor does it help to
point out that a case can be made for changes in either direction. The
question remains in any individual case: which direction of change is the
more probable?

The fact that you "don't see anything that would seriously challenge or
threaten to modify the FGH view of things" tells us, I fear, more about my
presentation and/or your response than about any objective reality. For we
seem to inhabit different source-critical universes.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG
In Response To: Ron Price
On: Method
From: Bruce

I can only agree with Ron's opinion, expressed during his recent three notes
responding to several of mine, that the discussion between us has gone about
as far as it can, due to differences of approach. As his detailed responses
to my comments on particular passages repeatedly show, for him a version of
Q is an accomplished physical fact, whose wording and order are fully known,
and which can therefore be dealt into the consideration of Synoptic Gospel
passages on an equal basis with the extant texts. That's not true for me. I
have still to be convinced of exactly what work needs to be done, in
Synoptic theory, by an unknown third source. Meanwhile, I prefer to work
only with extant texts. This difference leads to divergent readings of the
extant texts. Those who agree with Ron (or with any other version of the
general Q idea) may find his analyses more cogent than I am presently
prepared to, and for them, there is no need of me contributing further from
another angle altogether.

All I can usefully do at this point, then, is to thank Ron for introducing
the subject, since it is always fun to look again at these familiar yet
sometimes strange passages, and to make a final general response from the
methodology side. This note is that response. I can do it responsorially:

Ron [in response to a request for a few passages that had convinced him of
the need to posit a lost source]: It is not any particular passage that
convinces me that a non-synoptic source is required. Firstly there are so
many authentic-looking sayings in the synoptics, and I am highly sceptical
of the FT soft-line presumption that oral tradition could have preserved
them over several decades until the publication of Matthew's gospel.

Bruce: I would agree that relying on "oral transmission" for verbally exact
results is unrealistic. But as I noted a bit ago, I have grave doubts that
the criterion of "authenticity" can at this stage be anything but circular.
I think that relying on our impressions of authenticity can all too easily
reduce itself to relying on our most vivid childhood memories. I have my own
such memories, and I treasure them, and I recently drove 2,000 miles to
revisit the site of some of them, but I don't consider them part of the
toolkit.

Ron: Secondly the presence of many doublet sayings in Matthew (in contrast
with hardly any in Mark) in my opinion cries out for a second source in
addition to Mark in order to explain Matthew's repetition of so many
sayings.

Bruce: I agree that the Matthean doublets need a look. Not having yet given
them a very systematic look myself, I don't feel able to rely with
confidence on what Ron says the outcome of that look would be. Doubtless
just my own backwardness and culpable lack of energy, but there it is.

Ron:  Thirdly the straightforward interpretation of Papias' testimony about
the 'logia' is that there once did exist a stand-alone collection of sayings
attributed to Jesus.

Bruce: I am with those who find Papias anything but straightforward, and I
prefer to bracket his testimony, such as it may prove to be, until I make a
decently careful survey of the texts he is talking about. The texts, after
all, are earlier evidence than Papias. I am not sure, for example, whether
Papias is reporting early hearsay about Gospel origins, or at least in part
making his own inferences from the texts, such as we ourselves might also
make. On consulting the extent evidence, I seem to see things *in* the texts
which tend to challenge Papias's report *of* the texts, and accordingly I am
unwilling to make Papias an assured starting point. Ron has gone as far as
any one person I know of, to reify Papias's assertion of a Semitic sayings
source. We looked at it a while ago. I am still inclined to have
reservations about it. In any case, I don't feel comfortable accepting it as
a given before we (or anyway, I) have finished giving Ron's twelve Mt/Lk
passages, or any other subset of Mt/Lk passages, a decent scrutiny on their
extant merits.

Ron [on my suggesting that the sequence shrub, shrub/tree, tree suggests the
order Mk > Mt > Lk for the Mustard Seed parable]: On the surface this
sequence might seem plausible. But it's not convincing. Matthew's use of
both "shrub" and "tree" is most neatly explained as his combination of the
former from Mark and the latter from the early sayings source.

Bruce: Absent an assured "early sayings source," I find it not only
plausible BUT convincing. I don't see how, given these passages, one would
be driven to posit an external source. If the three Mustards are
intelligible, superficially or otherwise, as an evolutionary sequence, then
we would seem to have at least a workable explanation. If no such
explanation were possible, THEN a lost source might need to be posited. But
only then. Or so it seems to someone approaching the matter de novo.

Ron [as a final methodological comment]: I have found it surprising that
you're never prepared to assess one phrase against another to see which is
more *probably* original. This is the essence of source criticism and you
always seem to bypass it. Nor does it help throwing in questions to which
you know no answer. Nor does it help to point out that a case can be made
for changes in either direction. The question remains in any individual
case: which direction of change is the more probable?

Bruce: For me, Ron's last line is the fundamental principle of philology,
operative both in the text critical area and in what used to be called the
"higher criticism." It turns out to go back to Tischendorf, as was
ascertained some time back, both on and off this list. The earlier version
is the one from which the others may most rationally be seen as derived. But
why reduce the application of the Tischendorf principle to only the word
level?

To me, then, the flaw here is the term "source criticism," as a label for
one-word considerations, plus the disposition to regard "source criticism"
as the only tool one needs for the job. Others might concentrate on
"redaction criticism," or limit themselves to "form criticism," or awe the
rest of us into an abashed silence by invoking Religionsgeschichte. In all
its varieties, I find this sort of thing self-stultifying. "Source
criticism" is not a methodology, it is one tool in the methodological kit.
One should be aware of sources or possible sources (as in determining
directionality between extant sources, whether or not they turn out to imply
a non-extant source), AND of authorial intent, AND of the literary character
of the material being studied, AND of theological implications, AND of puns
in Aramaic, AND or allusions or echoes from Greek literature, AND of where
this text might be coming from in real life, AND of who the writer thought
he was talking to, AND of what he has himself already written, AND of the
text-critical status of the word or passage in question, AND of what else in
that or other texts falls into the same generic category. All at once, and
as far as possible. Few people are capable of keeping track of all that,
hence the need for collaboration, for conferences, for journals, for this
E-list.

[Guy came to the house today to work on the backup editorial computer. He
unzipped his little traveling toolkit. If it had held only a socket wrench,
I would have begun to fear for the life of the backup editorial computer. To
my relief, there were all sorts of other gizmos in there as well. I think
that this is how professionals operate. Do some carpenters specialize in
drilling, and others in planing, and others in rabbeting?]

If for some weird science fiction reason I had to choose only one tool for
passages like this, it would certainly not be one which limits me to
single-word directionality determinations. Not that they are invalid, but
that they are risky. The amount of relevant but excluded data is too great,
and the chance of error is correspondingly too high. At least it is too high
for me. I welcome such considerations along with others, but I am not
prepared to join Ron in confining the discussion to that species of evidence
alone. There is too much other evidence, with which a successful theory of
one passage is going to have to deal eventually. That evidence should be
left in play throughout, in the interest of a faster and more adequate final
result.

Or so it looks from here.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/wsp

Dennis Dean Carpenter wrote:

> I would have to disagree with the characterization of using "raven" versus
> "birds of the air" is a case of poetry becoming less specific. I think the
> author Luke is using the imagery of the unclean raven of Leviticus, along with
> the apocalyptic "day of retribution" found in Isaiah 34, where only the owls,
> ravens, jackdaws, thorns, nettles, briers, etc, will live. .....

Dennis,

This seems to me rather obscure for the author of a gospel clearly aimed at
Gentiles. It assumes Luke thought his readers would know that Jews
considered ravens 'unclean'. The uncleanness is arguably more likely to
point the other way, with Matthew, who is known to have had a strong Jewish
background, thinking that Jesus would not have used an unclean bird to
illustrate God's providence. Originally Jesus, being in some ways a radical
thinker, could well have deliberately chosen an unclean bird to put even
more stress on God's care of humans (if God cares for unclean birds, how
much more for humans, c.f. Davies & Allison).

Another argument is that according to Black there was a paranomasia between
'ravens' and 'feeds'. This suggests the existence of an older version of the
saying which predated the Greek gospels, and if true would tend to confirm
the originality of 'ravens'.

> Had it been merely poetry that was glossed over, the imagery of lilies would
> have been left out, I think, and replaced by "flowers," .....

Maybe. But flowers were not unclean.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

Ravens were symbols of destruction and death, ill omen and such, in the Greek
world. In the Greek, Jewish or even American, or Germanic world, carrion eaters
are generally considered "unclean." I can't recall any positive images of the
raven from Greek lore, so I'm not sure that the image of a raven would be
"obscure." Do you have any reason to believe that it would be obscure?

Furthermore, we find many allusions to Hebrew writings in Luke/Acts. With your
logic, would these allusions also not be "rather obscure" to Gentiles? The
author has Jesus begin his journey by quoting Isaiah 61. Are you saying that the
Gentile audience would have been more familiar with this than Isaiah 34, in
which I noted the raven as fitting into the gist of the block of material it is
found? It seem natural that the author of Luke/Acts would have tweaked "birds"
to fit his program.


Dennis Dean Carpenter
Dahlonega, Georgia


Ron stated:
This seems to me rather obscure for the author of a gospel clearly aimed at
Gentiles. It assumes Luke thought his readers would know that Jews
considered ravens 'unclean'. The uncleanness is arguably more likely to
point the other way, with Matthew, who is known to have had a strong Jewish
background, thinking that Jesus would not have used an unclean bird to
illustrate God's providence. Originally Jesus, being in some ways a radical
thinker, could well have deliberately chosen an unclean bird to put even
more stress on God's care of humans (if God cares for unclean birds, how
much more for humans, c.f. Davies & Allison).

Another argument is that according to Black there was a paranomasia between
'ravens' and 'feeds'. This suggests the existence of an older version of the
saying which predated the Greek gospels, and if true would tend to confirm
the originality of 'ravens'.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Bruce Brooks wrote:


> All I can usefully do at this point, then, is to thank Ron for introducing
> the subject,

Bruce,

And thank you for your responses.

> ....... I have grave doubts that
> the criterion of "authenticity" can at this stage be anything but circular.

Then at the very least the variety of literary forms in Matthew is surely
worth investigating to see whether it supports the existence of a second
source (in addition to Mark) behind that gospel.

> ....... I am with those who find Papias anything but straightforward,

On the whole you may have a point. But I am referring to one particular
statement of his which not only looks feasible as history, but which may
also hold the key to the biggest gap in contemporary NT models of the birth
of Christianity, namely that between the Aramaic-speaking Jesus movement in
Jerusalem and the Greek gospels.

> One should be aware of sources or possible sources (as in determining
> directionality between extant sources, whether or not they turn out to imply
> a non-extant source), AND of authorial intent, AND of the literary character
> of the material being studied, AND of theological implications, AND of puns
> in Aramaic, AND or allusions or echoes from Greek literature, AND of where
> this text might be coming from in real life, AND of who the writer thought
> he was talking to, AND of what he has himself already written, AND of the
> text-critical status of the word or passage in question, AND of what else in
> that or other texts falls into the same generic category. All at once, and
> as far as possible. Few people are capable of keeping track of all that,
> hence the need for collaboration, for conferences, for journals, for this
> E-list.

In principle I agree entirely. But in practice it is just not possible in
email discussion to mention all these aspects, even for discussion of
phrases, let alone your preferred pericope level or higher. The best we
achieve is to have as many as possible of these various aspects in mind when
discussing any particular passage, so as not to find ourselves arguing for a
point of view which would be ruled out by some aspect not expressly
mentioned.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

Bruce,

   Are you suggesting that there was development of these texts other than that
which is documented in variant readings in the ancient MSS?

   Rev. Chuck Jones
   Atlanta, Georgia

E Bruce Brooks wrote:
           CHUCK: So, if analysis shows that sometimes the directionality of
entire
passages flows from Mt to Lk and sometimes it flows from Lk to Mt, then this
alternating primitivity is in fact the evidence for an independent source.

BRUCE: Strictly speaking, there are other possibilities. For instance, it
can also happen that one or both of the texts is accretional, so that
instead of A vs B, you have A1, A2 vs B1, B2. If then we had material
created in the following absolute order:

A1, B1, A2, B2

and if the quality of "lateness" is apparent in the texts, as you move to
the right, then to the analyst thinking of the material as solely composed
of A and B, and unaware of the accretional dimension, it will sometimes seem
that A is earlier (eg, A1 is earlier than both B1 and B2) but sometimes also
that B is earlier (eg, B1 is earlier than A2). This is not necessarily
evidence for a Text C, may be, and in this case it is, a warning that either
A or B or both are not integral texts.

C remains a possibility, but it seems worth bearing in mind that it is not
the only possibility.




   .





---------------------------------
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Chuck Jones <chuckjonez@...> wrote:     Bruce and Ron,

   If a third may enter this conversation (snipped below), I'd like to make some
foundational observations:

   1.  No burden of proof should be attached either way to the matter of whether
there was a third source.  I could be misreading Bruce, but his question seems
framed as if the burden of proof is on one who thinks that a third source is the
best solution to the the relationship of Mt and Lk.  Neither hypothesis is
"cleaner," or more or less likely than the other.

   2.  The question on the table is What is the literary relationship of Mt and
Lk?  It is not, Was there a third source?  And the basic question
(literally--the base upon which subsequent thinking and questioning should be
built) is Were Mt and Lk produced independently of each other?

   3.  On this question, evidence that Mt and Lk were both ignorant of some of
the content of the other has been primary to me.  In particular, in the material
that precedes and follows the scope of the gospel of Mk, Mt and Lk have no
overlap in their material.  Not a single parallel passage prior to the baptism
or after the burial.  I've read material and participated in discussions that
try to carve up and swallow this elephant-in-the-living-room one bite at a
time--but they simply are not persuasive to me.

   5.  Per item 2. above, note that this set of evidence has nothing to do with a
third (or fourth or fortieth) source.  It does not even involve the double
tradition.  The discussion of sources for the double tradition is crucial--but
in its proper context.

   Rev. Chuck Jones
   Atlanta, Georgia

Ron Price wrote:
           Bruce Brooks wrote:

> Maybe Ron could contribute to present discussion the passage or passages
> that convinced him of the need for a third source hypothesis in the first
> place?

Bruce,

It is not any particular passage that convinces me that a non-synoptic
source is required. Firstly there are so many authentic-looking sayings in
the synoptics, and I am highly sceptical of the FT soft-line presumption
that oral tradition could have preserved them over several decades until the
publication of Matthew's gospel. Secondly the presence of many doublet
sayings in Matthew (in contrast with hardly any in Mark) in my opinion cries
out for a second source in addition to Mark in order to explain Matthew's
repetition of so many sayings. Thirdly the straightforward interpretation of
Papias' testimony about the 'logia' is that there once did exist a
stand-alone collection of sayings attributed to Jesus.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK



   .




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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG, WSW
In Response To: Chuck Jones
On: Text History
From: Bruce

CHUCK:  Are you suggesting that there was development of these texts other
than that which is documented in variant readings in the ancient MSS?

BRUCE: That is exactly what I am suggesting.

And there are two kinds. First, consider Lachmann's NT reconstruction; the
first really modern one. He very correctly said that he was aiming, not to
reconstruct the author's original, but only the most accurate text that was
exemplified by his manuscripts, which themselves did not go back further
than the 4th century. Lachmann even insisted on leaving in his text what
looked to him like scribal errors *in the text that his earliest copyists
were looking at,* since they went back earlier than he could generally
follow. That left 3 centuries for scribal corruptions to have happened, to
which the available manuscripts in the nature of things could not witness.
That long gap has been narrowed somewhat by the subsequent discovery of
earlier manuscripts, but nobody would say it is reduced to zero. I hold,
with Metzger and a few others, that the so-called Western Non-Interpolations
are passages which, for liturgical reasons, were added by some very early
scribe to the common ancestor of both Bezae and Vaticanus (etc). These are
scribal corruptions of the kind that text criticism can catch, if it has
early enough manuscripts or their uncontaminated descendants. From them we
can posit a copy which had features that are directly attested by *no*
surviving manuscript; the early copy is entirely inferential. This is
pushing about as hard as one can, on the manuscript evidence. What if we had
no Bezae? Then there would be an even larger gap between the "author's final
text" and the earliest point that can be reached by comparison of extant
manuscripts. We must thus always reckon with the possibility that there is a
substantial gap between the author's final text (the archetype) and the
earliest point we can reach through manuscript comparison.  That inability
is just chance; we might possess a verifiable author's holograph, but
usually we don't. This is a familiar situation with Latin secular texts, for
example, and people just make the best of it. They are well experienced in
making the best of it, thanks to the text critics of this and earlier
centuries. The error, as it seems to me, lies in thinking that *all*
manuscript changes are scribal corruptions, of the kind that manuscript
comparison is well adapted to handle.

2. Suppose we possessed the author's holograph; the archetype. But there is
also textual evolution that may *precede* the archetype, the text as it was
handed over to the copyists. How could this be so? Consider modern
parallels: What author among us has never had a second thought about the
content or arrangement of a book, an SBL paper, or a Synoptic E-mail
message? Who has not used a plane trip to interlineate last-minute
felicities into the draft of a lecture? Or crossed out the lead paragraph
and substituted a whole new page? I think we need to allow the same sort of
possibility for the Gospel texts, during the period when they were being
composed, or perhaps more often, in these and comparable cases, while they
were still closely held. My best guess is that Mark (for example) was not
written simply for general publication, like some modern book, but rather
for the guidance of a particular early congregation. Its intended hearers
were built into the conditions of its emergence as a set of pastoral notes.
And as it was used that way, and time passed, and conditions changed (one
well-known change is that people were losing heart about the Second Coming),
additions might be made to that house text in order to deal with them. There
are a couple of places in Mark where Jesus is made to say specifically (and
to underline his assurance with the pregnant term "verily") that not
*everybody* will die before he comes, and that the original promise will, at
least technically, be kept *within the generation of his original hearers.*
It helps this supposition that most of the Markan "verily" passages in
question meet all the texts of an interpolation. But these are probably not
scribal corruption interpolations, such as the liturgically motivated
addenda to Luke, of which we *barely* know through manuscript comparison;
they are more likely to be authorial patches or improvements; shoring up a
functional text *while it was still functioning* in its original context of
addressing the needs of a particular group of converts. (I will be
addressing this question in more detail in a paper at next month's SBL/NE
meeting, and is it all that far from Atlanta GA to Newton MA? Surely not).

Meanwhile, as matter for reflection, consider how works of music in our own
time remain fluid under their composer's hand long after they were first
"finished" in the sense of being consecutively performable. Mozart adapted
or inserted arias during opera rehearsals to meet the needs of a given
soprano, or the substitution of the lead tenor. Rachmaninoff, after
observing audience reactions, cut his Second Piano Sonata considerably, so
much so that later on Horowitz, thinking he had cut too much, got permission
to restore some of the cuts. (Rachmaninoff also cut his Second Symphony
after audiences found it too long, and having heard both versions, I find
that the audiences were right). Here is audience interaction at a very high
level. But there are all sorts of levels. I think that anybody who has ever
performed in public will probably agree that one readily senses whether the
thing is going over or not, and spontaneously adjusts to close the gap
between the presentation and the audience's receptivity to the
presentation - or for that matter, expands to accommodate audience
enthusiasm. All this is common knowledge and experience. For a systematic
look at the ways texts can grow in the course of becoming complete in the
library cataloguer's sense of complete, I venture to suggest the Text
Typology pages at

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/philology/typology/index.html

The idea of those pages is that if we get used to what we really already
know, so as to bring it up fully into our analytical consciousness, we may
be better set to consider alternatives for texts whose history, including
their pre-publication compositional history, we do not directly know.

Respectfully suggested,

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Bruce,

   Thanks for the thoughtful commentary.  While you raise an interesting,
legitimate point, I am not certain how we can proceed in literary analysis based
on possibilities for which there is no evidence.  It seems to me we must analyze
the literature we have, recognizing it limits our results.

   (A hobby horse of mine is that I am not at all persuaded by attempts--usually
in within Pauline studies--to solve literary and theological issues by
hypothesizing interpolations that have no textual evidence.  But that's for
another list, another day.)

   Chuck

E Bruce Brooks wrote:
           To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG, WSW
In Response To: Chuck Jones
On: Text History
From: Bruce

CHUCK: Are you suggesting that there was development of these texts other
than that which is documented in variant readings in the ancient MSS?

BRUCE: That is exactly what I am suggesting.

And there are two kinds. First, consider Lachmann's NT reconstruction; the
first really modern one. He very correctly said that he was aiming, not to
reconstruct the author's original, but only the most accurate text that was
exemplified by his manuscripts, which themselves did not go back further
than the 4th century. Lachmann even insisted on leaving in his text what
looked to him like scribal errors *in the text that his earliest copyists
were looking at,* since they went back earlier than he could generally
follow. That left 3 centuries for scribal corruptions to have happened, to
which the available manuscripts in the nature of things could not witness.
That long gap has been narrowed somewhat by the subsequent discovery of
earlier manuscripts, but nobody would say it is reduced to zero. I hold,
with Metzger and a few others, that the so-called Western Non-Interpolations
are passages which, for liturgical reasons, were added by some very early
scribe to the common ancestor of both Bezae and Vaticanus (etc). These are
scribal corruptions of the kind that text criticism can catch, if it has
early enough manuscripts or their uncontaminated descendants. From them we
can posit a copy which had features that are directly attested by *no*
surviving manuscript; the early copy is entirely inferential. This is
pushing about as hard as one can, on the manuscript evidence. What if we had
no Bezae? Then there would be an even larger gap between the "author's final
text" and the earliest point that can be reached by comparison of extant
manuscripts. We must thus always reckon with the possibility that there is a
substantial gap between the author's final text (the archetype) and the
earliest point we can reach through manuscript comparison. That inability
is just chance; we might possess a verifiable author's holograph, but
usually we don't. This is a familiar situation with Latin secular texts, for
example, and people just make the best of it. They are well experienced in
making the best of it, thanks to the text critics of this and earlier
centuries. The error, as it seems to me, lies in thinking that *all*
manuscript changes are scribal corruptions, of the kind that manuscript
comparison is well adapted to handle.

2. Suppose we possessed the author's holograph; the archetype. But there is
also textual evolution that may *precede* the archetype, the text as it was
handed over to the copyists. How could this be so? Consider modern
parallels: What author among us has never had a second thought about the
content or arrangement of a book, an SBL paper, or a Synoptic E-mail
message? Who has not used a plane trip to interlineate last-minute
felicities into the draft of a lecture? Or crossed out the lead paragraph
and substituted a whole new page? I think we need to allow the same sort of
possibility for the Gospel texts, during the period when they were being
composed, or perhaps more often, in these and comparable cases, while they
were still closely held. My best guess is that Mark (for example) was not
written simply for general publication, like some modern book, but rather
for the guidance of a particular early congregation. Its intended hearers
were built into the conditions of its emergence as a set of pastoral notes.
And as it was used that way, and time passed, and conditions changed (one
well-known change is that people were losing heart about the Second Coming),
additions might be made to that house text in order to deal with them. There
are a couple of places in Mark where Jesus is made to say specifically (and
to underline his assurance with the pregnant term "verily") that not
*everybody* will die before he comes, and that the original promise will, at
least technically, be kept *within the generation of his original hearers.*
It helps this supposition that most of the Markan "verily" passages in
question meet all the texts of an interpolation. But these are probably not
scribal corruption interpolations, such as the liturgically motivated
addenda to Luke, of which we *barely* know through manuscript comparison;
they are more likely to be authorial patches or improvements; shoring up a
functional text *while it was still functioning* in its original context of
addressing the needs of a particular group of converts. (I will be
addressing this question in more detail in a paper at next month's SBL/NE
meeting, and is it all that far from Atlanta GA to Newton MA? Surely not).

Meanwhile, as matter for reflection, consider how works of music in our own
time remain fluid under their composer's hand long after they were first
"finished" in the sense of being consecutively performable. Mozart adapted
or inserted arias during opera rehearsals to meet the needs of a given
soprano, or the substitution of the lead tenor. Rachmaninoff, after
observing audience reactions, cut his Second Piano Sonata considerably, so
much so that later on Horowitz, thinking he had cut too much, got permission
to restore some of the cuts. (Rachmaninoff also cut his Second Symphony
after audiences found it too long, and having heard both versions, I find
that the audiences were right). Here is audience interaction at a very high
level. But there are all sorts of levels. I think that anybody who has ever
performed in public will probably agree that one readily senses whether the
thing is going over or not, and spontaneously adjusts to close the gap
between the presentation and the audience's receptivity to the
presentation - or for that matter, expands to accommodate audience
enthusiasm. All this is common knowledge and experience. For a systematic
look at the ways texts can grow in the course of becoming complete in the
library cataloguer's sense of complete, I venture to suggest the Text
Typology pages at

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/philology/typology/index.html

The idea of those pages is that if we get used to what we really already
know, so as to bring it up fully into our analytical consciousness, we may
be better set to consider alternatives for texts whose history, including
their pre-publication compositional history, we do not directly know.

Respectfully suggested,

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst






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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

CHUCK: Are you suggesting that there was development of these texts
other
than that which is documented in variant readings in the ancient MSS?

BRUCE: That is exactly what I am suggesting.

Here I might add my own argument for this position -

I like to make an analogy to evolutionary biology. New varieties arise
by mutation. Assuming the mutation survives, a question can be asked. -
"How long before every member of the population carries this mutation?"
There are a number of factors at work and with certain assumptions you
can write exact equations, but here two factors are important.



1)       The smaller the population, the shorter the time until full
replacement. It takes less generations for the trait to be passed to a
population of few individuals than one with many.

2)       The strength of selective pressure will influence how fast
replacement takes place. Mutations that provide substantial advantage
will achieve full replacement faster than those that only provide
marginal advantage.



Now relating this to texts. Scribal errors and deliberate changes,
however motivated, might be described as mutations to the original text.
Early on in the history of Christianity there were far fewer adherents,
and one would therefore imagine far fewer copies of any given text. In
this environment any changes would be expected to achieve full
replacement in a shorter time frame than in later periods. Also, given
that the early history of Christianity was more diverse, and involved
more changes than in later periods, we would expect selective pressures
on documents to have been greater then than later. In later ages a text
variant acceptable in one century would almost certainly be acceptable
in the next. In the early history, decade to decade changes in attitude
would have put more pressure on the texts.

We have surviving evidence of the evolution of the texts from later
periods, and based on this it is reasonable to assume that the changes
in earlier periods were more substantial, and we do not, in fact, have
the original texts. In most cases of course, this means the text is
lost. In a few cases, however, with the synoptics, evidence of a lost
variant of one text may survive in another.

Some examples -

Recently we noted that the narrative portions of "Q" stand out in a
statistically significant way. They contain long passages of exact
agreement, also they occur outside of the two main blocks where Luke
located his non-Markian material. I think this indicates there were
earlier versions of Luke without the narrative bits of "Q", and this
represents assimilation to the text of Matthew. Additionally we can note
that some of these involve John the Baptist and we know Marcion had a
version of Luke without Some John the Baptist material.

A second such addition would be Mark 3:22-30. This material breaks up
references to the family of Jesus, and thus looks as if it could be an
insertion. There would be a motivation for this as well, if we read the
text without these lines. His family thinks he is insane, and he appears
to disown them. Luke follows neither the order nor the text of Mark
here. He groups this with his "Q" material and follows Q and/or Matthew
for the text. There is no reason a priori that Luke has to do both of
these things together. He could for example have left it in Mark's
position, and followed the Q text, or the other way around. But this
combination of actions supports the idea that Luke never even saw this
text in his copy of Mark, and this is a late addition.

One final example:

One surviving version of Luke 3:22 reads "You are my son, today I have
fathered you". Normally it is argued that "You are my son, the beloved,
with you I am well-pleased" is the original. This argument rests on the
idea that Luke would hardly have altered Mark and said "today I have
fathered you", while at the same time adding a birth narrative. However,
if we suppose a lost version of Mark also read "today I have fathered
you", and Luke merely preserved Mark's text, then we have a logical
progression of textual changes. The original text of Mark then would
have echoed Psalm 2 "I will proclaim the decree of Yahweh. He said to me
'You are my son, today I have fathered you'". This also might be echoed
in Mark 1:38 - "Let us go elsewhere...so I can proclaim the message
there too, for this is why I came". And of course being 'fathered' at
the baptism is at home in Mark's gospel where there is no birth
narrative.

Dave Gentile

Riverside, IL











[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG, WSW
In Response To: Chuck Jones
On: Methodology
From: Bruce

CHUCK: While you raise an interesting, legitimate point, I am not certain
how we can proceed in literary analysis based on possibilities for which
there is no evidence.  It seems to me we must analyze the literature we
have, recognizing it limits our results.

BRUCE: Evidence in one text is not "no evidence." Let me illustrate.

(1) As we read the newspaper (to borrow an example from Metzger), we
spontaneously correct misprints in the newspaper. If we see "thesef" we do
not need a whole second edition of the paper, identical save that this word
appears as "these," to judge that the compositor has let her finger rest
improvidently on the F key (its home key) before thumbing the spacebar. The
whole layout of the standard keyboard could probably be recovered with a
fair degree of accuracy by collating fifty thousand errors of this sort.
It's not as good as salvaging an actual 20th century keyboard, but it's not
mere speculation either. It has a basis in evidence.

(2) Suppose we have two manuscripts B and C, containing the same passage,
but B is longer by a sentence. The existence of the difference focuses our
attention on this situation, and we therefore are compelled to decide
between them. C is shorter. Do we follow an "iron rule" and rule it
preferable? Not if we have read Griesbach, who seems to have formulated the
"lectio brevior" guideline in great detail. Griesbach does in fact lay it
down that the shorter reading is better, since (as he says) scribes do
abbreviate. But he they proceeds to give even more examples of cases where
scribes do NOT abbreviate, but expand. Whence we get the opposite rule,
sometimes also cited, that the longer reading is preferable. The truth of
the matter, fully evident in Griesbach's examples (for which see Metzger
Text of the New Testament 3ed p120), is that neither the longer nor the
shorter reading is a priori preferable. We have no recourse, in this or any
other case, save to examine, on their merits, the two particular passages.

We might, as one possibility, find that the sentence found only in B is also
*interruptive* in B; that it does not articulate well with what comes before
and after it, and that when it is experimentally removed, the material
before and after it joins together in a satisfactory sequence. Then the line
standing only in B is very likely to be an interpolation, and we rule in
favor of C as preserving the original reading.

Or, to take the opposite possibility, suppose that the line in B makes the
context work concinnitously, but that the sequence in C is bumpy and
unsatisfactory. Then text C is somehow defective, and its defect is cured by
the existence of the B line. In this case, a line has been lost from C and
can be confidently supplied from B. Here, it is B that preserve the original
reading.

ONE TEXT EQUIVALENTS

Now suppose we had only text C. If it reads satisfactorily, there is no need
to pay further attention to it. If it reads problematically, such that the
connection at one point is faulty, then we can conjecture that a word, or a
line, or a page, has dropped out, but we have no way to restore the missing
material, or even to estimate its extent. The cure here is either
conjectural emendation (and there are famous cases where conjectural
emendation has succeeded), or simply to indicate a lacuna and move on. We
recognize a problem by considering the nature of the text, and solve it, or
mark it, as best we can.

Or, suppose we had only text B. If it reads satisfactorily, there is no need
to pay further attention to it, and in all probability, no attention, in
fact, would ever have been called to it. But if there is an inconcinnity, a
sense of non sequitur, a feeling of resumption after disturbance, as we read
the text, we may find on inspection (and inspection is implicitly called
for) that one sentence is causing all the trouble, and that if we remove it,
the text is fine. In this case, we judge that we are dealing with an
interpolation, identify the line in question as such, remove it from our
idea of the original, and pass on. We do not have the support of an
independent manuscript containing the text as we have conjectured it, but we
do have a solution, and a solution based on the evidence in the text.

MORAL

Divergent manuscript readings serve to focus attention on passages that may
be problematic, whether from scribal dropouts or from scribal additions or
from a host of other things. Divergent readings help to accelerate the
process of discovery by focusing attention on problem places. But we *solve*
those passages, once we have been led to consider them, not by the fact of
the difference, which of itself only identifies that a problem exists. We
solve them by considering the local merits of each single text. Those
determinations are such as could also be made (though if a line has dropped
out, not equally well made) by sufficiently careful attention to the
evidence within the single text.

It is the evidence of the single text that decides the problem. That
evidence is thus not properly "no evidence." It is just this sort of
evidence that is ultimately relied on by text criticism. Noting the
attestation of the several readings in other manuscripts merely gives the
history of dissemination of the correct and/or the incorrect readings. It
does not of itself say which reading *is* the correct one; at most, it puts
you in good company. The attestation pattern may itself be used as a
substitute for local judgement, and if the preferred pattern includes
Vaticanus, the result may often be successful. But it is ultimately local
judgement that establishes Vaticanus in the first place as something worth
betting on, when you have no other ideas in a given case.

Thus, in effect, Westcott and Hort, or a rule of thumb that derives from
their colossal labors. But I give them full marks for recognizing that there
are cases, albeit seemingly few of them, where Vaticanus itself stands a
little off to one side of the line of descent from the archetype. They did
this by considering the merits of the local situation. So should we.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/philology/typology/index.html (still recommended)

Bruce,

   Excellent thoughts that challenge long-held assumptions of mine.

   I have always placed much weight on the text critical principle of preferring
the more difficult reading, the thinking being that a scribe is more likely to
smooth a passage than make it more difficult.

   This is the main reason I have been reluctant to buy into emending texts in
the absence of textual variants:  we become the very scribes that we've been
cautioned about!

   But I have another, much more significant issue with proposing variant
readings in the absence of manuscript evidence.  The absence of variant
manuscript evidence is evidence for the absence of variation!

   For example, a significant number of Pauline scholars believe that I Thess.
2:15-16 is a later interpolation, despite the absence of textual variants.  So
here is what had to have happened.  One scribe inserted the passage into one
copy of I Thess.  And then all of the other copies of I Thess. had to perish
from the earth while this one copy became the single progenitor for all
manuscripts of I Thess. from that day forward.  I have a pretty big problem with
the plausibility of that scenario.

   Not sure how this contributes to our discussion, which I am much enjoying.

   Rev. Chuck Jones
   Atlanta, GA

E Bruce Brooks wrote:

   CHUCK: While you raise an interesting, legitimate point, I am not certain
how we can proceed in literary analysis based on possibilities for which
there is no evidence. It seems to me we must analyze the literature we
have, recognizing it limits our results.

BRUCE: Evidence in one text is not "no evidence." Let me illustrate.

(1) As we read the newspaper (to borrow an example from Metzger), we
spontaneously correct misprints in the newspaper. If we see "thesef" we do
not need a whole second edition of the paper, identical save that this word
appears as "these," to judge that the compositor has let her finger rest
improvidently on the F key (its home key) before thumbing the spacebar. The
whole layout of the standard keyboard could probably be recovered with a
fair degree of accuracy by collating fifty thousand errors of this sort.
It's not as good as salvaging an actual 20th century keyboard, but it's not
mere speculation either. It has a basis in evidence.

(2) Suppose we have two manuscripts B and C, containing the same passage,
but B is longer by a sentence. The existence of the difference focuses our
attention on this situation, and we therefore are compelled to decide
between them. C is shorter. Do we follow an "iron rule" and rule it
preferable? Not if we have read Griesbach, who seems to have formulated the
"lectio brevior" guideline in great detail. Griesbach does in fact lay it
down that the shorter reading is better, since (as he says) scribes do
abbreviate. But he they proceeds to give even more examples of cases where
scribes do NOT abbreviate, but expand. Whence we get the opposite rule,
sometimes also cited, that the longer reading is preferable. The truth of
the matter, fully evident in Griesbach's examples (for which see Metzger
Text of the New Testament 3ed p120), is that neither the longer nor the
shorter reading is a priori preferable. We have no recourse, in this or any
other case, save to examine, on their merits, the two particular passages.

We might, as one possibility, find that the sentence found only in B is also
*interruptive* in B; that it does not articulate well with what comes before
and after it, and that when it is experimentally removed, the material
before and after it joins together in a satisfactory sequence. Then the line
standing only in B is very likely to be an interpolation, and we rule in
favor of C as preserving the original reading.

Or, to take the opposite possibility, suppose that the line in B makes the
context work concinnitously, but that the sequence in C is bumpy and
unsatisfactory. Then text C is somehow defective, and its defect is cured by
the existence of the B line. In this case, a line has been lost from C and
can be confidently supplied from B. Here, it is B that preserve the original
reading.

ONE TEXT EQUIVALENTS

Now suppose we had only text C. If it reads satisfactorily, there is no need
to pay further attention to it. If it reads problematically, such that the
connection at one point is faulty, then we can conjecture that a word, or a
line, or a page, has dropped out, but we have no way to restore the missing
material, or even to estimate its extent. The cure here is either
conjectural emendation (and there are famous cases where conjectural
emendation has succeeded), or simply to indicate a lacuna and move on. We
recognize a problem by considering the nature of the text, and solve it, or
mark it, as best we can.

Or, suppose we had only text B. If it reads satisfactorily, there is no need
to pay further attention to it, and in all probability, no attention, in
fact, would ever have been called to it. But if there is an inconcinnity, a
sense of non sequitur, a feeling of resumption after disturbance, as we read
the text, we may find on inspection (and inspection is implicitly called
for) that one sentence is causing all the trouble, and that if we remove it,
the text is fine. In this case, we judge that we are dealing with an
interpolation, identify the line in question as such, remove it from our
idea of the original, and pass on. We do not have the support of an
independent manuscript containing the text as we have conjectured it, but we
do have a solution, and a solution based on the evidence in the text.

MORAL

Divergent manuscript readings serve to focus attention on passages that may
be problematic, whether from scribal dropouts or from scribal additions or
from a host of other things. Divergent readings help to accelerate the
process of discovery by focusing attention on problem places. But we *solve*
those passages, once we have been led to consider them, not by the fact of
the difference, which of itself only identifies that a problem exists. We
solve them by considering the local merits of each single text. Those
determinations are such as could also be made (though if a line has dropped
out, not equally well made) by sufficiently careful attention to the
evidence within the single text.

It is the evidence of the single text that decides the problem. That
evidence is thus not properly "no evidence." It is just this sort of
evidence that is ultimately relied on by text criticism. Noting the
attestation of the several readings in other manuscripts merely gives the
history of dissemination of the correct and/or the incorrect readings. It
does not of itself say which reading *is* the correct one; at most, it puts
you in good company. The attestation pattern may itself be used as a
substitute for local judgement, and if the preferred pattern includes
Vaticanus, the result may often be successful. But it is ultimately local
judgement that establishes Vaticanus in the first place as something worth
betting on, when you have no other ideas in a given case.

Thus, in effect, Westcott and Hort, or a rule of thumb that derives from
their colossal labors. But I give them full marks for recognizing that there
are cases, albeit seemingly few of them, where Vaticanus itself stands a
little off to one side of the line of descent from the archetype. They did
this by considering the merits of the local situation. So should we.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/philology/typology/index.html (still recommended)






---------------------------------
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG; WSW
In Response To: Chuck Jones
On: Methodology
From: Bruce

CHUCK: I could be misreading Bruce, but his question seems framed as if the
burden of proof is on one who thinks that a third source is the best
solution to the relationship of Mt and Lk.

BRUCE: I wouldn't use the term misreading, but my opinion, for what it may
be worth, is that there is no such thing in philology as "burden of proof."
As used in humanistic research contexts, it's merely a rhetorical device. I
don't think we know a priori whether a given problem has a simple solution
(that is, one involving only its seeming components, in this case Mt Mk Lk)
or a complicated one. I can easily imagine complicated situations, and some
of them suggest complex solutions. I just don't want to assume any
*particular* complicated solution until I have had a longer time to see how
the large tendency of the extant evidence lies. It something more elaborate
turns out to be required, that should emerge in the course of considering
the extant evidence.

As I have hinted, my own slow and sporadic previous examination of the
extant evidence does suggest a more complicated situation than is envisioned
by the Synoptic Problem as usually framed. The solution I have so far seen
indicated, however, is not complicated in the direction of multiple *lost*
texts; rather, it is complicated in the direction of complex definitions of
the *extant* texts. Specifically, I find that those three texts are not
necessarily integral (written by one person at one time); at least two, and
quite possibly all three, display accretional layers of composition, before
they were made available to a wider public via manuscript copies. This is a
different complication than the multi-source complication. It does not *rule
out* a further multi-source complication. I just haven't, myself, gotten far
enough yet to find that one or more outside and now lost sources are
indicated. Maybe next week. I try to keep myself open to the evidence, as it
comes in.

CHUCK:  2.  The question on the table is What is the literary relationship
of Mt and Lk?  It is not, Was there a third source?  And the basic question
(literally--the base upon which subsequent thinking and questioning should
be built) is Were Mt and Lk produced independently of each other?

BRUCE: That is one of many questions, and for me they are simultaneously on
the table. I can't think it a priori right to focus on only one question and
withdraw attention from all the others. I think the others should at least
hover on the periphery of our consciousness, as we consider any one. I admit
that this makes for longer E-mails than the Synoptic list protocol
recommends. My apologies accordingly, alike to management and members. But I
didn't invent this situation. I am merely trying to deal responsibly with
it.

CHUCK: 3.  On this question, evidence that Mt and Lk were both ignorant of
some of the content of the other has been primary to me.  In particular, in
the material that precedes and follows the scope of the gospel of Mk, Mt and
Lk have no overlap in their material.  Not a single parallel passage prior
to the baptism or after the burial.  I've read material and participated in
discussions that try to carve up and swallow this
elephant-in-the-living-room one bite at a time--but they simply are not
persuasive to me.

BRUCE: It has been shown, and to me convincingly shown, that the framework
of the Birth and Infancy narratives is the same, it is just that very
different laundry has been hung out to dry on the respective frameworks. In
this area, we are far from a situation that can imaginably be dealt with
along text-critical lines, that is, one is not a failed copy of the other. I
think that Chuck may be reacting to this fact, and if so, I am certainly
with him that far. But that does not mean that one was not *inspired by* the
other, or that one is not a *contentious attempt to improve on* the other.
On the contrary, I suggest that both these latter possibilities are true.
Chuck has previously mentioned the drastic (and I would add, both internally
and externally inconcinnitous) rewriting and repositioning of Mark's
Nazareth episode in Luke. This sort of thing happens all the time in
literary (as against scribal) interactions, and that case is sufficient to
establish this general possibility as also relevant to Luke's stance as a
writer.

I think we need to get used to the idea that Luke is not a copyist; he is an
apologetic composer, and a literary rival to the *previous* apologetic
composers. He as much as says this, as I read him, in his much-discussed
Prologue. I am inclined to take him as he says. Everything in his final
product seems to bear him out, on this reading of his self-introduction.

[Somehow item 4 got lost in transition from Chuck to Synoptic. Here is a
nice text critical problem, which, to avoid an appearance of archness, I
will here pass over]

CHUCK: 5.  Per item 2. above, note that this set of evidence has nothing to
do with a third (or fourth or fortieth) source.  It does not even involve
the double tradition.  The discussion of sources for the double tradition is
crucial--but in its proper context.

BRUCE: I am afraid that pretty much everything is crucial, or at least
sufficiently relevant that it shouldn't be ignored forever. Meaning, it
should be brought into play before we decide things on narrower evidence.

I allow myself one quibble before concluding: Isn't the term "double
tradition" now obsolete and indeed misleading? It implies two channels back
to Jesus, only one step less assuredly authentic than where the three texts
more or less agree ("triple tradition"). I think that implication is now
untenable. What the ancients called "triple tradition" is to me just stuff
in Mark that both Matthew and Luke retained, whether by compositional
inertia or with zestful elaboration. Whichever it might be, the fact of its
retention (or elaboration) surely says something about Matthew and Luke as
stylists and theoreticians, and/or about the somewhat different climate of
crisis in which they wrote, but I do not think that, as such, it says
anything about Jesus, or even necessarily about the earliest church. It may
tell us something about the church contemporary with Matthew and/or Luke. At
any rate, I doubt that we are justified in firmly supposing that it does
take us straight back to Jesus, and the terms "double" and "triple
tradition" do make that assumption, and tend to impose it on our thinking.
That's more static than we need, and I think the terms should be dropped. I
can propose functional substitute terms if desired.

Traditions sometimes keep stuff just because it *is* traditional. The
Chinese school texts, including the home text of Confucius's successor
school in Lu, proceed in very much this way. On the whole, they do not
discard or overwrite; they add. This leaves a lot of evidence behind for the
critic to work on. Sometimes earlier text gets dropped or altered, and this
makes things proportionately more difficult. I find, for example (SBL 2007,
for those who were there), that Luke's Nazareth narrative has not only been
expanded from Mark, it was later rewritten by Luke, and *replacively*
rewritten: we cannot get at the original by excising any addition. Stuff
like that happens; it's just the breaks. I try to work on the easier
instances first, just to get started, but the harder ones also have to be
dealt with eventually. Here is one example of what they will look like when
we finally take them up. We might keep those grimmer possibilities in mind
as we look at the fun cases.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/wsp

(PS: Interesting lecture here this Thursday, for those who are in the area.
See the News item on the homepage given above. / EBB)

To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG, WSW
In Response To: Chuck Jones
On: Methodology
From: Bruce

CHUCK: I have always placed much weight on the text critical principle of
preferring the more difficult reading, the thinking being that a scribe is
more likely to smooth a passage than make it more difficult.

BRUCE: Maybe *more* likely, but still not excluding the likelihood that the
*less* likely option may also occur. Housman has a wonderful refutation of
this mistake, and I will defer to him. A conveniently abridged version of
his 1921 paper is at
http://www.umass.edu/wsp/philology/front/housman/01.html. I think the
relevant part is actually on the third of those four pages, but all of it is
worth reading. I would add only that a typing error (I earlier invented the
case of "thesef") is more difficult than the reading "these" but this does
not make it preferable. It makes it wrong. Most accidental slips tend to
produce impossible readings, but their impossibility is no warrant for their
correctness. In short, no shortcut is safe, and no rule of thumb can
substitute for the use of all the fingers. And sometimes of the other hand,
or in really bad cases, of a knee or two. This stuff is not always easy;
sometimes it is recalcitrant.

CHUCK: This is the main reason I have been reluctant to buy into emending
texts in the absence of textual variants:  we become the very scribes that
we've been cautioned about!

BRUCE: There are certainly dangers, and caution is certainly needed, and any
erudition one happens to possess (via concordances or in propria persona)
comes in handy too. But I can only repeat my previous point: the evidence
*in the text* is still evidence. If you have a splinter in your right hand,
you don't check your left hand to be sure that is really *is* an
interpolation; you reach for the tweezers.

The scribes were sometimes careless; that we can remedy by trying to be
careful. One tool of the philologist is to know when you are too tired to do
the work; you keep routine chores on hand for those moments. The scribes
were sometimes piously inventive; that we can try to avoid by keeping a
decent emotional distance from the thing we are working on. (Keeping one's
literal "philological hat" on the hatstand, and donning it while doing the
work, may be useful to some in establishing and maintaining this separate
persona). And as always in the historical enterprise, if despite our best
efforts we make a mistake, others are there to point it out to us. Our
individual shortcomings are doubtless inevitable, but collectively, we may
be pretty good.

CHUCK: But I have another, much more significant issue with proposing
variant readings in the absence of manuscript evidence.  The absence of
variant manuscript evidence is evidence for the absence of variation!

BRUCE: A nice phrase. I have used s similar one myself, in arguing for the
validity of the "argumentum ex silentio." It goes like this: There are many
reasons why writers might not refer to something. But if that something in
fact did not exist in a particular period, the only evidence that fact is
capable of leaving in the texts is the *silence* of the texts.

In the end, I think it remains true that, if it is conceded (and
Rachmaninoff, off in his corner, is nodding assent) that a work may expand
or contract while still under its author's hand, then the unanimity of the
manuscripts may merely mean that none of them has varied from the author's
final version. It does not mean that the author's final version was not
preceded by the author's *prefinal* versions, full of erasures, insertions,
second thoughts, third thoughts refuting second thoughts ("stet"), and the
whole array. Have you even seen one of Beethoven's sketchbooks? Or Emily
Dickinson's? (The latter are held by the Amherst library, and I can show
them to you when you come up for Don Wyatt's talk on Thursday). There is a
whole philological education available there, just for the looking.

CHUCK: For example, a significant number of Pauline scholars believe that I
Thess. 2:15-16 is a later interpolation, despite the absence of textual
variants.  So here is what had to have happened.  One scribe inserted the
passage into one copy of I Thess.  And then all of the other copies of I
Thess. had to perish from the earth while this one copy became the single
progenitor for all manuscripts of I Thess. from that day forward.  I have a
pretty big problem with the plausibility of that scenario.

BRUCE: Again the fallacy of the scribe. The scenario would depend on how
many copies were in existence when the insertion was made. And maybe there
was only one; maybe 1Th was still in the custody of the recipient church,
and (as we have reason to believe) was read occasionally to that
congregation for edification and encouragement. If the resident reader felt
that some local strengthening was called for, then he (probably he) might
had added the lines in question, and his addition got copied into the text
when the Pauline Epistles were gathered - by what agency we seem not to
know, but we know that it happened, long before the end of the 1c - into the
Corpus Paulinum. That change, and that prior perhaps marginal improvement,
were made on the holograph, and thus on the thing from which all other
copies were made. Some junior philologist in the 4th century might
conceivably have detected a difference of tone, in the inserted lines, and
excised them out of a sense of tidiness and scruple; this would produce
manuscript variants. But the variant would still be rooted in the mind of a
4c philologist. It would, if you come to think of it, have no better
standing than the opinion of a 21c philologist, not to be sure tampering
with the physical manuscript, but publishing in some modern footnote.

Also relevant to the idea of an addition in 1Th is the idea that 2Th is a
much larger subsequent suppletion of 1Th. Relevant in turn to both these
problems is the oft mentioned possibility that 1Co has been conflated,
probably by the church originally holding them, out of two or more
originally separate Pauline letters, so as not to put that church in TOO bad
a light when their originally private possessions were made available to all
of Christendom. And this possibility in turn surely gains relevant evidence
when it is noticed that similar doubts have been expressed about other
undoubted Paulines, such as Romans. As these things are presently done,
those debates tend to blaze up as so many separate fires on the battlefield;
footnotes in so many separate commentaries. I think they also need to be
looked at as a single phenomenon, not disposed of one by one (as Schnelle,
for example, does) as "insufficiently persuasive." I always recommend the
question:  What's the big picture? The big picture here may be that the
recipient churches tended to strengthen the message of what was at that time
their only authority text, and that at the time of collection for
publication, further and perhaps frantic changes were introduced out of
consideration for the pending loss of privacy.

Nothing proves itself, but at minimum, I find this possibility viscerally
intelligible. What do I do myself, if I see somebody coming up the walk?
Answer: I use my four seconds of grace to pick up at least some of my notes
off the floor, whether they concern 1Th or any other matter, in the interest
of presenting an image of decency and civility, however counterfeit and
mendacious it may be, to my caller.

If the Corinthians had the same thought, I am 100% in sympathy with the
Corinthians. I feel their pain.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
http://www.umass.edu/wsp/philology/front/housman/01.html

Bruce,

   I thought I would break my replies into multiple posts to keep the
conversation more focused.

   I do not believe that a solution is more simple when it involves fewer sources
and more complex when it involves more.  A solution is more simple when it
requires fewer caveats and mental gymnastics and leaves fewer corners of the
data untucked.

   Separately, I'm struck that in the scenario you describe below many, many
sources have to have been lost to us--all of those evolutionary, accretional
versions of Mk, Mt and Lk.

   Rev. Chuck Jones
   Atlanta, Georgia


E Bruce Brooks wrote:
           I don't think we know a priori whether a given problem has a simple
solution (that is, one involving only its seeming components, in this case Mt Mk
Lk) or a complicated one. I can easily imagine complicated situations, and some
of them suggest complex solutions. I just don't want to assume any *particular*
complicated solution until I have had a longer time to see how the large
tendency of the extant evidence lies.
   SNIP

Specifically, I find that those three texts are not necessarily integral
(written by one person at one time); at least two, and quite possibly all three,
display accretional layers of composition, before they were made available to a
wider public via manuscript copies.


   .





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Bruce,

   Let me try to rephrase:  if we were not struggling to understand the literary
relationship of Mt and Lk, scholars would never have dived into
independence/directionality theories.  Those theories are important or useful
only to the extent that they help us understand the literary relationship of Mt
and Lk.

   Someone wrote in the last couple of days, "if one wanted to solve Q once and
for all...."  I don't want to solve Q.  I want to solve the literary
relationship between Mt and Lk.  That's what I was trying to say.

   Rev. Chuck Jones
   Atlanta, Georgia



E Bruce Brooks wrote:
           CHUCK: 2. The question on the table is What is the literary
relationship
of Mt and Lk? It is not, Was there a third source? And the basic question
(literally--the base upon which subsequent thinking and questioning should be
built) is Were Mt and Lk produced independently of each other?

BRUCE: That is one of many questions, and for me they are simultaneously on the
table. I can't think it a priori right to focus on only one question and
withdraw attention from all the others. I think the others should at least hover
on the periphery of our consciousness, as we consider any one. I admit that this
makes for longer E-mails than the Synoptic list protocol recommends. My
apologies accordingly, alike to management and members. But I didn't invent this
situation. I am merely trying to deal responsibly with it.



   .





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To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG, WSW
In Response To: Chuck Jones
On: Methodology
From: Bruce

I am getting the feeling that this conversation, despite its possible
interest for the participants, is boring everybody else, or taking up
bandwidth for which they may have other uses. Just this one bit more for
today.

CHUCK: Separately, I'm struck that in the scenario you describe below many,
many sources have to have been lost to us--all of those evolutionary,
accretional versions of Mk, Mt and Lk.

BRUCE: Those are not sources, in the usual sense of texts available to a
Gospel writer. They are not even texts. They are the previous own tentative
writings of that same Gospel writer, and each vanishes into the next.

Let me illustrate. If I put my SBL draft for next April on the kitchen table
and take my scissors and tape and remove some paragraphs to other positions,
and add in a few sentences with my pen, and then stick the whole thing in
the copier and file the copier output in my dedicated SBL April 08 notebook,
I am not losing a source. I am swallowing Draft 5 into Draft 6. At the end
of the process, which takes place entirely within the walls of my kitchen,
and involves no scribes in Ephesus or distribution centers in Antioch, Draft
5 does not exist any longer (except that a memory of some discarded
paragraph may re-intrude itself as I later compose Draft 7). There exists
only Draft 6. It is the algebraic sum, so to speak, of Drafts 1 through 5
inclusive. It is in turn liable to vanish into Draft 7, sometime next week.
But at any given moment, *only one exists,* more or less as the sum of the
preceding ones, but not identical to any of them.

Where now is the body you had when you were 5 years old? It is somewhere
inside your present body, and if you didn't get enough protein then, your
present body is not going to be as tall as it might have been, but it is not
identical with your present body, which also results from other input. There
is nothing heavily metaphysical here, just separate stages in a continuous
process, and only one stage of the process is extant and observable (shall
we say, snapshottable) at a given time.

Don't we all work more or less in the kitchen table way I have described?
And if we do, or even if only some of us do, why is it not a thinkable model
for how Matthew and Luke might have worked? And in the case of a simple
accretional text, where things are not moved around (as I think Luke did
with his previous Mark-based draft) but simply extended, there is even less
reason to regard the previous stage as a separate text. There is only one
text, which somehow keeps getting longer.

The things I have been talking about are personal texts, house texts,
kitchen table texts, closely held texts. They are not out there in Amazon
and the local bookstore; they do not subsist in a general literary medium; I
have the only one there is. And that one is itself a member of a series of
drafts, only one of which exists at any one time. Only the last of them (my
copy as orally delivered on April next, and even in the interstices of that
I am liable to pencil improvements as I speak) exists to be final copied for
wider distribution.

I know about that final copying process because only last night I was trying
to make out the marginalia of my SBL Nov 08 paper, so as to produce the
final authoritative copy, should anyone ask to see it, or should any editor
request it for his next issue. THAT version is the authorial final one. The
previous stuff is just earlier stages of the nautilus, on the way to the
final product.

[And I wish I could write more clearly while I am speaking, but I guess I
can't. The paleography of the self is the most embarrassing kind of
paleography. What WAS I thinking at that point? Nov 08 is now a long time
ago. It reduces to conjectural emendation of one's own manuscript. Which I
guess is where we came in].

Best wishes,

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
http://www.umass.edu/wsp

[I see around the edges of this draft on my screen that there is more from
Chuck on the subject. Exciting times. But in the interest of the wider
membership, I am going to give the topic a rest until the morrow, or later.
/ EBB]

Bruce,

   Lk's extreme reworking of Mk's Rejection at Nazareth story is instructive for
us as we think about the birth narratives.  Mk's story is 6 verses long; Lk's is
15.  In that amount of material, here are the verbal parallels:

   Mk - He came to his home town
   Lk – he came to Nazareth
   Mk - on the Sabbath
   Lk – on the Sabbath
   Mk - in the synagogue
   Lk – to the synagogue
   Mk - were astounded
   Lk  - were amazed
   Mk - the son of Mary
   Lk - Joseph’s son
   Mk - they took offence at him
   Lk - all were filled with rage
   Mk - ‘Prophets are not without honor, except in their home town’
   Lk - ‘no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town’

   And, the basic story outline is the same:  Jesus is rejected by neighbors in
the synagogue in Nazareth.  If Lk had Jesus being rejected by camel drivers
while preaching in a leather shop in Jericho--then we would have a situation
analogous to Mt and Lk's handling of the birth of Jesus.

   And finally, nobody ever talks about the resurrection narratives.  Both Mt and
Lk add them to Mk.  There is no overlap in their accounts--just as with J's
birth--but this doesn't seem to get discussed.  I'm not sure why.

   Chuck

E Bruce Brooks wrote:

CHUCK: 3. On this question, evidence that Mt and Lk were both ignorant of some
of the content of the other has been primary to me. In particular, in the
material that precedes and follows the scope of the gospel of Mk, Mt and Lk have
no overlap in their material. Not a single parallel passage prior to the baptism
or after the burial. I've read material and participated in discussions that try
to carve up and swallow this elephant-in-the-living-room one bite at a time--but
they simply are not persuasive to me.

BRUCE: It has been shown, and to me convincingly shown, that the framework of
the Birth and Infancy narratives is the same, it is just that very different
laundry has been hung out to dry on the respective frameworks. In this area, we
are far from a situation that can imaginably be dealt with along text-critical
lines, that is, one is not a failed copy of the other. I think that Chuck may be
reacting to this fact, and if so, I am certainly with him that far. But that
does not mean that one was not *inspired by* the other, or that one is not a
*contentious attempt to improve on* the other.

   On the contrary, I suggest that both these latter possibilities are true.
Chuck has previously mentioned the drastic (and I would add, both internally and
externally inconcinnitous) rewriting and repositioning of Mark's Nazareth
episode in Luke. This sort of thing happens all the time in literary (as against
scribal) interactions, and that case is sufficient to
establish this general possibility as also relevant to Luke's stance as a
writer.

I think we need to get used to the idea that Luke is not a copyist; he is an
apologetic composer, and a literary rival to the *previous* apologetic
composers. He as much as says this, as I read him, in his much-discussed
Prologue. I am inclined to take him as he says. Everything in his final product
seems to bear him out, on this reading of his self-introduction.


   .





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Bruce,

   All I mean by "double tradition" is the material that appears in both Mt and
Lk.  I understand "triple tradition" to mean material that appears in Mk, Mt and
Lk.  It doesn't not seem to me that anything else is implied by the terms.

   Rev. Chuck Jones
   Atlanta, Georiga


E Bruce Brooks wrote:
           CHUCK: 5. Per item 2. above, note that this set of evidence has
nothing to do with a third (or fourth or fortieth) source. It does not even
involve
the double tradition. The discussion of sources for the double tradition is
crucial--but in its proper context.

BRUCE: I am afraid that pretty much everything is crucial, or at least
sufficiently relevant that it shouldn't be ignored forever. Meaning, it
should be brought into play before we decide things on narrower evidence.

I allow myself one quibble before concluding: Isn't the term "double
tradition" now obsolete and indeed misleading? It implies two channels back to
Jesus, only one step less assuredly authentic than where the three texts more or
less agree ("triple tradition").


   .





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Dennis Dean Carpenter wrote:

> ..... we find many allusions to Hebrew writings in Luke/Acts. With your
> logic, would these allusions also not be "rather obscure" to Gentiles? The
> author has Jesus begin his journey by quoting Isaiah 61. Are you saying that
> the Gentile audience would have been more familiar with this than Isaiah 34,
> in which I noted the raven as fitting into the gist of the block of material
> it is found?

Dennis,

It is perfectly possible for a one-word allusion to be obscure while an
explicit multi-line quotation is meaningful. In any case with this explicit
quotation Luke's point is clear even to a reader who has never before
encountered this particular passage in Isaiah 61.

To answer your questions more directly, I would be amazed if a typical
Gentile audience in Luke's time would have been familiar with Isaiah 34, and
moderately surprised if they were familiar with Isaiah 61 (it was surely
Luke's quotation in Lk 4:18-19 which led to these OT verses becoming
well-known outside Judaism).

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

"...To answer your questions more directly, I would be amazed if a typical
Gentile audience in Luke's time would have been familiar with Isaiah 34, and
moderately surprised if they were familiar with Isaiah 61 (it was surely
Luke's quotation in Lk 4:18-19 which led to these OT verses becoming
well-known outside Judaism)
Ron Price"


I wasn't aware that the only Lukan allusion to the Hebrew scriptures was Isaiah
61. There is really no evidence that a Lukan audience wouldn't have been
familiar with Mark and its approximately 160 allusions to the scriptures, or
Matthew and its allusions. If, as many now see, Luke/Acts were second century
compositions, it puts these two writings preluding the Apologist Church Fathers
who certainly drew from the Hebrew scriptures. In fact, is there not a
continuous line from Mark through the second century where these were used in
Christian writings? Another thought might be that we see in the opening by Luke
a writing that, like the opening Josephus had in "The Antiquities of the Jews,"
implies that the writing was written for a literate audience:

Josephus: "Those who undertake to write histories do not, I perceive, take that
gtrouble on one and the same account but for many reasons, and those such as are
very different from one another...
Luke: "Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events
that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed onto us by those who
from the beginning were eyewitnesses...."

I would think that a literate reader of Luke (would there be any other?), would
also be familiar with the passages, especially in the prophets, that applied to
the Jewish Jesus. Is there a reason not to come to this conclusion? (I am aware
of the studies reporting on the literacy rates, but that is not at issue if the
writing was for the literate, as for instance "Antiquities" was.

Dennis Dean Carpenter
Dahlonega, Ga.



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