Minor agreements against gMark

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Bernard Muller
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

Post by Bernard Muller »

to Kunigunde Kreuzerin,
This was a major argument from earlier scholars who viewed the evangelists as collectors and editors of Jesus stories rather than writers. It took the form: "It is inconceivable that Luke would have written it that way if he (or she) had known Matthew". But meanwhile modern scholars can imagine a lot that was previously considered unthinkable.
Modern scholars can imagine a lot, but did they demonstrate what was previously considered unthinkable?
It seems to me that it is important to consider very carefully on the one hand the minor agreements and on the other hand the problems arising from the hypothesis of Luke's dependence on Matthew (which I would not be able to do).
First, one knowing about the other work is not very solid because:
a) "Q" being a stand-alone mini-gospel pre-dating GMark
b) The aforementioned Farrer's hypothesis, with "Q" material copied by "Luke" from GMatthew: James Hardy Ropes (1934), Austin Marsden Farrer (1955) & Michael Douglas Goulder (1974, 1989)
c) The opposite view, with "Q" coming from GLuke to GMatthew: Christian Gottlieb Wilke (1838), Bruno Bauer (1841), Ronald V. Huggins (1992) & Evan Powell (2006)
http://historical-jesus.info/q.html
If scholars can make gLuke dependent on gMatthew, and gMatthew dependent on gLuke, that tells me that the dependences are on shaky ground.
As I stated before, if one was dependent on the other, you would not observe huge differences in material between gLuke & gMatthew which is not in Q or gMark.
Furthermore in the case of "Luke" (with a pro-feminist and pro-roman outlook) knowing gMatthew, I would expect her to include from gMatthew the following:
27:19 While he [Pilate]was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent to him, saying, "Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him."
Furthermore, there are internal evidence that part of Q was written in Aramaic which was translated in Greek differently.
And that "Luke" had to deal with Q material which went big time against her view, which she could have avoided if "Luke" was doing selective picking from gMatthew.
All of that and more in http://historical-jesus.info/q.html. Also relevant is http://historical-jesus.info/39.html

Cordially, Bernard
Bernard Muller
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

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This is what shows in front of my web page on Q:

Named from the German 'quelle' (= source), common material used by "Matthew" and "Luke" but not found in GMark.
However, because scholars put the minor agreements within gLuke & gMatthew against gMark in a Q context,

From Wikipedia Q source: While the two-source hypothesis remains the most popular explanation for the synoptic gospels' origins, the existence of the "minor agreements" has raised serious concerns. ... The "minor agreements" call into question the proposition that Matthew and Luke knew Mark but not each other.

I think the conventional definition should be modified as such:
Q is part of the common material found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke without, or with, textual relationship in the Gospel of Mark.

Q-->GLuke & GMatthew or GMark-->Q-->GLuke & GMatthew

Therefore, Q would also include the "minor agreements", annulling the major argument against Q being a document. Furthermore, when Q is intermediary between gMark and Gluke & gMatthew, the "minor agreements" can be explained by the Q author rewriting a passage from GMark, and introducing new words not in GMark but later picked up by "Luke" & "Matthew".

From Wikipedia Q source: Specifically, there are 347 instances (by Neirynck's count) where one or more words are added to the Markan text in both Matthew and Luke; these are called the "minor agreements" against Mark. Some 198 instances involve one word, 82 involve two words, 35 three, 16 four, and 16 instances involve five or more words in the extant texts of Matthew and Luke as compared to Markan passages.

Cordially, Bernard
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MrMacSon
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

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(For me this video starts near the end. I dunno why. It does so on my computer too. I've cleared cache etc., tried to repost but it still starts near the end.That is not the intention.)
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davidmartin
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

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Therefore, Q would also include the "minor agreements", annulling the major argument against Q being a document. Furthermore, when Q is intermediary between gMark and Gluke & gMatthew, the "minor agreements" can be explained by the Q author rewriting a passage from GMark, and introducing new words not in GMark but later picked up by "Luke" & "Matthew".
What about if the minor agreements are the result of later editing of Matthew and Luke but not in there to begin with
That would also annul that argument against Q?

Even sticking rigidly to the church fathers accounts - you have Irenaeus proclaiming a fourfold gospel (180's?) which must already have been accepted for at least a decade or two - then a gap before manuscripts turn up dating to the 200's. Plenty of time for some harmonisation to occur surely?
Bernard Muller
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

Post by Bernard Muller »

to davidmartin,
What about if the minor agreements are the result of later editing of Matthew and Luke but not in there to begin with
That would also annul that argument against Q?

Even sticking rigidly to the church fathers accounts - you have Irenaeus proclaiming a fourfold gospel (180's?) which must already have been accepted for at least a decade or two - then a gap before manuscripts turn up dating to the 200's. Plenty of time for some harmonisation to occur surely?
Possible but unlikely due to the vast numbers of the "minor disagreements":
From Wikipedia Q source: Specifically, there are 347 instances (by Neirynck's count) where one or more words are added to the Markan text in both Matthew and Luke; these are called the "minor agreements" against Mark. Some 198 instances involve one word, 82 involve two words, 35 three, 16 four, and 16 instances involve five or more words in the extant texts of Matthew and Luke as compared to Markan passages.
That would be a lot of late editing for, most of the time, no obvious motive.

Cordially, Bernard
Bernard Muller
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

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to MrMacSon,
I listened to the entire hour of this video.
Goodacre contends that "Luke" knew about Josephus' antiquities. Absolutely not, as I explained on that webpage: http://historical-jesus.info/appa.html.
Goodacre spoke about common structure between gLuke and gMatthew, mostly because both have nativity and Jesus' reappearances stories, when gMark has none of that. But the interview failed to talk about the huge differences in these stories, and more generally between L & M material, which is very difficult to explain if "Luke" was working with gMatthew.

Cordially, Bernard
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MrMacSon
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

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Bernard Muller wrote: Wed Oct 21, 2020 6:27 pm to MrMacSon,
I listened to the entire hour of this video.
Goodacre contends that "Luke" knew about Josephus' Antiquities. Absolutely not, as I explained on that webpage: http://historical-jesus.info/appa.html.
Steve Mason makes the case in his book, Josephus and the New Testament that Luke knew of Josephus' Jewish War (79 CE) and Jewish Antiquities (94 CE). At it's core, the argument stems from a similar purpose behind the writings of Josephus and the Luke–Acts history buttressed by general and specific parallels between the authors. Richard Carrier elaborated on Mason's points in 2000 here - Lena Einhorn addresses the issues with mentions in both Josephus and Acts of (i) Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37; JW 2, JA 18); (ii) Theudas (Acts 5:36; JA 20); and (iii) "The Egyptian" (Acts 21:38; JW 2, JA 20), at least, in her 2016 book, -
Bernard Muller wrote: Wed Oct 21, 2020 6:27 pm Goodacre spoke about common structure between gLuke and gMatthew, mostly because both have nativity and Jesus' reappearances stories, when gMark has none of that. But the interview failed to talk about the huge differences in these stories, and more generally between L & M material, which is very difficult to explain if "Luke" was working with gMatthew.
I dunno what you're getting at with your comment, "the interview failed to talk about the huge differences in 'these' stories".

They talk about L & M, iirc. See, for example, -

Goodacre on Q on mythvision podcast.PNG
Goodacre on Q on mythvision podcast.PNG (281.31 KiB) Viewed 5982 times

Goodacre addresses and rebuts all arguments for Q, either in that discussion or in his other works, eg.
davidmartin
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

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ignore
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davidmartin
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

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Bernard Muller wrote: Wed Oct 21, 2020 6:06 pm to davidmartin,
What about if the minor agreements are the result of later editing of Matthew and Luke but not in there to begin with
That would also annul that argument against Q?

Even sticking rigidly to the church fathers accounts - you have Irenaeus proclaiming a fourfold gospel (180's?) which must already have been accepted for at least a decade or two - then a gap before manuscripts turn up dating to the 200's. Plenty of time for some harmonisation to occur surely?
Possible but unlikely due to the vast numbers of the "minor disagreements":
From Wikipedia Q source: Specifically, there are 347 instances (by Neirynck's count) where one or more words are added to the Markan text in both Matthew and Luke; these are called the "minor agreements" against Mark. Some 198 instances involve one word, 82 involve two words, 35 three, 16 four, and 16 instances involve five or more words in the extant texts of Matthew and Luke as compared to Markan passages.
That would be a lot of late editing for, most of the time, no obvious motive.

Cordially, Bernard
Very interesting thanks! I didn't know about this
I could still imagine a scenario where such a lot of editing might have been done
Because with Luke we know there was a Marcion version in circulation
With Matthew it's said there were versions in use by Ebionites around the same time
So i could imagine an 'official release' of an updated Matthew and Luke coming out to be the versions in use in orthodox circles
The motivation is there to have 'corrected and better' versions as part of the new fourfold gospel
I'm not sure really serious edits were done at this time though, like adding a birth narrative to Matthew or Luke that may be going too far
But I like this idea. It could be totally wrong though...i'm not qualified at all to comment further but i do believe there must have been some late editing done as part of orthodoxy's 2nd century commitment to four gospels with Matthew at the front which may have been influenced by failure for a gospel harmony to take off or for a single gospel alone to have been acceptable to all it just seems logical
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: Minor agreements against gMark

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davidmartin wrote: Thu Oct 22, 2020 2:29 amI could still imagine a scenario where such a lot of editing might have been done
Because with Luke we know there was a Marcion version in circulation
With Matthew it's said there were versions in use by Ebionites around the same time
So i could imagine an 'official release' of an updated Matthew and Luke coming out to be the versions in use in orthodox circles
The motivation is there to have 'corrected and better' versions as part of the new fourfold gospel
I'm not sure really serious edits were done at this time though, like adding a birth narrative to Matthew or Luke that may be going too far
But I like this idea. It could be totally wrong though...i'm not qualified at all to comment further but i do believe there must have been some late editing done as part of orthodoxy's 2nd century commitment to four gospels with Matthew at the front which may have been influenced by failure for a gospel harmony to take off or for a single gospel alone to have been acceptable to all it just seems logical
The above is in response to Bernard's critique of trying to fit editing of the texts in between Irenaeus and the wave of extant fragments which become available early in century III, but I do not know why Irenaeus should serve as an endpoint in the process in either direction. He is but a waypoint, an early representative of the so called Western text.

I want to give two quotations which have been offered on this forum before. First, one which I have presented from David Parker:

David C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, pages 121-122:

I am proposing that the evidence does not permit us to attempt a documentary solution. I am not thereby denying the existence of documents. I do not attempt to deny the substantial reality of Mark. His style alone is a sufficient criterion for us to know him in bulk from Matthew or Luke. But a documentary solution requires more than the degree of detail needed to know Mark from Matthew. It requires published editions, in which every last word, syllable and letter is known. It is this discernible, published precision which is lacking. The reason for the lack is not — as it might seem I was about to conclude — that we do not have the evidence to recover precisely what the evangelists wrote. It is that the comparison of published editions assumes, in its two-dimensional diagrams, that there is a single point of contact between two texts, for example, the single contact when Matthew copied Mark, and there was an end of the matter. I am proposing a three-dimensional diagram, in which the third dimension represents a series of contacts between texts each of which may have changed since the previous contact. For example, Matthew copies bits out of Mark in reproducing a tradition; then a later copy of Mark is enriched by some of Matthew’s alterations; and next a copy of Matthew (already different from the one we began with) is influenced by something from the also changed Mark. Add in Luke, and oral tradition, and any other sources that might have been available, at any points in the development that you please, and you have a process a good deal less recoverable than any documentary hypothesis. It is not at all the orderly business we had hoped, and looks instead like molecules bouncing around and off each other in bewildering fashion.

It may be that I will be considered to be offering what has been called a complex solution, in distinction to the simple solutions such as those of Streeter and Farrer. Such a solution is presented by Boismard, who discerns over a dozen documents, some existing in earlier and later forms. But there is a major difference. I am not attempting to identify and to name sources or to recover layers. I am suggesting that the evidence is not of a kind to permit one to demonstrate the existence of the many documents posited by such theories. Thus, while Boismard’s solution, like Streeter’s argument for Proto-Luke, along with other theories, may be close to mine in recognising more than one point of contact between the Gospels, we differ more than we agree.

The same must be said after comparing my suggestion with the Deutero-Markus theory. I agree that the copy of Mark used by Matthew will not have been identical to the copies available to us. I would add that Matthew’s copy will have been different also from Mark’s autograph (unless he used the autograph, which must be regarded as improbable), and that Luke’s copy will have been different again. But Deutero-Mark is a document, an edition. In contrast to that, I am proposing that we should be thinking of a process, and that the solid blocks of the documentary hypotheses prove to be at best soft and crumbling rock, at worst slowly shifting sand. Let us suppose, for example, that somebody who has read newly written Matthew copies Mark from a manuscript already different from the version known to Matthew, and introduces (intentionally or inadvertently) a few Matthaeanisms, and that Luke worked with such a copy. Who is to say that such a thing is impossible? That such confusing things occurred at a later date may be demonstrated from the manuscripts. A manuscript may harmonise a passage in Luke to Matthew; when we look at the Matthaean parallel in that manuscript, we find that it has a quite different form of the text from that taken into the Lukan version. This phenomenon may be found many times in Codex Bezae, one of the most frequently harmonising manuscripts. At its most extreme, we might say that every copying of a Gospel is, in the sense required by source criticism, a separate document, for it will to a greater or lesser extent be different from any other copy.

Second, one which MrMacSon has helpfully presented by Jason BeDuhn:
MrMacSon wrote: Sat Nov 17, 2018 1:50 amQuoted below is the relevant part of BeDuhn's argument from his 2017 paper (which, in turn, is based on a presentation delivered in the ‘Quaestiones disputatae’ session at the 71st General Meeting of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, held at McGill University, Montreal, on 3 August 2016) -

(the pertinent part of the paper based on Klinghardt's presentation, at the same above-mentioned 71st General Meeting of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, is in the next post)


We have all been guided by Occam’s Razor and the desire to find a clean, neat, simple, uni-directional model of gospel relationships that explains all the evidence. We need to accept that such an ideal is unattainable. There are two principal reasons for this. First, we have no autographs of these texts, so we are always dealing with manuscripts that reflect various degrees of modification and exposure to other gospel texts. Our difficulty in identifying which elements belong to which layer of composition and later development is a major obstacle to establishing the original textual dependencies of gospels as originally composed by their original authors. Second, these texts underwent an ongoing fluidity of text that defies familiar understanding of what constitutes authorship and composition, on the one hand, and what constitutes emendation and corruption, on the other, due to the sub-literary character of gospels as cultic texts. They have been mishandled in scholarship when read as works of high literature, comparable to the treatises of Cicero or poems of Virgil, the product of an authorial act with an original text that can be clearly distinguished from later textual ‘corruption’ or distinct redactions at the hands of specific editor-authors. By contrast, the intertextual exposure and modification we see in gospel texts flows seamlessly from the kind of textual dependencies involved in their original formation as cultic instruments, for which authorship or a singular event of composition is largely irrelevant.21

21 cf. Lieu, Marcion, 208-9: ‘Thus, both at the macro- and at the micro-level any solution to the origins of Marcion’s “Gospel” – or indeed of all Gospel relationships – that presupposes relatively fixed and stable written texts, edited through a careful process of comparison, excision, or addition, and reorganization, seems doomed to become mired in a tangle of lines of direct or indirect dependency, which are increasingly difficult to envisage in practice.’

A concrete example of how Marcion’s Gospel illuminates our understanding of these processes of gospel formation can be found in the so-called ‘Minor Agreements’ between Matthew and Luke against Mark in the clean, neat, simple, uni-directional Two-Source Hypothesis of Synoptic relationships. This phenomenon has caused a great deal of hand-wringing, and has led a significant number of scholars, including Matthias Klinghardt, to conclude that the Two-Source Hypothesis is wrong.22 The seriousness of the problem depends upon whether the ‘Minor agreements’ are an element of composition that existed in the original autograph of Luke (for some reason, it is always Luke, not Matthew), or were introduced subsequently as a textual corruption. The evidence of Marcion’s Gospel aligns with the latter idea, that they were introduced in the process of transmission of the gospel text, since Marcion’s Gospel contains between a half and two thirds fewer ‘Minor Agreements’ with Matthew than the current critical text of Luke does (a critical text that, due to axioms of text criticism, gives an absolute minimum of ‘Minor Agreements’ in Luke). In other words, the phenomenon of ‘Minor Agreements’ is reduced in Marcion’s Gospel to such a small factor that one must doubt that it was a feature of the original text at all, and conclude that Luke has more of them due to the greater exposure to the text of Matthew in the process of its transmission – either from a longer period of exposure or from transmission in closer association with Matthew, or both.

22 Klinghardt, Das älteste Evangelium, I.183ff.

In the case of Marcion’s Gospel, of course, exposure to the text of Matthew must have occurred before the gospel text reached Marcion and was sequestered within the Marcionite community, at which time exposure to Matthew in its transmission would have ceased. Nonetheless, two centuries of critical scholarship had to contend with the ‘Minor Agreements’ as if they were compositional elements that needed to be solved in the construction of our models of gospel interrelationships. Only now with the evidence of Marcion’s Gospel can this whole problem be set aside.

It is the unique conditions of control afforded by the three Synoptics and by the fortuitous partial survival of a fourth Synoptic, Marcion’s Gospel, that allow us to distinguish the stages at which certain developments of gospel texts occurred; but in countless other details of the gospel texts, where we do not have such controls, it is impossible for us to make similar distinctions. It is for this reason that we cannot insist on perfectly clean, neat, simple uni-directional models of gospel relationships with all elements accounted for and no flies in the ointment. We cannot insist on this because our manuscripts come too late in the transmission process to escape intertextual exposures and other changes that have altered the texts from their originally composed form.

Despite these challenging conditions of the materials we have to work with, neater, simpler, less-multi-directional models of gospel relationships are still to be preferred, as requiring less special pleading in their defence. Marcion’s Gospel, as the Fourth Synoptic, adds a control that allows us to assess such models of gospel relationship. Matthias Klinghardt argues that canonical Luke derives from Marcion’s Gospel by a process of additions to the text.23 His arguments are, on the whole, cogent and persuasive. But that does not necessarily mean that Luke is a post-Marcion, anti-Marcionite redaction. If Marcion’s Gospel predates Marcion, so too might the redactional relationship between it and Luke. The signs of an anti-Marcionite purpose that Klinghardt and others point to are far too subtle. There is a fundamental continuity in ideology and ethos between Marcion’s Gospel and Luke.24 If we were to think in terms of authorship and distinct redactions, it could even be suggested that Luke is a second edition of Marcion’s Gospel by the same author. Be that as it may, there are few grounds for proposing ideologically distinct communities as the venue of use for these two gospels. Since there is no clear ideological tendency that distinguishes one from the other, I would suggest a pragmatic or cultural purpose behind the differences between the two texts, that is, culturally rather than ideologically distinct communities. Not every variation in early Christian life and literature was ideology-driven. Marcion’s Gospel, which is relatively less engaged with the Jewish tradition, was suitable for use in Gentile-dominated communities, while Luke, relatively more engaged with it, could have been intended for use in communities with a stronger Jewish background.

23 Klinghardt, Das älteste Evangelium, I.117-79. His view revives a position I have discussed under the label of the Schwegler Hypothesis; see BeDuhn, The First New Testament, 84–6.

24 BeDuhn, The First New Testament, 70-7.


The agreement between Klinghardt and myself that Marcion’s Gospel is the earlier version, pre-Marcion in its composition, and not a tendentious derivative of Luke, leads to the implication that it is a closer witness to the textual dependencies of the Synoptic Gospels, and that is what I mean in calling it the Fourth Synoptic. As such, it should be included, and even given priority over Luke, in explorations of the Synoptic relationship. When we do that, my initial assessment differs from the conclusions of Klinghardt, who finds reason in the comparison of Marcion’s Gospel with Luke to reject the Two Source Hypothesis and the role of the hypothetical text ‘Q’.

In my judgement, however, the evidence of Marcion’s Gospel strengthens the case for the general accuracy of Two Source Hypothesis of the Synoptic relationships, once we allow for the greater fluidity of text I described previously. I have already mentioned the disposal of the problem of the ‘Minor Agreements’, removing a major stumbling block to the hypothesis. A second problem with the hypothesis has been the reconstruction of ‘Q’.

This strange hypothetical text, as currently reconstructed, starts out as a narrative, with Jesus baptised by John and enduring the Temptation, but then turns into a sayings source resembling Thomas. But if Marcion’s Gospel is substituted for Luke in the reconstruction of ‘Q’, the problem disappears. No baptism, no Temptation. ‘Q’ emerges as a pure sayings source. With the evidence of Marcion’s Gospel dispelling two of the major arguments against the Two Source Hypothesis, the latter is affirmed as fundamentally sound. The problems for the hypothesis created by the text of Luke on which it has been based stem from the fact that Luke is a relatively late redaction of the gospel that has been deeply impacted by intertextual exposures to the other gospels – John as well as the other Synoptics. Marcion’s Gospel, therefore, solves problems in the Synoptic relationships that have been insoluble on the evidence of the canonical gospels alone. ...

BeDuhn, J, April 2017 issue of New Testament Studies, Vol 63, Issue 2; pp. 324-7 (of pp. 324-9 in toto)
.

These snippets are not final conclusions, of course; both BeDuhn and Parker would balk at the suggestion that they are.

I cannot express how deeply I agree with BeDuhn's judgment that the cultic Christian texts we are studying are not the same kind of text as those of Cicero or Virgil. I have argued a similar point here before. These texts are more like those of the Hebrew scriptures, with multiple recensions, translations and retranslations, interpolations, layers, and redactions. This probability is what makes the gap between autograph and archetype so crucial for our texts whereas that gap is not necessarily as much of an issue with some other texts.
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