hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick) (04/21/85)
The view that you summarized is almost certainly still held by a plurality of scholars, aside from fundamentalists. However I should mention a couple of cautions. First, I think most scholars now believe that the simple documentary hypotheses were oversimplied. Obviously there was some source of information that Matthew and Luke had in common. Q seems as good a name as any. But I don't think it is going to be easy to show that it was a single written document. Places can be found where every pair of Gospels agrees against the others. I would hazard a guess that the Gospels we see now are the result of several decades of oral development, and that during that stage everybody had heard everybody else's version of the stories, at a number of different times, and in various forms (i.e. sometimes verbally and others in writing). It is not at all clear when these different versions were reduced to writing, or how much development continued to happen after that. One interesting idea is that so-called "higher" (i.e. literary) and "lower" (i.e. textual) criticism may not be as different as it used to appear. The sorts of changes in the text that textual critics study are in some cases the same kind as those that produced the different gospels. It is not clear that there is any one point at which the traditions were frozen to produce The Original Manuscript of one of the Gospels. I am afraid it is simply not reasonable to believe that we are going to be able to reconstruct a detailed history of the development of the text from the evidence that we have now. However I think the majority of scholars still do believe that Mark tends to include more primitive versions of the stories than the other gospels, and that some stage of the tradition embodied in Mark was also a source for the others. The second caution is that there are reputable scholars that do not believe in Markan priority, even in a less naive form. There is a group in the U.S. that appear to believe in the priority of Matthew. Since I am at my office with my computer terminal, I do not have my theological library nearby. Otherwise I would give you some citations. But as I recall there was a sort of scandal a few years back. A German scholar did a study of the history behind the original adoption of the hypothesis of Markan priority. His conclusion was that it was as much the result of what one might call scholarly politics as of careful study. When this study way submitted for publication, its initial refereeing appeared to be unjustifiably negative. This was interpreted by some as an attempt by the German academic establishment to prevent a publication critical of its work. I have not read the book, and as far as I know, it did not convince most scholars that Markan priority was groundless. But it seemed to be part of a renewed concern with the so-called "Synoptic problem", and a sign that it is not be any means a settled issue. One of the more interesting issues is in fact one of information processing. One of the major tools for evaluating these issues is a book that shows the accounts of the three Synoptic Gospels side by side. This allows easy comparison. The problem is that traditionally these books have used a particular one of the Gospels to supply the basic order. In effect, the others were cut and pasted so that their parallel passages fit next to the one that was used as the lead. Unfortunately, this results in a tool which is biased towards the priority of a certain Gospel. So the question is: how should one organize one of these parallel presentations so as to be neutral?