Synoptic Problem Archives – J. David Stark

Daily Gleanings: Q (21 November 2019)

Mark Goodacre discusses the interplay between Occam’s razor and appeals to Q to explain the relationships among the synoptic gospels. Ever the Q skeptic, Mark makes some good points about the nature, but also the limitations, of appeals to Occam’s razor when discussing any hypothesis, including those for the origins of the synoptics.

Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (2016)

Rick Brannan posted a couple tweets recently about 2016 articles from the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (1, 2). The journal had apparently fallen out of my list of RSS subscriptions somehow, so I was grateful for the prompt. The full list of 2016 articles in JGRChJ is:

Seth M. Ehorn and Mark Lee, “The Syntactical Function of ἀλλὰ καί in Phil. 2.4”

Matthew Oseka, “Attentive to the Context: The Generic Name of God in the Classic Jewish Lexica and Grammars of the Middle Ages—A Historical and Theological Perspective”

David I. Yoon, “Ancient Letters of Recommendation and 2 Corinthians 3.1-3: A Literary Analysis”

Stanley E. Porter, “The Synoptic Problem: The State of the Question”

Greg Stanton, “Wealthier Supporters of Jesus of Nazareth”

Burnett Streeter and Proto-Luke

In his Four Gospels, Burnett Streeter articulates his view of the sources of Luke and proto-Luke as follows:

The hypothesis I propose in no way conflicts with the generally accepted view that Matthew and Luke are ultimately dependent not only on Mark but on Q—meaning by Q a single written source. Most, if not all, of the agreements of Matthew and Luke, where Mark is absent, are, I think, to be referred to Q; but I desire to interpolate a stage between Q and the editor of the Third Gospel. I conceive that what this editor had before him was, not Q in its original form—which, I hold, included hardly any narrative and no account of the Passion—but Q+L, that is, Q embodied in a larger document, a kind of “Gospel” in fact, which I will call Proto-Luke. This Proto-Luke would have been slightly longer than Mark, and about one-third of its total contents consisted of materials derived from Q (Streeter 208).

Click here for a diagram of Streeter’s understanding of the synoptics’ sources. For an online version of the Four Gospels with sectional pagination, see κατα~Π (1924 ed.).

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