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Re: Wenham (less, rather than more)

>Re. Wenham, I wrote yesterday:
>
>> Aye, and from whom those liberals might also learn something. Wenham's
>> book on synoptic criticism is very nicely reasoned, whether or not one
>> agrees with it, and it is free from that strident tone that marks much
>> of what Linnemann and Farmer have written.

Perry Stepp wrote me privately yesterday to protest my speaking of
Linnemann and Farmer in the same category. He's really right, and I will
retract that statement, at least insofar as concerns most of the works
Farmer has written in defense of and in reassertion of what was once called
the Griesbach hypothesis and is now called the Farmer-Griesbach hypothesis.
Those are indeed nicely argued, reasoned staements. What I was thinking of
when I made that comment was one of Farmer's most recent books, entitled
something like (I don't have it at hand and can't readily find the title on
the web) _The Pastoral Significance of the Synoptic Dispute_; this was much
more polemical and actually seemed to express a fear that the accounts of a
reconstructed "gospel of Q" being presented by some members of the Jesus
Seminar are actually threatening the gospel. Perhaps I misread it, but I
couldn't help feeling that this was misplaced fear: if the gospel is what
we believe it to be, it will withstand any such current fads of
scholarship, and God knows that NT scholarship is a field that is always in
flux in any case.

Please let's not take this occasion to start a discussion of the Synoptic
Problem, which must necessarily go far afield of matters directly related
to the Greek Bible, which is our proper focus; I simply wanted to correct
any false note that my little comment yesterday might have occasioned.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(704) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/