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Re: Q and Papias
Stan,
You wrote:
>I am curious why you think it was _probably_ much larger. It would
>seem to me that since we can only reconstruct the material that Matt
>and Luke share then we can not say one way or the other whether it was
>larger or not. I would say that it probably is not much larger,
>because Luke and Matthew both incorporated nearly all of Mark, and so
>I would expect that they incorporated nearly all of Q.
I would take issue with the "?nearly all" part. There is a large chunch of
Mark (if memory serves me, at least two chapters using our modern system of
dividing the text) that Luke does not have (note I did not say omits). On the
other hand, there is a very large section (like about 121 chapters) of Luke
tht are not reflected much elsewhere. Those two features of the text as it is
deal a death blow, IMHO, to the idea that Luke copied Mark and shared Q with
Matthew. That is just too great a divergence for me to see this two-source
hypothesis working. I know others have answers for these phenomena, but they
require more ancillary hypotheses, which make the Two-SOurce hypothesis more
suspect in my eyes.
Actually, I'd be happy to accept Markan priority on the condition that you
could show me which parts of Mt and Lk hold the "original" resurrection
narrative that belongs at the end of Mark 16, since I think most of us are
pretty confident (I am at least) that the current ending is not original and I
vehemently reject the hypothesis that the origianl gospel ended at v.8
(not on the shakey ground that the last word is gar, which any first year
Greek student can refute, but based on the likelihood, IMHO, that Mark would
not have ended his Gospel without a resurrection appearance, so important to
the other three canonical writers). I'm sure I'll get in trouble for this,
but so what else is new?
Ken Litwak